Did the British Empire collapse or dissolve?

Did the British Empire collapse, or did it gradually dissolve?

Its territorial peak came in the 1920s, but the move toward dominion status and independence had begun decades earlier.

The empire reached its greatest territorial extent in the 1920s, while dominion development and paths toward independence had begun much earlier. Those beginnings can arguably be placed in the 1880s and 1890s, or even as early as the 1850s. Its territories were at different stages of that process, which complicates any single date for the empire's dissolution.