British power spread from trading posts to global dominion
The British Empire gathered colonies, dominions, protectorates, and mandates under the United Kingdom and its predecessors, starting with English trading posts in the late 1500s and 1600s. After losing the thirteen American colonies in 1783, expansion pivoted toward Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
Portugal and Spain led the Age of Discovery; England, France, and the Netherlands followed the wealth. Henry VII sent John Cabot in 1496; he reached Newfoundland the next year believing it was Asia, and serious American planting waited for Elizabeth I. Henry VIII’s 1533 statute already called England an “Empire,” John Dee coined the phrase British Empire, and Protestant England practiced colonization first in Irish plantations. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars with the Dutch and French left Britain dominant in North America, and the East India Company's victory at Plassey in 1757, which delivered Mughal Bengal, made it a major force in the Indian subcontinent.
At its peak it was the largest empire ever: by 1913 it governed 412 million people, about 23 percent of humanity, and by 1920 it spanned 35.5 million square kilometres, nearly a quarter of the world's land. After defeating Napoleon, Britain became the century's leading naval power, presiding over the so-called Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914, defeating the Maratha Empire by 1818, joining the Scramble for Africa and shaping Middle Eastern borders alongside France.
By 1900 Germany and the United States were catching up economically, and rivalry with Germany helped bring on the First World War, which drained British money and manpower even as the empire reached its greatest extent. In the Second World War Japan overran the East and Southeast Asian colonies, and the blow to prestige and finances hastened the end. India, the most valuable and populous possession, became independent in 1947 amid a wider wave of decolonisation.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed the decline, and many saw the return of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 as the empire's final curtain. Fourteen overseas territories remain British, most former colonies joined the Commonwealth of Nations, and fifteen realms, the United Kingdom among them, still share King Charles III as monarch.
Source: British Empire
