- For a comprehensive list of the territories that formed the British Empire see Evolution of the British Empire.
The British Empire in 1897, marked in pink, the traditional colour for Imperial British dominions on maps.
An anachronous map of British and, prior to the
Acts of Union 1707, English imperial
possessions
The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for a
substantial time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European
age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial
empires.
By 1921, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world's
population.[1] It covered about 36.6 million km² (14.2
million square miles),[2] about a quarter of Earth's total
land area. As a result, its legacy is widespread, in legal and governmental systems, economic practice, militarily,
educational systems, sports (such as cricket,
rugby and football), and in the global spread
of the English language. At the peak of its power, it was often said that
"the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span
across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous colonies
or subject nations.[3]
During the five decades following World War II, most of
the territories of the Empire became independent. Many went on to join the Commonwealth
of Nations, a free association of independent states.
Origins of the British Empire
The foundations of the British Empire were laid at a time before Britain existed as a single political entity, when
England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King
Henry VII of England, following the successes of Portugal and Spain in overseas exploration, commissioned
John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot
sailed in 1497, and though he successfully made landfall on the coast of Canada (mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus five years earlier, that he had reached Asia), the voyage was unprofitable,
and no attempt at establishing a colony was made. Disinterest in overseas matters followed this voyage, and continued until well
into the reign of Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century.
Enmity and rivalry between Catholic Spain and Protestant
England during the Anglo-Spanish Wars led to the Crown sanctioning English
privateers such as John Hawkins and Sir Francis
Drake to engage in piratical attacks on Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic,
laden with treasure from the New World. At the same time, influential writers such as
Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use
the term "British Empire"[4]) were beginning to press
for the establishment of England's own empire, to rival those of Spain and Portugal. By this time, Spain was firmly entrenched in
the Americas, Portugal had established a string of trading posts and forts from the coasts of Africa and Brazil to China, and
France had begun to settle the St. Lawrence River, later to become New France.
In 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a patent by Queen Elizabeth for discovery
and overseas exploration, and set sail for the West Indies with the intention of first
engaging in piracy and then, on the return voyage, establishing a colony in North America. The expedition failed at the outset
due to bad weather. In 1583 Gilbert embarked on a second attempt, on this occasion to the island of Newfoundland where he formally claimed for England the harbour of St. John's, though no settlers
were left behind. Gilbert did not survive the return journey back to England, and was succeeded as England's main coloniser by
his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who was granted his own patent by Elizabeth in 1584, in
the same year founding the colony of Roanoke on the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony did not survive due to lack of supplies.
Ireland
Though a relative latecomer to overseas colonisation in comparison to Spain and Portugal, England had been engaged in a form
of domestic colonisation[5] in Ireland that had begun during Norman times and accelerated
with the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland and Cromwellian conquest.[6] The Plantations of Ireland, run by English colonists,
were a precursor to the overseas Empire[7][8] and several people involved in these projects also had a hand
in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the "West Country men"[9] which included Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Sir
John Hawkins, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir
Ralph Lane.
The "First British Empire"
In 1603, King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne. The following
year he negotiated the Treaty of London, ending hostilities with Spain. King
James claimed to have an Imperial Crown of Great Britain[10], even though Scotland and England were still separate countries with their own parliaments. During
the next three centuries, England and then - following the 1707 Acts of Union - Great Britain extended its influence
overseas.
At the turn of the 17th century, attention shifted from preying on other nations' colonial infrastructure to the business of
establishing England's own overseas colonies.[11] Although
its beginnings were hit-and-miss, the British Empire began to take shape during the early 17th century, with the English
settlement of North America and the smaller islands of the Caribbean, and the establishment of a private company, the English East India Company, to trade with Asia. This period, until the loss of the
Thirteen Colonies after the United States Declaration of Independence towards the end of the 18th century
has subsequently been referred to as the "First British Empire".[12]
There were several pre-union attempts by Scotland to establish its own overseas colonies, with Scottish settlements in both North and South America.
Nova Scotia was to become Scotland's first unsuccessful attempt at establishing a foothold
in the Americas and the Darien scheme, on the Isthmus
of Panama, its last.
