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 The Rise of the British Empire

The British Empire is without doubt the largest empire history has ever seen. In the
early 1920s, it covered one fourth of the globe. Britain had colonies on all the
continents - Europe, America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and all the colonies
had English as their official language.

The Empire came about as a result of long historical processes, stretching from the
Renaissance in the 16th century to 1997, when Hong Kong was given back to China.
Hence, when we talk about the British Empire, we normally distinguish between the
first Empire and the second Empire, although the British Empire in singular, often
refers to the second Empire.

There is a correlation between the Empire and the contemporary composition of British
society. Mass immigration to the United Kingdom began in the decades when most of
the colonies were in the process of regaining their independence in the latter part of
the 20th century. (See texts on Multiculturalism in Britain and Post-War Immigration to
Britain).

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 The First Empire

During the English Renaissance (1509-1603) the world changed considerably.

New methods of navigation, the compass and a new worldview opened up the
seas for European countries, among them England (Britain from 1707).

Early Settlement

Explorations and discoveries led to opportunities never available before and England,
with King Henry VIII (1509-1547) and his daughter Elizabeth I (1558-1603) on the
throne, began to take advantage of trade, both for commercial and political reasons.
Henry made himself King of Ireland in 1541 and imported products like wine and
cheese from France, and Elizabeth sent an expedition to Virginia (named after
Elizabeth who was called the Virgin Queen) in America in 1584. The Colony of Virginia
was established in 1607 and the general notion in the 17th century was that trade
would be far more productive and commercially profitable if colonies were founded.

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The American War of Independence and New Colonies

colonies gained independence from Britain after the American War of Independence
in 1776, Britain had to look elsewhere for replacement territories. During the 17th and
18th centuries Australia and New Zealand gradually came under British control.
Canada remained loyal to the British crown despite American independence.

Trade, Economic and Industrial Development

Trade and foreign contacts brought changes to Britain as well. In the late 18th century,
the textile industry of Lancashire propelled British industrialisation forward and paved
the way for what is normally referred to as the Industrial Revolution. Industries, some
based on foreign products traded around the world, emerged in British cities, and vast
numbers of Britons moved into towns to seek work in the newly established factories.
Change in the social fabric and new living patterns created hardships for many people,
but the rapidly expanding industrial society also produced endless opportunities for
the commercially oriented population.

Triangular Trade - Trade in Goods and People

Towards the end of the 18th century, the

Triangular Trade evolved between
Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the
Caribbean/America. Slaves were an
important part in this trade. They were
captured, kidnapped and bought in West
Africa to be brought across the Atlantic
Ocean to work in the plantation sector. In the 1750s, Olaudah Equiano (11) and his
little sister were among the 12 million that were kidnapped from their home, which was

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located in present-day Nigeria, and brought to Barbados, the oldest sugar-producing
British colony in the New World. He was one of the few lucky ones that was allowed
to buy his freedom in 1766, whereupon he wrote down his gripping story. To listen to
his story and get an understanding of the Triangular Trade, it is strongly recommended
that you read this article about the British Slave Trade.

Plantations produced cotton, sugar and tobacco and the products were sent back to
Britain for refinement and further sale. The Triangular Trade turned out to be hugely
profitable for British traders and industrialists, and the accumulated capital was
redistributed into new factories and businesses at home. Into the 19th century, the
British home market demanded more and more goods to continue its growth and
traders realised that closer control of overseas production lines would pay off.
Moreover, to protect markets from European competitors, it became necessary for
Britain to take territorial control in order to discourage interest from other nations.

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 The Second Empire

There were ideas in the 19th century that supported bringing the English
language

and were convincingly used for colonising purposes.

In 1851 Britain decided to celebrate itself in the Great Exhibition, an exhibition that

of success and progress and it took place inside a huge iron and glass construction
ed the world that Britain truly was

Thus, much of the Victorian culture evolved around the ideas of trade and economic
development, in which overseas territories continued to play central roles. In the
decades following the Great Exhibition, it was not only trade that became pivotal for
Britain, but also the so-called civilised countries themselves where they traded and
had settled.

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The Raj

In the sense that the thirteen American colonies

were central for the first Empire, it is no

Company had been set up already in 1600,

under Queen Elizabeth I, showing the long and
successful trading history with India and the Far
East. With the East India Company firmly
established on the Indian subcontinent, India
became the centre of trade in the area, and
Britain had trading posts in China, Ceylon and
on the sea route to India, especially along the
African coast. In the mid-19th century tension in
India increased, and in 1857 Indian soldiers
organised a mutiny. In fear of losing markets and commercial interests, Britain decided
to take full control of the vast country by setting up an Indian administration on behalf

Queen Victoria (1836-

The Four Cs

Though many areas in the East, the Far East, the Caribbean and North and South
America had changed hands between the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the
British throughout the centuries, Africa had attracted less interest from European
powers. The continent was enormous, regarded as impenetrable and full of fatal
diseases. Therefore, European trading posts had been established on the coast in

