British Empire

For a comprehensive list of the territories that formed the British Empire see Evolution of the British Empire.

The British Empire in 1897, marked in pink, the traditional colour for Imperial British dominions on maps.

An anachronous map of British and, prior to the Acts of Union 1707, English imperial possessions

The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for a substantial time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires.

By 1921, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world's population. It covered about 36.6 million km² (14.2 million square miles), about a quarter of Earth's total land area. As a result, its legacy is widespread, in legal and governmental systems, economic practice, militarily, educational systems, sports (such as cricket, rugby and football), and in the global spread of the English language. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous colonies or subject nations.

During the five decades following World War II, most of the territories of the Empire became independent. Many went on to join the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states.

Origins of the British Empire

The foundations of the British Empire were laid at a time before Britain existed as a single political entity, when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Portugal and Spain in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, and though he successfully made landfall on the coast of Canada (mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus five years earlier, that he had reached Asia), the voyage was unprofitable, and no attempt at establishing a colony was made. Disinterest in overseas matters followed this voyage, and continued until well into the reign of Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. Enmity and rivalry between Catholic Spain and Protestant England during the Anglo-Spanish Wars led to the Crown sanctioning English privateers such as John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake to engage in piratical attacks on Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic, laden with treasure from the New World. At the same time, influential writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use the term "British Empire") were beginning to press for the establishment of England's own empire, to rival those of Spain and Portugal. By this time, Spain was firmly entrenched in the Americas, Portugal had established a string of trading posts and forts from the coasts of Africa and Brazil to China, and France had begun to settle the St. Lawrence River, later to become New France.

In 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a patent by Queen Elizabeth for discovery and overseas exploration, and set sail for the West Indies with the intention of first engaging in piracy and then, on the return voyage, establishing a colony in North America. The expedition failed at the outset due to bad weather. In 1583 Gilbert embarked on a second attempt, on this occasion to the island of Newfoundland where he formally claimed for England the harbour of St. John's, though no settlers were left behind. Gilbert did not survive the return journey back to England, and was succeeded as England's main coloniser by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who was granted his own patent by Elizabeth in 1584, in the same year founding the colony of Roanoke on the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony did not survive due to lack of supplies.

Ireland

Though a relative latecomer to overseas colonisation in comparison to Spain and Portugal, England had been engaged in a form of domestic colonisation in Ireland that had begun during Norman times and accelerated with the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland and Cromwellian conquest. The Plantations of Ireland, run by English colonists, were a precursor to the overseas Empire and several people involved in these projects also had a hand in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the "West Country men" which included Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Ralph Lane.

The "First British Empire"

In 1603, King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne. The following year he negotiated the Treaty of London, ending hostilities with Spain. King James claimed to have an Imperial Crown of Great Britain, even though Scotland and England were still separate countries with their own parliaments. During the next three centuries, England and then - following the 1707 Acts of Union - Great Britain extended its influence overseas.

At the turn of the 17th century, attention shifted from preying on other nations' colonial infrastructure to the business of establishing England's own overseas colonies. Although its beginnings were hit-and-miss, the British Empire began to take shape during the early 17th century, with the English settlement of North America and the smaller islands of the Caribbean, and the establishment of a private company, the English East India Company, to trade with Asia. This period, until the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after the United States Declaration of Independence towards the end of the 18th century has subsequently been referred to as the "First British Empire".

There were several pre-union attempts by Scotland to establish its own overseas colonies, with Scottish settlements in both North and South America. Nova Scotia was to become Scotland's first unsuccessful attempt at establishing a foothold in the Americas and the Darien scheme, on the Isthmus of Panama, its last.

British colonies in North America, c.1750. 1: Newfoundland; 2: Nova Scotia; 3: The Thirteen Colonies; 4: Bermuda; 5: Bahamas; 6: Belize; 7: Jamaica; 8: Lesser Antilles

The Americas

The Caribbean initially provided England's most important and lucrative colonies, but not before several attempts at colonisation failed. Charles Leigh's attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years, and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits. Colonies in St Lucia (1605) and Grenada (1609) also rapidly folded, but settlements were successfully established in St. Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628). The colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations successfully used by the Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labour, and - at first - Dutch ships, to sell the slaves and buy the sugar. To ensure the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led to hostilities with Holland - a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars - which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at Holland's expense. In 1655 England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas.

England's first permanent overseas settlement was founded in 1607 in Jamestown, led by Captain John Smith and managed by the Virginia Company, an offshoot of which established a colony on Bermuda which had been discovered in 1609. The Newfoundland Company was created in 1610 with the aim of creating a permanent settlement on Newfoundland, but was largely unsuccessful. In 1620, Plymouth was founded as a haven for religious separatists, later known as the Pilgrims. Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists to risk the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage.

