British Empire

The British Empire was a constitutional monarchy's system of colonial and dominion governance, extending British rule and influence over territories on every inhabited continent from the late sixteenth century onward and becoming, by the early twentieth century, the largest empire in recorded history by territory and population. Its administration was never uniform: crown colonies under direct rule sat alongside self-governing dominions and territories administered indirectly through retained local rulers, chiefs or princely states, and much of its early expansion was carried out not by the state itself but by chartered trading companies acting under royal licence and exercising quasi-governmental authority, most consequentially the East India Company's rule over the Indian subcontinent before the Crown assumed direct control in 1858. Two loosely bounded phases are conventionally distinguished: an earlier empire centred on the Americas and the Caribbean, curtailed by the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, and a second, larger empire built especially across South Asia, Africa and the Pacific through the nineteenth century, increasingly bound together through institutions such as the Imperial Conferences and, later, the Commonwealth. Decolonization accelerated rapidly after the Second World War, beginning with Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947, and is conventionally, if symbolically, closed with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, though a scatter of British Overseas Territories remains governed from London to this day.