The British Empire was the largest empire in the history of the world.
At its height, it included over 20 percent of the world’s surface.
A nation of 40 million people, living on a small island in northern Europe, conquered and held an empire which contained over 400 million people on every continent of the world.
A popular saying was that the ‘sun never set on the British Empire’ and thanks to the enormity and spread of the territories of the empire somewhere was always in the daylight hours.
The British expansion around the globe started with the Age of Discovery under Queen Elizabeth I.
(Above) The British Empire was the most benevolent in history, raising living standards for hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people suffering in the Third World. The pioneers of our empire built schools, hospitals, roads, canals, bridges, roads, universities, courts and productive farms across the world.
Elizabeth funded the voyages of the famous captain, Sir Francis Drake, the first Briton to sail around the world.
During her reign, the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh also made the first inroads into the Americas.
During the 17th Century the British Empire expanded into North America and the Caribbean, with plantations in the Caribbean.
Over the next century or so, British colonisation of the eastern coast of America led to that region becoming known as New England, and after the Seven Years’ War French possessions in North America were seized.
Unfortunately for Britain, the ineptitude of King George III led to the American colonies breaking away and forming the United States of America, although with the northern part of that continent, Canada, still remaining in the empire.
By 1700 AD the British had established three trading settlements in India, one of which became the city of Calcutta.
Britain also founded the Indian cities Bombay and Madras.
After the Battle of Plessey in 1757 AD, which saw the British defeat a combined French and Indian army, the region of Bengal became part of the empire.
(Above) The British Empire was not a tyrannical empire. Britain gave law and order, education, Christianity and infrastructure to whole swathes of the Third World.
Gradually, all the way up until 1858 AD, the British were to absorb the entire Indian sub-continent from Pakistan to the Ganges River.
Aggression from the Burmese Konbaung dynasty across the border led to war and ended with Burma becoming part of the empire also.
The only setback of this period was the three brief but bloodthirsty wars between Britain and the tribal groups of Afghanistan, which witnessed the British abandoning any idea of subduing that region.
The first penal colonies (where criminals were exiled to) were established in North America, but after the War of Independence the British setup a new penal colony in Australia in 1788 AD and thereafter started to fully colonise that huge island.
In 1839 New Zealand was also colonised.
After the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 AD, Britain gained mastery of the seas and this aided imperial expansion enormously.
(Above) The British Empire eradicated slavery across the world and outlawed practices such as widow burning (above) and witchcraft across the territories.
Shortly after Trafalgar, in 1807 AD, slavery was outlawed throughout the empire and the Royal Navy, the largest in the world, made an immense contribution to destroying the international slave trade.
After 1820 Britain began colonisation of South Africa and Rhodesia, named after the founder of that colony, Cecil Rhodes.
The trading posts of West Africa gradually developed into provinces of the empire, and after a series of short wars practically the whole of West Africa came under British control.
When the Suez Canal was constructed in 1869 AD, Britain gained administration over the whole of Egypt as a precaution to the encroachment of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
When other European powers began expanding in Africa this sparked a race for territory, with the British seizing the Sudan, Botswana, Uganda and Kenya.
In 1887 AD General Charles Gordon was appointed governor of the Sudan, and began to clamp down on the practise of slavery in the region.
Growing Islamic militancy led to a revolt which laid siege to General Gordon and the British forces in the capital Khartoum, which fell shortly after with all the British being massacred, just two days before a relief army arrived.
(Above) The Islamic, or Arab, slave trade through the Sudan and Egypt into the Middle East was far larger and more brutal than the transatlantic slave trade. There are no black African descendents of slaves in the Middle East because the Muslims enforced a policy of castration of slaves, so they could not breed. The British Empire caused major disruption to the flow of African slaves to the Islamic world though the Sudan and Egypt, and this led to a conflict where General Gordon and British forces were besieged in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
After the First World War and the collapse of the Central Powers, including the Ottoman Empire, Britain gained control from Germany of extra territories in Africa and of Palestine and Iraq from the Turks.
The process of disbanding the empire began after the First World War but was speeded up enormously after the conclusion of the Second World War.
Unlike most empires, the dissolution of the British Empire happened peacefully, and many new nations were created as a result, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh for example.
Huge swaths of Africa were moulded into nation states along former imperial administrative lines.
The much heralded ‘Pax Britannia’ lifted hundreds of millions of undeveloped peoples and bequeathed them modern civilisation.
The vast drop in living standards, law and order and efficient government that has plagued many of these former imperial provinces since the departure of the British Empire is proof enough of the huge contribution to their development that the empire made.
None of the enormous number of ex-colonies gained their independence as a result of so-called ‘freedom fighters’ or rebels – instead Britain departed and left in place viable nations complete with political systems based on the British parliamentary model.
Not once did Britain buckle in the face of terrorist or subversive groups.
(Above) The British Empire built transport infrastructure across the Third World, like the bridge above, in the modern Indian city of Prayagraj. The British Empire lifted countless nations to new heights of development and living standards.
