British Empire

The British Empire was made up of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or managed by the United Kingdom and its earlier states. It started with the overseas possessions and trading posts set up by England in the late 1500s and early 1600s, along with colonisation attempts by Scotland during the 1600s. At its height in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, the leading global power. By 1913 it ruled over 412 million people, which was 23 per cent of the world's population at that time. By 1920 it covered 35.5 million km² (13.7 million sq mi), or 24 per cent of the Earth's total land area. The British Parliament was the highest law-making authority for all the British possessions in the Empire. As a result, its constitutional, legal, linguistic, and cultural legacy is widespread. It was described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", because the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories.

During the Age of Discovery in the 1400s and 1500s, Portugal and Spain led European exploration of the world and built large overseas empires. Attracted by the great wealth these empires produced, England, France, and the Netherlands began to set up colonies and trade networks in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 1600s and 1700s with the Netherlands and France left Britain as the main colonial power in North America. Britain also became a major power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The American Revolution led to Britain losing some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America by 1783. Britain kept control of British North America (now Canada) and territories in and near the Caribbean in the British West Indies, and its colonial growth turned towards Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.

After France was defeated in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Britain became the main naval and imperial power of the 1800s and expanded its territories. It sought trade deals in China and Japan, and land in Southeast Asia. The Great Game and the Scramble for Africa also took place. The long period of relative peace from 1815 to 1914, when the British Empire became the world's hegemon, was later called Pax Britannica (Latin for "British Peace"). Britain also took control of India by defeating the last major imperial dynasty, the Maratha Empire, by 1818 in the Third Anglo-Maratha War. Beyond its formal control of colonies, Britain's dominance of much of world trade and of the oceans meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America, and readily enforced its interests there. It also came to dominate the Middle East, shaping its modern borders alongside France. Its white settler colonies were granted more self-government, and some were formally reclassified as dominions by the 1920s. By the start of the 1900s, Germany and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Military, economic, and colonial tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied heavily on its empire. The war placed huge strain on its military, financial, and manpower resources. Although the empire reached its largest size right after the First World War, Britain was no longer the world's leading industrial or military power.

In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East Asia and Southeast Asia were occupied by the Empire of Japan. Even though Britain and its allies won in the end, the damage to British prestige and the British economy helped speed up the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, gained independence in 1947 as part of a wider decolonisation movement, in which Britain granted independence to most of the empire's territories. The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain's decline as a global power. The handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolised the end of the British Empire for many people, although fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies, along with most of the dominions, joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states. Fifteen of these, including the United Kingdom, retain the same person as monarch, currently King Charles III.

Origins (1497–1583)

England and Scotland were separate kingdoms with different monarchs when the overseas British Empire began. In 1496, Henry VII of England asked John Cabot to search for a Northwest Passage to Asia, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration. Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, and reached the coast of Newfoundland. He believed he had reached Asia, and no colony was founded. He led another voyage the next year but did not return, and what happened to his ships is unknown. England made no formal claims. No further attempts to found English colonies in the Americas were made until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Earlier, Henry VIII's 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals had declared that England was an empire. The Protestant Reformation made England and Catholic Spain bitter enemies.

In 1562, Elizabeth I encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to carry out slave-raiding attacks off West Africa, aiming to start an Atlantic slave trade. This effort was unsuccessful. Later, during the Anglo-Spanish Wars, Elizabeth I approved further privateering raids on Spanish ports and on ships returning from the New World laden with treasure. Writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee, who was the first to use the term "British Empire", pushed for England to build its own empire. By this time, Spain dominated the Americas, Portugal had trading posts and forts from Africa to China, and France had begun settling the area of the Saint Lawrence River, later known as New France. England was slower than these countries to build overseas colonies, but it made its first modern colonisation in sixteenth-century Ireland, with settlements of English and Welsh Protestants known as "plantations". England had controlled part of Ireland since the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, but its authority had weakened over the centuries. Several men who helped set up the Munster plantations later played a part in the early colonisation of North America, especially a group known as the West Country Men.

