With Britain's Declining Empire, Ronald Hyam completes his chronological survey of politics, policy, and their significance in the dynamics of modern British Empire, which he began in 1976 with the publication of Britain's Imperial Century, with an informative narrative of its twilight years. His latest work is exhaustively researched, well organized, and meticulous in its attention to the details of high politics and the broad scope of policy across the length and breadth of the empire from the post–World War I era through Harold Wilson's first term as prime minister. From the very outset, the author makes clear his enthusiasm for Bernard Porter's argument that the empire mattered most to the British men who ran it, and it is to these men that Hyam devotes most of his attention. The empire after 1918 was “dysfunctional,” but those who administered it approached Britain's retreat from world prominence from positions driven far more by pragmatism than by ideology (12). The decline of the empire, Hyam argues, was a relatively orderly process directed from the metropole, accomplished by a political elite that had “fundamentally lost interest in the empire” by the 1950s (404). Violence and disorder, when they did occur, were exceptions and not attributable to any particular defects of personality on the part of most colonial officials, who “did their often lonely jobs faithfully, fairly, and humanely” (10).

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, since Hyam spends comparatively little time discussing the critical interwar period and focuses instead on the post–World War II era. Considering the broad chronological range of the work, and the author's explicit focus on the decolonization process, this is understandable. The first chapter is a highly compressed narrative of British imperial policy from 1918 to 1945. The heart of the book is a detailed examination of the policy dynamics of the Atlee, Churchill (third term), Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, and Wilson (first term) administrations in the decades following the end of World War II. South Africa, about which the author has written before (Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War [Cambridge, 2003]), receives particularly thorough treatment in this context, as do Tanganyika, Egypt, Cyprus, and India. The engine driving colonial policy in this period, Hyam argues, was the cold war and the battle against Communism, the latter a campaign that the overstretched and underfunded imperial system was ill suited to conduct. The empire could not last, the author concludes, not only because the British were, by and large, resigned to its end but because Britain was increasingly overshadowed on the geopolitical stage by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Although many British policy makers in the post–World War II period initially hoped that Britain could continue to steer the political destinies of its colonies through indirect methods and thus ensure their contribution to the anti-Communist effort, U.S. opposition to colonialism made this policy untenable in the long run. Financial pressure and colonial independence movements, according to Hyam, were not decisive spurs to decolonization, although the latter was similarly driven by pragmatism and could sometimes jibe with the goals of British administrators.

Britain's Declining Empire is a book that needed to be written in order to provide a broader context for more specific studies of British imperial policy and its vital role in the end of the empire. Hyam is one of a very small handful of scholars with the background and expertise necessary to engage the subject on such a broad scope without losing narrative coherence. The amount of official documentation that he brings to bear as evidence is epic, and his narrative is lively and engaging. He also provides stimulating insights into the personalities of major figures in British imperial institutions. In achieving its stated goal of evaluating the critical policy decisions that constituted the formal decline of the British Empire, the book succeeds.

Hyam's focus is very consciously on the political narrative from the perspective of the metropole. This allows Britain's Declining Empire to maintain a narrative stream across so broad a chronology, but it also limits the aspects of decolonization that are engaged. The discussion of postcolonial theory and its possible applications to our understanding of decolonization is cursory. The role of elite subalterns in the process of imperial decline is addressed, but the book engages neither the broader issue of race nor that of gender, which is surprising considering the author's previous investigation of the latter (Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience [Manchester, 1990 and 1991]). The frequent rhetorical chest thumping performed by Hyam's primary subjects makes his exclusion of any discussion of masculinity in colonial policy regrettable. Britain's Declining Empire alludes to British popular nationalism, immigration and its regulation, and domestic race issues, but more discussion of their relationship with decolonization would also have been helpful. This is especially true in light of the author's argument that racial categorization by policy makers was a bureaucratic tendency and sometimes a personal predilection but never a significant motivator of formal policy. “Making categories is what administrators do,” and we can ignore the derogatory racial attitudes that appeared in their private communications since they did not translate into official decisions (40).

Britain's Declining Empire provides a lucid, enlightening account of the political dynamics of empire in the half century following the end of World War I. Ronald Hyam's latest work reveals a wealth of information about British imperial decline and decolonization and provides a compelling narrative of the personalities and decisions that helped usher in the day when the sun finally set on the British Empire.