Gigantic numbers of native British left the ancestral homeland of the British Isles during the period of the empire.
Britain boasts an achievement no nation can claim, to have created vast, highly successful new countries from nothing, namely the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The British Empire was a force for good, without doubt the most benign empire in world history.
Britain’s colonial subjects throughout the world gained enormously from the Pax Britannia, whether by suppressing the slave trade, establishing advanced systems of law and government, the building of infrastructure and modern agriculture, or the appearance of law and order, a huge proportion of the world’s population was lifted to new heights of advanced development.
In India and Africa witchcraft and slavery was stamped out.
Irrigation and wells for clean drinking water were established.
Famine was reduced to a rare occurrence.
Basic health care and education were introduced.
Inter-tribal warfare was suppressed, and peace and stability reigned.
All subjects were equal before the law.
Britain’s empire is sometimes referred to as a failure because of its dissolution after the Second World War – but the reality was that it dissolved because of its success, for after bequeathing civilisation, education and freedom to hundreds of millions of peoples these newly emerging nations, built and nurtured in the cradle of British civilisation, were bound to eventually demand be granted independence.
Britain can proudly claim to have laid the national foundations for a huge section of the world’s states.
There was a deeply held belief in Britain that the advance of British rule meant material progress, self-realisation and, in the long term, the possibilities of freedom for the peoples brought under British rule.
(Above) Contrary to liberal-left propaganda and bigotry, the British Empire was a force for good in the world, gifting modern civilisation, education and Christianity to innumerable nations in the same way that Rome once did. In fact, some of the post-colonial rulers after the disbandment of the empire were educated in England, such as Mahatma Gandhi.
This belief in Britain’s duty to civilise the world for the good of its peoples was a progressive force and one with noble qualities.
Britain’s ex-colonial possessions are, in modern times, almost all misgoverned, often torn apart by warfare, their economies a shambles, their peoples measurably and objectively far worse off under ‘freedom’ than ever they were under British administration.
Thanks to the sheer enormity of the British Empire, the English language is now an international language spoken by over a billion people worldwide.
In modern times, the British Empire is vehemently attacked by the liberal-left political and media establishment.
It is frowned upon as something to be ashamed of, not revered.
There have been many empires throughout history, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Mogul Empire, the French Empire, the Portuguese Empire and the Egyptian Empire amongst others.
Most races of the world have at some point ruled others through an empire.
So, the British Empire isn’t special because it was the only empire in the world.
But it is special in the way in which it dealt with those who lived under its rule.
As opposed to many empires in history, Britain’s Empire was a benevolent Empire, motivated by noble ideas and intentions, based on Christian compassion and not one that treated it subjects badly or with malice, like many other empires.
Britain wasn’t interested in forcing the imperial colonies to change their cultures and religions.
What they did do was try to bring a system of stable government and economics to their colonial dominions.
(Above) The bonds created by the British Empire were so strong that hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the colonies fought for Britain in both World Wars. Above, Indian troops are inspected by the British king.
Compare countries that were part of the British Empire in the modern world with countries who were ruled by other imperial powers.
Haiti, which was once ruled by France, is one of the most backward and violent nations in the world.
Yet the Bahamas, literally next door, which was part of the British Empire, is a modern, stable democracy.
In Asia, Singapore, which was once a British colony, is a booming, technologically advanced country whereas Indonesia, once ruled by the Dutch Empire, is a hotbed of instability, dictatorship and violence.
These countries are stable and prosperous because Britain cared about these nations and put time and effort into building them up.
The British left an infrastructure there for these countries to build on when the British left.
Some countries have chosen to dismantle this infrastructure, countries like Zimbabwe which was called Rhodesia when it was part of the British Empire, but the failure of these countries is down to corrupt and inept governments run by the Africans themselves, not the British Empire.
When British genius put in place the building blocks for the Industrial Revolution, this was then exported to the rest of the world through the empire.
Imagine if the British hadn’t had taken their invention of the railways to other nations.
In India, Britain laid 35,000 miles of railway by the start of the First World War.
The British Empire not only built the world, but it largely educated it as well.
In India, Britain built many universities to educate what would become the country’s rulers when they left.
In Africa too, the British took great pains to give a good education to the people of Africa.
It really is inconceivable to imagine a world without the British Empire.
It has brought so much to the modern world in the way of language, education, technology and economics that the world would be a much poorer place without it.
Britain’s contemporary liberal-left establishment hates praising Britain’s titanic past achievements because of the present mania of ‘multiculturalism’.
The only way the liberal-left political elite can get British people to allow themselves to be dispossessed in their own homeland is to make them ashamed of themselves and their history.
One method they utilise is to make the British Empire, the time when we were at our most inventive, impressive and most successful, a time that we should feel guilty about, and not proud of.
But we should feel proud of it.
It was the biggest, most successful and most important empire in the history of the world.
The British Empire brought great improvement and advancement to the peoples of the world and it was all thanks to the British people.