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The British Empire
The largest empire in history, covering about a quarter of the worlds land by 1920
In the years after World War I, territories under British rule, protection or mandate covered about 35.5 million square kilometers, roughly a quarter of the world's land, and held close to a quarter of its people. No empire before or since has been larger. It was assembled over three centuries through settlement, trade, war and treaty, and it ranged from self-governing dominions such as Canada and Australia to colonies ruled from London and protectorates governed through local rulers. Its legacy includes the global spread of English, the common law, parliamentary government, cricket and railways, and also borders, partitions and economic patterns that many former colonies still contend with. More than 60 independent states trace their origins to it.
The empire had no single landmass. Its largest blocks were Canada, Australia, British India, which for much of the period included today's Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and a band of African colonies running from Egypt and Sudan to South Africa. It held islands across the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and ports such as Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong that guarded sea lanes. After World War I it took League of Nations mandates in Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq and parts of Africa. At its 1920 peak it spanned every continent but Antarctica, where it also made claims. Its former territory now lies in more than 60 countries, including the United States, Canada, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Ireland, and 14 overseas territories remain under British sovereignty.
English overseas expansion began with Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in 1607, followed by Caribbean sugar colonies worked by enslaved Africans. British ships carried more than 3 million enslaved people across the Atlantic before Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of the empire in 1833. After losing 13 American colonies in 1783, Britain looked to India, where the East India Company expanded by conquest until the Crown took direct rule after the rebellion of 1857. Much of Africa followed after 1880. After two world wars, independence movements, some largely peaceful and others marked by armed conflict, won statehood for India and Pakistan in 1947 and for most of Africa and the Caribbean by the 1970s. The 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China is often taken as the empire's end.