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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.
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.
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 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 ...
Ornamentalism presents a new view of the British Empire through an economic, social, and political lens. It argues that the British were motivated not only by race, but also by class to expand the empire. Cannadine traces the origins of this view to the local governments of sixteenth-century Tory England where those with high social prestige ...
The main British contribution was financial—loans and grants helped Russia, Italy and smaller allies afford the war. [114] The stalemate required an endless supply of men and munitions. By 1916, volunteering fell off, the government imposed conscription in Britain (but not in Ireland) to keep up the strength of the Army.
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 ...
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."