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order to avoid the African interior, and African middlemen were used, for example
during the peak of the slave trade in the 18th century. But in the mid-Victorian period,
Africa commenced to attract more and more attention, and a typical embodiment of
many of the Victorian
values was David
Livingstone, the
missionary and
explorer. As a man of
his time, he advocated
the four Cs: Christianity,
Commerce,
Colonialisation and
Civilisation. Missing in
Africa, he became

The Scramble for Africa

During the Scramble for Africa, launched in

the wake of the Berlin Conference in 1884/5,
Britain along with the other European
nations determined to take what they saw as
the civilised approach to the colonisation of
Africa. In Berlin, the present European
heads of state carved up Africa and divided
the continent between them, without any
Africans being present. Under the slogan

possessions in Africa and aimed at

constructing a railway line from Cairo in
Egypt in the north to the Cape Province in
the south. At the same time, the French

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sought to safeguard trade along the east-west axis, causing the two most powerful
European colonial nations to meet head-on. And they did in Fashoda, in the Sudan, in
1898.

The territorial disputes nearly ended in warfare, but were eventually solved
-
south railway as too many political, geographical and economic obstacles proved the
project too ambitious. Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist and one of the foremost
spokesmen for colonial Africa and an enthusiastic defender of the railway line, was the
personification of the British dream scenario in Africa. He was a good example of a
business magnate who made fortunes in diamond mining in southern Africa.

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 Geographical Spread of Britain

Geographical spread of Britain

The first exploratory forays by the English

were to attempt to discover a North West
Passage linking the Atlantic with the spices
and exotic goods of the Orient. This resulted
in John Cabot's discovery of Newfoundland in
1497 but little else besides. These were
followed up by other explorers who all came
back empty handed. Nearly a century later,
Early Elizabethan Voyages
Sir Francis Drake attempted to look for the
North West Passage from the Pacific side. He failed to discover it but did claim 'New
Albion' as a colony on the West Coast of America. There were attempts by Raleigh to
establish a similar colony on the East Coast of the Americas but this with English
settlers to start it up. Neither of these colonies thrived largely due to the antagnonism
and hostility of Spain which was attempting to guard its own claims to the New World.
A further attempt to establish a colony in Virginia seemed as if it would seriously
collapse only for it to discover a light weight substance that could be sold at profit back
in Europe; Tobacco. This crop slowly but
surely transformed the economic rationale
for settlers on the other side of the Atlantic.
For the first time, they could afford to buy
the supplies and equipment from Europe to
allow them to set up and run the economy.

Over time, the English were to challenge

the primacy of the Spanish in the Sailing Times
Caribbean and were to take colonies in
order to grow the increasingly lucrative sugar cane. Labour was required to help grow
the sugar and so the first forays into Africa led to trading forts on the West Coast to
help facilitate the acquisition of slaves who were then transported across the Atlantic.

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 Attempts to move into the rich spice islands of the Far East were to meet limited
success initially. The better capitalised Dutch
were able to take the lion's share of the
Portuguese trade and colonies and ruthlessly
prevented English and French attempts to
muscle in and break their monopoly on the
spice trade.

The Eighteenth Century saw a shift in the

focus of the British Empire from the Western
British Empire 1880
Hemisphere to the Orient. The British had
managed to displace the French from Canada during the Seven Years War, but their
reward of removing the French threat from the hemisphere was to be Revolution just
two decades later in the 13 colonies. However, as Britain was losing its influence in
North America - although still retaining it in the Caribbean - it was gaining ground in
India by the East India Company which was slowly but surely displacing rival European
powers and becoming a force on the Indian sub-continent. Over time, the size of the
economy and population of India allowed it to displace the Spice Islands and become
the powerhouse of the empire.

The Eighteenth Century also saw the Royal Navy explore the furthest reaches of the
planet as it sought to discover if there was a North-West Passage linking the Pacific
to the Atlantic and also to see if the predicted Southern Continent really existed. It did
not exist, but the British were content to discover Australia, New Zealand and a score
of Pacific Islands in the process. They established a penal colony in Australia which
would prove to be a catalyst for European expansion in the Pacific region in the
following century.

The Royal Navy was to demonstrate its strategic prowess during the Napoleonic and
Revolutionary Wars. In particular, the victory at Trafalgar illustrated that Britain really
did rule the waves and helped usher in a century of British dominance. Various islands
and ports were taken to facilitate the Royal Navy in controlling the freedom of the seas
and to allow commerce and the industrial revolution to flourish. The following century
would become something of a golden age of imperial expansion.

