Comment by bell-cot

I'm less familiar with Dutch history - but that happened to the British Empire because its situation went from being the world's obvious #1, to barely avoiding national bankruptcy, due to the staggering costs of WWI and WWII.

The bailout, July '46 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American_loan

Loss of India (the empire's real money tree), August '47 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

FWIW, "dismantled" generally implies a personal outside actor, with the intention and power to take things apart. Vs. the British Empire crumbled mostly because Britain's & Europe's relative power / prestige / image, post-WWII, were just smouldering ashes of what they'd been before WWI. That had obvious feedback loops with ambitious "native" leaders, nationalistic memes, and the just-won "moral crusade" to liberate Europe from evil Fascist occupation.

EDIT: The post-WWII revelations & condemnations of Nazi atrocities, plus how well the "yellow" Japanese had done against European/"white" powers, were pretty much fatal to (then prevalent) meme of white people enjoying "natural" moral and military superiority over non-whites. Which meme was an important foundation stone of most of the Empires which crumbled in the decades after WWII.