Britain's scattered overseas territories are the last pieces of a vanished empire
Fourteen territories, home to about 250,000 people, still sit under British sovereignty far from the British Isles. They range from Gibraltar, the smallest by land, to a vast wedge of Antarctica, and Bermuda owes its settlement to a shipwreck in 1609.
The British Overseas Territories are the fragments of empire that stayed British after decolonisation. Inhabited ones run most of their own affairs, while London keeps final constitutional authority plus control of defence, foreign policy and internal security. The Cayman Islands and Bermuda together hold about half of all residents, the Caymans alone 28 per cent. Some have no permanent civilians at all: the British Antarctic Territory hosts only research stations, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands only officials and scientists. On Cyprus, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia house about 7,000 civilians, but permanent residence there is restricted to Cypriot citizens.
Together the territories cover about 1,600,000 square kilometres, nearly all of it the Antarctic claim; without it the land area is just 18,015 square kilometres. Their roots reach back to early English plantations. Fishermen camped seasonally in Newfoundland in the 16th century, Jamestown in 1607 became the first lasting English colony in North America, and Bermuda was settled by accident when the Virginia Company's flagship was wrecked there in 1609, the archipelago joining the company's charter in 1612.
The empire later peaked in the 1920s with close to a quarter of the world's land. The big settler colonies won self-government, and after the Second World War most colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean chose independence; many joined the Commonwealth, whose members total around 2.2 billion people. After Zimbabwe in 1980 and Belize in 1981, Hong Kong, with over 5 million people, was the last major colony, passing to China in 1997.
The labels have shifted too. The territories were Crown Colonies until 1 January 1983, then British Dependent Territories, and took their present name under the British Overseas Territories Act 2002, which also restored full British citizenship to most of their people. The monarch, now King Charles III, is head of state, represented locally by a governor. In 2023 the territories' shields were set into stained-glass windows in the Speaker's House at Westminster.
Source: British Overseas Territories
