The conditions that brought about the rapid dissolution of the British Empire after World War II had been developing since the late nineteenth century, but they were quickened by the war's devastation and aftermath. Postwar realignments of geopolitical power, as well as the systemic damage that the war inflicted, ensured that Britain had neither the political nor the financial resources to maintain its empire. The 1956 Suez Canal Crisis crystallized these shifting dynamics, and that year – which, as we've seen, is also and fittingly the apex of Movement poetry – continues to be understood as a crucial marker of Britain's altered position. After the United States halted Britain's attempt (in league with France and Israel) to invade Egypt in order to maintain its access to the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by President Nassar in July 1956, it was clear that Britain's imperial reach had diminished. Colonies that had been aiming for political independence for decades found and seized their moment. Other colonies that had less well-developed independence movements became caught up in the wave of decolonization that swept through the Caribbean and Africa, the famous “winds of change” that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described in a 1960 speech in South Africa. Between the 1947 Indian Independence Act and the late 1960s, much of Britain's empire in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean was dismantled. Without attempting a full survey of postcolonial poetry in English, and without aiming to incorporate all narratives of emerging national canons into a monolithic story of “global English literature,” this chapter will consider some of the ways in which poets responded to the complex process of British decolonization from the 1950s through the 1970s.

The effects and implications of decolonization were many and multifarious. Burgeoning independence movements were fed by the desire for freedom and political autonomy, by feelings of ethnic and cultural pride, and by anger at the violent, coercive history of British imperialism, especially the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Such wide and deep animosity among colonial subjects was, however, often tempered by genuine feelings of affinity for and a sense of belonging to Britain.