Balfour-Paul deals with what he calls the "crepuscular decades" - the quarter century after 1945 when Britain's world position underwent a period of stark decline. Rather than generalize, he tells the sad but surprisingly poignant tale of British retreat from three Middle East dependencies (Sudan, withdrawn from in 1955; Aden, in 1967; and the Trucial States, in 1971). Balfour-Paul's understated but accurate conclusion: "Britain's missionary endeavour to prepare these three territories for independence can hardly be judged a success."
At the same time, in keeping with the increasingly favorable memory of imperial rule (due less to its own virtues than to the disasters that followed), Balfour-Paul offers a generally positive interpretation of British rule ("an abiding seriousness of purpose coupled with a self-critical sense of the absurdity of seeking to match the ideal with the real").
The author is uniquely qualified for the task at hand: not only did he personally witness the first and last of those episodes, but he is a diligent researcher who wields a sparkling (and oh-so-British) pen. In brief, The End of Empire is a minor classic.