The Americas
The Caribbean initially provided England's most important and lucrative colonies[13], but not before several attempts at colonisation failed. Charles Leigh's attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604
lasted only two years, and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits.[14] Colonies in St Lucia (1605) and Grenada (1609) also rapidly folded, but settlements were successfully established in St. Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis
(1628). The colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations successfully used by the
Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labour, and - at
first - Dutch ships, to sell the slaves and buy the sugar. To ensure the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in
English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led
to hostilities with Holland - a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars - which would eventually
strengthen England's position in the Americas at Holland's expense. In 1655 England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas.
England's first permanent overseas settlement was founded in 1607 in Jamestown,
led by Captain John Smith and managed by the Virginia Company, an offshoot of which established a colony on Bermuda
which had been discovered in 1609. The Newfoundland Company was created in
1610 with the aim of creating a permanent settlement on Newfoundland, but was largely unsuccessful. In 1620, Plymouth was founded as a haven for religious separatists, later known as the Pilgrims. Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists to risk
the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage.
Britain's American empire was slowly expanded by war and colonisation, with England gaining control of New Amsterdam (later New York) via negotiations following the
Second Anglo-Dutch War. The growing American colonies pressed ever westward as
colonists sought new agricultural lands, a search that dispersed settlers across vast landmasses in North America.
The American colonies, which provided tobacco, cotton, and
rice in the south and naval materiel and furs in the north, were less financially successful than those of the Caribbean, but had large areas of good
agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants.[15]
From the outset, slavery was a vital economic component of the British Empire in the Americas. Until its abolition in 1807,
Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic.[16] In the British Caribbean, the percentage of the population comprised by blacks rose from 25% in
1650 to around 80% in 1780, and in the Thirteen Colonies from 10% to 40% over the same period (the majority in the
south).[17] For the slave traders, the trade was
extremely profitable, and became a major economic manistay for such cities as Bristol and
Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. However, for the transportees, harsh and unhygienic
conditions on the slaving ships and poor diets meant that the average mortality rate during the middle passage was one in seven.
Asia
At the end of the 16th century, England and Holland began to
challenge Portugal's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages - the English (later British) and Dutch East
India Companies, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative
spice trade, and focussed their efforts on the source, the Indonesian archipelago, and an
important hub in the trade network, India. The proximity of London and Amsterdam and rivalry between England and Holland
inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas (previously a Portuguese stronghold) after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, and the
English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory in 1613.
Though England would ultimately eclipse Holland as a colonial power, in the short term Holland's more advanced financial
system[18] and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia. Hostilities ceased after
the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between Holland and England. A deal
between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to Holland and the textiles industry of India to
England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability, and by 1720, in terms of sales the English company had
overtaken the Dutch.[19] The English East India Company
shifted its focus from Surat - a hub of the spice trade network - to Fort St George
(later to become Madras), Bombay (ceded by the Portuguese to
Charles II of England in 1661 as dowry for Catherine de Braganza) and Sutanuti (which would merge with two
other villages to form Calcutta).
Global Struggles of the 18th Century
Peace between England and Holland in 1688 meant that the two countries entered the Nine Years' War as allies, but the conflict - waged in Europe and overseas between France,
Spain and the Anglo-Dutch alliance - left the English a stronger colonial power than the Dutch, who were forced to devote a
larger proportion of their military budget on the costly land war in Europe.[20] The 18th century would see England (after 1707, Britain) rise to be the world's dominant colonial
power, and France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage.[21]
The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its
colonial empire to Philippe of Anjou, a grandson of the King of France, raised the
prospect of the unification of France, Spain and their respective colonies, an unacceptable state of affairs for Britain and the
other powers of Europe. In 1701, Britain, Portugal and Holland sided with the Holy Roman
Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The conflict, which France and Spain were to lose, lasted
until 1714. At the concluding peace Treaty of Utrecht, Philip renounced his and his
descendents' right to the French throne. Spain lost its empire in Europe, and though it kept its empire in the Americas and the
Philippines, it was irreversibly weakened as a power. The British Empire was territorially enlarged: from France, Britain gained
Newfoundland and Acadia, and from Spain,
Gibraltar and Minorca. Gibraltar, which is still a British overseas territory
to this day, became a critical naval base and allowed Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the
Mediterranean. Minorca was returned to Spain at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, after changing hands twice. Spain also ceded the rights to the lucrative
asiento (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America) to Britain.
