I think that in the post-war years, the matter of the British leaving gracefully comes down to the fact that the British parliament was more willing to accept the practical reality of the situation more so than their contemporaries in, say, France. The reality was that they just couldn’t manage it any more when people were starving at home, and the public wasn’t going to be keen on launching into a string of other wars trying to fend off the inevitable.
As for the effect of the Empire, I can take two stances: one from being Canadian, and the other from being a student studying the decolonisation period.
As a Canadian, the Empire generally seems to have been a good thing. It established a common cultural ground for countries around the world. English is the lingua franca of business and politics around the world, and while any other language would work equally well, the double whammy of the British Empire followed by the United States’ leading role in world politics and economics established english in that role on a scale that no other culture has really managed before. What’s more, the global economy really depends on that. Without a common language, it’s a lot more difficult to do business on a cross-cultural scale.
The infrastructure improvements bankrolled by the Empire have already been mentioned, and that’s no small consideraton either. Rule of law, also mentioned, is a big one as well. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every region the British colonised lacked it beforehand, though, but British rule did standardise things, and in doing so I would guess that it made it easier to enact International Law and treaties that could be inclusive of non-European nations (At least in the case of Commonwealth countries).
Culturally though, I don’t know if it was so great. The British built railroads, sure, but that, and everything else they did in their colonies, were pretty much all to facilitate the extraction of wealth from those regions. All the European countries that had empires did this, but the British were cagey. They didn’t send over hordes of their own people to manage things, but preferred to play the locals off each other to largely rule themselves, and in the process set up an infrastructure that extracted the resources, turned them into something salable, and got them to the ports.
They taught the locals that if they wanted to better themselves, they needed to become more like the British; live like Brits, go to British schools, work to make Britain great (and rich). They created a middle class that aspired to be British. A lot of the nationalist movements tried to reverse that, but that attitude still lingers, and it’s really created a disconnnect from local traditions that people are still adjusting to, often in pretty destructive ways. (The massive emphasis on Hindu identity in India since partition, for example. Once upon a time, India was a pretty well-integrated society, but racial riots of one kind or another have flared up every decade or so since independence).
What’s more, IMHO the prevalence of tin-pot dictators can be attributed in large part to colonization. If you set up a puppet government to funnel resources out of a country, what happens when you pull out and leave all the tools behind? The few in power can use the same infrastructure to continue to funnel resources to fatten their own wallets without the colonial oversight. In the same vein, being a colony or part of an empire can lead to a whole culture of political rule which is grossly irresponsible towards the local subjects that even revolution can’t seem to shake.
The British didn’t play fair, either. I’ve wondered in the past if the current U.S. paranoia about the international drug trade could be due in part to having seen it actively used as a means to destabilize a whole economy in China during the 19th century. Those kind of things can take generations to recover from, and it’s only in my lifetime that that recovery has started to pick up speed in China. And while the effect of individual massacres and atrocities shouldn’t be understated, IMHO the effect of moulding entire cultures into for-profit ventures for the benefit of a very select few has had a far worse impact in the longer term.
So, taken all together, does it come out net positive or negative? Honestly, I think it’s still too early to tell. Until at least India and China can be definitively termed first-world countries on par with Europe or North America (as they really should be, given their history and culture prior to European influence), I’ll have to say negative.
