British Empire

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For a comprehensive list of the territories that formed the British Empire see Evolution of the British Empire. , English imperial possessionsThe British Empire was the List of largest empires in history and for a substantial time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires.

By 1921, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world's population.Angus Maddison. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (p. 98, 242). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 2001. It covered about 36.6 million km² (14.2 million square miles),Bruce R. Gordon. To Rule the Earth... (See Bibliography for sources used.) about a quarter of Earth's total land area. As a result, its legacy is widespread, in Common law and Westminster system systems, economic practice, British Armed Forces, educational systems, sports (such as cricket, Rugby football and Football (soccer)), and in the global spread of the English language. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "The empire on which the sun never sets" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous colonies or subject nations.This phrase had already been used a few centuries before by the king Charles I of Spain, referring to the Spanish Empire.

During the five decades following World War II, most of the territories of the Empire became independent. Many went on to join the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states.

Origins of the British Empire The foundations of the British Empire were laid at a time before Britain existed as a single political entity, when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Portuguese Empire and Spanish Empire in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, and though he successfully made landfall on the coast of Canada (mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus five years earlier, that he had reached Asia), the voyage was unprofitable, and no attempt at establishing a colony was made. Disinterest in overseas matters followed this voyage, and continued until well into the reign of Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. Enmity and rivalry between Catholic Spain and Protestant England during the Anglo–Spanish War (1585) led to the Crown sanctioning English privateers such as John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake to engage in piratical attacks on Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic, laden with treasure from the New World. At the same time, influential writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use the term "British Empire" and Fur trade in the north, were less financially successful than those of the Caribbean, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants.

by Benjamin West. The defeat of the French by Wolfe's forces foreshadowed British ascendancy in North America.

From the outset, slavery was a vital economic component of the British Empire in the Americas. Until its abolition in 1807, Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all Atlantic slave trade. In the British Caribbean, the percentage of the population comprised by blacks rose from 25% in 1650 to around 80% in 1780, and in the Thirteen Colonies from 10% to 40% over the same period (the majority in the south). For the slave traders, the trade was extremely profitable, and became a major economic manistay for such cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. However, for the transportees, harsh and unhygienic conditions on the slaving ships and poor diets meant that the average mortality rate during the middle passage was one in seven.

Asia At the end of the 16th century, England and Holland began to challenge Portugal's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages - the British East India Company (later British) and Dutch East India Company East India Companies, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative spice trade, and focussed their efforts on the source, the Indonesian archipelago, and an important hub in the trade network, India. The proximity of London and Amsterdam and rivalry between England and Holland inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas (previously a Portuguese stronghold) after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, and the English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory in 1613. Though England would ultimately eclipse Holland as a colonial power, in the short term Holland's more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between Holland and England. A deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to Holland and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability, and by 1720, in terms of sales the English company had overtaken the Dutch. The English East India Company shifted its focus from Surat - a hub of the spice trade network - to Fort St George (later to become Madras), Bombay (ceded by the Portuguese to Charles II of England in 1661 as dowry for Catherine de Braganza) and Sutanuti (which would merge with two other villages to form Calcutta).

Global Struggles of the 18th Century Peace between England and Holland in 1688 meant that the two countries entered the Nine Years' War as allies, but the conflict - waged in Europe and overseas between France, Spain and the Anglo-Dutch alliance - left the English a stronger colonial power than the Dutch, who were forced to devote a larger proportion of their military budget on the costly land war in Europe. The 18th century would see England (after 1707, Britain) rise to be the world's dominant colonial power, and France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage.

The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its colonial empire to Philip V of Spain, a grandson of the King of France, raised the prospect of the unification of France, Spain and their respective colonies, an unacceptable state of affairs for Britain and the other powers of Europe. In 1701, Britain, Portugal and Holland sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The conflict, which France and Spain were to lose, lasted until 1714. At the concluding peace Treaty of Utrecht, Philip renounced his and his descendents' right to the French throne. Spain lost its empire in Europe, and though it kept its empire in the Americas and the Philippines, it was irreversibly weakened as a power. The British Empire was territorially enlarged: from France, Britain gained Newfoundland (island) and Acadia, and from Spain, Gibraltar and Minorca. Gibraltar, which is still a British overseas territory to this day, became a critical naval base and allowed Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean. Minorca was returned to Spain at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, after changing hands twice. Spain also ceded the rights to the lucrative asiento (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America) to Britain.

