Even in making the argument in 1971 that Britain should stay out of Europe and forget all its pretensions to be a world power, Joan Robinson, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, appealed to a notion of innate moral superiority that could be nurtured in splendid isolation: ‘I think that, as empires go, the British Empire was not discreditable and that to give it up (in the main) without a fight was a very unusual example of common sense.
