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The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
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 ...
Below are lists of the countries and territories that were formerly ruled or administered by the United Kingdom or part of the British Empire (including military occupations that did not retain the pre-war central government), with their independence days. Some countries did not gain their independence on a single date, therefore the latest day ...
The following table gives gross domestic product (GDP) estimates of the British Empire and its territories in 1870 and 1913, as a percentage of the world economy and the empire's economy, along with comparisons to the United States and Russian Empire. The British imperial territory with the largest economy in 1870 was British India (including ...
Historians refer to the British Empire after 1783 as the "Second British Empire"; this period saw Britain increasingly focus on Asia and Africa instead of the Americas, and increasingly focus on the expansion of trade rather than territorial possessions.
The second half of the 19th century saw a major expansion of Britain's colonial empire in Asia and Africa as well as the Pacific. In the "Scramble for Africa", the boast was having the Union Jack flying from "Cairo to Cape Town." Britain defended its empire with the world's dominant navy, and a small professional army.
The British monarch was the nominal head of the vast British Empire, which covered a quarter of the world's land area at its greatest extent in 1921. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 recognised the evolution of the Dominions of the Empire into separate, self-governing countries within a Commonwealth of Nations.
The United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 (which sought to end British rule in Ireland) failed, and the 1800 Act of Union merged the Kingdom of Ireland into a combined United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. [4] In the mid-19th century, the Great Famine (1845–1852) resulted in the death or emigration of over two million people. At the time ...