British Empire

Although England had long been engaged in sporadic efforts to colonize neighboring Ireland, the nation did not begin to build its empire in earnest until the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the British Empire, as it had come to be known, was arguably the most powerful in the world and encompassed colonies and other possessions in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The empire’s vast colonial expansion was fueled by British economic imperatives, and its imperialist policies included mercantilist objectives such as the search for markets, the use of coerced or free indigenous labor, and the exploitation of raw materials, among others. Imperial expansion also drew on the nation’s nationalist sentiments and perceived obligation to promote British culture among the indigenous populations of its colonies. The British Empire reached its peak in the late nineteenth century, during the Victorian Era; by the mid-twentieth century, the majority of its colonies had received their independence.

Background

The British Empire was a political and economic system that developed from the colonization that began during the sixteenth century. During the early phases of colonization, most of the empire was geared toward a protectionist and dependent economy based on industries that required little in the way of technological investment and skilled work, such as agriculture and mining. Colonialism also served to ease demographic pressures in Britain, as many British citizens moved to the colonies during the first centuries of the colonial era. In order to further imperialist aims, politicians promoted imperialist policies based on nationalism and argued that the British Empire was burdened with the responsibility to civilize the nonwhite indigenous populations of the colonies.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British mercantilist system, which was linked to traditional colonialism, clashed with the developing economic liberalism supported by economic theorists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham, who openly opposed protectionism and colonialism. However, despite this opposition and the loss of colonies in the Americas, perhaps most significantly those that became the United States, the British Empire flourished in the nineteenth century, establishing itself as a powerful maritime empire with little significant competition in Europe.

Overview

The British Empire had its roots in the Elizabethan Era, when British explorers were able to develop trading posts and commercially viable colonies in the Caribbean and North America. In an aggressive competition for more and better markets, the British Empire maintained tense relations with European powers such as Spain, France, and the Netherlands, which were similarly focused on building globe-spanning empires. As the Industrial Revolution took hold in Britain, the empire’s colonies became an essential source of raw materials.

By 1870, there was a new surge in expansionist policies in England. The European powers determined to divide Asia and Africa, and during the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, various European empires set guidelines for claiming territories. The economic crisis of 1873 and the resulting wave of protectionism that overtook European markets caused Britain to rely increasingly on its colonies. Patriotic sentiment in Britain grew inextricably tied to the new economic pressures, giving way to intense nationalism. By the early twentieth century, the British Empire had expanded to include Egypt and Sudan, forming arguably the most extensive empire that the world has ever known.

The British Empire developed several types of colonies, including ports or trading posts, such as Hong Kong; commercial production colonies, as in present-day Sierra Leone and the Gambia; plantation colonies, as in present-day Honduras and Guyana; and dominions, such as Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, each of which had a large white population and thus was granted a greater degree of autonomy within the empire. British India, which was home to a large population of potential workers and had numerous natural resources, was known as the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The colonization of India began in the eighteenth century, when the East India Company arrived to trade and supply Britain with goods such as cotton, tea, and oil. In time, the East India Company was dissolved, and India was incorporated into the British Empire in 1858.

By the early 1900s, London was a global financial capital, and the British Empire was one of the world’s major producers of manufactured goods. The empire’s navy was the largest and best equipped in the world. However, the twentieth century became a period of decline for the empire, as the costs incurred in two world wars and the transition of many of its colonies to independent nations diminished its global influence. India gained its independence in 1947, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, Britain lost many of its remaining holdings, particularly in Africa and Asia.

The British Empire effectively ceased to exist following decolonization. However, a number of former colonies chose to remain loosely affiliated with Britain as members of the Commonwealth of Nations. Officially established in the first half of the twentieth century, the Commonwealth of Nations comprised more than fifty nations by the beginning of the twenty-first. In addition, a group of sovereign states commonly known as the Commonwealth realms, including Canada, Australia, and Jamaica, continued to acknowledge the authority of the British monarch, despite being otherwise autonomous.

Bibliography

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Dalziel, Nigel. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire. Introd. John Mackenzie. London: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic, 2003. Print.

Levine, Philippa. The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Lloyd, Trevor O. The British Empire, 1558–1995. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Print.

Peers, Douglas M., and Nandini Gooptu, eds. India and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

Thompson, Andrew, ed. Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.