English overseas possessions (1583–1707)

Main article: English overseas possessions

Main articles: British colonisation of the Americas, British America, Thirteen Colonies, British West Indies, and Atlantic slave trade

Main article: East India Company

In 1578, Elizabeth I gave Humphrey Gilbert permission to explore and claim lands overseas. That year, Gilbert set sail for the Caribbean to take part in piracy and start a colony in North America, but the trip was stopped before it crossed the Atlantic. In 1583, he tried again. This time he officially claimed the harbour of the island of Newfoundland, but he left no settlers behind. Gilbert died on the way back to England, and his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, took over. Elizabeth gave Raleigh his own permission in 1584. Later that year, he founded the Roanoke Colony on the coast of what is now North Carolina, but the colony failed because it did not have enough supplies. From 1585 to 1603, England fully conquered Ireland and challenged the sea power of Spain in the Anglo-Spanish War, which ended in a draw. In 1603, James VI of Scotland became king of England as James I. In 1604, he signed the Treaty of London, which ended fighting with Spain. With peace in place, England began building its own overseas colonies instead of attacking other nations' colonies. The British Empire took shape in the early 1600s through the English settlement of North America and the smaller Caribbean islands, and through joint-stock companies, most notably the East India Company, which ran colonies and overseas trade. Some historians call the period up to the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after the American War of Independence the "First British Empire." England's early attempts in the Americas had mixed results. A colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years, and colonies on St Lucia and Grenada quickly failed. The first lasting English settlement in the Americas was founded at Jamestown in 1607 by Captain John Smith and run by the Virginia Company. In 1624, the Crown took control, creating the Colony of Virginia. Bermuda was settled after a shipwreck involving the Virginia Company's flagship, while attempts to settle Newfoundland mostly failed. In 1620, Plymouth was founded by Puritan separatists, later known as the Pilgrims. Escaping religious persecution was a major reason many English colonists risked the difficult trans-Atlantic voyage. Maryland was set up by English Roman Catholics in 1634, Rhode Island in 1636 as a colony tolerant of all religions, and Connecticut in 1639 for Congregationalists. In 1664, England took the Dutch colony of New Netherland after capturing New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York. These North American colonies made less money than the Caribbean ones, but they had good farmland and drew many more English settlers, who liked their milder climates.

The British West Indies were at first England's most valuable colonies. Settlements on St. Kitts in 1624, Barbados in 1627 and Nevis in 1628 struggled until the "Sugar Revolution" changed the Caribbean economy in the mid-1600s. Large sugarcane plantations were first started on Barbados in the 1640s, with help from Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews who had fled Portuguese Brazil. At first, sugar was grown mainly by white indentured labour, but rising costs led English traders to use enslaved Africans instead. The wealth from sugar made Barbados the most successful colony in the Americas. Sugar growing spread across the Caribbean, and the Atlantic slave trade grew quickly, especially the triangular trade that moved slaves, sugar and supplies between Africa, the West Indies and Europe. In 1651, Parliament decreed that only English ships could trade in English colonies. This led to conflict with the United Dutch Provinces in a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars, which slowly gave England the stronger position in the Americas. In 1655, England took the island of Jamaica from Spain, and in 1666 it settled the Bahamas. In 1670, Charles II granted the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) a royal charter and a monopoly on the fur trade in Rupert's Land, an area that later became a large part of the Dominion of Canada. The French, who ran their own fur trade in neighbouring New France, often attacked HBC forts and trading posts. Two years later, the Royal African Company was given a monopoly on supplying enslaved people to the British Caribbean colonies. Its share of England's trade grew from 33 per cent in 1673 to 74 per cent in 1683. Once this monopoly ended between 1688 and 1712, independent British traders grew rapidly, and the number of enslaved people transported increased quickly. British ships carried about a third of all people shipped across the Atlantic in the slave trade, roughly 3.5 million Africans, until Parliament abolished the trade in 1807 (see § Abolition of slavery). Forts were built on the coast of West Africa, such as James Island, Accra and Bunce Island, to help ship enslaved people. Ships from Bristol, Liverpool and London carried most of Britain's slave trade. The mortality rate during the Middle Passage was about one in seven. After slavery ended in the British Empire, plantation owners in the Caribbean brought in more than 500,000 workers from India from the mid-1800s to replace enslaved labour.

