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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.
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Thus, British imperialism began in India with the conquest of Bengal, a game in which a main pawn was the great city of Calcutta. Calcutta also had an indirect but important influence on the battles of the Carnatic Wars. When Madras fell to Dupleix, the British were still able to direct the war from another of their strongholds, Calcutta.
The British built up a very large worldwide British Empire, which peaked in size in 1922. The cumulative costs of fighting two world wars, however, placed a heavy burden upon the UK economy, and after 1945 the British Empire gradually began to disintegrate, with many territories demanding independence.
A princely state (also called native state or Indian state) was a nominally sovereign [1] entity of the British Indian Empire that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by an Indian ruler under a form of indirect rule, [2] subject to a subsidiary alliance and the suzerainty or paramountcy of the British crown.
Her reign meant the revival of the British Empire, as the United Kingdom rapidly grew powerful territorially and economically. Under her rule, Britain saw a massive upheaval of colonial power, as over a quarter of the world fell into British rule; France's 1830 revolution reinstated liberal values – and later French imperialism – back into ...
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]
In days to come they were to contribute to American distrust of Western Europe and of the British Empire. Hobson helped make the British averse to the exercise of colonial rule; he provided indigenous nationalists in Asia and Africa with the ammunition to resist rule from Europe. [12]