The Seven Years' War, which began in 1756, was the first war waged on a global
scale, fought in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and coastal Africa. The signing of the
Treaty of Paris (1763) had important consequences for Britain and its empire. In
North America, France's future as a colonial power there was effectively ended with the ceding of New France to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. In India, the Carnatic War had left France still in
control of its enclaves but with military restrictions and an obligation to support British
client states, effectively leaving the future of India to Britain. The British victory over France in the Seven Years War
therefore left Britain as the world's dominant colonial power.[22]
The Rise of the "Second British Empire"
The Loss of the Thirteen Colonies
Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (
John Trumbull, 1797). The loss of the American
colonies marked the end of the "first British Empire".
During the 1760s and 1770s, relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain became increasingly strained, primarily
because of resentment of the British Parliament's ability to tax American colonists without their consent.[23] Disagreement turned to violence and in 1775 the American Revolutionary War began. The following year, the colonists declared the independence of the United States, and - with the assistance of
the French - would go on to win the war in 1783. As a result, Britain lost its most populous colony. However, during the war many
loyalists had moved north to Canada, thereby strengthening the future of British North
America, though it was not secured until the War of 1812, during which the United
States unsuccessfully attempted to extend its border northwards.
The loss of the thirteen colonies resulted in a shift of British attention from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later
Africa, and showed that colonies were not necessarily particularly beneficial in economic terms, since Britain could still profit
from trade with the ex-colonies without having to pay for their defence and administration.[citation needed] Mercantilism, the economic doctrine of competition between nations for a finite amount of wealth which had
characterised the first period of colonial expansion, now gave way in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to the laissez-faire economic liberalism of Adam Smith and successors like Richard Cobden.
Convicts and Empire
Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for
various criminal offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year across the Atlantic.[24] Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the
Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered land of New Holland, later renamed Australia.
In 1770, James Cook had discovered the eastern coast of Australia whilst on a scientific
voyage to the South Pacific. In 1778, Joseph
Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail,
arriving in 1788. Matthew Flinders proved New Holland and New South Wales to be a single land mass by completing a circumnavigation of it in 1803. His
recommendation that the continent be known as Australia was accepted.[citation needed] In 1826 New Holland was formally claimed for the United Kingdom with the
establishment of a military base, soon followed by a colony in 1829. The colonies later became self-governing colonies and became profitable exporters of wool and
gold.
Abolition of Slavery
Under increasing pressure from the abolitionist movement, the United Kingdom outlawed
the slave trade (1807) and soon began enforcing this principle on other nations. By
the mid-19th century the United Kingdom had largely eradicated the world slave trade. An Act making slavery illegal was passed in 1833 and became law on August 1, 1834. However the
act was only gradually implemented and thus although slavery itself was abolished in most
British colonies by 1838, it was only abolished in the remainder, Sierra Leone,
India, Nigeria, Gambia,
Ghana and Aden over the next 100 years. Slavery was finally
abolished in Sierra Leone, its last outpost in the Empire, on 1st January, 1928. The end of
the old colonial and slave systems was accompanied by the adoption of free trade, culminating
in the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in
the 1840s. Free trade opened the British market to unfettered competition, stimulating reciprocal action by other countries
during the middle quarters of the 19th century.[citation needed]
Between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the United Kingdom was the world's sole industrialised
power,[citation needed] with over 30% of the global
industrial output in 1870. As the "workshop of the world", the United Kingdom could produce finished manufactures so efficiently
and cheaply that they could undersell comparable locally produced goods in foreign markets. Given stable political conditions in
particular overseas markets, the United Kingdom could prosper through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule.