The Seven Years' War, which began in 1756, was the first war waged on a global scale, fought in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and coastal Africa. The signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763) had important consequences for Britain and its empire. In North America, France's future as a colonial power there was effectively ended with the ceding of New France to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. In India, the Carnatic Wars#Third Carnatic War (1756-1763) had left France still in control of its French India but with military restrictions and an obligation to support British client states, effectively leaving the future of India to Britain. The British victory over France in the Seven Years War therefore left Britain as the world's dominant colonial power.

The Rise of the "Second British Empire" The Loss of the Thirteen Colonies , 1797). The loss of the American colonies marked the end of the "first British Empire".

During the 1760s and 1770s, relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain became increasingly strained, primarily because of resentment of the British Parliament's ability to tax American colonists without their consent. Disagreement turned to violence and in 1775 the American Revolutionary War began. The following year, the colonists United States Declaration of Independence, and - with the assistance of the French - would go on to win the war in 1783. As a result, Britain lost its most populous colony. However, during the war many loyalists had moved north to Canada, thereby strengthening the future of British North America, though it was not secured until the War of 1812, during which the United States unsuccessfully attempted to extend its border northwards.

The loss of the thirteen colonies resulted in a shift of British attention from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa, and showed that colonies were not necessarily particularly beneficial in economic terms, since Britain could still profit from trade with the ex-colonies without having to pay for their defence and administration. Mercantilism, the economic doctrine of competition between nations for a finite amount of wealth which had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, now gave way in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to the laissez-faire economic classical liberalism of Adam Smith and successors like Richard Cobden.

Convicts and Empire Since 1718, penal transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various criminal offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year across the Atlantic. Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered land of New Holland (Australia), later renamed Australia.

In 1770, James Cook had discovered the eastern coast of Australia whilst on a scientific First voyage of James Cook to the South Pacific. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Matthew Flinders proved New Holland and New South Wales to be a single land mass by completing a circumnavigation of it in 1803. His recommendation that the continent be known as Australia was accepted. In 1826 New Holland was formally claimed for the United Kingdom with the establishment of a military base, soon followed by a colony in 1829. The colonies later became self-governing colony and became profitable exporters of wool and gold.

Abolition of Slavery Under increasing pressure from the abolitionist movement, the United Kingdom outlawed the slave trade (1807) and soon began enforcing this principle on other nations. By the mid-19th century the United Kingdom had largely eradicated the world slave trade. An Slavery Abolition Act 1833 making slavery illegal was passed in 1833 and became law on August 1, 1834. However the act was only gradually implemented and thus although slavery itself was abolished in most British colonies by 1838, it was only abolished in the remainder, Sierra Leone, India, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana and Aden over the next 100 years. Slavery was finally abolished in Sierra Leone, its last outpost in the Empire, on 1st January, 1928. The end of the old colonial and slave systems was accompanied by the adoption of free trade, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in the 1840s. Free trade opened the British market to unfettered competition, stimulating reciprocal action by other countries during the middle quarters of the 19th century.

