14.1.14 to 14.1.16

The rest of the British Empire consisted for the most part of colonies and other dependencies whose predominant indigenous populations had no such experience. For them a variety of administrative techniques was tried, ranging from the sophisticated Indian Civil Service, with its largely effective adoption of native practices in civil law and administration, to the very loose and indirect supervision exercised in a number of African territories, where settlers and commercial interests were left much to themselves while native Africans were segregated into "reserves." Nationalist sentiment developed rapidly in many of these areas after World War I and even more so after World War II, with the result that, beginning with India in 1947, independence was granted them, along with the option of retaining an association with Great Britain and other former dependencies in the Commonwealth of Nations (the adjective "British" was not used officially after 1946). Indian and Pakistani independence was followed by that of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar) in 1948. The Gold Coast became the first sub-Saharan African colony to reach independence (as Ghana) in 1957. The movement of Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean toward self-government gained speed in the years after 1960 as international pressure mounted (especially at the United Nations), as the notion of independence spread in the colonies themselves, and as the British public, which was no longer actively imperial in its sentiments, accepted the idea of independence as a foregone conclusion. The last significant British colony, Hong Kong, was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. By then, virtually nothing remained of the empire. The Commonwealth, however, remained a remarkably flexible and durable institution. (Encyclopaedia Britannica Article)