In the Americas the informal British trade empire was backed by the shared interests of the United Kingdom in the tenets of the
United States' Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the New World was no longer open to
colonisation or political interference by Europeans. As the United States did not yet have the military strength to enforce this
doctrine, the British were largely left with a free hand to enter the new markets in Latin America created after independence
from Spain and Portugal, and British commercial supremacy lasted until the outbreak of World War I.[25]
Company Rule in India
Expansion
The decline of the Mughal Empire, which had separated into many smaller states
controlled by local rulers who were often in conflict with one another, allowed the Company to expand its territories, which
began in 1757, when the Company came into conflict with the Nawab of Bengal,
Siraj Ud Daulah. Under the leadership of Robert Clive, the British defeated the Nawab on 23 June
1757 at the Battle of Plassey as a result of superior
British artillery, military discipline and to a lesser extant the treachery of the Nawab's former army chief Mir Jafar[26][27] This victory, which resulted in the virtual conquest of Bengal,
established the British East India Company as both a military and commercial power. However, the Company did not claim absolute
authority over the territory for a long time. They preferred to rule through a puppet Nawab who could be blamed for the
administrative failures caused by excessively avaricious economic exploitation of the territory by the Company. This event is
widely regarded as the beginning of British rule in India.[citation needed] The wealth gained from the Bengal treasury allowed the Company to
strengthen its military might significantly. This army (comprised mostly of Indian soldiers, called sepoys, and led by British officers) conquered most of India's geographic and political regions by the mid 19th
century and thus the Company's territories were substantially augmented.
The Company fought many wars with local Indian rulers during its conquest of India, the most difficult being the four
Anglo-Mysore Wars (between 1766 and 1799) against the South Indian Kingdom of Mysore ruled by Hyder Ali, and later his son Tipu Sultan (The Tiger of Mysore)
who developed the use of rockets in warfare. Mysore was only defeated in the Fourth
Anglo-Mysore War by the combined forces of Britain and of Mysore's neighbours. After the Battles of Palashi (1757) and
Buxar (1764) which established British dominion over East India, the Anglo-Mysore wars (1766-1799) and the Anglo-Maratha Wars
(1775-1818) consolidated the British claim over South Asia, resulting in the British Empire in India, though pockets of
resistance among the Sikhs, Afghans and in Burma would last well into the 1880s.
There were a number of other states which the Company could not conquer through military might, mostly in the North, where the
Company's presence was ever increasing amidst the internal conflict and dubious offers of protection against one another.
Coercive action, threats and diplomacy aided the Company in preventing the local rulers from putting up a united struggle against
British rule.[citation needed] By the 1850s the Company ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent and as
a result, the Company began to function more as a state and less as a trading concern.
The Company was also responsible[citation needed] for the opium trade with China against the Qing Emperor's will, which later led to the two
Opium Wars (between 1834 and 1860). As a result of the Company's victory in the
First Opium War, it established Hong Kong as a
British territory. The Company also had a number of wars with other surrounding Asian countries, the most difficult probably
being the three Anglo-Afghan Wars (between 1839 and 1919) against Afghanistan, which were mostly unsuccessful from a British perspective.[citation needed]
- See: Company rule in India in the History of South Asia series for the history of the Company's rule in India between 1757 and
1857.
Collapse
The Company's rule effectively came to an end exactly a century after its victory at Plassey. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British faced their toughest military challenge during their rule
in India. It occurred when the Company's Indian sepoys rebelled against their British commanders.
