How can we reckon with the complex and painful legacies of the British Empire? What would it mean to create an international truth-telling commission, and why is this conversation so urgent today?

(How the Commonwealth arose from a crumbling British Empire.) Mountbatten convinced leaders to agree to the creation of two new states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

With the end of British colonial rule in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two nations, majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan. But simmering secular tensions and a hastily ...