Between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the United Kingdom was the world's sole industrialised power, with over 30% of the global industrial output in 1870. As the "workshop of the world", the United Kingdom could produce finished manufactures so efficiently and cheaply that they could undersell comparable locally produced goods in foreign markets. Given stable political conditions in particular overseas markets, the United Kingdom could prosper through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule. In the Americas the informal British trade empire was backed by the shared interests of the United Kingdom in the tenets of the United States' Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the New World was no longer open to colonisation or political interference by Europeans. As the United States did not yet have the military strength to enforce this doctrine, the British were largely left with a free hand to enter the new markets in Latin America created after independence from Spain and Portugal, and British commercial supremacy lasted until the outbreak of World War I.Britain and Latin America, Alan Knight, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III

Company Rule in India Expansion 's victory at the Battle of Plassey established the Company as a military as well as a commercial power.The decline of the Mughal Empire, which had separated into many smaller states controlled by local rulers who were often in conflict with one another, allowed the Company to expand its territories, which began in 1757, when the Company came into conflict with the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah. Under the leadership of Robert Clive, the British defeated the Nawab on 23 June 1757 at the Battle of Plassey as a result of superior British artillery, military discipline and to a lesser extant the treachery of the Nawab's former army chief Mir Jafar Battle of PlasseyMeer Jaffier had given no assistance to the English during the action. But, as soon as he saw that the fate of the day was decided, he drew off his division of the army, and, when the battle was over, sent his congratulations to his all. Life of Robert Clive This victory, which resulted in the virtual conquest of Bengal, established the British East India Company as both a military and commercial power. However, the Company did not claim absolute authority over the territory for a long time. They preferred to rule through a puppet Nawab who could be blamed for the administrative failures caused by excessively avaricious economic exploitation of the territory by the Company. This event is widely regarded as the beginning of British rule in India. The wealth gained from the Bengal treasury allowed the Company to strengthen its military might significantly. This army (comprised mostly of Indian soldiers, called sepoys, and led by British officers) conquered most of India's geographic and political regions by the mid 19th century and thus the Company's territories were substantially augmented.

The Company fought many wars with local Indian rulers during its conquest of India, the most difficult being the four Anglo-Mysore Wars (between 1766 and 1799) against the South Indian Kingdom of Mysore ruled by Hyder Ali, and later his son Tipu Sultan (The Tiger of Mysore) who developed the use of rockets in warfare. Mysore was only defeated in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War by the combined forces of Britain and of Mysore's neighbours. After the Battles of Palashi (1757) and Buxar (1764) which established British dominion over East India, the Anglo-Mysore wars (1766-1799) and the Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775-1818) consolidated the British claim over South Asia, resulting in the British Empire in India, though pockets of resistance among the Sikhs, Afghans and in Burma would last well into the 1880s.

There were a number of other states which the Company could not conquer through military might, mostly in the North, where the Company's presence was ever increasing amidst the internal conflict and dubious offers of protection against one another. Coercive action, threats and diplomacy aided the Company in preventing the local rulers from putting up a united struggle against British rule. By the 1850s the Company ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent and as a result, the Company began to function more as a state and less as a trading concern.

The Company was also responsible for the opium trade with China against the Qing Emperor's will, which later led to the two Opium Wars (between 1834 and 1860). As a result of the Company's victory in the First Opium War, it established Hong Kong as a British territory. The Company also had a number of wars with other surrounding Asian countries, the most difficult probably being the three Anglo-Afghan Wars (between 1839 and 1919) against Afghanistan, which were mostly unsuccessful from a British perspective.

See: 'Company rule in India in the History of South Asia series for the history of the Company's rule in India between 1757 and 1857.

Collapse The Company's rule effectively came to an end exactly a century after its victory at Plassey. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British faced their toughest military challenge during their rule in India. It occurred when the Company's Indian sepoys rebelled against their British commanders. The rebellion began at Meerut, a town east of Delhi, when a few sepoys mutinied against their English officers and killed them. Then, the rebellion spread like wild fire over most of northern India, especially the modern states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. It immediately gained the support of almost every section of Indian society (except the westernised Indians like who believed that British rule was necessary to mitigate the social evils prevalent in Indian society at that time), most notably the zamindars, peasants and Indian princes. The rebellion was a result of many factors, social, political and economical. By 1857, the inhabitants of India grew greatly dissatisfied with British rule, the character of which was perceived to be oppressive and exploitative by them. There was simmering discontent with British rule and only a spark was necessary to set it afire.Amazon.com, India's Struggle for Independence (India) (Paperback) retrieved 2007-09-05 One such event that surely seemed trivial to the Company at the time, but that turned out to have dire consequences, was the Company's introduction of the P53 Enfield rifle. Its gunpowder containing paper cartridges were claimed to be lubricated with animal fat and had to be bitten open before the powder was poured into the muzzle. Eating cow or pig fat was forbidden for religious reasons for the vast majority of the soldiers. Beef products were forbidden for the Hindu majority, likewise pork for the large Muslim minority.

