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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 ...
Empire size in this list is defined as the dry land area it controlled at the time, which may differ considerably from the area it claimed. For example: in the year 1800, European powers collectively claimed approximately 20% of the Earth's land surface that they did not effectively control. [ 8 ]
The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1988) excerpt and text search; Cooke, Jacob E. Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (3 vol 1993) Foster, Stephen, ed. British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion) (2014) excerpt and text search; 11 essays by scholars
The British Empire in 1921. The loss of a large portion of British America defined the transition between the "first" and "second" empires, in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific, and later Africa. [107]
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.
By the 1930s, an Empire so vast was a challenge for historians to grasp in its entirety. The American Lawrence H. Gipson (1880–1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for his monumental coverage in 15 volumes of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published 1936–70. [46]
Britain found a market for their goods in the British colonies of North America, increasing her exports to that region by 360% between 1740 and 1770. British merchants offered credit to their customers; [85] this allowed Americans to buy a large amount of British goods.
"The Imperialism of Free Trade" is an academic article by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson first published in The Economic History Review in 1953. It argued that the New Imperialism could be best characterised as a continuation of a longer-term policy begun in the 1850s in which informal empire, based on the principles of free trade, was favoured over formal imperial control unless ...