“In the end,” writes Ferguson, “the British sacrificed [their] Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs,” and it was this inevitably Pyrrhic victory that makes the sacrifice of her empire “so fine, so authentically noble.”24 But is this really how it happened? Was the sacrifice of the empire done willingly as an act of martyrdom? Or was it rather the result of British blundering on a colossal scale?
