All the major European countries - France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and England, to name a few - had empires back in the day. Most of them seem to have started out back in maybe the 16th-17th century, though Germany had the Holy Roman Empire, started by Karl der Grosse (AKA Charlemagne) from the 800’s onwards, and medieval England had enough continental territories that it’s been called the Angevin Empire. The British Empire, though, was one of the 16th century ones.
Those basically all started because of some important events in Spain; the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus’ expedition to the Americas, and because they had just finished throwing the Moors out of the peninsula at the time, they had a lot of soldiers. So the Spanish conquered the native American empires in Central and South America, the Aztecs, the Incans, and got a lot of land while doing it. Land and gold and gems - the Spanish galleons which annually voyaged from Mexico to Spain are the stuff of legend. So everybody else wanted in, and France and England built these massive empires in North America. The Netherlands tried as well, but they found they were much more suited for trade and the like - their colonies pretty much got conquered by the British completely. The Holy Roman Empire was never really united enough to have such far-flung colonies; and the Portuguese wound up getting Brazil. That about sums up the empires in the New World, as they called the Americas, and how the British Empire got started. Here, have a map:
But let’s get a bit more specific and focus just on the British Empire. This is the really important one; the Spanish Empire relied on the galleons and when the gold dried up, it promptly collapsed, and the French Empire… Well, that actually ties into the British Empire, so we’ll get to that. First thing’s first, though: India and the East India Trading Company.
You see, just as the Spanish galleons became legendary for the wealth they carried, Asia was considered to be a land filled to the brim with gold, jewels, silk, spices - all this valuable stuff that would make anybody rich with a single voyage. Now, the traditional trading route was this overland route called the Silk Road. And it had to go a long way to get to these “fledgling” empires, through a lot of different countries, which made everything expensive, especially the more fragile stuff like Chinese porcelain and spices. But if somebody could get around Africa, they could have a way to bypass that - the Asian traders didn’t really care who they sold to. Well, the Japanese did, but seeing as how they didn’t want any contact with anybody at the time, we’ll just give them what they wanted and ignore them.
It was the Portuguese, I believe, who first rounded Africa and reached India, but the British, with only a few small wars, managed to kick everybody else out and by the time of the American Revolution (1770’s), they had a near-complete economic control over India. The East India Trading Company was given pretty much complete freedom, which resulted about how you would expect, when a corporation is put in charge of a government: the Indians rebelled quite violently midway through the 1800’s and the British government shut down the East India Trading Company. Here’s where we skip back a century or so and talk about the French empire again.
The French Empire relied on one thing, in the same way that the Spanish Empire did. In Spain’s case, it was the money they got from America. In France’s case, it was the strong, alluring personality of their leaders. In the case of le Roi-Soleil up there, it went perfectly. Louis XIV was a magnificent leader, loved throughout France and respected worldwide. His grandson, Louis XVI, however, was a weak and ineffectual ruler, who had the bad luck to be the one to deal with an economic downturn. He wound up getting deposed in a violent revolution, and was succeeded by a nominally republican government, called the Committee of Public Safety. They went around chopping everybody’s heads off in the name of liberty, and soon joined the dead king on the chopping block. They got followed by Napoleon Bonaparte, whom you might have heard about before.
Napoleon was a military genius. He’s commonly called a second Julius Caesar, so you can tell from that how good he was. He not only maintained the old French Empire, but he managed to take down the Spanish and Holy Roman Empires. He wound up making two mistakes, though. First, he invaded Russia in winter, which as always wound up with the invaders devastated by the weather; second, he invaded Spain at the same time. He overreached himself. The British sent Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, to Spain, and he did a brilliant job fighting the French there. Seriously, his conduct there alone would earned him a place in the history books. At the same time, the British ramped up the Royal Navy, and by the time the war ended, there was nothing that could compete with Britain at sea. They were the monarchs of the sea, as they’ve been saying ever since then.
Long story short, the British defeated Napoleon, and were pretty much the most powerful empire in the world - there were others, and the United States was building its strength around this time, but nothing could really compete with an empire so vast that the sun would be rising on one part of the empire while it set in another. This is where we get into the cruelty thing, as exemplified by India, Ireland, and China.
In India, after the EITC was kicked out, the British crown took control - direct control, no more illusions about who was in charge. Surprisingly, they took a fairly light hand in India; relations between the British and Indians afterwards were about as good as they could be between imperialists and natives. There was a bit of bad blood about the massacres and rebellions that ended the Trading Company, but all in all it was pretty polite. India being Britain’s biggest and most important possession, though, they absolutely refused to allow the Indians to rule themselves. It took Gandhi starting the whole non-violent protest philosophy in the 1940’s to get India its freedom.
Ireland is a sadder story. It was actually a holdover from the Angevin Empire, conquered in the 12th century by Henry II Plantagenet. The English and Irish had never got along well; but the real problem began in the 1800’s. Ireland’s main food source at this time was the potato, and a disease called “late blight” wound up infecting the crops in 1845. Without any food, the obvious result occurred: famine, throughout the Green Isle. Now, the English landowners who controlled Ireland could have supplied another food source. They could have taken measures to stop the plague. But it would get them more money if they rose sheep instead of planting farms, and they couldn’t be raising sheep with all those people about.
When the Irish complained, they were attacked by the British Army; when the Irish stopped paying rent to buy food, they were kicked out - out of Ireland entirely, and forced to go either to America or Australia, which had a history of the British Empire deporting criminals there. Ireland didn’t recover for a while; and when the Irish demanded their freedom in the 1960’s, just half a century ago, they had to fight right up until 1998 to get it. And there’s still violence in Northern Ireland, which remains part of the UK because the Northern Irish are mostly descendants of English settlers. You know how it is, you get rid of the old lot and bring your own in. Conquerors always go in for that sort of thing.
Finally, we come to China. China had had various European interests fighting over who got to sell there; it’s another case of, nobody was saying the Chinese weren’t in control, but the Chinese didn’t really get a say in anything. The British, of course, were the ones who came out on top; but they hit a problem in 1832, when the Chinese government confiscated a large cargo of opium, which was the 1800’s drug of choice. The British objected to not being allowed to sell their cargoes in China, and started a war over it, the Opium War. The British, of course, won, and for the next century China was British property in all but name. There were a number of rebellions, the Arrow War, the Boxer Rebellion, but it wasn’t until Mao Tse-Tung and the communists took power that China was united and free. Ironic, isn’t it?
The British Empire had a lot of other colonies, of course, and there’s a lot of ill will towards them because of their actions, most of which were in the service of economic gain. It’s only over the past century that the empire has slowly been divided up, the colonies given their independence; the sun finally set on the British Empire back in 1998 when the British gave Hong Kong back to China. I hope you found this informative!
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