Britain's American empire was slowly expanded by war and colonisation, with England gaining control of New Amsterdam (later New York) via negotiations following the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The growing American colonies pressed ever westward as colonists sought new agricultural lands, a search that dispersed settlers across vast landmasses in North America.

The American colonies, which provided tobacco, cotton, and rice in the south and naval materiel and furs in the north, were less financially successful than those of the Caribbean, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants.

The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West. The defeat of the French by Wolfe's forces foreshadowed British ascendancy in North America.

From the outset, slavery was a vital economic component of the British Empire in the Americas. Until its abolition in 1807, Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic. In the British Caribbean, the percentage of the population comprised by blacks rose from 25% in 1650 to around 80% in 1780, and in the Thirteen Colonies from 10% to 40% over the same period (the majority in the south). For the slave traders, the trade was extremely profitable, and became a major economic manistay for such cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. However, for the transportees, harsh and unhygienic conditions on the slaving ships and poor diets meant that the average mortality rate during the middle passage was one in seven.

Asia

At the end of the 16th century, England and Holland began to challenge Portugal's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages - the English (later British) and Dutch East India Companies, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative spice trade, and focussed their efforts on the source, the Indonesian archipelago, and an important hub in the trade network, India. The proximity of London and Amsterdam and rivalry between England and Holland inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas (previously a Portuguese stronghold) after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, and the English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory in 1613. Though England would ultimately eclipse Holland as a colonial power, in the short term Holland's more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between Holland and England. A deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to Holland and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability, and by 1720, in terms of sales the English company had overtaken the Dutch. The English East India Company shifted its focus from Surat - a hub of the spice trade network - to Fort St George (later to become Madras), Bombay (ceded by the Portuguese to Charles II of England in 1661 as dowry for Catherine de Braganza) and Sutanuti (which would merge with two other villages to form Calcutta).

Global Struggles of the 18th Century

Peace between England and Holland in 1688 meant that the two countries entered the Nine Years' War as allies, but the conflict - waged in Europe and overseas between France, Spain and the Anglo-Dutch alliance - left the English a stronger colonial power than the Dutch, who were forced to devote a larger proportion of their military budget on the costly land war in Europe. The 18th century would see England (after 1707, Britain) rise to be the world's dominant colonial power, and France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage.

The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its colonial empire to Philippe of Anjou, a grandson of the King of France, raised the prospect of the unification of France, Spain and their respective colonies, an unacceptable state of affairs for Britain and the other powers of Europe. In 1701, Britain, Portugal and Holland sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The conflict, which France and Spain were to lose, lasted until 1714. At the concluding peace Treaty of Utrecht, Philip renounced his and his descendents' right to the French throne. Spain lost its empire in Europe, and though it kept its empire in the Americas and the Philippines, it was irreversibly weakened as a power. The British Empire was territorially enlarged: from France, Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia, and from Spain, Gibraltar and Minorca. Gibraltar, which is still a British overseas territory to this day, became a critical naval base and allowed Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean. Minorca was returned to Spain at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, after changing hands twice. Spain also ceded the rights to the lucrative asiento (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America) to Britain.

The Seven Years' War, which began in 1756, was the first war waged on a global scale, fought in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and coastal Africa. The signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763) had important consequences for Britain and its empire. In North America, France's future as a colonial power there was effectively ended with the ceding of New France to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. In India, the Carnatic War had left France still in control of its enclaves but with military restrictions and an obligation to support British client states, effectively leaving the future of India to Britain. The British victory over France in the Seven Years War therefore left Britain as the world's dominant colonial power.

The Rise of the "Second British Empire"

The Loss of the Thirteen Colonies

Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (John Trumbull, 1797). The loss of the American colonies marked the end of the "first British Empire".

During the 1760s and 1770s, relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain became increasingly strained, primarily because of resentment of the British Parliament's ability to tax American colonists without their consent. Disagreement turned to violence and in 1775 the American Revolutionary War began. The following year, the colonists declared the independence of the United States, and - with the assistance of France - would go on to win the war in 1783. As a result, Britain lost its most populous colony. However, during the war many loyalists had moved north to Canada, thereby strengthening the future of British North America, though it was not secured until the War of 1812, during which the United States unsuccessfully attempted to extend its border northwards.