At the end of the 1500s, England and the Dutch Empire began to challenge the monopoly of the Portuguese Empire on trade with Asia. They set up private joint-stock companies to pay for the voyages: the English, later British, East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, which were chartered in 1600 and 1602. These companies mainly wanted to profit from the spice trade in the East Indies archipelago and in India, an important hub of trade. There they competed with Portugal and with each other. England later overtook the Netherlands as a colonial power, but the Dutch had stronger finances and won the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1600s, so they held a stronger position in Asia for a time. Fighting stopped after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Dutch William of Orange became king of England. A deal left the spice trade to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon became more profitable than spices. England and the Netherlands fought together as allies in the Nine Years' War, which left England a stronger colonial power, since the Dutch had to spend more of their military budget on the costly land war in Europe. When Charles II of Spain died in 1700 and left Spain and its empire to Philip V of Spain, a grandson of the King of France, other European powers feared that France and Spain might join together, which they found unacceptable. In 1701, England, Portugal and the Netherlands sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted thirteen years.

Colonies and territories of Scotland (1629–1707)

Main article: Scottish colonization of the Americas

Scotland tried to start colonies before the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Empire existed. During the 17th century, the Kingdom of Scotland tried to set up trading schemes in Ireland and Canada. Nova Scotia, which is today a province of Canada, was a short-lived scheme on land belonging to the Mi'kmaq people. Many Scots also lived in Ireland, especially in the region of Ulster, where they settled as planters. The first documented Scottish settlement in the Americas was in Nova Scotia in 1629. On 29 September 1621, James VI of Scotland granted a charter for a colony to Sir William Alexander. Between 1622 and 1628, Sir William made four attempts to send colonists to Nova Scotia, and all of them failed for various reasons. A settlement was finally successful in 1629. The colony's charter made Nova Scotia, which covered all the land between Newfoundland and New England (that is, The Maritimes), part of mainland Scotland. This was later used to get around the English navigation acts.

In the 1680s, Scotland tried two more ventures to set up colonies inside English colonies, in Carolina and East New Jersey. The effort in Carolina was largely due to Scottish Presbyterians fleeing religious persecution in Scotland. Scottish merchants, who wanted to build transatlantic trade that was not controlled by the English Navigation Acts, helped them. The Act limited Scottish trade with English colonies. Scottish settlement in Carolina began in 1682, but it was eventually defeated when the Spanish destroyed the Scottish settlement of Stewartstoun, which had been set up in 1684, in 1686. In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland granted a charter to the Company of Scotland, which set up a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama. Attacked by neighbouring Spanish colonists of New Granada and affected by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later. The Darien scheme was a financial disaster for Scotland, as a quarter of Scottish money was lost. It also had major political effects. It helped persuade the government of the Kingdom of Scotland to turn its personal union with England into a political and economic union under the Kingdom of Great Britain, created by the Acts of Union 1707.

Expansion and colonial conflict (1707–1783)

The 18th century saw the newly united Great Britain rise to be the world's dominant colonial power, with France as its main rival. Great Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire fought the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted until 1714 and ended with the Treaty of Utrecht. Philip V of Spain gave up his claim to the French throne, and Spain lost its empire in Europe. Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia from France, and Gibraltar and Menorca from Spain. Gibraltar became a critical naval base and let Britain control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean. Spain also gave Britain the rights to the asiento (permission to sell African slaves in Spanish America). When the War of Jenkins' Ear broke out in 1739, Spanish privateers attacked British merchant ships on the Triangle Trade routes. Peace talks began in 1746, and Spain agreed to stop these attacks. However, the 1750 Treaty of Madrid took away Britain's slave-trading rights in Latin America.

