British Empire: A Visual History

The British Empire grew from a handful of trading posts and failed Elizabethan colonies into the largest empire the world has seen. It was never a single planned project: chartered companies, settlers, missionaries, admirals, bankers and bureaucrats each pushed in different directions, and London often followed rather than led. Its legacy is everywhere, from the English language and common law to railways in India, cricket in the Caribbean and borders across Africa and the Middle East that still shape today's conflicts.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is British Empire. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Land area under British rule

Rough estimates of territory formally under British sovereignty or protection. Sources disagree on exact figures, especially for loosely held claims.

Timeline of the British Empire

1. 1583
   Newfoundland claimedHumphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland for Elizabeth I; he drowns on the way home.
2. 1600
   East India Company charteredA private company that will one day govern India.
3. 1607
   Jamestown foundedThe first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
4. 1707
   Act of UnionEngland and Scotland unite; the empire becomes British rather than English.
5. 1757
   Battle of PlasseyClive's victory begins Company rule in Bengal.
6. 1763
   Treaty of ParisFrance cedes Canada; Britain dominates North America and India.
7. 1783
   American independenceThe thirteen colonies are lost.
8. 1807
   Slave trade abolishedSlavery itself in the colonies ends in 1833-1838.
9. 1858
   Crown takes over IndiaAfter the 1857 rebellion the Company is dissolved.
10. 1884-85
    Berlin ConferenceThe Scramble for Africa accelerates.
11. 1920
    Territorial peakMandates in the Middle East and Africa push the empire to about 35.5 million km2.
12. 1947
    Indian independencePartition creates India and Pakistan.
13. 1956
    Suez CrisisBritain is forced to withdraw from Egypt under US pressure.
14. 1960s
    African decolonisationMost African colonies become independent within a decade.
15. 1997
    Hong Kong handed to ChinaConventionally the end of the empire.

Origins: pirates, plantations and joint stock companies

England came late to empire. Spain and Portugal had divided the New World between them by 1494, and for most of the sixteenth century English ambition amounted to raiding Spanish treasure fleets, fishing off Newfoundland and searching for a north-west passage to Asia. Humphrey Gilbert's claim to Newfoundland in 1583 is the conventional starting date, and Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony vanished without trace a few years later.

The pattern that would define the empire was set in the early 1600s: private money took the risk and the Crown took the credit. The East India Company (chartered 1600) and the Virginia Company (1606) were investor-owned. Jamestown survived, Barbados and Jamaica became sugar factories worked by enslaved Africans, and Puritan New England grew into a society of small farmers. By 1700 the Atlantic slave trade was central to the whole system.

The first empire and its collapse

Victory in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) made Britain the dominant power in North America and India in a single stroke: France lost Canada, and Robert Clive's win at Plassey in 1757 turned the East India Company from a trader into a territorial ruler in Bengal. Britain had never been so powerful, and never so indebted.

Trying to make the American colonies pay for their own defence triggered the American Revolution. The loss of the thirteen colonies in 1783 was a humiliation, but the empire simply pivoted east and south: Australia was claimed in 1788 (initially as a penal colony), Cape Colony was taken from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Company's armies marched across India.

Pax Britannica: the nineteenth century

After 1815 the Royal Navy had no rival, and Britain used it to police the seas, suppress the slave trade it had itself dominated, and force open markets in China through the Opium Wars. Free trade, the gold standard, undersea telegraph cables and the City of London tied the world economy to Britain whether territories flew the Union Jack or not.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 ended Company rule; India became a Crown possession and Victoria was proclaimed Empress in 1876. In the 1880s the Scramble for Africa added Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Rhodesia and much more. Settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand were granted self-government and became the model for the later Commonwealth.

Peak, world wars and the end

The empire reached its greatest extent after World War I, when former German and Ottoman territories, including Palestine, Iraq and Tanganyika, were added as League of Nations mandates. It also had never looked so fragile. The wars drained Britain's finances, Ireland broke away in 1922, and Indian nationalism under Gandhi and Nehru became impossible to ignore.

World War II settled the matter. Britain survived only with American money, and its Asian empire was overrun by Japan in 1942, shattering the myth of invincibility. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, the Suez Crisis of 1956 exposed the limits of British power, and Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech in 1960 signalled the rapid decolonisation of Africa. Hong Kong's return to China in 1997 is usually treated as the end.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Mughal Empire (1526 to 1857)
• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Russian Empire (1721 to 1917)
• Maratha Empire (1674 to 1818)
• Rozvi Empire (1660 to 1866)
• Sikh Empire (1799 to 1849)

Wars of the same era and region

• Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763)
• American Revolution (1775 to 1783)
• Indian Rebellion of 1857 (1857 to 1858)
• World War I (1914 to 1918)
• World War II (1939 to 1945)
• French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792 to 1815)

10 surprising things about the British Empire

1. The empire was famously said to be acquired 'in a fit of absence of mind' (historian J. R. Seeley, 1883). Nobody sat down and planned it.
2. For its first two centuries much of the empire was run by private companies with their own armies. By 1800 the East India Company's army was about twice the size of the British Army.
3. The Newfoundland claim of 1583 was made by reading a proclamation to some fishermen; the man who made it, Humphrey Gilbert, drowned on the voyage home.
4. Australia was originally colonised largely because Britain had lost its previous dumping ground for convicts, the American colonies.
5. At the 1920 peak the sun genuinely never set on the empire, and thanks to the Pitcairn Islands and British Indian Ocean Territory it still doesn't set on British territory today.
6. Britain fought two wars with China partly to protect its right to sell opium there, then annexed Hong Kong as a base for the trade.
7. The 1801 Act of Union brought Ireland into the United Kingdom, making Britain's oldest colony technically part of the metropole while it was still governed like a colony.
8. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron spent about sixty years hunting slave ships after 1807, having earlier escorted them.
9. The empire's telegraph network was called the 'All Red Line' because it touched only British territory, so it could not be cut by rivals.
10. The Union Jack still appears on the national flags of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tuvalu, and on the state flag of Hawaii.

Sources

• British Empire Encyclopaedia Britannica
• British Empire Wikipedia
• The East India Company The National Archives (UK)
• Britain and the Slave Trade The National Archives (UK)
• How the British Empire ended Imperial War Museums
• Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) Penguin
• John Darwin, The Empire Project (2009) Cambridge University Press

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