British Empire

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The British Empire was once described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", because the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. By 1913, it held sway over 412 million people. By 1920, it covered 35.5 million square kilometres of the Earth's land. It was the largest empire in history, and for a century the foremost global power. Yet it began modestly, with trading posts set up by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and colonisation attempts by Scotland during the 17th century. How did scattered ventures grow into a power that controlled the economies of distant regions without ruling them? What pulled it apart? And why do fourteen overseas territories still remain under British sovereignty today? The man who first used the term "British Empire" was John Dee, an Elizabethan writer urging England to build an empire of its own.

• 2. False Starts

  ›

  In 1496, King Henry VII of England commissioned John Cabot to find a Northwest Passage to Asia across the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus made his first voyage, and reached the coast of Newfoundland. He thought he had reached Asia, and left no colony behind. Cabot led another voyage the following year and never returned. What became of his ships is unknown.

  Queen Elizabeth I waited until the last decades of the 16th century before England tried again in the Americas. In 1578, she granted a patent to Humphrey Gilbert for overseas exploration. He sailed for the Caribbean intending piracy, but the expedition was aborted before crossing the Atlantic. In 1583, Gilbert formally claimed the harbour of Newfoundland, though no settlers stayed. He did not survive the journey home.

  Walter Raleigh, Gilbert's half-brother, received his own patent in 1584. He founded the Roanoke Colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina that same year. A lack of supplies caused it to fail. England's first taste of colonisation came not in the Americas but in 16th-century Ireland, with settlements of English and Welsh Protestants known as "plantations". Several men who helped establish the Munster plantations, a group called the West Country Men, later took part in colonising North America.

• 3. Sugar And Bondage

  ›

  Jamestown, founded in 1607 by Captain John Smith and managed by the Virginia Company, was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. The Crown took direct control in 1624, founding the Colony of Virginia. In 1620, Puritan separatists known as the Pilgrims founded Plymouth as a haven. Fleeing religious persecution drove many colonists: Maryland was settled by English Roman Catholics in 1634, Rhode Island in 1636 as tolerant of all religions, Connecticut in 1639 for Congregationalists.

  The British West Indies provided England's most lucrative early colonies. Settlements rose in St. Kitts in 1624, Barbados in 1627 and Nevis in 1628. The "Sugar Revolution" transformed the Caribbean economy in the mid-17th century. Large sugarcane plantations first appeared in the 1640s on Barbados, with help from Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews fleeing Portuguese Brazil. Sugar was grown first with white indentured labour, then increasingly with imported African slaves. Slave-produced sugar made Barbados the most successful colony in the Americas and one of the most densely populated places in the world.

  In 1672, the Royal African Company received a monopoly on supplying slaves to the British Caribbean. It transported more slaves across the Atlantic than any other, raising England's share of the trade from 33 per cent in 1673 to 74 per cent in 1683. British ships carried roughly 3.5 million Africans, a third of all slaves shipped across the Atlantic, until Parliament abolished the trade in 1807. The average mortality rate during the Middle Passage was one in seven. Ships registered in Bristol, Liverpool and London carried the bulk of British slave trading. After abolition of slavery, Caribbean plantation owners turned to indentured labour from India, bringing in more than 500,000 Indians from the mid-19th century to British Guiana, Trinidad and other colonies.

• 4. The Scottish Gamble

  ›

  On the 29th of September 1621, James VI of Scotland granted Sir William Alexander a charter to found a colony in Nova Scotia, then Mi'kmaq territory. Between 1622 and 1628, Sir William launched four attempts to send colonists, all of which failed. A successful settlement came in 1629, the first documented Scottish settlement in the Americas. The colony's charter made Nova Scotia, defined as all land between Newfoundland and New England, a part of mainland Scotland in law.

  During the 1680s, Scotland tried to establish colonies within English colonies in Carolina and East New Jersey. Scottish settlement in Carolina began in 1682, partly by Presbyterians fleeing religious persecution. The settlement of Stewartstoun, established in 1684, was destroyed by the Spanish in 1686.

  In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland chartered the Company of Scotland, which set up a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama. Besieged by Spanish colonists of New Granada and afflicted by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later. The Darien scheme cost Scotland a quarter of its capital. That disaster helped persuade Scotland of the merits of union, leading to the Kingdom of Great Britain established by the Acts of Union 1707.

• 5. The Jewel In The Crown

  ›

  The Battle of Plassey in 1757 left the British East India Company in control of Bengal after it defeated the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies. The company became a major military and political power in India. It expanded its territory across the subcontinent, ruling directly or through local rulers under threat of force from the Presidency Armies, composed mostly of Indian sepoys led by British officers.

