 |
British Empire
 Encyclopædia
Britannica Article |
a worldwide system of dependencies—colonies,
protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three
centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great
Britain and the administration of the British government. The
policy of granting or recognizing significant degrees of
self-government by dependencies, which was favoured by the far-flung
nature of the empire, led to the development by the 20th
century of the notion of a “British Commonwealth,” comprising
largely self-governing dependencies that acknowledged an
increasingly symbolic British sovereignty. The term was embodied in
statute in 1931. Today, the Commonwealth
(q.v.) includes former elements of the British Empire in a
free association of sovereign states.
Great Britain made its first tentative
efforts to establish overseas settlements in the 16th
century. Maritime expansion, driven by commercial ambitions
and by competition with France, accelerated in the 17th
century and resulted in the establishment of settlements in
North America and the West Indies. By 1670 there were British
American colonies in New England, Virginia, and Maryland and
settlements in the Bermudas, Honduras, Antigua, Barbados, and Nova
Scotia. Jamaica was obtained by conquest in 1655, and the Hudson's
Bay Company established itself in what became northwestern Canada
from the 1670s on. The East India
Company began establishing trading posts in India in
1600, and the Straits Settlements (Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and
Labuan) became British through an extension of that company's
activities. The first permanent British settlement on the African
continent was made at James Island in the Gambia River in 1661.
Slave trading had begun earlier in Sierra Leone, but that region did
not become a British possession until 1787. Britain acquired
the Cape of Good Hope (now in South Africa) in 1806, and the South
African interior was opened up by Boer and British pioneers under
British control.
Nearly all these early settlements arose from
the enterprise of particular companies and magnates rather than from
any effort on the part of the English crown. The crown exercised
some rights of appointment and supervision, but the colonies were
essentially self-managing enterprises. The formation of the empire
was thus an unorganized process based on piecemeal acquisition,
sometimes with the British government being the least willing
partner in the enterprise.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the
crown exercised control over its colonies chiefly in the areas of
trade and shipping. In accordance with the mercantilist philosophy
of the time, the colonies were regarded as a source of necessary raw
materials for England and were granted monopolies for their
products, such as tobacco and sugar, in the British market. In
return, they were expected to conduct all their trade by means of
English ships and to serve as markets for British manufactured
goods. The Navigation
Act of 1651 and subsequent acts set up a closed economy between
Britain and its colonies; all colonial exports had to be
shipped on English ships to the British market, and all colonial
imports had to come by way of England. This arrangement lasted until
the combined effects of the Scottish economist Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations (1776), the loss of the American colonies,
and the growth of a free-trade movement in Britain slowly
brought it to an end in the first half of the 19th
century.
The slave trade acquired a peculiar importance to
Britain's colonial economy in the Americas, and it became an
economic necessity for the Caribbean colonies and for the southern
parts of the future United States. Movements for the end of slavery
came to fruition in British colonial possessions long before the
similar movement in the United States; the trade was abolished in
1807 and slavery itself in Britain's dominions in
1833.
British military and naval power, under the
leadership of such men as Robert Clive, James Wolfe, and Eyre Coote,
gained for Britain two of the most important parts of its
empire—Canada and India. Fighting between the British and French
colonies in North America was endemic in the first half of the 18th
century, but the Treaty of
Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War (known as the
French and Indian War in North America), left Britain
dominant in Canada. In India, the East India Company was confronted
by the French Compagnie des Indes, but Robert
Clive's military victories against the French and the rulers of
Bengal in the 1750s provided the British with a massive accession of
territory and ensured their future supremacy in India.
The loss of Britain's 13 American
colonies in 1776–83 was compensated by new settlements in Australia
from 1788 and by the spectacular growth of Upper Canada (now
Ontario) after the emigration of loyalists from what had become the
United States. The Napoleonic Wars provided further additions to the
empire; the Treaty of Amiens (1802) made Trinidad and Ceylon (now
Sri Lanka) officially British, and in the Treaty of Paris (1814)
France ceded Tobago, Mauritius, Saint Lucia, and Malta. Malacca
joined the empire in 1795, and Sir Stamford Raffles acquired
Singapore in 1819. Canadian settlements in Alberta, Manitoba, and
British Columbia extended British influence to the Pacific, while
further British conquests in India brought in the United Provinces
of Agra and Oudh and the Central Provinces, East Bengal, and
Assam.
The 19th century marked the full
flower of the British Empire. Administration and policy changed
during the century from the haphazard arrangements of the
17th and 18th centuries to the sophisticated system
characteristic of Joseph Chamberlain's tenure (1895–1900) in the
Colonial Office. That office, which began in 1801, was first an
appendage of the Home Office and the Board of Trade, but by the
1850s it had become a separate department with a growing staff and a
continuing policy; it was the means by which discipline and pressure
were exerted on the colonial governments when such action was
considered necessary.
New Zealand became officially British in
1840, after which systematic colonization there followed rapidly.
