British Empire, Worldwide system of dependencies—colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of three centuries came under the British government.
British territorial acquisition began in the early 17th century with a group of settlements in North America and West Indian, South Asian, and African trading posts founded by private individuals and trading companies.
In the 18th century the British took Gibraltar, established colonies along the Atlantic seacoast of North America and in the Caribbean Sea, and began to add territory in India. With its victory in the French and Indian War (1763), the empire secured Canada and the eastern Mississippi Valley and gained supremacy in India.
From the late 18th century it began to build power in Malaya and acquired the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and Malta. The British settled Australia in 1788 and subsequently New Zealand. Aden was secured in 1839, and Hong Kong in 1841.
Britain went on to control the Suez Canal (1875–1956). In the 19th-century European partition of Africa, it also acquired Nigeria, Egypt, the territories that would become British East Africa, and part of what would become the Union (later Republic) of South Africa.
After World War I, Britain secured mandates to German East Africa, part of the Cameroons, part of Togo, German South-West Africa, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and part of the German Pacific islands.
Britain gradually evolved a system of self-government for some colonies after the U.S. gained independence, as set forth in Lord Durham’s report of 1839. Dominion status was given to Canada (1867), Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), the Union of South Africa (1910), and the Irish Free State (1921). Britain declared war on Germany in 1914 on behalf of the entire empire; after World War I the dominions signed the peace treaties themselves and joined the League of Nations as independent states.
In 1931 the Statute of Westminster recognized them as independent countries “within the British Empire,” referring to the “British Commonwealth of Nations,” and from 1949, the Commonwealth of Nations. The British Empire, therefore, developed into the Commonwealth in the mid-20th century, as former British dependencies obtained sovereignty but retained ties to the United Kingdom.
