Prospectiv A-z is thinking about 'subordinate elites'.
Britannia may have ruled the waves, but when it came ashore for either
formal or informal rule it needed local allies who could serve as
intermediaries in controlling complex, often volatile populations. These
“subordinate elites”—so essential to the rise of any empire—can also
precipitate its decline if they move into opposition. With its
contradictory motto “Imperium et Libertas,” the British Empire
necessarily became, as the London Times said in 1942, “a
self-liquidating concern.” Indeed,
historian Ronald Robinson has famously argued that British imperial rule
ended “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators,”
with the result that the “inversion of collaboration into noncooperation
largely determined the timing of decolonization.” The support of these
local elites sustained the steady expansion of the British Empire for
two hundred years, just as their later opposition assured its rapid
retreat in just twenty more. (A.W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the
American Century, 2017)
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