The British war with Japan began on 8 December 1941 (after Japanese attacks on Malaya and the American base at Pearl Harbor); it ended with Japanese surrender in August 1945. Between these two dates, Britain won a war and lost an empire. American entry into the war guaranteed that Britain would be a part of the winning coalition. As for the Empire, the Japanese capture of Singapore in February 1942 was a blow from which the British never fully recovered. The prim, self-satisfied world evoked in the stories of Somerset Maugham was turned upside down as officials fled and officers lost control of their men – some of whom enjoyed a few hours of drunken rebellion before enduring several years of hell in Japanese prison camps.

There was, however, also a sense in which the Empire – often, so far as ordinary British people were concerned, nothing more tangible than the pink bits in a battered school atlas – had a last burst of feverish animation in the war against Japan. There were just over 200,000 soldiers in the Indian army in 1939; by 1945 there were more than two million and they were serving alongside British soldiers in Burma, East Africa and the Middle East. British men, and a few women, who might normally not have moved far from their birthplace, saw the pyramids in Egypt and the Red Fort in Delhi. There was a brief moment in late 1945, after the British had reconquered all their old territories and acquired effective control of a few new ones, when the Empire was larger than ever before.

It sometimes seemed to those in power that parts of the Empire had brought about a kind of reverse colonisation. The settler colonies were self-governing dominions whose armed forces operated with a degree of independence. Jan Smuts of South Africa – a man who had himself fought against the British