“The place of those who have ceased to rule is to teach,” V. S. Pritchett wrote of Spain in 1954, as the British Empire was collapsing around him. By the end of the 20th century, Britain had long since ceased to rule. But in India, where I grew up and which had been a British colony for nearly 90 years and subject to its growing influence since the 1700s, it continued to feed us in myriad ways. The phantom limb of empire outlasted Britain’s physical presence; we felt ourselves bound, as if by an invisible cord, to our former colonial masters. It wasn’t just the side of the road we drove on, our army and our system of government. Britain was part of our cultural heritage.

From the books we read — Enid Blyton and the Biggles adventure series as children; Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham as adults — to the way we organized our schools and examinations, our spellings and pronunciations, Britain exerted tremendous influence. Britain was the place where we aspired to go to university. If there was a big international news story — the civil war in Sri Lanka, say — it was to British newspapers and radio that we turned for credible information and analysis. The British seemed more knowing than their American counterparts, less provincial. They were at home in the world. Their history of empire made them a kind of cultural pivot in the Anglophone world.

This was even truer for the republic of letters. Since the time of Joseph Conrad, Britain had been able to recognize new voices and project them beyond its borders. British critics, editors and literary agents were better positioned to judge foreign writing than American ones. And for well over a century, Britain was the place where African and Asian writers, like myself, would come, be understood and hope that our talent would be broadcast to places with bigger readerships, like America. A roll call of great writers — V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee — owe their existence to Britain as the supreme arbiter of writing from farther shores.

Now may be the first time in a hundred years this is no longer true. I had an experience the other day that made me realize how much the shape of my world had changed. My British publisher, with which I’d been working since the beginning of my writing career nearly a decade ago, wrote to say it could no longer publish my books. It praised the new work on submission, cited the low sales of past work and then told me that “the market has changed.”