Though, you only get to be both ‘inward focused’ and ‘empire’ by doing some good, old fashioned, expanding at some point; then (whether by some accident of history, because you’ve run out of soft targets, or something else) switching tactics.
We think of the Brits as aggressively expansionistic because their expansionary period was relatively recent history; and because they (mostly) couldn’t make the territorial gains stick post WWII.
In the world wars period, when the European powers sat down to hammer out who got what colonial spoils; and ensure that they could get on with squeezing the natives without the distraction of border wars between themselves; we could have seen the beginning of a British move toward focusing on the empire they had; had the European custom of fighting a horrifyingly brutal and somewhat incomprehensible meatgrinder war every generation or two not gotten in the way.
