You can't just march into someone else's country, give it entirely arbitrary boundaries, decide to rule it with only the minimum of resources, settle an alien population on its best land, brutally suppress any sign of resistance, then scuttle before you've properly prepared it for self-government - and expect everything to turn out OK. That's with the best will in the world; of which there was some, but not enough, in the British Empire. It probably hasn't ever happened in history. It certainly didn't happen in Zimbabwe, where Britain more or less washed its hands of the country from the start.

LRB 26 March 2009 | PDF Download