The rebellion began at Meerut, a town east of Delhi, when a few
sepoys mutinied against their English officers and killed them. Then, the rebellion spread like wild fire over most of
northern India, especially the modern states of Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. It immediately gained the support of almost every section of Indian society (except the westernised Indians
like who believed that British rule was necessary to mitigate the social evils prevalent in Indian society at that time), most
notably the zamindars, peasants and Indian princes. The rebellion was a result of many factors,
social, political and economical. By 1857, the inhabitants of India grew greatly dissatisfied with British rule, the character of
which was perceived to be oppressive and exploitative by them. There was simmering discontent with British rule and only a spark
was necessary to set it afire.[28] One such event that surely seemed trivial to the Company at the time, but that
turned out to have dire consequences, was the Company's introduction of the Pattern 1853
Enfield rifle. Its gunpowder containing paper cartridges were claimed to be lubricated with animal fat and had to be
bitten open before the powder was poured into the muzzle. Eating cow or pig fat was forbidden for religious reasons for the vast
majority of the soldiers. Beef products were forbidden for the Hindu majority, likewise pork for the large Muslim
minority.[28]
Although Company and Enfield representatives insisted that neither cow nor pig fat were being used, the rumour persisted and
many sepoys refused to follow orders involving the use of the weapons using those particular cartridges. Sepoy Mangal Pandey, a Hindu saraswat brahmin of 5th Company, 34th
Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, who would later become
a symbol of Indian resistance to British rule, was hanged on the 8th of April as a punishment for having attacked and injured
British superiors at the introduction of the rifle increasing tension at a time when Indians had come to resent decades of
British rule under which they felt like second class citizens; exploited and seen as incapable of Home Rule.[citation needed]
In the past, Indians had feuded as much with other Indians as they did with the British, this has greatly aided the British in
their conquest. There had yet to occur any sort of unified uprising against British authority. But in 1857, a number of events
such as the issue concerning the Enfield cartridges led to the Mutiny of 1857,
which eventually brought about the end of the British East India Company's
regime in India. The British quickly suppressed the rebellion, with the majority of the Madras and Bombay armies remaining loyal
and the rebellion being largely restricted to Bengal.[29]
The British also had superior organisation, weapons and communications. The rebellion came to a decisive end when the British
finally took control of Delhi, which was the centre of the rebellion. The fall of Delhi was followed by a large scale massacre of
the inhabitants of Delhi by British forces.[30] This was
not the only massacre associated with the rebellion; the massacre of British women and children at Cawnpore being the most
infamous.
The Company's failure to demonstrate effective control over its conquered Indian territories caused British financial and
political entities to become uneasy about the security of their interests in India and what that meant for the future of the
Empire. By 1857, India was a tremendously large part of the Empire's economy. The disaster of the Mutiny in particular had a
tremendous influence on the Crown's policy regarding the most effective way to govern India.[citation needed] As a result, the Crown and British
government assumed direct rule over the Indian sub-continent for ninety years following the dissolution of the Company.
The period of direct rule in India is referred to as the The Raj during which the nations
now known as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar were collectively known as British India.
- See British Raj in the History of
South Asia series for the history of British rule in India between 1857 and 1947.
Breakdown of Pax Britannica
Britain's overseas commercial dominance had been able to draw on most of the accessible world for raw materials and markets.
This dominance was won through major territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Dutch
and the French in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning with the Seven Years War.
Utilising its naval supremacy, Britain mastered control of the world's raw materials and markets. Under its mercantilistic and
protectionist policies, this ensured a near permanent dominance of world trade, which fed British industrialisation. However,
under similar programmes practised by its progeny in the now independent United States, that dominance was slowly being
challenged. Additionally Britain abandoned its protectionist policies in favour of free trade simultaneously as other Continental
powers implemented their own protectionist and government promoted industrialisation programmes. Under the influence of
commercial and financial vested interests this policy of free trade continued to be practised under successive ministries despite
Britain's declining global relative industrial and trade economic value. This situation gradually deteriorated during the late
19th century as other powers began to advance their protectionist programmes and sought to use the state to guarantee their
markets and sources of supply. By the 1870s, British manufactures in the staple industries of the
Industrial Revolution were beginning to experience real competition abroad.[citation needed]
Britannia became a symbol of Britain's imperial might
Industrialisation progressed rapidly in Germany and the United States, allowing them to catch up with the British economy as world leaders. By 1870, the German
textile and metal industries had surpassed those of the United Kingdom in organisation and technical efficiency and usurped
British manufactures in the domestic market. By the turn of the century, the German metals and engineering industries would even
be producing for the free trade market of the former "workshop of the world".[citation needed]
While invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services) kept the United Kingdom "out of the red," her share of
world trade fell from a quarter in 1880 to a sixth in 1913.[31][32] The United Kingdom was
losing out not only in the markets of newly industrialising countries, but also against third-party competition in less-developed
countries. The United Kingdom was even losing her former overwhelming dominance in trade with India, China, Latin America, and the coasts of Africa.[citation needed] However, this loss of supremacy was not so much a matter of the United
Kingdom falling behind as it was a matter of other regions catching up in industrialisation.
