The British Empire was the world's first global power; by 1921, it held sway over a population of 400–500 million people — roughly a quarter of the world's population — and covered more than 14.1 million square miles (nearly 36 million square kilometres), roughly 40% of the world's habitable land area, and a little more than the world's next largest empire, the Mongol Empire, which at its largest encompassed nearly 13.8 million square miles (35 million square kilometres).
The British Empire came together over 300 years through a succession of phases of expansion by trade, settlement, or conquest, interspersed with intervals of pacific commercial and diplomatic activity, or imperial contraction. Its territories were scattered across every continent and ocean, and it was often accurately described as "the empire on which the sun never sets". Arguably, its zenith was achieved in the 1890s and 1900s.
The Empire facilitated the spread of British technology, commerce, language, and government around much of the globe. Imperial hegemony contributed to Britain's extraordinary economic growth, and greatly strengthened its voice in world affairs. Even as Britain extended its imperial reach overseas, it continued to develop and broaden democratic institutions at the homeland.
From the perspective of the colonies, the record of the British Empire is mixed. The colonies received from Britain the English language, an administrative and legal framework on the British model, and technological and economic development. During decolonisation, Britain sought to pass parliamentary democracy and the rule of law to its colonies, with varying degrees of success. Almost all former British colonies have since chosen to join the Commonwealth of Nations, the association which replaced the Empire.
Nonetheless, British colonial policy was always driven to a large extent by Britain's trading interests. While settler economies developed the infrastructure to support balanced development, 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. A reliance upon the manipulation of conflict between ethnic 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 or inter-communal difficulties in areas as diverse as Ireland, India, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Uganda, Iraq, Guyana, and Fiji. Colonel Frank Kitson, in his book Gangs and Countergangs (1960), described how British colonial authorities in Kenya successfully manipulated the Mau Mau uprising so that it became warfare between rival factions; ultimately only 22 Europeans were killed, as opposed to 18,000–30,000 Africans.
The credit for the first ever usage of the words "British Empire" is usually given to Doctor John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, alchemist, and mathematician.
Background: English colonialism
Expansion in the British Isles and France
After the conquest of England by Normandy in 1066, England initially supported William the Conqueror's holdings in France. England's policy of active involvement in continental European affairs endured for several hundred years. By the end of the 14th century, foreign trade, originally based on wool exports to Europe, had emerged as a cornerstone of national policy.
These centuries saw the beginnings of England's political expansion with the conquest of Wales (to 1282) and Ireland (from 1169). A short-lived English triumph in Scotland in 1296 was temporarily reversed at Bannockburn in 1314, leaving the two crowns to be united by dynastic succession in 1603. Despite the loss of Normandy in 1204, fortunate marriage and dynastic inheritance on the part of England's post-Norman rulers brought them large territories in western France, lost finally in 1453. England after this point clung on to the strategic port of Calais, until this too was lost in 1563.
Growth of the overseas empire
The overseas British Empire — in the sense of British oceanic exploration and settlement outside of Europe and the British Isles — was rooted in the pioneering maritime policies of King Henry VII, who reigned 1485–1509. Building on commercial links in the wool trade promoted during the reign of his predecessor King Richard III, Henry established the modern English merchant marine system, which greatly expanded English shipbuilding and seafaring. The merchant marine also supplied the basis for the mercantile institutions that would play such a crucial role in later British imperial ventures, such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the British East India Company. Henry also ordered construction of the first dry dock, at Portsmouth, and made improvements to England's small navy.
The foundations of sea power, having been laid during Henry VII's reign, were gradually expanded to protect English trade and open up new routes. King Henry VIII founded the modern English navy, more than tripling the number of warships and constructing the first large vessels with heavy, long-range guns. He initiated the Navy's formal, centralised administrative apparatus, built new docks, and constructed the network of beacons and lighthouses that greatly facilitated coastal navigation for English and foreign merchant sailors. Henry thus established the munitions-based Royal Navy that was able to repulse the Spanish Armada in 1588, and his innovations provided the seed for the Imperial Navy of later centuries.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in the years 1577 to 1580, only the second to accomplish this feat after Ferdinand Magellan's expedition. In 1579, Drake landed somewhere in northern California and claimed for the Crown what he named Nova Albion ("New Britain"), though the claim was not followed by settlement. Subsequent maps spell out Nova Albion to the north of all New Spain. Thereafter, England's interests outside Europe grew steadily. Humphrey Gilbert followed on Cabot's original claim when he sailed to Newfoundland in 1583 and declared it an English colony on August 5 at St. John's. Sir Walter Raleigh organised the first colony in Virginia in 1587 at Roanoke. Both Gilbert's Newfoundland settlement and the Roanoke colony were short-lived, however, and had to be abandoned due to food shortages, severe weather, shipwrecks, and hostile encounters with indigenous tribes on the American continent.