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The Nineteenth Century saw Britain's interest and activity expand throughout Asia as
Britain attempted to increase its commercial activities with China. Singapore, Hong
Kong and Malaya were all taken to facilitate trade and economic opportunities in the
region - especially between India and China. The
Nineteenth Century also saw Britain's interest in
Africa bloom as they attempted to control the
maritime routes via the Cape and later the Suez
Canal. As rival European powers expanded their
own imperial interest in the continent, there
occurred something of a 'scramble' which saw the
majority of Africa come under direct European
control in a remarkably short period of time.
Britain's interest in the Gulf and Middle East also British Empire Map, 1897
intensified for the same reason - as Britain sought
to control access routes to and from their 'Jewel in the Crown'

The Twentieth Century saw Britain's Empire grow yet further in the aftermath of the
First World War. It took control of many former German and Ottoman colonies as
League of Nations' mandates. The first cracks in the Empire began during the inter-
war period as Ireland sought to distance itself from Britain and her Empire. Rising
nationalist tensions in India and the Middle East signalled growing difficulties in
maintaining the world's largest empire.

The Second World War saw the empire very much in peril - particularly in North Africa
and the Far East. The Fall of Singapore in 1942 represented a turning point in the
fortunes of Britain's Empire as Britain was unable to provide enough resources to
defend itself from German aggression whilst also defending South-East Asia and the
Pacific from the Japanese. Ultimately, it was the arrival of American support and help
in the Pacific region that allowed Britain to concentrate on defending itself, North

Africa and India. It should also be noted that Soviet and American pressure combined
to encourage Britain to relinquish control of its colonies and begin the decolonisation
process. Britain had also made a number of commitments to various nationalists and
freedom fighters in return for a commitment to aid them in fighting the Germans and
Japanese.
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 The post-war World saw Britain quickly divest itself
of its 'Jewel in the Crown' as the decolonisation
process got under way. However, the emerging
Cold War complicated matters as Western powers
were reluctant to see newly independent nations
become easy prey for Communist insurgencies and
take-overs. The de-colonisation process was
slowed down in a number of colonies until a stable

British Empire Map, 1907 government could be established or until insurgents

were defeated.

The British withdrawal from Asia and

Africa escalated in the aftermath of the
Suez Crisis in 1956. As the burden for
keeping colonies escalated and the
value of the economic opportunities
declined, there was less of a will to
hold on to reluctant colonies. The
The Empire at its Height
'Winds of Change' speech by
Macmillan in 1961 confirmed Britain's intention to divest itself of all those colonies who
wished for independence as rapidly as possible.

The Empire steadily declined as bases became redundant and international trade no
longer required the Royal Navy to guard the sealanes. Britain's military forces also
refocussed their efforts on European security as NATO commitments took priority
against a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The last significant colony to
leave the Empire was Hong Kong in 1997 when part of its lease to China terminated.
There are still some 14 isolated dependencies scattered around the world as a legacy
of Empire - but these are generally islands which are too small or too isolated to be
viable states in their own right. Otherwise, by the end of the Twentieth Century, the
Empire had all but disappeared.

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 The Fall of the British Empire

The Dismantling of the Empire

Moving into the 20th century, the world was about to go through many changes,
changes that would affect Britain's position in the world and the way people
viewed the rulers and the ruled. The century was dominated by two world wars
that changed the world order.

The Aftermath of World War I - Colonies with a New Status

In the peace negotiations after World War I in Versailles 1919, Germany was forced

them, gained colonies in Africa and these additions made the British Empire reach its
peak in the early 1920s. However, the Empire had begun to disintegrate as the
colonies with dominion status, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, had become
independent in the first decades of the century. In 1931 The Commonwealth of Nations
was founded by Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa and Newfoundland to secure
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friendly, diplomatic and trade relations between the former colonies and the mother
country.

World War II - East vs. West

But it was World War II that changed the world order profoundly. The emergence of
the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, changed the

USA urged the colonial powers of the west, and particularly allied Britain, to get rid of
their empire. The presumed anti-imperialistic stance created a new climate in the late
1940s and having colonies around the world did not fit the political agenda anymore.
All of a sudden, Britain looked like a country of the past while America represented the
future. Furthermore, maintaining the Empire became a costly affair for Britain, as
finances were difficult after the war. Britain needed loans from America to invest in its
own health and infrastructure, and hence money could not be ploughed into the far-
flung empire.

The Aftermath of World War II - the Indian Example

When the Indian

subcontinent regained
its independence in
1947, it was divided into
Pakistan (Muslim) and
India (Hindu).
Independence and
partition created a
domino effect and in
1957, Ghana, in West
Africa, was the first
African colony to

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become independent. Britain realised that it was only a matter of time before the British
Empire disappeared and provided for the former colonies through the Commonwealth
of Nations. In some colonies independence came quietly while in others there were
periods of unrest and violence. In fact, many former colonies still grapple with political,
economic and social instability. A example is modern day Nigeria.

The Commonwealth of Nations

It took centuries to build up the British Empire, even though the second empire came
about rapidly from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. After World War II,
decolonialisation also occurred swiftly, but the Commonwealth helped maintain the
ties with the former colonies. Today, the Commonwealth consists of 54 member
countries, all former colonies with the exception of Rwanda and Mozambique.

Britain, with a glorious past, was in the post-war period reduced to a medium-sized
west European country, both in terms of influence and power.

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