The British Empire was a massive maritime power during the period from 1450-1750 and had set up numerous trading posts and slave labor sites across the Atlantic. Hong Kong island became British in 1841, and an “informal empire” operated in China by way of British treaty ports and the great trading city of Shanghai. In fact taking the good years and bad, British capitalists did rather well out of their informal and free empire.
It had it's start during Elizabethan times when Europe began colonisation in response to the example of prosperity exhibited by Spain's exploitation of the Americas. Dominion governments, Indian proconsuls, and colonial administrators, like their … The current consensus is that trade and empire were significant for British economic growth in the Hanoverian period, even if they were not decisively important.
Britain was the acknowledged ruling force in Egypt from 1882 and in the Sudan from 1899. British Empire, a worldwide system of dependencies— colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great Britain and the administration of the British government. The treaty was renewed and strengthened in 1905 to guarantee either nation coming to the other’s aid if attacked. DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259885.003.0003. To a remarkable extent, the economic history of the Empire in the thirties is an account of price-raising devices — commodity control, protection, preferential tariffs, and the manipulating of marketing arrangements. I agree.
The British imperial territory with the largest economy in 1870 was British India (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh ), followed by the United Kingdom. The basis of the British Empire was founded in the age of mercantilism, an economic theory that stressed maximising the trade outside the empire, and trying to weaken rival empires.
Discussion of the economy of the British Empire would need to be much wider. Great Britain has over 100 former colonies, located all over the world. This chapter provides a discussion on the Imperial economy of the Empire from the early up to the late 17th century. This partly reflects the difficulties of the sources, but also widely differing expectations, assumptions, and ‘counter-factual’ models. As I've read about the British Empire, a pretty clear tend has emerged; when the British open China to the opium trade, export food out of Ireland during a famine, squelch Indian weavers beneath the weight of British manufacturing, or otherwise exert economic influence and naval muscle abroad, they usually justify their actions, at least in part, as being in the interests of free trade. Jessica Brain is a freelance writer specialising in history. The fate of the Indian economy under British rule has long been a battleground of historiography, with little agreed between historians either of interpretation or of fact.