The British Empire comprised of Britain, the 'mother country', and the colonies, countries ruled to some degree by and from Britain. In the 16th century Britain began to establish overseas colonies. By , Britain had built a large empire with colonies in America and the West Indies.
The years were a turning point in British history, as the nation lost a huge part of its empire in the American War of Independence. With the help of Spain , France and the Netherlands, they won the war, and gained independence , becoming the United States of America.
By the early s, huge parts of Africa — including Egypt , Kenya , Nigeria and large areas of southern Africa — all came under British rule. The British Empire was larger and more powerful than ever….
She was even Empress of India! Here she is pictured on a Canadian postage stamp during her reign. The unjust treatment of indigenous peoples ran the course of the British Empire.
For example, in North America, local people were taken advantage of by greedy traders, robbed of their land and even faced violence and death at the hands of British settlers. During the Second World War , India suffered some of the worst famines lack of food in human history, partly caused by the British government taking vital supplies away from the Indian people to support the war effort elsewhere — causing the death of millions. Indigenous peoples in Africa were affected in their millions.
The British took valuable materials like gold , salt and ivory out of Africa and sent it back to Britain, and elsewhere. The British were also heavily involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in West Africa — more on that, in the next section.
Many indigenous peoples, including Indigenous Australians , lost not just their land, food and possessions, but their traditions, too. When British settlers arrived, they forcibly replaced the beliefs , language and traditions of indigenous populations with their own, removing their cultural identities.
In some countries, these changes are still a source of conflict, even now. Today, many indigenous communities are trying to reconnect with the heritage the British tried to erase, by celebrating their cultural identities and protecting them for the future. Throughout history, slavery has existed on all continents and in many societies , but when the European imperialists arrived in Africa in the 15th Century, they began the most organised slave operation the world had ever seen — the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Over the next years, European traders bought and sold an estimated 12 million African people , who were forcibly taken from their homes and shipped across the ocean to the Americas and Europe , where their buyers forced them to work. Of those 12 million Africans, British slave traders are estimated to have bought and sold over 3 million people — although only 2. Many enslaved people were only children, like you, and were separated from their parents and siblings.
Slavery made Britain incredibly wealthy. It provided slave owners with unpaid labour to farm expensive items like sugar , tobacco and cotton , which they could sell for huge profits — at the expense of the enslaved people and their homelands.
Britain banned the trading of enslaved people in its empire in , known as Abolition but it was a further 26 years until it outlawed slavery altogether known as Emancipation. People considered them less important than white people, and used these beliefs to help them justify the former trading of enslaved people.
No compensation was paid to the enslaved people themselves! The compensation sum was vast , and in fact, the loan taken out to pay for it was still being paid off by British tax payers as recently as ! Many former slave owners went on to invest their compensation money in businesses — some of which still exist today — or in development projects like the British railways.
Therefore, even though slavery had ended, its legacy continued to live on. In fact, you can still see evidence of the profits of slavery in Britain today.
By more than 20 British territories were independent. Little remains of British rule today across the globe, and it is mostly restricted to small island territories such as Bermuda and the Falkland Islands. However, a number of countries still have Queen Elizabeth as their head of state including New Zealand, Australia and Canada - a hangover of the Empire.
Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer. Daily Briefing. The Print Collector. How did the empire come about? How big was the Empire? Log in Subscribe. In his new book, Niall Ferguson argues that the Empire was a force for global good, and that its demise was caused less by nationalist movements than by the cost of its efforts to keep more malign imperial powers at bay.
By Niall Ferguson. Monday January 06 ,
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