The Stuart era
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 firmly established England as a major naval power, though subsequent naval defeats at the hands of Spain in the 1590s thwarted additional settlement attempts. Finally in 1604, King James I of England negotiated the Treaty of London which ceased hostilities with Spain, and the first permanent English settlement followed in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. During the next three centuries, England extended its influence overseas and consolidated its political development at home. In 1707, the parliaments of England and Scotland were united in London as the parliament of Great Britain.
Colonisation of the Americas
The British Empire first took shape during the early 17th century, with the English settlement of the eastern colonies of North America, which would later become the original United States as well as Canada's Atlantic provinces, and the colonisation of the smaller islands of the Caribbean such as Jamaica and Barbados.
The sugar-producing colonies of the Caribbean, where slavery became the basis of the economy, were at first England's most important and lucrative colonies. The American colonies providing tobacco, cotton, and rice in the south and naval materiel and furs in the north were less financially successful, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants.
England's American empire was slowly expanded by war and colonisation, England gaining control of New Amsterdam (later New York) in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The growing American colonies pressed ever westward in search of new agricultural lands. During the Seven Years War the British defeated the French at the Plains of Abraham and captured all of New France in 1760, giving Britain control over the greater part of North America.
Later, settlement of Australia (starting with penal colonies from 1788) and New Zealand (under the crown from 1840) created a major zone of British migration, although indigenous populations suffered terribly through war and particularly disease, reducing numbers by some 60–70% over a century. The colonies later became self-governing colonies and became profitable exporters of wool and gold.
See also British colonization of the Americas, Colonial history of America.
Free trade and "informal empire"
Main article: Pax Britannica.
The old British colonial system began to decline in the 18th century. During the long period of unbroken Whig dominance of domestic political life (1714–62), the Empire became less important and less well-regarded, until an ill-fated attempt (largely involving taxes, monopolies, and zoning) to reverse the resulting "salutary neglect" (or "benign neglect") provoked the American War of Independence (1775–83), depriving Britain of her most populous colonies.
The period is sometimes referred to as the end of the "first British Empire", indicating the shift of British expansion from the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries to the "second British Empire" in Asia and later also Africa from the 18th century. The loss of the United States showed that colonies were not necessarily particularly beneficial in economic terms, since Britain could still dominate 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 Britain and elsewhere to the laissez-faire economic liberalism of Adam Smith and successors like Richard Cobden.
The lesson of Britain's North American loss — that trade might continue to bring prosperity even in the absence of colonial rule — contributed to the extension in the 1840s and 1850s of self-governing colony status to white settler colonies in Canada and Australasia whose British or European inhabitants were seen as outposts of the "mother country". Ireland had been treated differently, being incorporated into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
During this period, Britain also outlawed the slave trade (1807) and soon began enforcing this principle on other nations. By the mid-19th century Britain had largely eradicated the world slave trade. Slavery itself was abolished in the British colonies in 1834, though the phenomenon of indentured labour retained much of its oppressive character until 1920.
The end of the old colonial and slave systems were 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.
Some argue that the rise of free trade merely reflected Britain's economic position and was unconnected with any true philosophical conviction. Indeed, Britain has always been far more enthusiastic about urging the policy upon others, than she has been about practicing it herself. Despite the earlier loss of 13 of Britain's North American colonies, the final defeat in Europe of Napoleonic France in 1815 left Britain the most successful international power. While the Industrial Revolution at home gave her an unrivalled economic leadership, the Royal Navy dominated the seas. The distraction of rival powers by European matters enabled Britain to pursue a phase of expansion of her economic and political influence through "informal empire " underpinned by free trade and strategic pre-eminence.
Between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Britain was the world's sole industrialised power, with over 30% of the global industrial output in 1870. As the "workshop of the world", Britain 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, Britain could prosper through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule.
The British Empire in Asia
Main article: Imperialism in Asia.
