British Empire around the world

-Alberto Visentin,Pinton Filippo,Lorenzo Bergamo, Tommaso Finesso-

S T A R T

British Empire around the world

Index

-The British Empire in Africa-

-The British Empire in Asia-

-The British Empire in America-

-The British Empire in Oceania and Antarctica-

- The British Empire -

John Cabot's ship

The British Empire was made up of the dominions, colonies and other territories governed by the United Kingdom. It was the largest empire of all time extending its dominion over more than 450 million people and a quarter of the earth's surface. The origins of the British Empire date back to the time when England and Scotland were two separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, after the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned an expedition from John Cabot to discover a Northwest Passage to Asia across the North Atlantic. After the first expedition ended with the landing in Newfoundland, he sailed again and then never returned. Although England tended to follow Portugal, Spain, in establishing overseas colonies, carried out its first modern colonization, called Ulster Plantation, in Ireland by settling English Protestants in this territory. Several people who helped found the plantations of Ulster later played a part in the early colonization of North America, particularly a group known as West Country Men.

What is it and its origins

BRITISH EMPIRE

Map of Antarctica territory of the British Empire

Map of the territories of the British Empire

The British Antarctic Territory is a sector of Antarctica claimed by the United Kingdom. The Territory was formed on 3 March 1962, although the UK's claim to this part of Antarctica dates back to letters patent of 1908 and 1917. The area now covered by the territory includes three regions which Graham Land, the South Orkney Islands and the South Shetland Islands.

On the continent of Oceania, British colonies began to develop from Australia. The first was New South Wales, founded in 1788. New colonies were then formed such as New Zealand which was part of New South Wales (Australia) until 1835. Then there are other colonies such as Papua New Guinea which remained under British control until 1905. Other territories are Fiji until 1970 and the archipelago of Tonga until 1952.

The British Empire in Oceania and Antarcticara

Relations with the American colonies

British America included the colonial territories of the English Empire, which became the British Empire after the 1707 union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, in the Americas from 1607 to 1783. Prior to the Union, this was called English America, except for Scotland's failed attempts to establish its own colonies. A number of English colonies were founded in America between 1607 and 1670 by individuals and corporations whose investors expected to reap the rewards of their speculations. A London state department known as the Southern Department governed all of the colonies from 1660. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War and Britain lost much of this territory to the newly formed United States. Additionally, Britain ceded East and West Florida to the Kingdom of Spain, which in turn ceded them to the United States in 1821. Most of the remaining colonies to the north formed Canada in 1867.

The British Empire in America

Territories of the British Empire in America

France, Spain and England vied for dominance over North America. The French, beset by foreign wars and internal religious quarrels, failed for long to realize the great possibilities of the new continent,while the Spanish were concerned about South America and the lands bordering the Caribbean. The British, after initial failures,they planted solid settlements,they brought us a constant flow of people and created different capitals. Within a century and a half the British had 13 colonies on the Atlantic coast: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The British Empire in America

The British territories in Asia

The following year the British government dissolved the company and assumed direct control over India establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor-general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India.India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength. The British had competed with Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch for their interests in Asia since the early 17th century and by the mid-19th century held much of India,Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Singapore. The last British acquisition in Asia was the New Territories of Hong Kong, which was leased to the Qing Emperor in 1897, expanding the originally ceded British colony in 1942.

The British Empire in Asia

Coat of arms of the India Company

Asia was the very first target of imperial and commercial activities for the English. In fact, a Company is created to control the territory in Asia called the "India Company". From its base in India, the Company had been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to Qing China. This trade, illegal since it was banned by China in 1729, helped reverse trade imbalances resulting from British tea imports, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China. The company's demise was hastened by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict which had begun with the mutiny of "sepoys", Indian troops, under British officers. The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides.

The British Empire in Asia

A group of slaves

Most of the territories that were part of the British Empire were in Africa. Britain controlled much of the African continent for nearly a century before its empire collapsed in the mid-1900s. In the early modern period, British traders brought products such as weapons to Africa in exchange for raw materials and enslaved persons. These traders often were protected by the government through the creation of monopolies, which meant their trading company had exclusive rights to conduct commerce with a certain region or for a certain product.

The British Empire in Africa

Territories that were under the rule of the British Empire in Africa

In the latter third of the 1800s, European imperial powers expanded from their small coastal colonies to seize control of most of the continent of Africa. This has been called the Scramble for Africa. In part, the scramble was facilitated by the 1884 Berlin Conference, in which European imperial powers agreed on a system to recognize each other's control of colonies. From Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria and the Cape Colony, Britain expanded into the interior of Africa. In 1882, Britain invaded Egypt and established control over the territory, but legally it was still part of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Later that decade, the British East Africa Company expanded its power inward from the coast. By the beginning of the First World War, Britain controlled a massive swathe of territory. Its colonies included Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, North and South Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, South Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, the East African Protectorate, and Somaliland.

The scramble for Africa.