The loss of the thirteen colonies resulted in a shift of British attention from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa, and showed that colonies were not necessarily particularly beneficial in economic terms, since Britain could still profit from trade with the ex-colonies without having to pay for their defence and administration. Mercantilism, the economic doctrine of competition between nations for a finite amount of wealth which had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, now gave way in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to the laissez-faire economic liberalism of Adam Smith and successors like Richard Cobden.

Convicts and Empire

Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various criminal offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year across the Atlantic. Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered land of New Holland, later renamed Australia.

In 1770, James Cook had discovered the eastern coast of Australia whilst on a scientific voyage to the South Pacific. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Matthew Flinders proved New Holland and New South Wales to be a single land mass by completing a circumnavigation of it in 1803. In 1826, Australia was formally claimed for the United Kingdom with the establishment of a military base, soon followed by a colony in 1829. The colonies later became self-governing colonies and became profitable exporters of wool and gold.

Abolition of Slavery

Under increasing pressure from the abolitionist movement, the United Kingdom outlawed the slave trade (1807) and soon began enforcing this principle on other nations. By the mid-19th century the United Kingdom had largely eradicated the world slave trade. An Act making slavery illegal was passed in 1833 and became law on August 1, 1834. However the act was only gradually implemented and thus although slavery itself was abolished in most British colonies by 1838, it was only abolished in the remainder, Sierra Leone, India, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana and Aden over the next 100 years. Slavery was finally abolished in Sierra Leone, its last outpost in the Empire, on 1st January, 1928. The end of the old colonial and slave systems was accompanied by the adoption of free trade, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in the 1840s. Free trade opened the British market to unfettered competition, stimulating reciprocal action by other countries during the middle quarters of the 19th century.

Between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the United Kingdom was the world's sole industrialised power, with over 30% of the global industrial output in 1870. As the "workshop of the world", the United Kingdom could produce finished manufactures so efficiently and cheaply that they could undersell comparable locally produced goods in foreign markets. Given stable political conditions in particular overseas markets, the United Kingdom could prosper through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule. In the Americas the informal British trade empire was backed by the shared interests of the United Kingdom in the tenets of the United States' Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the New World was no longer open to colonisation or political interference by Europeans. As the United States did not yet have the military strength to enforce this doctrine, the British were largely left with a free hand to enter the new markets in Latin America created after independence from Spain and Portugal, and British commercial supremacy lasted until the outbreak of World War I.

Company Rule in India

Main article: Company rule in India

Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Plassey established the Company as a military as well as a commercial power.

During its first century of operation, the focus of the East India Company had been trade, not the building of an empire in India. Indeed, the Company was no match for the powerful Mughal Empire, which had granted the Company trading rights in 1617. Company interests turned from trade to territory during the 18th century as the Mughal Empire declined in power and the British East India Company struggled with its French counterpart, the La Compagnie française des Indes orientales, during the Carnatic Wars of the 1740s and 1750s. The Battle of Plassey, which saw the British, led by Robert Clive, defeat the French and their Indian allies, left the Company in control of Bengal and a major military and political power in India. In the following decades it gradually increased the size of the territories under its control, either ruling directly or indirectly via local puppet rulers under the threat of force of the Indian Army, 80% of which was composed of native Indian sepoys drawn from the warrior caste.

The East India Company was dissolved in 1858, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The rebellion began as an uprising of sepoys against their British commanders over the rumoured introduction of gun cartridges lubricated with animal fat and needing to be bitten open before use, which would have been in violation of the religious beliefs of Hindus and Muslims (had the fat been that of cows or pigs, respectively). However, the ensuing First War of Independence, as it is referred to in India, had causes that went beyond the introduction of these bullets: at stake was Indian culture and religion, in the face of the steady encroachment of that of the British.

As a result of the war, which caused heavy loss of life on both sides, the British government assumed direct control over India, ushering the period known as the British Raj.

Breakdown of Pax Britannica

The Battle of Waterloo marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the Pax Britannica.

Britain's overseas commercial dominance had been able to draw on most of the accessible world for raw materials and markets. This dominance was won through major territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Dutch and the French in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning with the Seven Years War. Utilising its naval supremacy, Britain mastered control of the world's raw materials and markets. Under its mercantilistic and protectionist policies, this ensured a near permanent dominance of world trade, which fed British industrialisation. However, under similar programmes practised by its progeny in the now independent United States, that dominance was slowly being challenged. Additionally Britain abandoned its protectionist policies in favour of free trade simultaneously as other Continental powers implemented their own protectionist and government promoted industrialisation programmes. Under the influence of commercial and financial vested interests this policy of free trade continued to be practised under successive ministries despite Britain's declining global relative industrial and trade economic value. This situation gradually deteriorated during the late 19th century as other powers began to advance their protectionist programmes and sought to use the state to guarantee their markets and sources of supply. By the 1870s, British manufactures in the staple industries of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to experience real competition abroad.

