British Empire An Enthralling Guide To The Rise And Fall Of The World S Largest Superpower In History A Concise History Of The Story Of The British Empire An Empire On Which The Sun Never Set

British Empire: An Enthralling Guide to the Rise and fall of the World’s Largest Superpower in History (A Concise History of the Story of the British Empire an Empire on Which the Sun Never Set)

In the Age of Exploration, the British began building an enormous and highly profitable foreign empire. While the British Empire initially lagged behind other European powers such as Spain and Portugal, it still managed to colonize the New World and discover highly-lucrative trade routes British colonies could be found on virtually any continent. For decades, colonialism was painted as the duty of the more advanced European civilizations. In part one of this book, you will learn about: · British involvement in the slave trade · The mystery behind the lost colony of Roanoke · The English civil wars and their impact on the empire · A guide to Britain’s role in the Napoleonic Wars · The Suez Crisis and its aftermath The mysterious thought processes of historical luminaries such as Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill in the chapters that are yet to come. In that case, you should brace yourself for revelations that will not only educate you but also contradict the assumptions you've made.

The British Empire

The British Empire

The sun never set upon the British Empire, its critics liked to say, because God didn’t trust the British in the dark. The joke was a backhanded tribute to the astonishing achievement of the inhabitants of small island kingdom off the European mainland. Beginning in the 17th century with a few colonial settlements and trading posts clinging like barnacles to alien shores, and expanding dramatically thereafter by occupation and conquest, they created the greatest empire that the world had ever seen. In its Victorian heyday, when Britannia ruled the waves, it consisted of 58 countries with a population of 400 million. Covering 14 million square miles, or about a quarter of the earth’s surface, it was seven times larger than the territories of Rome at their greatest extent. By then it was a far-flung but loosely-amalgamated assortment of dominions and dependencies that dwarfed its tiny base. As early as 1810, one writer described it as an “oak planted in a flower-pot”. In a book full of telling anecdotes and colourful characters Piers Brendon tells the story of this extraordinary empire, from its adolescence to its maturity to its demise and, with the benefit of hindsight, assesses its pros and cons.