british empire

• British Empire


  A worldwide system of dependencies—colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great Britain and the administration of the British government
• British Empire


  • The policy of granting or recognizing significant degrees of self-government by dependencies
  • Led to the development by the 20th century of the notion of a "British Commonwealth"
  • Comprising largely self-governing dependencies that acknowledged an increasingly symbolic British sovereignty
• The term "British Commonwealth" was embodied in statute


  1931
• Today the Commonwealth includes former elements of the British Empire in a free association of sovereign states
•  The British established control over South Asia through a combination of military conquest and economic domination
• During the nineteenth century, the British Empire expanded greatly in terms of size, population and wealth.
• Coal and iron ores were mined domestically while Great Britain sourced other raw materials like cotton from colonies such as India and the US
•  British slave traders started supplying African slaves to the British colonies to work on plantations. Around six million Africans were taken as slaves to the Americas, at least one third of them in British ships.