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Under the terms of the concluding Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, the empire reached its greatest extent with the addition of 1.8 million sq mi (4.7 million km 2) and 13 million new subjects. [167] The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were distributed to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates.
The Ten Year Rule was a British government guideline, first adopted in August 1919, that the armed forces should draft their estimates "on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years". [1]
The precise extent of either empire at its greatest territorial expansion is a matter of debate among scholars. Several empires in human history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power.
The fourth British Empire, meanwhile, is used to denote Britain's rejuvenated imperial focus on Africa and South-East Asia following the Second World War and the independence in 1947–48 of Britain's South Asian dependencies, when the Empire became a vital crutch in Britain's economic recovery.
The British Empire refers to the possessions, dominions, and dependencies under the control of the Crown.In addition to the areas formally under the sovereignty of the British monarch, various "foreign" territories were controlled as protectorates; territories transferred to British administration under the authority of the League of Nations or the United Nations; and miscellaneous other ...
The fundamental socioeconomic distinctions between the agrarian and isolationist United States and the industrialized British Empire rapidly diminished after 1865. The United States emerged from the Civil War as a major industrial power with a renewed commitment to a stronger federal government as opposed to one ruled by individual states, permitting engagement in imperial expansion and ...
The world's colonial population at the time of the First World War totaled about 560 million people, of whom 70.0% were in British domains, 10.0% in French, 8.6% in Dutch, 3.9% in Japanese, 2.2% in German, 2.1% in American, 1.6% in Portuguese, 1.2% in Belgian, and 0.5% in Italian possessions. The home domains of the colonial powers had a total ...
The overseas First British Empire was devastated by the loss of the thirteen American colonies in a war when Britain had no major allies. The Second British Empire was built fresh in Asia and Africa and reached its zenith in the 1920s. Foreign policy made sure it was never seriously threatened.