Although Company and Enfield representatives insisted that neither cow nor pig fat were being used, the rumour persisted and many sepoys refused to follow orders involving the use of the weapons using those particular cartridges. Sepoy Mangal Pandey, a Hindu saraswat brahmin of 5th Company, 34th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, who would later become a symbol of Indian resistance to British rule, was hanged on the 8th of April as a punishment for having attacked and injured British superiors at the introduction of the rifle increasing tension at a time when Indians had come to resent decades of British rule under which they felt like second class citizens; exploited and seen as incapable of Home Rule.

In the past, Indians had feuded as much with other Indians as they did with the British, this has greatly aided the British in their conquest. There had yet to occur any sort of unified uprising against British authority. But in 1857, a number of events such as the issue concerning the Enfield cartridges led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which eventually brought about the end of the British East India Company's regime in India. The British quickly suppressed the rebellion, with the majority of the Madras and Bombay armies remaining loyal and the rebellion being largely restricted to Bengal. The Truth about the Indian Mutiny The British also had superior organisation, weapons and communications. The rebellion came to a decisive end when the British finally took control of Delhi, which was the centre of the rebellion. The fall of Delhi was followed by a large scale massacre of the inhabitants of Delhi by British forces.Amazon.com, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Hardcover), retrieved 2007-09-05 This was not the only massacre associated with the rebellion; the massacre of British women and children at Cawnpore being the most infamous.

The Company's failure to demonstrate effective control over its conquered Indian territories caused British financial and political entities to become uneasy about the security of their interests in India and what that meant for the future of the Empire. By 1857, India was a tremendously large part of the Empire's economy. The disaster of the Mutiny in particular had a tremendous influence on the Crown's policy regarding the most effective way to govern India. As a result, the Crown and British government assumed direct rule over the Indian sub-continent for ninety years following the dissolution of the Company.

The period of direct rule in India is referred to as the British Raj during which the nations now known as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar were collectively known as British Raj.

See 'British Raj in the History of South Asia series for the history of British rule in India between 1857 and 1947.

Breakdown of Pax Britannica marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the Pax Britannica.

Britain's overseas commercial dominance had been able to draw on most of the accessible world for raw materials and markets. This dominance was won through major territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Netherlands and the French in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning with the Seven Years War. Utilising its naval supremacy, Britain mastered control of the world's raw materials and markets. Under its mercantilistic and protectionist policies, this ensured a near permanent dominance of world trade, which fed British industrialisation. However, under similar programmes practised by its progeny in the now independent United States, that dominance was slowly being challenged. Additionally Britain abandoned its protectionist policies in favour of free trade simultaneously as other Continental powers implemented their own protectionist and government promoted industrialisation programmes. Under the influence of commercial and financial vested interests this policy of free trade continued to be practised under successive ministries despite Britain's declining global relative industrial and trade economic value. This situation gradually deteriorated during the late 19th century as other powers began to advance their protectionist programmes and sought to use the state to guarantee their markets and sources of supply. By the 1870s, British manufactures in the staple industries of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to experience real competition abroad.

became a symbol of Britain's imperial mightIndustrialisation progressed rapidly in Germany and the United States, allowing them to catch up with the British economy as world leaders. By 1870, the German textile and metal industries had surpassed those of the United Kingdom in organisation and technical efficiency and usurped British manufactures in the domestic market. By the turn of the century, the German metals and engineering industries would even be producing for the free trade market of the former "workshop of the world".

While invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services) kept the United Kingdom "out of the red," her share of world trade fell from a quarter in 1880 to a sixth in 1913.Peter Cain. British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (p. 428). Pearson Education, 2001, ISBN 0-582472-86-5.Manfred Görtemaker. Britain and Germany in the Twentieth Century (p. 21). Berg Publishers, 2006, ISBN 1-859738-42-7. The United Kingdom was losing out not only in the markets of newly industrialising countries, but also against third-party competition in less-developed countries. The United Kingdom was even losing her former overwhelming dominance in trade with India, China, Latin America, and the coasts of Africa. However, this loss of supremacy was not so much a matter of the United Kingdom falling behind as it was a matter of other regions catching up in industrialisation.

As a result, the United Kingdom's commercial difficulties deepened with the onset of the "Long Depression" of 1873–96. This was a prolonged period of price deflation punctuated by severe business downturns. After nearly twenty years of self-evident failure of its free-trade policies, the combined results finally pressured the commercial and financial interests out of government dominance and returned a more protectionist oriented policy crowd. This retrenchment of the United Kingdom's trade system caused the other European Continental Powers to quickly move on their objective of abandoning the vestigial remnants of the early 19th century British Free-Trade system particularly by Germany in 1879 and in France in 1881 when they ended their former trade agreements with the British Empire.

The resulting limitation of the British Empire's domestic markets to European governments led the French government to attempt engineering a recreation of its earlier Empire in Africa. Soon Germany and finally the United Kingdom pushed forward in demarching respective colonial spheres in Africa, all with the goal of establishing newer sheltered overseas markets united to the home country behind imperial tariff barriers under which new overseas subjects would provide export markets free of foreign competition, while supplying cheap raw materials. Although she continued at times to attempt to adhere to free trade until 1932, the United Kingdom mitigated its risk by joining the renewed scramble for formal empire rather than allow areas under her influence to be seized by rivals.

The United Kingdom and the New Imperialism and Benjamin Disraeli.

The policy and ideology of European colonial expansion between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 are often characterised as the "New Imperialism". The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of what has been termed "empire for empire's sake", aggressive competition for overseas territorial acquisitions and the emergence in colonising countries of doctrines of jingoism which denied the fitness of subjugated peoples for self-government.

During this period, Europe's powers added nearly 8,880,000 square miles (23,000,000 km²) to their overseas colony possessions. As it was mostly unoccupied by the western civilisation powers as late as the 1880s, Africa became the primary target of the "new" imperialist expansion, although conquest took place also in other areas — notably south-east Asia and the East Asian seaboard, where Japan joined the European powers' scramble for territory.

The United Kingdom's entry into the new imperial age is often dated to 1875, when the Conservative Party (UK) government of Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha 44% shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million to secure control of this strategic waterway, a channel for shipping between the United Kingdom and India since its opening six years earlier under Emperor Napoleon III. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882.

Fear of Russia's centuries-old southward expansion was a further factor in British policy: in 1878 the United Kingdom took control of Cyprus as a base for action against a Russian attack on the Ottoman Empire, after having taken part in the Crimean War 1854–56 and invading Afghanistan to forestall an increase in Russian influence there. The United Kingdom waged three bloody and unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan, as ferocious popular rebellions, invocations of jihad and inscrutable terrain frustrated British objectives. The First Anglo-Afghan War led to one of the most disastrous defeats of the Victorian military when an entire British army was wiped out by Russian-supplied Afghan Pashtun tribesmen during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. The Second Anglo-Afghan War led to the British débâcle at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, the siege of Kabul and British withdrawal into India. The Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 stoked a tribal uprising against the exhausted British military on the heels of World War I and expelled the British permanently from the new Afghan state. The "Great Game" in Inner Asia ended with a bloody British expedition against Tibet in 1903–04.At the same time, some powerful industrial lobbies and government leaders in the United Kingdom, later exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain, came to view formal empire as necessary to arrest the United Kingdom's relative decline in world markets. During the 1890s the United Kingdom adopted the new policy wholeheartedly, quickly emerging as the front-runner in the scramble for tropical African territories.