Britannia became a symbol of Britain's imperial might

Industrialisation progressed rapidly in Germany and the United States, allowing them to catch up with the British economy as world leaders. By 1870, the German textile and metal industries had surpassed those of the United Kingdom in organisation and technical efficiency and usurped British manufactures in the domestic market. By the turn of the century, the German metals and engineering industries would even be producing for the free trade market of the former "workshop of the world".

While invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services) kept the United Kingdom "out of the red," her share of world trade fell from a quarter in 1880 to a sixth in 1913. The United Kingdom was losing out not only in the markets of newly industrialising countries, but also against third-party competition in less-developed countries. The United Kingdom was even losing her former overwhelming dominance in trade with India, China, Latin America, and the coasts of Africa. However, this loss of supremacy was not so much a matter of the United Kingdom falling behind as it was a matter of other regions catching up in industrialisation.

As a result, the United Kingdom's commercial difficulties deepened with the onset of the "Long Depression" of 1873–96. This was a prolonged period of price deflation punctuated by severe business downturns. After nearly twenty years of self-evident failure of its free-trade policies, the combined results finally pressured the commercial and financial interests out of government dominance and returned a more protectionist oriented policy crowd. This retrenchment of the United Kingdom's trade system caused the other European Continental Powers to quickly move on their objective of abandoning the vestigial remnants of the early 19th century British Free-Trade system particularly by Germany in 1879 and in France in 1881 when they ended their former trade agreements with the British Empire.

The resulting limitation of the British Empire's domestic markets to European governments led the French government to attempt engineering a recreation of its earlier Empire in Africa. Soon Germany and finally the United Kingdom pushed forward in demarching respective colonial spheres in Africa, all with the goal of establishing newer sheltered overseas markets united to the home country behind imperial tariff barriers under which new overseas subjects would provide export markets free of foreign competition, while supplying cheap raw materials. Although she continued at times to attempt to adhere to free trade until 1932, the United Kingdom mitigated its risk by joining the renewed scramble for formal empire rather than allow areas under her influence to be seized by rivals.

The United Kingdom and the New Imperialism

Main article: New Imperialism

Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli.

The policy and ideology of European colonial expansion between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 are often characterised as the "New Imperialism". The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of what has been termed "empire for empire's sake", aggressive competition for overseas territorial acquisitions and the emergence in colonising countries of doctrines of jingoism which denied the fitness of subjugated peoples for self-government.

During this period, Europe's powers added nearly 8,880,000 square miles (23,000,000 km²) to their overseas colonial possessions. As it was mostly unoccupied by the Western powers as late as the 1880s, Africa became the primary target of the "new" imperialist expansion, although conquest took place also in other areas — notably south-east Asia and the East Asian seaboard, where Japan joined the European powers' scramble for territory.

The United Kingdom's entry into the new imperial age is often dated to 1875, when the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Ismail's 44% shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million to secure control of this strategic waterway, a channel for shipping between the United Kingdom and India since its opening six years earlier under Emperor Napoleon III. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882.

Fear of Russia's centuries-old southward expansion was a further factor in British policy: in 1878 the United Kingdom took control of Cyprus as a base for action against a Russian attack on the Ottoman Empire, after having taken part in the Crimean War 1854–56 and invading Afghanistan to forestall an increase in Russian influence there. The United Kingdom waged three bloody and unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan, as ferocious popular rebellions, invocations of jihad and inscrutable terrain frustrated British objectives. The First Anglo-Afghan War led to one of the most disastrous defeats of the Victorian military when an entire British army was wiped out by Russian-supplied Afghan Pashtun tribesmen during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. The Second Anglo-Afghan War led to the British débâcle at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, the siege of Kabul and British withdrawal into India. The Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 stoked a tribal uprising against the exhausted British military on the heels of World War I and expelled the British permanently from the new Afghan state. The "Great Game" in Inner Asia ended with a bloody British expedition against Tibet in 1903–04. At the same time, some powerful industrial lobbies and government leaders in the United Kingdom, later exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain, came to view formal empire as necessary to arrest the United Kingdom's relative decline in world markets. During the 1890s the United Kingdom adopted the new policy wholeheartedly, quickly emerging as the front-runner in the scramble for tropical African territories.

The United Kingdom's adoption of the New Imperialism may be seen as a quest for captive markets or fields for investment of surplus capital, or as a primarily strategic or pre-emptive attempt to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption of overseas markets into the increasingly closed imperial trading blocs of rival powers. The failure in the 1900s of Chamberlain's Tariff Reform campaign for Imperial protection illustrates the strength of free trade feeling even in the face of loss of international market share. Historians have argued that the United Kingdom's adoption of the "New imperialism" was an effect of her relative decline in the world, rather than of strength.

