British empire. At its apogee, around 1920, the British empire was the greatest—the biggest, at any rate—ever known. It was reputed to cover a quarter of the world's land area, and a fifth of its population. Most of that, however, was of recent provenance. Like all mighty oaks, this one had a tiny origin. A medieval English proto-empire can be dimly made out, in 12th–13th-cent. Ireland and Gascony. Most historians date the beginnings of the empire proper, however, from Tudor times. It grew out of the great seafaring voyages of that age. Britain was a little behind the Spanish and Portuguese, so initially her empire did not compare with theirs. They took the plums. Britain had to make do with North America and the Caribbean, which were not so obviously valuable. The first British colony was Virginia, which was settled in 1585, but not for long. A ship returning four years later found that the colonists had disappeared. In 1607 the colony was re-established, and this time survived. Other places were also colonized, especially some Caribbean islands, and more of the North American coast. Trading posts were established in India. These became the two main focuses of British imperial dominion for the next two centuries.

It was mainly a commercial empire, run by chartered monopoly companies, and defended by the Royal navy. Britain made sure its benefits accrued to her exclusively, by a series of Navigation Acts passed in the mid-17th cent. to prevent the colonies dealing with anyone else. That was to cause trouble later on. Meanwhile, however, the empire expanded steadily, partly through the extension of British trade, and partly as a result of wars with other colonial powers. The Seven Years War, for example, saw Britain take control of much of India (1756–7). That marked the peak of what later came to be called the ‘first’ British empire, which came to an end with the rebellion of the thirteen American colonies, originally against Britain's trading restrictions, in 1776.

The loss of America (except Canada) threatened to mark the beginning of the end of the British empire as a whole. That was because the idea of exclusive trading colonies was coming under attack on other fronts. Adam Smith, for example, taught that they undermined the ‘wealth of nations’, rather than promoting it. In the early 19th cent. most liberals believed that empires were things of the past. For years historians followed them in assuming that the early and mid-19th cent. was one of the British empire's low points. In fact, however, it continued to expand. Even while America was being lost, Captain Cook was sniffing out new imperial possibilities in the antipodes. The first colony there, New South Wales, was established in 1788. Sierra Leone in west Africa was established as a home for freed slaves at around the same time. Other gains—Trinidad, Malta, Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope—were made as a result of the French Revolutionary wars. Later came Tasmania, Singapore, Burma, Western Australia, New Zealand, Aden, Hong Kong, Natal … a full list would be tedious, but would also illustrate the continuity of Britain's imperial history at this time. Most of this expansion was due to the requirements of Britain's ever-expanding trade. By the 1880s, when the conventional view used to be that the empire picked up again, the bulk of it was already in place.

The difference about the 1880s was that Britons thereafter became infused with a conscious mood of imperialism. They sought empire deliberately, instead of merely accepting its growth in what the imperialist J. R. Seeley called ‘a fit of absence of mind’. That may have had some effect on this phase of its expansion, though it has to be said that much of it took place under non-imperialists, like Gladstone. It was he who took control of Egypt in 1882, for example, though strictly—perhaps to save his anti-imperialist face—this was never called a colony. That sparked off the Scramble for Africa, which added much of the eastern and southern part of the continent to Britain's collection. The culmination of this phase was the second Boer war (1899–1902). The only substantial additions to the British empire after this were the ‘mandated’ territories—ex-German and Ottoman possessions, including much of the Middle East—which were allocated to it in the wake of the First World War. They too were not meant to be ‘colonies’, though most people at the time regarded them as such.

This was the empire's zenith. It was huge. In 1901 an imperial census reckoned its total population was 398,401,404, but even that may have been an underestimate, as it apparently never occurred to the heads of households in some colonies that the British wanted them to count their women too. It had a presence in every habitable continent, giving rise to the boast that ‘the sun never set’ on it: though one subversive joke suggested that this was only because ‘God doesn't trust the Brits in the dark’. Most Britons felt it was beneficial: ‘the greatest secular agency for good that the world has seen’, according to Lord Rosebery, though there were other opinions, voiced by J. A. Hobson. The wonder was that so small a country as Britain, at the very edge of Europe, was able to exercise so wide a sway. How was it done?

The simple answer to that is: ‘with difficulty’. Britain's empire would have been far too much for her, if she really had tried to dominate it. She succeeded in holding it mainly by being flexible, and persuading others to take much of the strain. In the ‘white’ dominions these were the European settlers, who were given effective self-government from early on in the 19th cent., in exchange for which they agreed to look after their ‘natives’ themselves. That often meant exploiting, enslaving, and even extirpating them, while the Colonial Office in London looked on helplessly. Elsewhere local governors utilized divisions amongst natives cleverly, or adopted a policy of preserving native social and power structures, so as to keep disruption to a minimum. This, however, diluted Britain's real control. Collaborators needed to be appeased. Later they proved less willing, especially as Britain's prosperity and strength came to look more vulnerable. That, in the end, was what brought the empire down, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the process of decolonization began.

The empire left legacies on both sides. For the ex-colonies it brought stability for a while, though sometimes only by bottling up natural conflicts that were bound to erupt later. It helped the spread of capitalism, Christianity, parliamentary institutions, English as a lingua franca, and (most beneficially) cricket. Afterwards it conferred automatic membership of a new club, the Commonwealth of Nations, of which most ex-colonies availed themselves. So far as Britain is concerned, the balance sheet is controversial. She may not have profited as much as she thought from the empire. It can be argued that it held her back industrially; for example, by boosting the public schools, whose paternalist ethos was necessary to furnish its governors, but disastrous for the entrepreneurial spirit. Its collapse was felt as a loss, however, economically and emotionally. Many of the country's problems in the second half of the 20th cent. were undoubtedly aggravated by her difficulty in coming to terms with its disappearance. On the other hand it provided the later British film industry, while it lasted, with some splendid locations and plots.

Bernard Porter

Bibliography

Lloyd, T. , The British Empire, 1558–1983 (Oxford, 1984);
Porter, B. , The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1983 (1985).