The United Kingdom's adoption of the New Imperialism may be seen as a quest for captive markets or fields for investment of surplus capital, or as a primarily strategic or pre-emptive attempt to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption of overseas markets into the increasingly closed imperial trading blocs of rival powers. The failure in the 1900s of Chamberlain's Tariff Reform League for Imperial protection illustrates the strength of free trade feeling even in the face of loss of international market share. Historians have argued that the United Kingdom's adoption of the "New imperialism" was an effect of her relative decline in the world, rather than of strength.

British colonial policy British colonial policy was always driven to a large extent by the United Kingdom's trading interests, perhaps most noticeably that of the East India Company.. While settler economies developed the infrastructure to support balanced development, some tropical African territories found themselves developed only as raw-material suppliers. British policies based on comparative advantage left many developing economies dangerously reliant on a single cash crop, which others exported to the United Kingdom or to overseas British settlements. A reliance upon the manipulation of conflict between ethnic, religious and racial identities, in order to keep subject populations from uniting against the occupying power — the classic "divide and rule" strategy — left a legacy of partition and/or inter-communal difficulties in areas as diverse as Ireland, India, Malaya (Malaysia), Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cyprus, The Sudan, and Uganda.

The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Great Britain had over other countries. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out, however, that slave trade and the West Indies plantations provided less than 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution. Was slavery the engine of economic growth?

The United Kingdom and the scramble for Africa - Cecil John Rhodes spanning "Cape to Cairo".

In 1875 the two most important European holdings in Africa were French controlled Algeria and the United Kingdom's Cape Colony. By 1914 only Ethiopia and the republic of Liberia remained outside formal European control. The transition from an "informal empire" of control through economic dominance to direct control took the form of a "scramble" for territory by the nations of Europe. The United Kingdom tried not to play a part in this early scramble, being more of a trading empire rather than a colonial empire; however, it soon became clear it had to gain its own African empire to maintain the balance of power.

As French, Belgium and Portugal activity in the lower Congo River region threatened to undermine orderly penetration of tropical Africa, the Berlin Conference, 1884-85 of 1884–85 sought to regulate the competition between the powers by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of territorial claims, a formulation which necessitated routine recourse to armed force against indigenous states and peoples.

The United Kingdom's 1882 military occupation of Egypt (itself triggered by concern over the Suez Canal) contributed to a preoccupation over securing control of the Nile valley, leading to the conquest of the neighbouring Sudan in 1896–98 and confrontation with a French military expedition at Fashoda Crisis (September 1898).

In 1899 the United Kingdom completed its takeover of what is today South Africa. This had begun with the annexation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1795 and continued with the conquest of the Boer Republics in the late 19th century, following the Second Boer War. Cecil John Rhodes was the pioneer of British expansion north into Africa with his privately owned British South Africa Company. Rhodes expanded into the land north of South Africa and established Rhodesia. Rhodes' dream of a railway connecting Cape Town to Alexandria passing through a British Africa covering the continent is what led to his company's pressure on the government for further expansion into Africa.

British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Rhodes and Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, the United Kingdom's High Commissioner in South Africa, to urge a "Cape-to-Cairo" empire linking by rail the strategically important Canal to the mineral-rich South, though German occupation of Tanganyika prevented its realisation until the end of World War I. In 1903, the All Red Line telegraph system communicated with the major parts of the Empire.

Paradoxically, the United Kingdom, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. Between 1885 and 1914 the United Kingdom took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, compared to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed fifteen million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire.

Home rule in white-settler colonies The United Kingdom's empire had already begun its transformation into the modern Commonwealth of Nations with the extension of Dominion status to the already self-governing colony of Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), Dominion of Newfoundland (1907), and the newly-created Union of South Africa (1910). Leaders of the new states joined with British statesmen in periodic Colonial (from 1907, Imperial) Imperial Conferences, the first of which was held in London in 1887.