British colonial policy

British colonial policy was always driven to a large extent by the United Kingdom's trading interests, perhaps most noticeably that of the East India Company.. While settler economies developed the infrastructure to support balanced development, some tropical African territories found themselves developed only as raw-material suppliers. British policies based on comparative advantage left many developing economies dangerously reliant on a single cash crop, which others exported to the United Kingdom or to overseas British settlements. A reliance upon the manipulation of conflict between ethnic, religious and racial identities, in order to keep subject populations from uniting against the occupying power — the classic "divide and rule" strategy — left a legacy of partition and/or inter-communal difficulties in areas as diverse as Ireland, India, Malaya (Malaysia), Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cyprus, The Sudan, and Uganda.

The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Great Britain had over other countries. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out, however, that slave trade and the West Indian plantations provided less than 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution.

The United Kingdom and the scramble for Africa

Main article: Scramble for Africa

The Rhodes Colossus- Cecil Rhodes spanning "Cape to Cairo".

In 1875 the two most important European holdings in Africa were French controlled Algeria and the United Kingdom's Cape Colony. By 1914 only Ethiopia and the republic of Liberia remained outside formal European control. The transition from an "informal empire" of control through economic dominance to direct control took the form of a "scramble" for territory by the nations of Europe. The United Kingdom tried not to play a part in this early scramble, being more of a trading empire rather than a colonial empire; however, it soon became clear it had to gain its own African empire to maintain the balance of power.

As French, Belgian and Portuguese activity in the lower Congo River region threatened to undermine orderly penetration of tropical Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 sought to regulate the competition between the powers by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of territorial claims, a formulation which necessitated routine recourse to armed force against indigenous states and peoples.

The United Kingdom's 1882 military occupation of Egypt (itself triggered by concern over the Suez Canal) contributed to a preoccupation over securing control of the Nile valley, leading to the conquest of the neighbouring Sudan in 1896–98 and confrontation with a French military expedition at Fashoda (September 1898).

In 1899 the United Kingdom completed its takeover of what is today South Africa. This had begun with the annexation of the Cape in 1795 and continued with the conquest of the Boer Republics in the late 19th century, following the Second Boer War. Cecil Rhodes was the pioneer of British expansion north into Africa with his privately owned British South Africa Company. Rhodes expanded into the land north of South Africa and established Rhodesia. Rhodes' dream of a railway connecting Cape Town to Alexandria passing through a British Africa covering the continent is what led to his company's pressure on the government for further expansion into Africa.

British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Rhodes and Alfred Milner, the United Kingdom's High Commissioner in South Africa, to urge a "Cape-to-Cairo" empire linking by rail the strategically important Canal to the mineral-rich South, though German occupation of Tanganyika prevented its realisation until the end of World War I. In 1903, the All Red Line telegraph system communicated with the major parts of the Empire.

Paradoxically, the United Kingdom, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. Between 1885 and 1914 the United Kingdom took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, compared to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed fifteen million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire.

Home rule in white-settler colonies

The United Kingdom's empire had already begun its transformation into the modern Commonwealth with the extension of Dominion status to the already self-governing colonies of Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), Newfoundland (1907), and the newly-created Union of South Africa (1910). Leaders of the new states joined with British statesmen in periodic Colonial (from 1907, Imperial) Conferences, the first of which was held in London in 1887.

The foreign relations of the Dominions were still conducted through the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom: Canada created a Department of External Affairs in 1909, but diplomatic relations with other governments continued to be channelled through the Governors-General, Dominion High Commissioners in London (first appointed by Canada in 1880 and by Australia in 1910) and British legations abroad. The United Kingdom's declaration of war in World War I applied to all the Dominions.

But the Dominions did enjoy a substantial freedom in their adoption of foreign policy where this did not explicitly conflict with British interests: Canada's Liberal government negotiated a bilateral free-trade Reciprocity Agreement with the United States in 1911, but went down to defeat by the Conservative opposition.

In defence, the Dominions' original treatment as part of a single imperial military and naval structure proved unsustainable as the United Kingdom faced new commitments in Europe and the challenge of an emerging German High Seas Fleet after 1900. In 1909 it was decided that the Dominions should have their own navies, reversing an 1887 agreement that the then Australasian colonies should contribute to the Royal Navy in return for the permanent stationing of a squadron in the region.

The impact of the First World War

British Empire memorial for World War I in the Brussels cathedral.