In the East Indies, British and Dutch merchants competed in spices and textiles. By 1720, the British company had overtaken the Dutch in textile sales. In the middle decades of the 1700s, there were several outbreaks of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, where the English East India Company and its French counterpart struggled alongside local rulers to fill the gap left by the decline of the Mughal Empire. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 saw the British defeat the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, leaving the British East India Company in control of Bengal. France kept its five enclaves but lost its military rights in Bengal. The company then gradually expanded its territories, using the Presidency Armies, made up mostly of Indian sepoys led by British officers. These struggles were one part of the global Seven Years' War (1756–1763). The Treaty of Paris of 1763 brought major changes. France's future as a colonial power in North America effectively ended, as Britain gained New France, leaving a large French-speaking population under British control, while Louisiana went to Spain. Spain gave the Floridas to Britain. With its victory over France in India, Britain became the world's most powerful maritime power.

Loss of the Thirteen American Colonies

Main articles: American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Decolonization of the Americas, British North America, History of Canada (1763–1867), and War of 1812

See also: Timeline of the American Revolution

Relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain grew strained during the 1760s and early 1770s. The main cause was resentment of the British Parliament's attempts to govern and tax American colonists without their consent. The colonists summed up this complaint with the slogan "No taxation without representation," which they saw as a breach of the Rights of Englishmen. The American Revolution began as colonists rejected Parliament's authority and moved toward self-government. Britain sent troops to restore direct rule, and war broke out in 1775. In 1776, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, declaring the colonies' independence from the British Empire as the new United States of America. When French and Spanish forces joined the war, the balance shifted in the Americans' favour. After a decisive defeat at Yorktown in 1781, Britain began negotiating peace, and American independence was recognised at the Peace of Paris in 1783. Some historians see the loss of British America, then Britain's most populous overseas possession, as the turning point between the first and second empires. Britain then turned its attention toward Asia, the Pacific, and later Africa. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, argued that colonies were unnecessary and that free trade should replace the older mercantilist policies, which dated back to the protectionism of Spain and Portugal. Trade between the new United States and Britain grew after 1783, which seemed to confirm Smith's view that political control was not needed for economic success.

The war also shaped British policy in Canada. Between 40,000 and 100,000 defeated Loyalists had moved from the new United States after independence. The 14,000 who settled in the Saint John and Saint Croix river valleys, then part of Nova Scotia, felt too far from the government in Halifax, so London made New Brunswick a separate colony in 1784. The Constitutional Act 1791 created Upper Canada, mainly English speaking, and Lower Canada, mainly French-speaking, to ease tensions between French and British communities. It set up systems of government similar to Britain's, aiming to keep imperial authority and avoid the kind of popular control that was thought to have led to the American Revolution. Tensions rose again during the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain tried to cut off American trade with France and boarded American ships to impress men into the Royal Navy. The United States Congress declared the War of 1812 and invaded Canadian territory. Britain invaded the US in response, but the 1814 Treaty of Ghent reaffirmed the pre-war boundaries, ensuring Canada's future would be separate from that of the United States.

Consolidation and global dominance (1783–1815)

Main articles: History of Australia (1788–1850) and History of New Zealand

Main article: French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Main article: Abolitionism in the United Kingdom

Since 1718, transportation and exile to the American colonies had been a punishment for various crimes in Britain. After losing the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government looked for another place and eventually turned to Australia. James Cook reached New Zealand in October 1769 on his first of three government voyages, and he was the first European to sail around and map the country. Later, missionaries, traders and adventurers visited often, but no one tried to settle it. The coast of Australia had been found by the Dutch in 1606, but no one tried to colonise it. In 1770 Cook charted its eastern coast, claimed it for Britain and named it New South Wales. In 1778 Joseph Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, told the government that Botany Bay would suit a penal settlement. In 1787 the first convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Australia was claimed by proclamation, because Indigenous Australians were considered too uncivilised to need treaties. Colonisation brought disease and violence, and the loss of land and culture was devastating to these peoples. Britain sent convicts to New South Wales until 1840, to Tasmania until 1853 and to Western Australia until 1868. The Australian colonies became rich exporters of wool and gold, mainly because of the Victorian gold rush, and Melbourne was for a time the richest city in the world. Britain also expanded in the North Pacific. Spain and Britain became rivals there, leading to the Nootka Crisis in 1789. When France refused to support Spain, Spain had to back down in the Nootka Convention, which left it giving up nearly all claims on the North Pacific coast. A naval expedition led by George Vancouver explored the inlets of the Pacific North West, especially around Vancouver Island. On land, expeditions looked for a river route to the Pacific for the North American fur trade. Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company led the first in 1792, and a year later became the first European to reach the Pacific overland north of the Rio Grande, near present-day Bella Coola. This came twelve years before the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Mackenzie's companion, John Finlay, founded the first permanent European settlement in British Columbia, Fort St. John. Later, David Thompson and Simon Fraser pushed through the Rocky Mountains and the Interior Plateau to the Strait of Georgia on the Pacific Coast, expanding British North America westward.