Partly owing to pressure from missionaries, British control was
extended to Fiji, Tonga, Papua, and other islands in the Pacific
Ocean, and in 1877 the British High Commission for the Western
Pacific Islands was created. In the wake of the Indian Mutiny
(1857), the British crown assumed the East India Company's
governmental authority in India. Britain's acquisition of
Burma (Myanmar) was completed in 1886, while its conquest of the
Punjab (1849) and of Balochistan (1854–76) provided
substantial new territory in the Indian subcontinent itself. The
French completion of the Suez Canal
(1869) provided Britain with a much shorter sea route to
India. Britain responded to this opportunity by expanding its
port at Aden, establishing a protectorate in Somaliland (now
Somalia), and extending its influence in the sheikhdoms of southern
Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Cyprus ,
which was, like Gibraltar and Malta, a link in the chain of
communication with India through the Mediterranean, was occupied in
1878. Elsewhere, British influence in the Far East expanded with the
development of the Straits Settlements and the federated Malay
states, and in the 1880s protectorates were formed over Brunei and
Sarawak. Hong Kong island became British in 1841, and an “informal
empire” operated in China by way of British treaty ports and the
great trading city of Shanghai.
The greatest 19th-century extension of
British power took place in Africa ,
however. Britain was the acknowledged ruling force in Egypt
from 1882 and in the Sudan from 1899. In the second half of the
century, the Royal Niger Company began to extend British
influence in Nigeria, and the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and The Gambia
also became British possessions. The Imperial British East Africa
Company operated in what are now Kenya and Uganda, and the British
South
Africa Company operated in what are now Zimbabwe (formerly
Southern Rhodesia), Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), and
Malawi. Britain's victory in the South African War
(1899–1902) enabled it to annex the Transvaal and the Orange Free
State in 1902 and to create the Union of South Africa in 1910. The
resulting chain of British territories stretching from South Africa
northward to Egypt realized an enthusiastic British public's idea of
an African empire extending “from the Cape to Cairo.” By the end of
the 19th century, the British Empire comprised nearly
one-quarter of the world's land surface and more than one-quarter of
its total population. (See the Map.)
The idea of limited self-government for some
of Britain's colonies was first recommended for Canada by
Lord Durham in 1839. This report proposed “responsible
self-government” for Canada, so that a cabinet of ministers chosen
by the Canadians could exercise executive powers instead of
officials chosen by the British government. The cabinet would depend
primarily on support by the colonial legislative assembly for its
tenure of ministerial office. Decisions on foreign affairs and
defense, however, would still be made by a governor-general acting
on orders from the British government in London. The system whereby
some colonies were allowed largely to manage their own affairs under
governors appointed by the mother country spread rapidly. In 1847 it
was put into effect in the colonies in Canada, and it was later
extended to the Australian
colonies, New
Zealand , and to the Cape Colony and Natal in
southern Africa. These colonies obtained such complete control over
their internal affairs that in 1907 they were granted the new status
of dominions. In 1910 another dominion, the Union of South Africa,
was formed from the Cape Colony, Natal, and the former Boer
republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
This select group of nations within the
empire, with substantial European populations and long experience of
British forms and practices, was often referred to as the British
Commonwealth. The demands and stresses of World War I and its
aftermath led to a more formal recognition of the special status of
the dominions .
When Britain had declared war on Germany in 1914 it was on
behalf of the entire empire, the dominions as well as the colonies.
But after World War I ended in 1918, the dominions signed the peace
treaties for themselves and joined the newly formed League of
Nations as independent states equal to Britain. In 1931 the
Statute of
Westminster recognized them as independent countries “within the
British Empire, equal in status” to the United Kingdom. The statute
referred specifically to the “British Commonwealth of Nations.” When
World War II broke out in 1939, the dominions made their own
declarations of war.
The rest of the British Empire consisted for
the most part of colonies and other dependencies whose predominant
indigenous populations had no such experience. For them a variety of
administrative techniques was tried, ranging from the sophisticated
Indian Civil Service, with its largely effective
adoption of native practices in civil law and administration, to the
very loose and indirect supervision exercised in a number of African
territories, where settlers and commercial interests were left much
to themselves while native Africans were segregated into
“reserves.”
Nationalist sentiment developed rapidly in
many of these areas after World War I and even more so after World
War II, with the result that, beginning with India in 1947,
independence was granted them, along with the option of retaining an
association with Great Britain and other former dependencies
in the Commonwealth of Nations (the adjective “British” was not used
officially after 1946). Indian and Pakistani independence was
followed by that of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar) in
1948. The Gold Coast became the first sub-Saharan African colony to
reach independence (as Ghana) in 1957. The movement of
Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, Asia, and the
Caribbean toward self-government gained speed in the years after
1960 as international pressure mounted (especially at the United
Nations), as the notion of independence spread in the colonies
themselves, and as the British public, which was no longer actively
imperial in its sentiments, accepted the idea of independence as a
foregone conclusion.
The last significant British colony, Hong Kong
, was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. By then, virtually
nothing remained of the empire. The Commonwealth, however, remained
a remarkably flexible and durable institution. See also colonialism.
 Back
to top |
|
.gif)
.gif)