The aftermath of World War I saw the last major extension of British rule, with the United Kingdom gaining control through League of Nations Mandates in Palestine and Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, as well as in the former German colonies of Tanganyika, South-West Africa (now Namibia) and New Guinea (the last two actually under South African and Australian rule respectively). The British zones of occupation in the German Rhineland after World War I and West Germany after World War II were not considered part of the Empire.

But although the United Kingdom emerged among the war's victors, and its rule expanded into new areas, the heavy costs of the war undermined its capacity to maintain the vast empire. The British had suffered millions of casualties and liquidated assets at an alarming rate, which led to debt accumulation, upending of capital markets and manpower deficiencies in the staffing of far-flung imperial posts in Asia and the African colonies. Nationalist sentiment grew in both old and new Imperial territories, fuelled by pride at Empire troops' participation in the war.

The 1920s saw a rapid transformation of Dominion status. Although the Dominions had had no formal voice in declaring war in 1914, each was included separately among the signatories of the 1919 peace Treaty of Versailles, which had been negotiated by a British-led united Empire delegation. In 1922 Dominion reluctance to support British military action against Turkey influenced the United Kingdom's decision to seek a compromise settlement. The League of Nations deputed former German colonies to come under the control of the United Kingdom's colonies. For example, New Zealand took over the mandate of Western Samoa, Australia that of Rabual and South Africa that of German South-West Africa.

Full Dominion independence was formalised in the 1931 Statute of Westminster: each Dominion was henceforth to be equal in status to the United Kingdom herself, free of British legislative interference and autonomous in international relations. The Dominions section created within the Colonial Office in 1907 was upgraded in 1925 to a separate Dominions Office and given its own Secretary of State in 1930.

File:BritishEmpire1921.png

Map showing British Empire in 1921 coloured pink.

Canada led the way, becoming the first Dominion to conclude an international treaty entirely independently (1923) and obtaining the appointment (1928) of a British High Commissioner in Ottawa, thereby separating the administrative and diplomatic functions of the Governor-General and ending the latter's anomalous role as the representative of the head of state and of the British Government. Canada's first permanent diplomatic mission to a foreign country opened in Washington, DC in 1927: Australia followed in 1940.

Egypt, formally independent from 1922 but bound to the United Kingdom by treaty until 1936 (and under partial occupation until 1956) similarly severed all constitutional links with the United Kingdom. Iraq, which became a British Protectorate in 1922, also gained complete independence ten years later in 1932.

The Irish Free State

A memorial to the Irish War of Independence

Irish home rule was to be provided under the Home Rule Act 1914, but the onset of World War I delayed its implementation indefinitely. At Easter 1916 an unsuccessful armed uprising was staged in Dublin by a mixed group of nationalists and socialists. From 1919 the Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla war to secede from the United Kingdom. This Anglo-Irish War ended in 1921 with a stalemate and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty confirmed the division of Ireland into two states, most of the island (26 counties) became the Irish Free State, a dominion within the British Commonwealth, while the six counties in the north with a majority Protestant community remained a part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The Free State evolved into the Republic of Ireland, which withdrew from the Commonwealth when enacted in 1949.

Ireland's Constitution claimed Northern Ireland as a part of the Republic until 1998. The issue of whether Northern Ireland should remain in the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland has divided Northern Ireland's people and was a factor in a long and bloody conflict known as the Troubles. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 brought about a ceasefire between most of the major organisations on both sides.

Decolonisation and decline

Mohammad Ali Jinnah & Mahatma Gandhi, two of the leaders of the Indian independence movement.

The rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements in British colonies and the changing economic situation of the world in the first half of the 20th century challenged an imperial power now increasingly preoccupied with issues nearer home. The Empire's end began with the onset of the Second World War, when a deal was reached between the British government and the leaders of the Indian independence movement, whereby the Indians would co-operate and remain loyal during the war, after which they would be granted independence. India was granted independence in August of 1947. Over the next two decades most of the former colonies would become independent.

The Dominions

The United Kingdom's efforts during World War II left the country all but exhausted and found its former allies disinclined to support the colonial status quo. Though the United Kingdom and its Empire emerged victorious from World War II, the economic costs of the war were far greater than those of World War I. The United Kingdom was heavily bombed and the tonnage war cost the Empire almost its entire merchant fleet. The United Kingdom's already weakened commercial and financial leadership were further undermined, heightening the importance of the Dominions and the United States as a source of military assistance.

