It was a strange world that emerged from the Second World War.

Both genocide and the mass killing of civilians, above all through bombing, culminating with the A-bombs dropped on Japan, had become somehow normalised. They rather weaken the case of the developed nations, which made these things happen, denouncing ethnic cleansing and terrorist bombs when they happen again today.

The Soviet Union had massively extended its control of territory and what Churchill called an ‘iron curtain’ had as a result descended across Europe, dividing the continent in two.

As for Britain, it had emerged broke, a condition it might have hoped the US would help with, discovering with some shock that actually the aid that flowed in under lend-lease would be stopping far more quickly than expected. Instead, the British government would have to negotiate a loan, which it finally paid off sixty years later.

As for its imperial role, the Empire was beginning to fall apart. The major step was the independence of India, something on which the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had been keen for a long time. Sadly, it was done too quickly and botched, amongst massive violence and bitterness, especially with the partition of India to allow the creation of Muslim Pakistan. The violence and pain continued to decades, with wars and genocidal actions, not just in India and Pakistan but also in the other parts of the British Indian empire, Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

That rather leads to the question, might it not have been better had Britain never set out to rule India in the first place?

Illustration: Muslim refugees attempting to flee India sit on the roof of an overcrowded train near Delhi in September 1947. From The Guardian. Photograph: AP

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License