The British Empire ended because India made it unaffordable

The conventional story of Indian independence focuses on Gandhi's moral campaign and Attlee's Labour government. The economic argument is equally compelling: World War II left Britain deeply indebted to India under the Sterling Balances agreement — India had supplied the Empire on credit, and by 1945 Britain owed India roughly £1.3 billion (equivalent to hundreds of billions today). Maintaining the Raj militarily while repaying a creditor nation was fiscally and politically impossible. Empire's end was as much an accounting exercise as an ideological one.

Source: Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006); Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)