The United Kingdom's declaration of hostilities against Germany in September 1939 did not automatically commit the Dominions. All except Ireland declared a state of hostility with Germany. The Irish Free State had negotiated the removal of the Royal Navy from the Treaty Ports the year before, and chose to remain legally neutral throughout the war. Australia went to war under the British declaration, though Australian prime minister John Curtin's unprecedented action in 1942 of successfully demanding the recall for home service of Australian troops that had been earmarked for the defence of British-held Burma demonstrated that Dominion governments could no longer be expected to subordinate their own national interests to British strategic perspectives.

After the war, Australia and New Zealand joined with the United States in the ANZUS regional security treaty in 1951 (although the US repudiated its commitments to New Zealand following a 1985 dispute over port access for nuclear vessels). The United Kingdom's pursuit (from 1961) and attainment (in 1973) of European Community membership weakened the old commercial ties to the Dominions, ending their privileged access to the UK market.

In January of 1947, Canada became the first Dominion to create its nationals as citizens in addition to their status as British subjects (which was retained until 1977). Canada became fully independent in 1982 with the patriation of a national constitution.

India, Ceylon, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean

Post-war economic crisis in 1947 made many realise that the Labour government of Clement Attlee should abandon the United Kingdom's attempt to retain all of its overseas territories. The Empire was increasingly regarded as an unnecessary drain on public finances by politicians and civil servants, if not the general public.

The independence of India in August 1947 (and, Ceylon in February 1948) came at the end of a forty year campaign by the Indian National Congress, first for self-government and later for full sovereignty, though the land's partition into India and Pakistan entailed violence costing hundreds of thousands of lives. The acceptance by the United Kingdom, and the other Dominions, of India's adoption of republican status (1950) is now taken as the start of the modern Commonwealth. Owing to this declaration, thirty-one Commonwealth Republics are now members of the Commonwealth.

In the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, post-war decolonisation was accomplished in the face of increasingly powerful (and sometimes mutually conflicting) nationalist movements, with the United Kingdom rarely fighting to retain any territory. The United Kingdom's limitations were exposed to a humiliating degree by the Suez Crisis of 1956 in which the United States opposed British, French and Israeli intervention in Egypt, seeing it as a doomed adventure likely to jeopardise American interests in the Middle East.

Singapore became independent in two stages. The British did not believe that Singapore would be large enough to defend itself against others alone. Therefore, Singapore was joined with Malaya, Sarawak and North Borneo to form Malaysia upon independence from the Empire. This short-lived union was dissolved in 1965 when Singapore was expelled by Malaysia and achieved complete independence, although the United Kingdom continued to offer protection through the Five Power Defence Arrangements.

Burma achieved independence (1948) outside the Commonwealth; Burma being the first colony to sever all ties with the British; Ceylon (1948) and Malaya (1957) within it. The United Kingdom's Palestine Mandate ended (1948) in withdrawal and open warfare between the territory's Jewish and Arab populations. In the Mediterranean, a guerrilla war waged by Greek Cypriot advocates of union with Greece ended (1960) in an independent Cyprus, although the United Kingdom did retain two military bases - Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo were given independence from the United Kingdom in 1964.

The end of the United Kingdom's Empire in Africa came with exceptional rapidity, often leaving the newly-independent states ill-equipped to deal with sovereignty: Ghana's independence (1957) after a ten-year nationalist political campaign was followed by that of Nigeria and Somaliland (1960), Sierra Leone and Tanganyika (1961), Uganda (1962), Kenya and Zanzibar (1963), The Gambia (1965), Lesotho (formerly Basutoland) (1966), Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) (1967), and Swaziland (1968).

British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was complicated by the region's white settler populations: Kenya had already provided an example in the Mau Mau Uprising of violent conflict exacerbated by white landownership and reluctance to concede majority rule. White minority rule in South Africa remained a source of bitterness within the Commonwealth until the Union of South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961.

Although the white-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ended in the independence of Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) and Zambia (the former Northern Rhodesia) in 1964, Southern Rhodesia's white minority (a self-governing colony since 1923) declared independence with their UDI rather than submit to the immediate majority rule of black Africans. The support of South Africa's apartheid government, and the Portuguese rule of Angola and Mozambique helped support the Rhodesian regime until 1979, when agreement was reached on majority rule, ending the Rhodesian Bush War and creating the new nation of Zimbabwe.

Most of the United Kingdom's Caribbean territories opted for eventual separate independence after the failure of the West Indies Federation (1958–62): Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (1962) were followed into statehood by Barbados (1966) and the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean (1970s and 1980s), Antigua and Barbuda being the last in November 1981. The United Kingdom's last colony on the American mainland, British Honduras, became a self-governing colony in 1964 and was renamed Belize on 1 June 1973, achieving full independence in 1981.