The victory of forces of the British East India Company at Plassey in 1757 opened the great Indian province of Bengal to British rule, though later famine (1770) exacerbated by massive expropriation of provincial government revenues aroused controversy at home. The 19th century saw Company rule extended across nearly the whole of India. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857 the Company's territories were placed (1858) under the administration of the Crown. Queen Victoria (1837–1901) was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876.
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma were added to Britain's Asian territories, which extended further east to Malaya and, from 1841, to Hong Kong following a successful war in defence of the Company's opium exports to China.
British interest in China began in the late 18th century as Britain became a large importer of tea. This trade created a bilateral trade deficit which the British sought to resolve by exporting opium from India to China, despite opposition among Chinese officials to the trade. Conflict over the trade resulted in the Opium Wars in which Britain twice decisively defeated China.
After the Opium Wars, Britain maintained a complex relationship with China. Although Britain annexed Hong Kong, most of its trade with China was regulated by treaties which allowed trade through a number of coastal ports. As a result, Britain was interested in maintaining an independent Chinese state since the collapse of China would open opportunities for territorial gains by other Western Powers.
At the same time, Britain was opposed to a Chinese state that was too strong, because this would allow China to cancel or renegotiate its treaties. These interests explain the apparent contradictions of British policy in China: Britain provided the Qing dynasty with aid during the Taiping rebellion, but at the same time, in alliance with France, engaged in the Second Opium War against the Qing court.
Breakdown of Pax Britannica
As the first country to industrialise, Britain had been able to draw on most of the accessible world for raw materials and markets. But this situation gradually deteriorated during the 19th century as other powers began to industrialise 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.
Industrialisation progressed rapidly in Germany and the United States, allowing them to clearly outstrip the "old" British and French capitalisms. The German textile and metal industries, for example, had by 1870, surpassed those of Britain 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 Britain "out of the red," her share of world trade fell from a quarter in 1880 to a sixth in 1913. Britain was losing out not only in the markets of newly industrialising countries, but also against third-party competition in less-developed countries. Britain was even losing her former overwhelming dominance in trade with India, China, Latin America, or the coasts of Africa.
Britain's commercial difficulties deepened with the onset of the "Long Depression" of 1873–96, a prolonged period of price deflation punctuated by severe business downturns which added to pressure on governments to promote home industry, leading to the widespread abandonment of free trade among Europe's powers (in Germany from 1879 and in France from 1881).
The resulting limitation of both domestic markets and export opportunities led government and business leaders in Europe and later the US to see the solution in sheltered overseas markets united to the home country behind imperial tariff barriers: new overseas subjects would provide export markets free of foreign competition, while supplying cheap raw materials. Although she continued to adhere to free trade until 1932, Britain joined the renewed scramble for formal empire rather than allow areas under her influence to be seized by rivals.
Britain 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 racial superiority which denied the fitness of subjugated peoples for self-government.
During this period, Europe's powers added nearly 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 the United States and Japan joined the European powers' scramble for territory.
Britain'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 shareholding in the Suez Canal to secure control of this strategic waterway, a channel for shipping between Britain 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 Britain 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. Britain 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 tribesman during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. The Second Anglo-Afghan War led to the British debacle at 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 and wholly unnecessary British expedition against Tibet in 1903–04.
At the same time, some powerful industrial lobbies and government leaders in Britain, later exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain, came to view formal empire as necessary to arrest Britain's relative decline in world markets. During the 1890s Britain adopted the new policy wholeheartedly, quickly emerging as the front-runner in the scramble for tropical African territories.
Britain'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 Britain's adoption of the "New imperialism" was an effect of her relative decline in the world, rather than of strength.
The evolution of colonialism in India should dissuade people from sweeping generalisations and over-simplifications regarding the roles of inter-capitalist competition and accumulated surplus in precipitating the era of the New Imperialism. Formal empire in India, beginning with the Government of India Act of 1858, was a means of consolidation, reacting to the abortive Indian Mutiny, which was in itself a conservative reaction among Indian traditionalists to British policy in the subcontinent.
Britain and the Scramble for Africa
Main article: Scramble for Africa.
In 1875 the two most important European holdings in Africa were Algeria and the 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 in areas previously regarded as open to British trade and influence.
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.
Britain'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 Britain set out to complete her takeover of South Africa, begun with the annexation (1795) of the Cape, by invading the Afrikaner republics of the gold-rich Transvaal and the neighbouring Orange Free State. The chartered British South Africa Company had already seized the land to the north, renamed Rhodesia after its head, the Cape tycoon Cecil Rhodes. Criticism for this takeover led to Britain's Splendid Isolation.