  From its Indian base, the company ran a profitable opium export trade to Qing China from the 1730s, illegal in China since 1729. This trade helped reverse the silver outflows caused by British tea imports. In 1839, Chinese authorities at Canton confiscated 20,000 chests of opium, prompting Britain to attack China in the First Opium War. Britain seized Hong Kong Island, then a minor settlement, along with treaty ports including Shanghai.

  The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys and took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life. The following year Britain dissolved the company and assumed direct control through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj. A governor-general administered India, and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India. India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown". Serious crop failures late in the 19th century brought famines in which an estimated 15 million people died. The East India Company had failed to implement any coordinated policy against famine during its rule.

• 6. Pax Britannica

  ›

  Around 10 million square miles of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire between 1815 and 1914, its "imperial century". Victory over Napoleon left Britain without a serious rival except Russia in Central Asia. Unchallenged at sea, Britain became the global policeman in a period known as Pax Britannica, with a foreign policy of "splendid isolation". Its dominance of world trade meant it effectively controlled the economies of countries such as China, Argentina and Siam, seen as its "Informal Empire". By 1902, a network of telegraph cables called the All Red Line linked the empire together.

  In 1840, Captain William Hobson and many Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi in the Bay of Islands on the 6th of February. Hobson declared British sovereignty over all New Zealand on the 21st of May 1840. New Zealand was established as a separate Crown colony on the 3rd of May 1841 with Hobson as governor.

  Britain and the Russian Empire competed for influence across Central Asia in a rivalry known as the "Great Game". Fearing an overland invasion of India, Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, but the First Anglo-Afghan War was a disaster. When Russia invaded the Ottoman Balkans in 1853, Britain and France entered the war to support the Ottomans and invaded the Crimean Peninsula. The Crimean War of 1854 to 1856 was a resounding defeat for Russia. The two powers settled their spheres of influence in 1907 with the Anglo-Russian Entente.

  The Suez Canal opened in 1869, linking the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean, and became the "jugular vein of the Empire". In 1875, Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Isma'il Pasha's 44 per cent shareholding for £4 million. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 regulated the "Scramble for Africa" by defining "effective occupation" as the test for recognising claims. Cecil Rhodes urged a "Cape to Cairo" railway, and through his British South Africa Company occupied and annexed the territories named after him, Rhodesia.

• 7. The Empire At War

  ›

  Germany's rise as a military and industrial power led Britain to abandon "splendid isolation". Britain allied with Japan in 1902, then with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Britain quickly occupied most of Germany's overseas colonies in Africa. Australia and New Zealand occupied German New Guinea and German Samoa.

  Over 2.5 million men served in the armies of the Dominions, alongside thousands of volunteers from the Crown colonies. Australian and New Zealand troops fought in the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire, a watershed in their transition from colonies to nations, still commemorated on Anzac Day. Canadians viewed the Battle of Vimy Ridge similarly. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement secretly drew up a post-war division of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, brought the empire to its greatest extent, adding 1.8 million square miles and 13 million subjects. Britain gained League of Nations mandates over Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togoland, and Tanganyika.

  The 1926 Imperial Conference declared Britain and the Dominions "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another". The 1931 Statute of Westminster gave this legal substance, freeing the parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland from British legislative control.

  Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. After the Fall of France in June 1940, Britain and the empire stood alone against Germany. In August 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed the Atlantic Charter, stating that "the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live" should be respected. Churchill said he had not become Prime Minister to oversee the liquidation of the empire. The rapid defeat of British forces in the Far East, particularly the Fall of Singapore, irreversibly harmed Britain's standing as an imperial power.

• 8. The Sun Sets

  ›

  Britain emerged from the Second World War essentially bankrupt, with insolvency averted only in 1946 after negotiating a US$3.75 billion loan from the United States. The last installment was repaid in 2006. American anti-communism prevailed over anti-imperialism, so the United States supported the empire's survival to keep Communist expansion in check. By 1960, British politicians recognised an irresistible "wind of change". Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK fell from 700 million to 5 million, 3 million of whom were in Hong Kong.

  The Labour government elected in 1945 under Clement Attlee moved quickly on Indian independence. The Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, favoured a unified secular state. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, wanted a separate Islamic state. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought the date forward to the 15th of August 1947. Partition left tens of millions as minorities in India and Pakistan, and violence between the communities cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Burma and Sri Lanka, formerly British Ceylon, gained independence in 1948.

  The British Mandate for Palestine officially terminated at midnight on the 15th of May 1948 as the State of Israel declared independence. The last British troops departed Haifa on the 30th of June 1948. The Malayan Emergency began in 1948 and lasted until 1960; Britain granted independence to the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Sudan was granted independence on the 1st of January 1956. The handover of Hong Kong to China on the 1st of July 1997 symbolised for many the end of the British Empire. Fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under British sovereignty, and fifteen states including the United Kingdom still retain the same person as monarch.