Jarod Diamond and Britain’s empire

From FT magazine: “(Anthropologist Jared) Diamond believes Britain’s response to the loss of its empire after the second world war was striking. ‘I went to Britain in the late 1950s and it was a time when Britain was in slowly developing crisis, with Suez, race riots, the scrapping of the last battleships,’ he observes. … ‘[Then] we would never have guessed that Britain would have dealt with problems of becoming a hetero­geneous society as peacefully as it has. Today no one talks about the empire on which the sun never sets – Britain has a new identity.’”