The British Empire

The British Empire was the largest empire in history. At its height, in the 1920s, it covered about a quarter of the world's land and ruled nearly a quarter of its population: it was "the empire on which the sun never sets". Its history of trade, conquest, exploitation and the spread of languages and institutions shaped the modern world, and its legacy is still hotly debated today.

The first empire: the Atlantic

English expansion began in the late 16th century under Elizabeth I, with privateers and the first expeditions to the New World. In the 17th century the North American colonies were founded, starting with Jamestown in Virginia (1607) and the Pilgrim Fathers' colony (1620), together with those of the Caribbean, such as Barbados and Jamaica, where sugar plantations relied on enslaved African labour. In the 18th century Britain became the world's leading slave-trading power: its ships carried more than three million Africans across the Atlantic. After victory in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), which gave it Canada and dominance in India, Britain nonetheless lost the thirteen American colonies, which declared independence in 1776 and won it in 1783.

The second empire: India and the world

The centre of the empire then shifted towards Asia. The East India Company, founded in 1600 as a trading company, gradually conquered much of the Indian subcontinent after the battle of Plassey (1757). After the great Indian rebellion of 1857 the Crown took direct rule of India, the Raj, and in 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Meanwhile the colonisation of Australia (1788) and New Zealand began, Canada was consolidated, and in the second half of the 19th century Britain took part in the Scramble for Africa, dreaming of a line of possessions "from Cairo to the Cape". It also controlled strategic points such as Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong, and its navy ruled the waves.

The empire rested on naval, industrial and financial superiority, on alliances with local elites and on military force. It was accompanied by wars such as the Opium Wars against China, by famines worsened by colonial policies, as in Ireland and India, and by violence such as the concentration camps of the Boer War or the Amritsar massacre of 1919. But it also brought railways, schools, legal systems and the English language, and in 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade and in 1833 slavery throughout the empire, then committing the navy to suppressing the trade.

Decolonisation

After the two world wars the UK, indebted and weakened, could no longer maintain the empire, and independence movements were ever stronger. In 1947 India and Pakistan gained independence, with a partition that caused terrible violence and millions of refugees. Burma and Ceylon followed (1948), then Ghana (1957), the empire's first independent African country, and in the 1960s most of the African and Caribbean colonies, sometimes after bloody wars such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The Suez crisis of 1956 showed that Britain was no longer a superpower. The last great handover was the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

What remains

The UK retains fourteen overseas territories, including Gibraltar, the Falklands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands. The Commonwealth, the voluntary association of 56 countries born of the empire and symbolically headed by King Charles III, brings together a third of humanity. The empire's legacy can be seen in the worldwide spread of English, common law, parliamentary government and sports such as football, cricket and rugby, but also in borders drawn on maps and the conflicts that followed. In the UK itself immigration from Commonwealth countries has created a multicultural society. Judgements on the empire still divide historians and the public, between those who stress its contributions and those who denounce its exploitation and racism.

See also the history of the United Kingdom, the Industrial Revolution, Liverpool and population.