"This book combines an analysis of the ideas and policies that governed the British experience of decolonisation. It shows how the British - or perhaps more correctly the English - political tradition, with its emphasis on experience over abstract theory, was integral to the way in which the empire was regarded as being transformed rather than lost. This was a significant aspect of the relatively painless British loss of empire. The author places the process of decolonisation in its wider context, tracing the twentieth-century domestic and international conditions that hastened decolonisation and, through a close analysis of not only the policy choices but the language of British imperialism, the book throws new light on the British way of managing both the expansion and contraction of empire."--BOOK JACKET.