[The Critic] Britain’s Archipelago of Shame

However cruel the UK’s treatment of Chagossians, it doesn’t amount to a crime against humanity.

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy. By Philippe Sands. Weidenfeld & Nicholson; 200 pages; £16.99.

When a retired US Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamented, in 1962, that the UK “had lost an empire, but not yet found a role”, he clearly overlooked the role the fading power would soon play in handing one of its outposts to America’s defense complex — the little-known atoll of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean’s disputed Chagos archipelago. Per Philippe Sands’ new book, Chagos remains — but may soon cease to be — The Last Colony (2022) of Britain in Africa. Two years before Acheson’s phrase, PM Harold Macmillan had wrapped up a monthlong tour of Britain’s African satrapies by famously pledging in Cape Town that his government would let the “winds of change” blow across the empire, thus effectively aligning the Tories’ posture towards decolonization with the more internationalist Labour party’s. Yet the right to self-determination that Macmillan’s speech wrestled with, codified that same year by the UN General Assembly’s resolution 1514, would soon collide with America’s geostrategic imperatives amidst the new postwar bipolar order — and indirectly with those of Britain, its main ally.

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