The East India Company fought a series of Anglo-Mysore Wars in Southern India against the Sultanate of Mysore, first under Hyder Ali and then Tipu Sultan. It lost the First Anglo-Mysore War, had a stalemate in the Second, and won the Third and the Fourth. Tipu Sultan died in the Siege of Seringapatam (1799), after which the kingdom became a protectorate of the company. The company also fought three Anglo-Maratha Wars with the Maratha Confederacy. The First Anglo-Maratha War ended in 1782 with the pre-war situation restored, and the Second and Third Anglo-Maratha wars were British victories. After Peshwa Bajirao II surrendered in 1818, the East India Company gained control of most of the Indian subcontinent. Britain was challenged again by France under Napoleon. This struggle was different from earlier wars, because it was a contest of ideas between the two nations. Napoleon even threatened to invade Britain itself, after his armies had overrun many countries of continental Europe. French ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy, which won a decisive victory over a French Imperial Navy and Spanish Navy fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. France was finally defeated by a coalition of European armies in 1815. In the peace treaties that followed, France gave up the Ionian Islands, Malta, Mauritius, St Lucia, the Seychelles and Tobago. Spain gave up Trinidad, the Netherlands gave up Guiana, Ceylon and the Cape Colony, and Denmark gave up Heligoland. Britain returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion to France, Menorca to Spain, the Danish West Indies to Denmark, and Java and Suriname to the Netherlands. With the Industrial Revolution, goods made by slavery became less important to the British economy, and stopping regular slave rebellions had become costly. With support from the abolitionist movement, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807, which ended the slave trade in the empire. In 1808 the Sierra Leone Colony became an official British colony for freed slaves. Parliamentary reform in 1832 reduced the influence of the West India Committee. The Slavery Abolition Act, passed the following year, ended slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834. It did not apply to territories run by the East India Company or to Ceylon, where slavery ended in 1844. Under the Act, enslaved people were granted full freedom after four to six years of "apprenticeship". After further opposition from abolitionists, the apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838. The British government compensated slave-owners.

Britain's imperial century (1815–1914)

See also: Timeline of British diplomatic history § 1815–1860, Industrial Revolution, and Political and diplomatic history of the Victorian era

Between 1815 and 1914, about 10 million square miles (26 million km²) of land and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire. After defeating Napoleon, Britain had no serious rival at sea, except for Russia in Central Asia. It became the global policeman in what was called the Pax Britannica. Its strong position in world trade also meant it controlled the economies of countries such as China, Argentina and Siam, which were known as its "Informal Empire". New technologies, the steamship and the telegraph, helped Britain control and defend its empire. By 1902, the empire was linked by a network of telegraph cables, the All Red Line.

The East India Company drove British expansion in Asia, often working with the Royal Navy. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British government ended the company's rule and took direct control of India, creating the British Raj. India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown." In the Pacific, James Cook visited New Zealand, and in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between Captain William Hobson and many Māori people chiefs. Britain and Russian Empire also competed for influence in Central Asia during the "Great Game," and in Africa, the Cape Colony was formally acquired by Britain in 1806. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and was quickly seen as very important to the empire.

