British Empire

The British Empire was known as "the empire on which the sun never sets". The British Empire is the most extensive empire in world history and for a time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the global maritime explorations of Portugal and Spain in the late fifteenth century.

 

By 1921, the British Empire ruled a population of between 470 and 570 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world's population. It covered about 14.3 million square miles (more than 37 million square kilometers), about a quarter of Earth's total land area. Though it has now mostly evolved into the Commonwealth of Nations, British influence remains strong throughout the world: in economic practice, legal and governmental systems, sports (such as cricket and football), and the English language itself.The British Empire is the most extensive empire in world history and for a time was the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the global maritime explorations of Portugal and Spain in the late fifteenth century.

Colonization

The empire took shape during the early seventeenth century, with the English settlement of the 13 colonies of North America, which would later become the original United States as well as Canada's Atlantic provinces, and the colonization of the smaller islands of the Caribbean such as Jamaica and Barbados.

The sugar-producing colonies of the Caribbean, where slavery became the basis of the economy, were at first England's most important and lucrative colonies. The American colonies provided tobacco, cotton, and rice in the South and naval materiel (military hardware) and furs in the North were less financially successful, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants.By 1783, Britain had established an empire which comprised colonies in Canada, America and the West Indies. Trading posts in India. Naval bases in the Mediterranean - Gibraltar and Minorca. 

Settlement of Australia and New Zealand  created a major zone of British migration. The entire Australian continent was claimed for Britain when Matthew Flinders proved New Holland and New South Wales to be a single land mass by completing a circumnavigation of it. The colonies later became self-governing colonies and became profitable exporters of wool and gold.

In the century 1815–1914, 10 million square miles of territory and 400 million people were added to the British Empire. By the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 Britain was the 'Mother Country' of a worldwide empire which covered a fifth of the land in the world, and Britannia 'ruled the waves'.

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1948-2000 The British Empire is finished due to wars and pax settlements.

 source: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/British_Empire