British Empire

The British Empire which, in the early decades of the 20th century, covered 11.4 million square miles with a population of 410m (nearly a quarter of the world's population), was the most extensive area under a single country's rule in history. The Empire had come about through a succession of phases of expansion by settlement or conquest, interspersed with intervals of pacific commercial and diplomatic activity or contraction over 400 years. The territories under British influence were scattered across every continent and every ocean in many widely seperate pieces.

The British Empire may be said to have taken shape from the early 17th c., with the British colonisation and settlement of the eastern colonies of North America which would later become the original United States, and the settlement of the smaller islands of the Caribbean, where slavery became the basis of sugar production, as well as the initial exploits of the East India Company in India and the surrounding areas.

Successes during the same period against Britain's rival France in India and later (1760) Canada were already extending the Empire even as British defeat in the American War of Independence (1775-83) deprived it of its most extensive possessions to date. This is sometimes referred to as the end of the "First British Empire", indicating the shift of British influence from the Americas between the 16th and 18th Centuries to the "Second British Empire" of Afica and especially India from the 18th century.

The victory of forces of the British East India Company at Plassey (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. Settlement of Australia (a penal colony from 1788) and New Zealand (under the crown from 1840) created a major zone of British migration.

The nineteenth century saw Company rule extended across India and transformed (1858) into British government rule following the Indian Mutiny. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma were added to Britain's Asian territories, which extended further east to Malaya and (1841) to Hong Kong following successful war in defence of the Company's opium exports to China.

The late 19th century saw the transition from 'Informal Empire' of control through economic dominance to direct control, marked by the scramble for further territory in Africa from around 1870 in areas which Britain had regarded as theirs to take. While some British colonies were already a century old, Egypt was taken over in 1882 (though not annexed until 1914); Nigeria was subjugated in the 1890s and early 1900s; in east Africa, Kenya and Uganda underwent a similar process; while in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighbouring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers in the Boer Wars. The imperial competition between the British, the French and the Germans needed the Congress of Berlin (1878) to control the aggression. The Brussels Congress (1890) codified the division of Africa between the European powers and altered the conflict into the suppression of African tribes.

The aftermath of World War I saw the last major extension of British rule, with the British gaining mandates in Palestine and Iraq from the collapse of the Turkish empire in the Middle East and Tanganyika under League of Nations Mandates from Germany.

But Britain's Empire had already begun its transformation into the modern Commonwealth, as the white colonies of Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907) and the newly-created Union of South Africa (1910) became self-governing Dominions, recognised as fully independent states under the British crown by the 1926 Balfour Declaration and the 1931 Statute of Westminster.

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 Eire}, 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.

The end of Empire gathered pace after Britain's efforts during World War II left the country all but exhausted and the rise of nationalism put great pressure on the government, many including the US did not see the resumption of colonial rule as reasonable. Post-war decolonisation was accomplished with almost unseemly haste, with Britain rarely fighting to retain any territory. The key withdrawal was from the "Jewel in the Crown" - independence of India in 1947 ended a 40-year struggle by the Indian National Congress for first self-government and later full sovereignty at the cost of partition into India and East and West Pakistan (East Pakistan later became Bangledesh). 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.

Burma achieved independence (1948) outside the Commonwealth, Ceylon (1948) and Malaya (1957) within it, while Hong Kong ultimately reverted to China (1997) with constitutional safeguards for its socio-economic system upon the expiry of Britain's 99-year lease of the mainland New Territories. In the Mediterranean, a guerrilla war waged by Greek Cypriot advocates of union with Greece ended (1960) in an independent Cyprus.

The end of Britain's Empire in Africa came with exceptional rapidity, often leaving the newly-independent states ill-equipeed 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), Gambia (1965), Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) and Lesotho (formerly Basutoland) (1966), and Swaziland (1968).

Most of Britain's Caribbean territories opted for evential separate independence after the failure of the West Indies Federation (1958-61): Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago (1962) were followed into statehood by Barbados (1966) and the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean (1970s and 1980s). By 2000 only a few small territories remained under British administration.