The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy

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Macintyre, Stuart (2009). A Concise History of Australia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51608-2. Archived from the original on 17 August 2021 . Retrieved 17 January 2021. Pagden, Anthony (2003). Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present. Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-8129-6761-6. Archived from the original on 16 August 2021 . Retrieved 22 July 2009. Sanchez Manning (24 February 2013). "Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after". The Independent. Archived from the original on 12 December 2019 . Retrieved 11 February 2018.

Below are lists of the countries and territories that were formerly ruled or administered by the United Kingdom or part of the British Empire (including military occupations that did not retain the pre-war central government), with their independence days. Some countries did not gain their independence on a single date, therefore the latest day of independence is shown with a breakdown of dates further down. A total of 65 countries have claimed their independence from the British Empire/ United Kingdom. [ citation needed] In 2019, as a result of the hearings involving Elysé’s testimony, the judges at The Hague stated that the UK is under “…an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all member states must cooperate with the United Nations to complete the decolonisation of Mauritius”. At the same time that Brexiter government ministers were standing up in parliament to suggest that international law could be broken in certain circumstances and Tories boasted about plans to tear up human rights, the UN general assembly voted by an overwhelming majority in favour of setting a six-month deadline for the UK to withdraw from the Chagos Archipelago. The ruling hardly made the news. An illustration by Martin Rowson from The Last Colony. Gained independence as Burma. Renamed Myanmar in 1989, but still officially known by the United Kingdom government as Burma. Andrews, Kenneth (1984). Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-27698-6 . Retrieved 22 July 2009.The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain's limitations to the world and confirmed Britain's decline on the world stage and its end as a first-rate power, [228] [229] demonstrating that henceforth it could no longer act without at least the acquiescence, if not the full support, of the United States. [230] [231] [232] The events at Suez wounded British national pride, leading one Member of Parliament (MP) to describe it as "Britain's Waterloo" [233] and another to suggest that the country had become an "American satellite". [234] Margaret Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen Britain's political leaders after Suez where they "went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing", from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982. [235] Became self-governing on 3 June 1959, and became a part of Malaysia on 16 September 1963. Subsequently gained independence from Malaysia on the 9 August 1965. [11]

The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and 1919 Irish Declaration of Independence were never recognised by the UK but given symbolic priority by post-1922 Irish leaders. From the 1932 Irish election, successive governments unilaterally amended the state's status: the Constitution (Removal of Oath) Act on 3 May 1933 implicitly abrogated the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty; the 27th amendment and External Relations Act, both on 12 December 1936, attenuated the role of the monarchy; the enactment of the Constitution on 29 December 1937 established the office of President and definitively abolished all British powers over Ireland except diplomatic functions; the Republic of Ireland Act, which transferred diplomatic functions to the President of Ireland, came into force on 18 April 1949 with Ireland formally leaving the British Commonwealth. Related UK statutes included the Éire (Confirmation of Agreements) Act 1938 and the Ireland Act 1949. The Last Colony shares the elements that shaped East West Street: a personal angle and a discussion of international law, here revolving around a particular case. The personal dominates the book in two ways. First, the author uses the voice of Liseby Elysé, born on the Chagossian island of Peros Banhos in 1953 and compulsorily resettled two decades later, to provide an emotional, perhaps sentimental, dimension to the narrative. Second, the author’s own perspective runs through the book – there is quite a lot of ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that’, which I can understand (occasionally having written this way myself), but some might find it a little irritating. Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 (Cth)". National Archives of Australia . Retrieved 28 July 2014. In what is now the eastern US, thirteen British colonies were set up during the 17th and 18th centuries. These areas became prosperous economically and many people living in them began to rally support around the contentious issue of "taxation without representation." This eventually led to the American War of Independence, also known as the Revolutionary War, which took place from 1775 to 1783. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British Crown began to assume an increasingly large role in the affairs of the company. A series of Acts of Parliament were passed, including the Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt's India Act of 1784 and the Charter Act of 1813 which regulated the company's affairs and established the sovereignty of the Crown over the territories that it had acquired. [127] The company's eventual end was precipitated by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict that had begun with the mutiny of sepoys, Indian troops under British officers and discipline. [128] The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides. The following year the British government dissolved the company and assumed direct control over India through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor-general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India. [129] India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength. [130]

India

The British Empire was the largest of its kind in history, and once covered about one quarter of all the land on Earth. What happened to the rest? Here is a brief look at some former British Colonies and how they came to be. India Suez Crisis: Key players". BBC News. 21 July 2006. Archived from the original on 3 February 2012 . Retrieved 19 October 2010. Anguilla declared independence from St Kitts and Nevis in 1967, following the Anguillan Revolution; in favour of returning to British authority in 1971 with full British Crown Colony status (renamed in 2002 as British Overseas Territory status) returning in 1980. Goodlad, Graham David (2000). British foreign and imperial policy, 1865–1919. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-20338-8. Archived from the original on 13 May 2011 . Retrieved 18 September 2010.