Newsweek magazine, April 19, 1982.

The British Western Pacific Territories such as the Gilbert Islands (which had seen the last attempt at human colonisation within the Empire - the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme) underwent a similar process of decolonisation.

As decolonisation and the Cold War were gathering momentum during the 1950s, an uninhabited rock in the Atlantic Ocean, Rockall, became the last territorial acquisition of the United Kingdom to date. Concerns that the Soviet Union might use the island to spy on a British missile test Template:PDFlink prompted the Royal Navy to land a party and officially claim the rock in the name of the Queen in 1955. In 1972 the Island of Rockall Act formally incorporated the island into the United Kingdom.

In 1982, the United Kingdom's resolve to defend her remaining overseas territories was put to the test when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, acting on a long-standing claim that dated back to the Spanish Empire. The United Kingdom's ultimately successful military response to retake the islands during the ensuing Falklands War prompted headlines in the US press that "the Empire strikes back", and was viewed by many to have contributed to reversing the downward trend in the UK's status as a world power.

In 1984, the United Kingdom ended the protectorate status of Brunei, although the British Army maintains a presence in the Sultanate at the request of the Government of Brunei.

In 1997, the United Kingdom's last major overseas territory, Hong Kong, became a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration agreed some thirteen years previously.

Legacy

The remaining overseas territories

The United Kingdom retains sovereignty over fourteen territories outside of the British Isles, collectively named the British overseas territories, which remain under British rule due to lack of support for independence among the local population or because the territory is uninhabited except for transient military or scientific personnel. British sovereignty of two of the overseas territories, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, is disputed by their nearest geographical neighbours, Spain and Argentina respectively.

Most former British colonies (and one former Portuguese colony) are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, a non-political, voluntary association of equal members, in which the United Kingdom has no privileged status. The head of the Commonwealth is currently Queen Elizabeth II. Fifteen members of the Commonwealth continue to share their head of state with the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth realms.

Many former British colonies share or shared certain characteristics:

• The English language as either the main or secondary language.
• A democratic parliamentary system of government modelled on the Westminster system.
• A legal system based upon English law. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, one of the United Kingdom's highest courts of appeal, still serves as the highest court of appeal for several former colonies.
• A military, police and civil service based upon British models.
• The imperial system of measurement (Myanmar, Cyprus and the United States are the only former British colonies not to have officially adopted the metric system).
• Educational Institutions such as boarding schools and universities modelled on Oxford and Cambridge.
• Driving on the left hand side of the road, with some exceptions mainly in North America and North Africa.
• Popularity of football, rugby union and/or cricket, as well as related sports.

See also

British Emperor British colonisation of the Americas Scottish colonisation of the Americas Welsh colonisation of the Americas European colonisation of the Americas Tudor re-conquest of Ireland Cromwellian conquest of Ireland Penal Laws Wars involving England All Red Line British East India Company British Empire and Commonwealth Museum The British Empire in Fiction Commonwealth of Nations Commonwealth Realm Decolonisation Commonwealth Day Evolution of the British Empire History of the United Kingdom Protestant work ethic

Naval history Napoleonic Wars Imperialism in Asia List of United Kingdom topics Size of Empires Government Houses of the British Empire British Personal Unions British Raj History of South Asia Triangular trade Atlantic Slave Trade Great Irish Famine World War I Industrial Revolution Global empire Western culture World War II The British Imperial Lifeline American Revolutionary War Irish Rebellion of 1798 Economic history of Britain

References

• Bryant, Arthur. The History of Britain and the British Peoples, 3 vols. (London, 1984–90).
• Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002),
• Hyam, Ronald. Britain's Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (Macmillan, 1993).
• James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (St. Martin's Griffin, 1997).
• Judd, Denis. Empire: The British Imperial Experience, From 1765 to the Present (London, 1996).
• Lloyd; T. O. The British Empire, 1558-1995 Oxford University Press, 1996
• Louis, William. Roger (general editor), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1998–99).
• Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1996).
• Olson, James S. and Robert S. Shadle; Historical Dictionary of the British Empire 1996
• Rose, J. Holland, A. P. Newton and E. A. Benians (gen. eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 9 vols. (Cambridge, 1929–61).
• Smith, Simon C. British Imperialism 1750-1970 Cambridge University Press, 1998. brief
• Chandra, Bipan India's Struggle For Independence (Penguin Books, India, 1989).
• Dalrymple, William The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Knopf, 2007).
• Butler, Lawrence J. Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World (I.B. Tauris, 2002)

External links

• Extensive information on the British Empire
• Sizes of various empires and quasi-empires
• The Commonwealth - UK government site