As a result, the United Kingdom's commercial difficulties deepened with the onset of the "Long Depression" of 1873–96.[citation needed] This was a prolonged period of price deflation punctuated by severe
business downturns. After nearly twenty years of self-evident failure of its free-trade policies, the combined results finally
pressured the commercial and financial interests out of government dominance and returned a more protectionist oriented policy
crowd. This retrenchment of the United Kingdom's trade system caused the other European Continental Powers to quickly move on
their objective of abandoning the vestigial remnants of the early 19th century British Free-Trade system particularly by Germany
in 1879 and in France in 1881 when they ended their former trade agreements with the British Empire.
The resulting limitation of the British Empire's domestic markets to European governments led the French government to attempt
engineering a recreation of its earlier Empire in Africa. Soon Germany and finally the United Kingdom pushed forward in
demarching respective colonial spheres in Africa, all with the goal of establishing newer sheltered overseas markets united to
the home country behind imperial tariff barriers under which new overseas subjects would provide export markets free of foreign
competition, while supplying cheap raw materials. Although she continued at times to attempt to adhere to free trade until
1932, the United Kingdom mitigated its risk by joining the renewed scramble for formal empire
rather than allow areas under her influence to be seized by rivals.
The United Kingdom and the New Imperialism
-
The policy and ideology of European colonial expansion between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 are often characterised as the "New Imperialism".[citation needed] The period is distinguished by an
unprecedented pursuit of what has been termed "empire for empire's sake", aggressive competition for overseas territorial
acquisitions and the emergence in colonising countries of doctrines of jingoism which denied
the fitness of subjugated peoples for self-government.[citation needed]
During this period, Europe's powers added nearly 8,880,000 square miles (23,000,000 km²) to their overseas colonial possessions[citation needed]. As it was mostly unoccupied by the Western powers as late as the 1880s, Africa
became the primary target of the "new" imperialist expansion, although conquest took place also in other areas — notably
south-east Asia and the East Asian seaboard, where
Japan joined the European powers' scramble for territory.
The United Kingdom's entry into the new imperial age is often dated to 1875, when the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli bought
the indebted Egyptian ruler Ismail's 44% shareholding in
the Suez Canal for £4 million to secure control of this strategic waterway, a channel for
shipping between the United Kingdom and India since its opening six years earlier under Emperor Napoleon III. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British
occupation in 1882.
Fear of Russia's centuries-old southward expansion was a further factor in British
policy[citation needed]: in 1878 the United Kingdom
took control of Cyprus as a base for action against a Russian attack on the Ottoman Empire, after having taken part in the Crimean War 1854–56
and invading Afghanistan to forestall an increase in Russian influence there. The United
Kingdom waged three bloody and unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan, as ferocious popular rebellions, invocations of jihad and inscrutable terrain frustrated British objectives.[citation needed] The First Anglo-Afghan War
led to one of the most disastrous defeats of the Victorian military when an entire British army was wiped out by Russian-supplied
Afghan Pashtun tribesmen during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. The Second Anglo-Afghan War led to the British débâcle at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, the siege of Kabul and British withdrawal into India. The Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 stoked a tribal uprising against the exhausted British
military on the heels of World War I and expelled the British permanently from the new Afghan state. The "Great Game" in Inner Asia ended with a bloody British expedition
against Tibet in 1903–04. At the same time, some powerful industrial lobbies and government
leaders in the United Kingdom, later exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain, came to view
formal empire as necessary to arrest the United Kingdom's relative decline in world markets. During the 1890s the United Kingdom adopted the new policy wholeheartedly, quickly emerging as the front-runner in the
scramble for tropical African territories.[citation needed]
The United Kingdom's adoption of the New Imperialism may be seen as a quest for captive markets or fields for investment of
surplus capital, or as a primarily strategic or pre-emptive attempt to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption
of overseas markets into the increasingly closed imperial trading blocs of rival powers.[citation needed] The failure in the 1900s of
Chamberlain's Tariff Reform campaign for Imperial protection illustrates the
strength of free trade feeling even in the face of loss of international market share. Historians have argued that the United
Kingdom's adoption of the "New imperialism" was an effect of her relative decline in the world, rather than of
strength.[citation needed]
British colonial policy
British colonial policy was always driven to a large extent by the Unite
