Britain's Latest Ugly Partition

Last Thursday's vote to leave the European Union was hardly the U.K.'s first "Brexit." More than a few countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa have scars to show from Britain's long and haphazard withdrawal from its onetime empire. Borders drawn through Palestine and around Iraq continue to fuel bitter conflicts throughout the region and beyond. The welter of tribes compacted into modern Burma, now Myanmar, battle still for greater autonomy. South Sudan, clubbed together with its larger neighbor for half a century, is struggling violently to find its independent footing.

The first in this ill-starred series of colonial pullouts proved almost unimaginably brutal. Up to a million people may have died in the sectarian massacres that followed the end of the British Raj in August 1947. Some 14 million people were uprooted from their homes and forced to flee across the new borders dividing India and Pakistan. That searing experience gave birth to one of the world's fiercest national rivalries and its most dangerous nuclear standoff.