‘So long as we rule India,’ declared Lord Curzon, surveying the kingdom of Great Britain in the early years of the 20th century, ‘we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third rate power.’ He was a prescient imperialist, and he was right. Half way through the century India gained its independence from Britain, and almost at once the immense construction of the British Empire disintegrated. One by one the imperial colonies were emancipated, and the self-governing dominions became states of their own. The legendary imperial fleets were dispersed, the imperial kings and captains lost their almost magical potency, and the British would never again be supreme among the Powers.

It was an object lesson, pundits declared, in the meaning of hubris – the condition of insolent pride that often preceded, so the ancients believed, the calamity of nemesis. But in my opinion the pundits were mistaken. Heaven knows there was insolence enough in the British pride of empire, but it was tempered by the miseries of two world wars and if hubris necessarily preceded nemesis, it hasn’t happened yet. The British have paid the price of empire in subtler, sadder ways.

Even in the heyday of British imperialism there were those who doubted if the Empire was economically worth having – the command of resources had to be balanced against the cost of acquiring and protecting them. Far-flung colonies, too, were debatably profitable, and the expense of maintaining garrisons around the world and fleets in every ocean would become more burdensome as the decades passed.

As it turned out, the sceptics were half-right. There was a time, certainly, when the possession of the Empire had made Britain rich, but the time was long ago, and by the end of the 20th century it was apparent that without an empire, Great Britain Inc was at least as profitable as Pax Britannica. Other countries had overtaken Britain in an age of new technology and the kingdom was decidedly no longer ‘The Workshop of the World’, as it had loved to call itself. But the British found compensatory profit in intellectual, financial and service industries, and by then almost nobody attributed national problems to the decline of the Empire.

Anyway, the British public as a whole had never been hubristic. Empire was essentially an enthusiasm of the middle classes. Except at moments of heady triumphalism (Queen Victoria’s jubilee, say) or dramatic poignancy (Rorke’s Drift, the death of General Gordon), toffs and workers alike generally found the Empire rather a bore. A national joke said that King George V’s reported last words, ‘How goes the Empire?’ were really, ‘What’s on at the Empire?’, and by the time it all ended, with the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, there were few who shed sentimental tears over its passing.