British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Rhodes and Alfred Milner, Britain'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 Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to her long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting her advantageous position at its inception. Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under her control, compared to 15 percent for France, 9 percent for Germany, 7 percent for Belgium and 1 percent for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire.
Home Rule in white-settler colonies
Britain'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. Britain'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 Empire military and naval structure proved unsustainable as Britain 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 British navy in return for the permanent stationing of a squadron in the region.
The impact of the First World War
British Empire memorial for the First World War in the Brussels cathedral.
The aftermath of World War I saw the last major extension of British rule, with Britain 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 Britain emerged among the war's victors, and her rule expanded into new areas, the heavy costs of the war undermined her 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 and the grievance felt by many non-white ex-servicemen at the racial discrimination they had encountered during their service to the Empire.
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 Britain's decision to seek a compromise settlement.
Full Dominion independence was formalised in the 1926 Balfour Declaration and the 1931 Statute of Westminster: each Dominion was henceforth to be equal in status to Britain 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.
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 in 1927: Australia followed in 1940.
The Irish Free State, accorded Dominion status in 1921 after a bitter war against British rule, ended its formal constitutional link with the crown in 1937 (renaming itself Éire), and became the Republic of Ireland outside the Commonwealth in 1949. Egypt, formally independent from 1922 but bound to Britain by treaty until 1936 (and under partial occupation until 1956) similarly severed all constitutional links with Britain. Iraq, which became a British Protectorate in 1922, also gained complete independence ten years later in 1932.
Decolonisation
The rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements in the subject territories in the first half of the 20th century challenged an imperial power now increasingly preoccupied with issues nearer home, particularly after the Second World War. Seizing the opportunity, first India, then other territories in Asia and Africa demanded independent statehood. After sometimes disastrous attempts to stem the tide, Britain's eventual acceptance of the new situation led to the Empire's transformation into today's Commonwealth.
The end of Empire gathered pace after Britain's efforts during World War II left the country all but exhausted and found its former allies disinclined to support the colonial status quo. Economic crisis in 1947 made many realise that the Labour government of Clement Attlee should abandon Britain's attempt to remain a first-rank power.
Britain's declaration of hostilities against Germany in September 1939 did not commit the Dominions, other than Australia, which had not yet legally adopted the Statute of Westminster. The other Dominions issued their own declarations of war, except for Éire, which had negotiated the removal of British forces from its territory the year before, and which now chose to remain legally neutral throughout the war.
World War II fatally undermined Britain's already weakened commercial and financial leadership and heightened the importance of the Dominions and the United States as a source of military assistance. Australian prime minister John Curtin's unprecedented action (1942) in successfully demanding the recall for home service of Australian troops 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). Britain's pursuit (from 1961) and attainment (1973) of European Community membership weakened the old commercial ties to the Dominions, ending their privileged access to the UK market.
In the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, post-war decolonisation was accomplished with almost unseemly haste in the face of increasingly powerful (and sometimes mutually conflicting) nationalist movements, with Britain rarely fighting to retain any territory. Britain's limitations were exposed to a humiliating degree by the Suez Crisis of 1956 in which the United States opposed Anglo-French intervention in Egypt, seeing it as a doomed adventure likely to jeopardise American interests in the Middle East.
The independence of India in 1947 ended a 40-year struggle by the Indian National Congress, firstly 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 Britain, and the other Dominions, of India's adoption of republican status (1949) is now taken as the start of the modern Commonwealth.
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 to form Malaysia upon independence from the Empire. This short lived union was dissolved in 1965 when Singapore left Malaysia and achieved complete independence.
Burma achieved independence (1948) outside the Commonwealth, Ceylon (1948) and Malaya (1957) within it. Britain'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 Britain did retain two military bases - Akrotiri and Dhekelia.
The reign of
Queen Elizabeth II, the current Queen, has seen the gradual dismantling of the Empire.
The end of Britain's Empire in Africa came with exceptional rapidity, often leaving the newly-independent states ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of sovereignty: Ghana's independence (1957) after a ten-year nationalist political campaign was followed by that of Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone and Tanganyika (1961), Uganda (1962), Kenya and Zanzibar (1963), The Gambia (1965),Singapore (1965), Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) and Lesotho (formerly Basutoland) (1966), 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 ending of apartheid policy in 1994.