World wars (1914–1945)

Main article: History of the United Kingdom during the First World War

By the early 1900s, Britain worried that it might not be able to defend the metropole and the whole empire while keeping its policy of "splendid isolation". Germany was growing fast as a military and industrial power and was seen as the most likely enemy in any future war. Britain was stretched thin in the Pacific and felt threatened at home by the Imperial German Navy, so it formed an alliance with Japan in 1902, and with its old enemies France and Russia in 1904 and 1907. In 1914 Britain's fears of war with Germany came true with the outbreak of the First World War. Britain quickly invaded and occupied most of Germany's overseas colonies in Africa, while Australia and New Zealand occupied German New Guinea and German Samoa. In 1916 Britain and France secretly drew up the Sykes–Picot Agreement to plan how the Ottoman Empire would be divided after the war. This was not shared with the Sharif of Mecca, whom the British had encouraged to start an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, which gave the impression that Britain supported an independent Arab state. The Dominions gave vital military, financial and material support. Over 2.5 million men served in the armies of the Dominions, and many thousands of volunteers came from the Crown colonies. Australian and New Zealand troops in the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on how people at home saw their countries, marking a step from colonies to nations in their own right. Both countries still remember this on Anzac Day. Canadians saw the Battle of Vimy Ridge in a similar way. In 1917 British prime minister David Lloyd George recognised the Dominions' contribution to the war effort by inviting each Dominion prime minister to join an Imperial War Cabinet to coordinate imperial policy. After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the empire reached its greatest size, gaining 1.8 million square miles (4.7 million km²) and 13 million new subjects. The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were given to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates. Britain gained Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togoland, and Tanganyika. The Dominions also received mandates: the Union of South Africa gained South West Africa (now Namibia), Australia gained New Guinea, and New Zealand gained Western Samoa. Nauru became a joint mandate of Britain and the two Pacific Dominions.

Main articles: Interwar Britain, Irish revolutionary period, Indian independence movement, Partition of the Ottoman Empire, and Commonwealth of Nations

After the war, Britain chose not to renew its Anglo-Japanese Alliance and instead signed the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, accepting naval equality with the United States. Britain worried about the Great Depression and about militaristic governments in Germany and Japan, because the British economy depended on the empire's security. In Ireland, frustration over delays to Irish home rule led the MPs of Sinn Féin, who had won most Irish seats in the 1918 British general election, to set up an independent parliament in Dublin, where Irish independence was declared. The Irish Republican Army began a guerrilla war against British rule. The Irish War of Independence ended in 1921 in a stalemate, with the Anglo-Irish Treaty creating the Irish Free State, a Dominion with effective internal independence but still linked to the British Crown. Northern Ireland, made up of six of the 32 Irish counties set up under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, chose to stay in the United Kingdom. In India, the Government of India Act 1919 did not satisfy demands for independence. Fears of communist and foreign plots after the Ghadar conspiracy led to the Rowlatt Acts, which kept wartime strict rules. Tension grew in the Punjab region, where harsh measures led to the Amritsar Massacre. The non-cooperation movement was called off in March 1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident, but discontent continued for the next 25 years. Egypt, a British protectorate since the start of the First World War, was granted formal independence in 1922 but stayed a British client state until 1954. British troops stayed until the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which said they would leave but still defend the Suez Canal zone. Iraq, a British mandate since 1920, joined the League of Nations in its own right after gaining independence in 1932. In Palestine, Britain had to balance the needs of Arabs and growing numbers of Jews. When the Arabs revolted in 1936 and the threat from Germany grew, Britain shifted to support the Arabs and limited Jewish immigration, which led to a Jewish insurgency. The right of the Dominions to set their own foreign policy was recognised at the 1923 Imperial Conference, after Canada and South Africa had refused Britain's request for help in the Chanak Crisis, and Canada had refused to be bound by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. After pressure, the 1926 Imperial Conference issued the Balfour Declaration of 1926, calling Britain and the Dominions equal "autonomous Communities within the British Empire" within a "British Commonwealth of Nations". The Statute of Westminster of 1931 gave this legal force, so Dominion parliaments could cancel British laws. Newfoundland returned to colonial status in 1933 because of financial difficulties during the Great Depression. In 1937 the Irish Free State adopted a republican constitution, renaming itself Ireland.

