The last thousand days of the British Empire

The war, Mr. Clarke notes, "left India a creditor on a vast scale, with Britain owing it huge sums in the form of the sterling balances." This fact meant that London actually owed New Delhi some £1.3 billion pounds (or $5.2 billion in 1945 dollars). The empire had conferred many benefits on Britain, but by the 1940s its administration and defense were a net drain on London.

And Britain owed a lot to the U.S. as well. . . .

Burdened by its great-power status, which involved the expensive occupation of a large section of northwest Germany with the responsibility to feed Germany's starving population, Britain could not even adequately feed its own people (who faced more draconian rationing in the late 1940s than during the war). Still less could it afford the cost of large troop deployments and the other costs of governing India and Palestine.