The foreign relations of the Dominions were still conducted through the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom: Canada created a Department of External Affairs in 1909, but diplomatic relations with other governments continued to be channelled through the Governors-General, Dominion High Commissioners in London (first appointed by Canada in 1880 and by Australia in 1910) and British legations abroad. The United Kingdom's declaration of war in World War I applied to all the Dominions.

But the Dominions did enjoy a substantial freedom in their adoption of foreign policy where this did not explicitly conflict with British interests: Canada's Liberal Party of Canada government negotiated a bilateral free-trade Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty with the United States in 1911, but went down to defeat by the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada opposition.

In defence, the Dominions' original treatment as part of a single imperial military and naval structure proved unsustainable as the United Kingdom faced new commitments in Europe and the challenge of an emerging German High Seas Fleet after 1900. In 1909 it was decided that the Dominions should have their own navies, reversing an 1887 agreement that the then Australasian colonies should contribute to the Royal Navy in return for the permanent stationing of a squadron in the region.

The impact of the First World War in the Brussels cathedral.

The aftermath of World War I saw the last major extension of British rule, with the United Kingdom gaining control through League of Nations Mandates in British Mandate of Palestine and British Mandate of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, as well as in the former German colonies of Tanganyika, South-West Africa (now Namibia) and New Guinea (the last two actually under South African and Australian rule respectively). The British zones of occupation in the German Rhineland after World War I and West Germany after World War II were not considered part of the Empire.

But although the United Kingdom emerged among the war's victors, and its rule expanded into new areas, the heavy costs of the war undermined its capacity to maintain the vast empire. The British had suffered millions of casualties and liquidated assets at an alarming rate, which led to debt accumulation, upending of capital markets and manpower deficiencies in the staffing of far-flung imperial posts in Asia and the African colonies. Nationalist sentiment grew in both old and new Imperial territories, fuelled by pride at Empire troops' participation in the war.

The 1920s saw a rapid transformation of Dominion status. Although the Dominions had had no formal voice in declaring war in 1914, each was included separately among the signatories of the 1919 peace Treaty of Versailles, which had been negotiated by a British-led united Empire delegation. In 1922 Dominion reluctance to support British military action against Turkey influenced the United Kingdom's decision to seek a compromise settlement. The League of Nations deputed former German colonies to come under the control of the United Kingdom's colonies. For example, New Zealand took over the mandate of Western Samoa, Australia that of Rabual and South Africa that of German South-West Africa.

Full Dominion independence was formalised in the 1926 Balfour Declaration 1926 and the 1931 Statute of Westminster 1931: each Dominion was henceforth to be equal in status to the United Kingdom herself, free of British legislative interference and autonomous in international relations. The Dominions section created within the Colonial Office in 1907 was upgraded in 1925 to a separate Dominions Office and given its own Secretary of State in 1930.

Canada led the way, becoming the first Dominion to conclude an international treaty entirely independently (1923) and obtaining the appointment (1928) of a British High Commissioner in Ottawa, thereby separating the administrative and diplomatic functions of the Governor-General and ending the latter's anomalous role as the representative of the head of state and of the British Government. Canada's first permanent diplomatic mission to a foreign country opened in Washington, DC in 1927: Australia followed in 1940.

Egypt, formally independent from 1922 but bound to the United Kingdom by treaty until 1936 (and under partial occupation until 1956) similarly severed all constitutional links with the United Kingdom. Iraq, which became a British Protectorate in 1922, also gained complete independence ten years later in 1932.

The Irish Free State Irish home rule was to be provided under the Home Rule Act 1914, but the onset of World War I delayed its implementation indefinitely. At Easter 1916 Easter Rising was staged in Dublin by a mixed group of nationalists and socialists. From 1919 the Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla warfare to secede from the United Kingdom. This

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BBC - History - Symbiosis: Trade and the British Empire
Was it the desire for greater trade or the thirst for conquest that made Britain's one of the largest empires ever seen? By Professor Kenneth Morgan.

British Empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The British Empire was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the ...

BBC NEWS | Europe | British Empire blamed for modern conflicts
The UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, blames Britain's imperial past for many of the modern political problems.