In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland granted a charter to the Company of Scotland, which established a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama. Besieged by neighbouring Spanish colonists of New Granada, and affected by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later. The Darien scheme was a financial disaster for Scotland: a quarter of Scottish capital was lost in the enterprise. [59] The episode had major political consequences, helping to persuade the government of the Kingdom of Scotland of the merits of turning the personal union with England into a political and economic one under the Kingdom of Great Britain established by the Acts of Union 1707. [60] "First" British Empire (1707–1783) Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Plassey established the East India Company as both a military and commercial power. To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of colonial trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led to hostilities with the United Dutch Provinces—a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars—which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at the expense of the Dutch. [43] In 1655, England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas. [44] Most of the UK's Caribbean territories achieved independence after the departure in 1961 and 1962 of Jamaica and Trinidad from the West Indies Federation, established in 1958 in an attempt to unite the British Caribbean colonies under one government, but which collapsed following the loss of its two largest members. [248] Jamaica attained independence in 1962, as did Trinidad and Tobago. Barbados achieved independence in 1966 and the remainder of the eastern Caribbean islands, including the Bahamas, in the 1970s and 1980s, [248] but Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands opted to revert to British rule after they had already started on the path to independence. [249] The British Virgin Islands, [250] The Cayman Islands and Montserrat opted to retain ties with Britain, [251] while Guyana achieved independence in 1966. Britain's last colony on the American mainland, British Honduras, became a self-governing colony in 1964 and was renamed Belize in 1973, achieving full independence in 1981. A dispute with Guatemala over claims to Belize was left unresolved. [252] Hopkirk, Peter (2002). The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. Kodansha International. ISBN 978-4-7700-1703-1.Booth, Robert (11 March 2020). "UK more nostalgic for empire than other ex-colonial powers". The Guardian . Retrieved 29 June 2022. Brown, Judith (1998). The Twentieth Century, The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume IV. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-924679-3. Archived from the original on 3 January 2014 . Retrieved 22 July 2009. Slavery Abolition Act 1833; Section XXIV". pdavis. 28 August 1833. Archived from the original on 24 May 2008 . Retrieved 3 June 2008.

Russo, Jean (2012). Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America. JHU Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-0694-7. From 1943 to 1951 Libya was under the control of Britain and France. On 24 December 1951, Libya declared its independence and became the United Kingdom of Libya.Sands was in the group that landed on Peros Banhos; so was Liseby Elysé, along with five other islanders, the first exiles to set foot on the beaches of their homeland for half a century. On the island they came across a tarnished metal plaque signed by the “BIOT commissioner’s representative” engraved with the age-old landowner’s and colonialist’s mantra, that “trespassers will be prosecuted”. As Sands’s book makes clear, and despite Britain’s shameful intractability, there is now not a judge in all the world to uphold that threat. The American War of Independence resulted in Britain losing some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America by 1783. While retaining control of British North America (now Canada) and territories in and near the Caribbean in the British West Indies, British colonial expansion turned towards Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. After the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Britain emerged as the principal naval and imperial power of the 19th century and expanded its imperial holdings. It pursued trade concessions in China and Japan, and territory in Southeast Asia. The " Great Game" and " Scramble for Africa" also ensued. The period of relative peace (1815–1914) during which the British Empire became the global hegemon was later described as Pax Britannica (Latin for "British Peace"). Alongside the formal control that Britain exerted over its colonies, its dominance of much of world trade, and of its oceans, meant that it effectively controlled the economies of, and readily enforced its interests in, many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. [6] [7] It also came to dominate the Middle East. Increasing degrees of autonomy were granted to its white settler colonies, some of which were formally reclassified as Dominions by the 1920s. By the start of the 20th century, Germany and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Military, economic and colonial tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied heavily on its empire. The conflict placed enormous strain on its military, financial, and manpower resources. Although the empire achieved its largest territorial extent immediately after the First World War, Britain was no longer the world's preeminent industrial or military power. Gibraltar held a referendum on whether or not to share sovereignty with Spain. 98.48% of voters rejected the proposal in favour of remaining solely a British overseas territory with only 1.02% supporting the proposal. Rein Taagepera (September 1997). "Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia". International Studies Quarterly. 41 (3): 475–504. doi: 10.1111/0020-8833.00053. JSTOR 2600793. Archived from the original on 19 November 2018 . Retrieved 28 December 2018. Head of the Commonwealth". Commonwealth Secretariat. Archived from the original on 6 July 2010 . Retrieved 9 October 2010.