Editing Blog/2026-03-03/As The Magic Leaves (section)

== The End of Empire ==

All those lives spent in the Boer War for British dominion over South Africa found themselves wasted when South Africa very soon after became nominally independent.

Then came the Great War which pulverized Germany (2 million war dead) and Britain (a million) but left America relatively<ref name=only-relatively/> unscathed (about a hundred thousand). Britain ended the war grievously in debt as a creditor that held junk-rate bonds in allies who promptly defaulted. By this time, it was clear that Britain's fall as global titan to regional power was all but assured. To Tolkien, a soldier who fought at [[wikipedia:Battle of the Somme|the Somme]] and who lost all of his friends there, even victory here must have seemed like the magic was leaving. So many of these soldiers, returning with [[wikipedia:Come Out, Ye Black and Tans|their medals from Flanders]], would find crisis back home in the isles at the heart of empire. Very soon, Ireland had broken away free and the cracks were entirely visible.

The Lord of the Rings was written as Britain's time as global power was coming to an end. Even before the Second World War that demonstrated that the grand power shift of the world had occurred entirely, naval power arms races were limited by treaties. Once an absolute naval power and now constrained to not grow her strongest asset, the empire must have seemed to someone of the time to have been steadily in decline. And by the mid-1930s, Canada, and Australia were functionally independent.

Of course, WW2 delivered a decisive death blow to this once powerhouse. Soon after, Palestine's exit from empire was only dwarfed from the chaos of South Asian independence and fragmentation. Then it was just the Suez crisis, the loss of the African colonies, and the slow managed walk to that precocious island's dream of world dominance finally ending decades later with the handing of Hong Kong over to China.