the idea that the british empire accepted their decline with grace and peacefully and willingly withdrew from all their colonial territories and took their loss quietly is commonly expressed as fact but it's very much untrue, it's a successful propaganda campaign for them to claim that this is what happened but they were busy committing war crimes throughout their colonial territories long after supposed "independence" & they continued/continue to maintain economic control over these regions and actively killed local movements that wanted economic sovereignty, land reform, nationalization of natural resources much like the united states did/does within their sphere of influence. i say this not to minimize the atrocities the us has committed but to make a point that the uk is also guilty of these crimes up to the present as much as they'd like to pretend this was an era that ended a century ago. british colonial violence isn't something that ended after ww2 it continued throughout the 20th century and still to this day if you look at the actions undertaken by the british military and their mercenaries throughout the former empire