From a struggling fort in Virginia to a quarter of the world's land: how Britain built the largest empire in history through trade, slavery and conquest, and how it came apart between 1947 and the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.
Stop 01 · 1607–1780s
Tobacco, Sugar and Slavery
England's first lasting colony in the Americas was Jamestown, Virginia, founded in May 1607 on the land of the Powhatan peoples, who fought the newcomers for years. Tobacco made Virginia pay, but the richest colonies were Caribbean islands: Barbados from 1627, and Jamaica, taken from Spain in 1655. From the 1640s, Barbados planters grew sugar using enslaved Africans. British ships went on to carry about 3.5 million Africans across the Atlantic, a third of the whole trade, many from forts such as Bunce Island; on average one in seven died on the crossing. By 1780 around 80 per cent of the British Caribbean's people were of African descent.
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, British Province of South Carolina, in 1769Unknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
England's first lasting colony in the Americas was Jamestown, Virginia, founded in May 1607 on the land of the Powhatan peoples, who fought the newcomers for years. Tobacco made Virginia pay, but the richest colonies were Caribbean islands: Barbados from 1627, and Jamaica, taken from Spain in 1655. From the 1640s, Barbados planters grew sugar using enslaved Africans. British ships went on to carry about 3.5 million Africans across the Atlantic, a third of the whole trade, many from forts such as Bunce Island; on average one in seven died on the crossing. By 1780 around 80 per cent of the British Caribbean's people were of African descent.
The East India Company, chartered in London on 31 December 1600, spent its first century as a trader under Mughal rule. As Mughal power fragmented after 1707, it competed with the French and local rulers. In 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, seized the Company's base at Calcutta. At Plassey, Robert Clive's 3,100 men beat the Nawab's army of about 50,000, mainly because the Nawab's commander, Mir Jafar, had secretly agreed to betray him. In 1765 the Company gained the right to collect Bengal's taxes. In the famine of 1769–1770, which Company rule may have worsened, estimates of the dead range from about one million to ten million.
In the 1760s and 1770s, the Thirteen Colonies resisted taxes imposed by a Parliament in which they had no vote; their slogan was 'No taxation without representation'. War broke out in 1775, and in 1776 the colonies declared independence as the United States. France and Spain joined the Americans, and after a British army was defeated at Yorktown in 1781, Britain sought peace. At the Peace of Paris in 1783 it recognised American independence. Britain kept Canada and its Caribbean islands, but some historians see the loss as the end of a 'first' empire: its attention now turned towards Asia, the Pacific and, later, Africa.
Since 1718 Britain had shipped about a thousand convicts a year to America. With that door shut, it turned to Australia, whose east coast James Cook had claimed in 1770. On 13 May 1787 eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip left Portsmouth with roughly 1,400 to 1,500 people, most of them convicts. They reached Botany Bay in January 1788 and on 26 January settled at Sydney Cove, in the country of the Eora people. Britain claimed the land by proclamation, without treaties. Disease, violence and the taking of land devastated Aboriginal societies; how smallpox reached Sydney's Aboriginal people in 1789 is still disputed.
A campaign begun in 1787 by evangelical Protestants and Quakers, and led in Parliament by William Wilberforce, won the Slave Trade Act of 1807. From 1808 the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron hunted slave ships, freeing about 150,000 Africans by 1860. Slavery itself remained, and enslaved people pressed for freedom themselves: at Christmas 1831 up to 60,000 of Jamaica's 300,000 slaves joined the Baptist War, led by the deacon Samuel Sharpe. Hundreds of rebels were killed or executed, and the rising helped push Parliament to act. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 freed slaves from 1 August 1834, after years of 'apprenticeship'. Owners received £20 million in compensation; the freed received none.
On 10 May 1857, sepoys, the Company's Indian soldiers, mutinied at Meerut, stirred partly by rumours that new rifle cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat. They reached Delhi and declared the 81-year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, emperor. Revolt spread across northern India, with leaders such as Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. Both sides killed civilians: British women and children were massacred at Cawnpore, and British troops took savage reprisals. About 6,000 Britons died; Indian deaths, including famine and disease, are put at about 800,000 or more. In 1858 the Crown replaced the Company, beginning the British Raj. Its name is still debated: mutiny, rebellion, or First War of Independence.
BattlesDelhi: retaken by the British, September 1857 · Cawnpore (Kanpur) · Siege of Lucknow
In the 'Scramble for Africa', regulated at Berlin in 1884–85, Britain took a large share. It occupied Egypt in 1882 and defeated the Mahdist state in Sudan; in the south, Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company seized the lands named Rhodesia, and the Boer republics fell after the war of 1899–1902. Rhodes dreamed of a railway from the Cape to Cairo. After the First World War, German colonies and Ottoman lands such as Palestine and Iraq became British mandates. By 1920 the empire covered 35.5 million square kilometres, about a quarter of the world's land. British rule met protest with repression: in 1919 troops at Amritsar shot into a crowd, killing between 379 and over 1,000 people, by differing counts.
The Second World War left Britain nearly bankrupt. In India, the Congress under Gandhi had campaigned for independence for decades, while Jinnah's Muslim League sought a separate state for Muslim-majority regions. Wartime rule also saw the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated 0.8 to 3.8 million people died; how far British policy was to blame is still debated. The last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought independence forward to 15 August 1947, and British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Between 12 and 20 million people were displaced, and estimates of those killed range from 200,000 to two million. Burma and Ceylon became independent in 1948.
On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist whose Convention People's Party had built a mass movement for self-rule. In February 1960, in Cape Town, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa's parliament that a 'wind of change' was blowing through the continent. Nigeria became independent that October, and by 1968 almost all of Britain's African colonies had followed. Withdrawal was not always peaceful. In Kenya, the Mau Mau rising from 1952 was met with mass detention; between 12,000 and over 20,000 rebels died, and about 1,090 people were executed. Kenya became independent in December 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta.
Britain had seized Hong Kong Island in 1841, during the First Opium War, which began after Chinese officials at Canton confiscated 20,000 chests of British traders' opium. Kowloon was added in 1860 and the New Territories in 1898, on a 99-year lease. As the lease neared its end, Margaret Thatcher negotiated with Beijing, and the 1984 Joint Declaration agreed that all of Hong Kong would become a special administrative region of China. The handover came at midnight on 1 July 1997, ending 156 years of British rule. For many, including Prince Charles, who attended, it marked the end of empire. Most former colonies now belong to the voluntary Commonwealth of Nations.