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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 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 joint-stock companies, most notably the East India Company, to administer colonies and overseas trade.
In 1016, the kingdom became part of the North Sea Empire of Cnut the Great, a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway. The Norman Conquest in 1066 led to the transfer of the English capital city and chief royal residence from the Anglo-Saxon one at Winchester to Westminster , and the City of London quickly established itself as ...
Gildas, a fifth-century Romano-British monk, was the first major historian of Wales and England.His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (in Latin, "On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain") records the downfall of the Britons at the hands of Saxon invaders, emphasizing God's anger and providential punishment of an entire nation, in an echo of Old Testament themes.
The major multi-volume multi-author coverage of the history of the British Empire is the Oxford History of the British Empire (1998–2001), five-volume set, plus a companion series. [277] Douglas Peers says the series demonstrates that, "As a field of historical inquiry, imperial history is clearly experiencing a renaissance." [278]
Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige and the British economy helped accelerate the decline of the empire. India , Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence in 1947 as part of a larger decolonisation movement, in which Britain granted independence to most territories of ...
Engineers during World War Two test a model of a Halifax bomber in a wind tunnel, an invention that dates back to 1871.. The following is a list and timeline of innovations as well as inventions and discoveries that involved British people or the United Kingdom including the predecessor states before the Treaty of Union in 1707, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland.
The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, a one-volume work edited by P. J. Marshall, was published in 1996 but that also is out of print. Historian Caroline Elkins has described the work as promoting a teleological Whig history of the British Empire that minimises, ignores or explains away the role of violence in expanding and ...