Britain's declaration of war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 covered the Crown colonies and India, but did not automatically commit the Dominions, which all soon declared war too. Ireland chose to stay legally neutral throughout the war. After the Fall of France in June 1940, Britain and the empire stood alone against Germany until the German invasion of Greece in April 1941. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill lobbied US President Franklin D. Roosevelt for military aid, but Roosevelt was not yet ready to ask Congress to commit the country to war. In August 1941 they agreed the Atlantic Charter, which said that "the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live" should be respected. Its meaning was unclear, as it could refer to European countries invaded by Germany and Italy, or to peoples colonised by European nations. Churchill rejected its wider use for subject nations, including the British Indian Empire. The British defeat in the Far East, especially the Fall of Singapore, which had been seen as an unbeatable fortress, badly harmed Britain's standing as an imperial power. Australia and New Zealand moved closer to the United States, leading to the 1951 ANZUS Pact. The war also weakened British control of politics in India, caused long-term economic damage, and changed geopolitics by pushing the Soviet Union and the United States to the centre of the world stage.

Decolonisation and decline (1945–1997)

Further information: Decolonization

After the Second World War, Britain was left almost bankrupt. It avoided collapse in 1946 by taking a large loan from the United States. At the same time, people in the colonies of European countries were calling more strongly for independence, and the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union made the situation more complicated. Britain gave up its colonies mostly through peaceful steps, although there was violence in some places. India, Pakistan, Burma, and Sri Lanka all became independent between 1947 and 1948. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK fell from 700 million to 5 million. The Suez Crisis of 1956 showed that Britain was no longer as powerful as before. In 1960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke of the "wind of change" blowing through Africa, and many African colonies became independent during the 1960s. By 1981, most of the empire had been given up. In 1982, Britain fought the Falklands War to defend the Falkland Islands. Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, which many people saw as the end of the empire.

See also: Anglicisation

Britain still rules 14 territories outside the British Isles. In 1983, the British Nationality Act 1981 renamed the Crown Colonies as "British Dependent Territories," and in 2002 they became the British Overseas Territories. Most former British colonies and protectorates have joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of equal members with about 2.2 billion people. The United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms voluntarily share the same king, Charles III, as their head of state. These countries are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. Each is a separate and equal country.

During the colonial era, schools studied the Greco-Roman heritage and the experience of empire, to think about how to improve the future of Britain's colonies. The hegemony of the United States, which had challenged British claims to be the "New Rome", took over Britain's global leadership in the mid-20th century. Their historical ties and wartime teamwork helped make the power passing after World War II peaceful. British views of the former Empire are more positive than those in other former empires, and debates about it still shape how Britons see themselves, including before the country chose to leave the European Union in 2016. The English language spread through regions around the world, and English has significantly influenced other languages. Britain also sent out sports such as football, cricket, lawn tennis and golf, while polo and snooker were invented or standardised in former colonies. Missionaries spread Protestantism, including Anglicanism, to every continent. Political borders drawn by the British did not always match ethnic groups or religions, which contributed to conflicts in places such as Nigeria and the Indian sub-continent. Migration linked the Commonwealth diaspora, with many people leaving the British Isles, South Asian people emigrating to other parts of the empire, and Overseas Chinese moving to Malaysia, Singapore and the Caribbean. The demographics of the United Kingdom changed after the Second World War because of immigration to Britain. Britain's innovation in Britain led to big changes in manufacturing and transport, and scholars debate how much the Industrial Revolution depended on empire. The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy and English common law shaped many former colonies, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is still the highest court of appeal for twelve of them. Historians still debate the approaches to understanding the British Empire. Some, such as Caroline Elkins, argue that the empire was not mainly about liberal progress, pointing to its heavy use of violence and emergency laws, detention camps and massacres of indigenous peoples. Amartya Sen argues that British policies made the famines in India worse, while Niall Ferguson argues the empire brought a net benefit to its colonies.