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 rather than submit to African government. The support of South Africa's apartheid government kept the Rhodesian regime in place until 1979, when agreement was reached on majority rule in an independent Zimbabwe.
Most of Britain'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). Britain's Pacific dependencies underwent a similar process of decolonisation in the latter decades. At the end of Britain's 99-year lease of the mainland New Territories, all of Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997.
Extent
At its traditional height in 1921, the British Empire consisted of the following territories:
Africa
The Americas and Atlantic
Antarctica
Asia
Europe
Pacific
Post World War II Extent
During and after World War II the British Empire attained it greatest territorial extent and so this can be considered the greatest territorial height of the Empire, even though by then it was heavily financially strained due to six years of war. Territories obtained during and after the war were controlled in a variety of ways, with some ruled as UN Trust Territories and others being totally occupied and administered, while still others were only militarily occupied and the local administrations allowed to continue. These territories were:
Africa
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Comoros (as part of Madagascar, see below)
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Eritrea (as a UN Trust Territory)
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Ethiopia (and the Ogaden for a slightly longer period, as part of Italian East Africa, Ehtiopia was soon handed back to the Ethiopian government-in-exile).
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French Somaliland (now Djibouti) (occupied and local administration continued)
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Italian Somaliland (occupied and administered until 1950, then returned to Italy as a UN Trust Territory).
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Madagascar (occupied and administered)
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Mayotte (as part of the Comoros, see above)
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Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (now most of Libya) (as a UN Trust Territory)
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Reunion (occupied, local administration continues)
The Americas and Atlantic
Asia
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Dutch East Indies- mainly just Java (occupied and administered by South East Asia Command (SEAC) to accept Japanese surrender and restore law and order until the Dutch arrived)
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French Indochina- south of the 16th parallel, but mainly Saigon (occupied and administered by SEAC to accept Japanese surrender and restore law and order until the French arrived)
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Iran (occupied and administered by Indian Command)
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Iraq (under same administration as Iran)
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Japan (Shikoku and part of Honshu occupied as British Commonwealth Occupation Zone )
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Lebanon (occupied and administered)
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Syria (same administration as Lebanon)
Europe
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Austria (occupied southeastern Austria as British Occupation Zone )
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Faeroe Islands (occupied and administered, but local administration continued also)
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Germany (occupied northwestern Germany as British Occupation Zone )
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Iceland (occupied and local administration continues)
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Italy (temporary military government and occupation, except in Udine and Venezia Gulia provinces)
Territories Lost by British Empire before 1921
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Thirteen Colonies, later the United States of America
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Delaware
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Maryland
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New Jersey
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Virginia, later Virginia and West Virginia
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Massachusetts, later Massachusetts and Maine
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New York, later New York and Vermont
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New Hampshire
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Rhode Island
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Georgia
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North Carolina
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South Carolina
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Connecticut
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Pennsylvania
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Northwest Territory between the 13 Colonies and the Mississippi River, with conflicting claims between the Colonies, which is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota.
- Territory between the 13 Colonies and the Mississippi south of the Ohio River, with conflicting claims, which is now Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and part of Louisiana.
- Mediæval territories in France.
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Helgoland seized by the British in 1807 ceded to Germany in 1890.
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Hanover from the accession of George I on 1 August 1714 to the death of William IV on 20 June 1837.
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Florida, to Spain, but later in the United States.
- Part of the Oregon Country (which was disputed with the USA, Spain, and Russia), to the United States.
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Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) ceded to Britain on 25 February 1843; gained Independence 28 November 1843; annexed by the United States on 7 July 1898.
- The Ionian Islands were captured by the British in 1809 and ceded to Greece in 1864.
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Minorca was first captured by the British in 1708; it was formally ceded to Spain in 1802.
- The Mosquito Coast was a British protectorate from 1655 to 1850.
Remaining Overseas Territories
Main article: British overseas territory.
Now only a few small territories remain under British administration, mostly for reasons of perceived insufficiency as sovereign states. The last remaining Overseas Territories are:
Overseas Territories possessing substantial self-government
Other Overseas Territories
Crown Dependencies in British Isles (Outside UK & EU)
See also
External links
Further Reading
- James, Lawrence,(1998) The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 2nd. ed, Abacus ISBN 031216985X
- Judd, Denis, (1999) Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present, Fontana ISBN 0465019544
- Fergusson, Niall (2003) . Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World, Pengiun Books ISBN 0-141-00754-0
Last updated: 10-24-2005 13:34:30
