The British Empire

WASPs are probably the most beautiful people in the world.

Why did they let go of America so easily?

R2. Mad king George went Mad

R2, They didn't. The Revolutionary War was followed later by the War of 1812, when the British burned down Washington, which both countries prefer to forget.

They left Hong Kong off that map.

The French Empire was more elegant, however.

What does the map depict OP...does it include Great Britain territories...is it current?

...and Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma & The Caribbean.

Malaysia was actually three separate regions, Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah. A lot of the British Empire was just client-state protection in exchange for free transit/trade. There still are a handful of remnant colonies: Bermuda, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Pitcairn Island, Diego Garcia, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, and Anguilla, the Falklands, St. Helena, Channel Islands and some others. Most are territories too small to survive as independent states or places that chose to remain under the protection of Great Britain.

I think Rome was more impressive in what it accomplished. Like r9 said, the British Empire was a loose conglomeration of client states for most of its existence. Rome might have been the same, but the Romans built roads and a lot more.

From 1860 onwards, the British empire spread a specific set of legal codes and common law that made male homosexual relations illegal.

In contrast with the British experience, the other major colonial powers did not leave such an institutional legacy on criminalisation of homosexual conduct. This is why former British colonies are far more likely to still have these laws in place than the former colonies of other European states or other states in general. Of the 72 countries in which homosexual acts are illegal in 2018, at least 38 of them were once subject to some sort of British colonial rule.

I've always though Alicia Keys goes into the red side of the Dyke meter.

Rome beats British empire easily. Rome had basically what it considered most of the world. No serious competition for supremacy. Total control of everything it owned. Britain had a fraction of the world, many major competitors, esp France and Germany, and much looser control over its colonies.

That map is not correct. Because if everything that had been part of the British empire is supposed to be shaded red, then at least the eastern United States should shaded red. We were part of the British Empire, as well. Our Law and Constitution grew out of theirs. The Revolution was because the colonists felt that their rights as Englishmen was not being respected. It is why we speak the English language.

R3, the War of 1812, is forgotten in the UK, because in was a sideshow compared to the Napoleonic Wars. And in fact, it was the nascent Canadian nation that 'won', if anything.

R2, anti-war sentiment in Britain. Britain was also bereft of allies, and was under attack by France, the Netherlands, Spain simultaneously.

Empires are awful, terrible entities. They subjugate, terrorise, wipe entire people's from the face of the earth; all for wealth and power. Unfortunately, this eventually hollows out the soul of these empires and their people, until they become decadent and ineffectual, and get swept away in the tide of history, for the good of humanity.

Britain was the luckiest to have had the US supplant them as the world power, because the country was treated relatively well after it was clear the US had surpassed them in influence.

R14, I think it's a 1922 map of the empire, so America wouldn't be included.

R14 is right, here.

[quote]The Revolutionary War was followed later by the War of 1812, when the British burned down Washington, which both countries prefer to forget.

Is there any way we can get them to burn down the White House again?

The Mongol empire was pretty vast and impressive.

R15 that is because they were surpassed by one of their children. Usually, tend to followed by another that is different, like Spain giving way to the British. Basically, you can say that America's world dominance is just a continuation of British dominance, it is the same language, same type of law, similar governmental forms, etc...

Agree with the Mongols. They accomplished a lot, relatively quickly. I'd put them up there with the Romans. The British win if we're talking about the modern period only. They have been extremely influential, for better and for worse, in the lives of the most people since 1800.

Spain had amassed a great empire for two centuries, but got bogged down in inter-European conflicts over the Low Countries and Italy.

Portugal and the Netherlands amassed empires that would have been larger had the British not moved them aside.

France would have had a larger empire in North America had they been more enthusiastic about settling colonists instead of just trading with the Indians...the except of course was Quebec.

The contiguous empires of the Russians and Ottomans were also quite impressive at their height. What Britain had over their competitors was the superior Navy, seamanship in general, and industrialization that made their goods more desired around the world.

[quote] Basically, you can say that America's world dominance is just a continuation of British dominance, it is the same language, same type of law, similar governmental forms, etc...

That's how I see it.

The fact that the US is a continuation of it is also why the transfer of power was relatively seamless.

Yes,. The transfer was basically during WW II.

What about MY empire?

Europe's greatest empire was Byzantium. Its greatest projection of power the Russian Empire, which is far from through.

The Spanish empire was pretty large.

The Brits made anti-gay laws everywhere they went..

[quote] Europe's greatest empire was Byzantium

Only for the length of time it lasted, not for the extent of it's realm. Byzantium never ruled over the Russians. They made some incursions north of the Black Sea but never ruled the whole of Russia. The Mongols saw to that.

The British Empire was the largest the world has seen. It covered 13.01 million square miles of land - more than 22% of the earth's landmass. The empire had 458 million people in 1938 — more than 20% of the world's population.

Some Empires dribble away, and some topple suddenly and quickly. Look what happened to the Tsars, all it took was about ten years, and then the USSR - the latter only lasted 70 years. The British Raj, formally, only lasted 70 years.

For Britain, the handwriting was on the wall by the end of WWII. Modernity is more favourable to some countries than others. Some nations adapt better to change, some less well.

To some extent, I think the jury is still out on Britain's handling of its shift.

And sometimes loss of empire is beneficial. It offers chances for renewal and reorganisation, and the chance to break out of a stale and burdensome identity.

I think Britain is still in its transition phase. Remains to be seen what it will be in, say, 100 years, when the Empire is a dim historical footnote rather than a lingering potent memory.

R29 - Sure, every other place in the world was a haven for gays before the British got there . . .

I think I would rather be gay in any of the former Spanish colonial countries than the British ones...

Almost every global hotspot of instability and civil unrest is pretty directly attributable to the shitty way the Brits got out of their colonial obligations. The Arab-Israeli conflict? Thanks, Britain. The bloody civil wars in Central Africa? Thanks Britain. The standoff in Kashmir between India and Pakistan? Thanks Britain. They have a lot to live down.

R34 - You could say the same about most empires. They're rarely entirely beneficent. In fact, they're usually only accidentally beneficent.

Britain was a fogged in bog before Rome got here.

But in AD400 or something, as the Roman empire began falling apart, they left. Britain, whose very name comes from the Romans, fell into chaos. Native tribes and other foreign invaders battled each other for power. Towns built by the Romans crumbled and people went back to the countryside.

Rome left its mark all everywhere. They gave Britain new towns, plants, animals, and brought in reading and counting.

It's rarely as black and white as all that.

R35 - I forgot to mention the roads the Romans built - seeing as how ancient Britain had none? Road with ditches on the side so that rainwater rolled off instead of turning the roads to mud?

The Romans brought literacy - in Latin. Our coins are based on those brought in by the Romans. Any place name with "chester" "caster" or "cester" in it comes from the Roman word "castrum", which means "fort".

The Parliamentary system of government Britain brought with it survived Britain's exit and is still in use today in most of those countries.

Britain without the Roman empire would probably never have advanced much farther than it did, even given the abandonment of much that Rome built here by the next era, the Anglo-Saxon one, which was more agricultural in focus.

Nothing we are today, starting with our name, would have existed without the Roman invasion and empire, which was autocratic, slave-owning, and hardly tender.

Except the Roman influence on Britain completely fell apart with astonishing rapidity, so it's really hard to say anything definitive about what the UK would have done if the Romans hadn't ran the place. They never did conquer Germany and they did pretty well. The parliamentary system is native to the UK. Place names are an interesting oddity, but would places not have names if the Romans hadn't invaded?

But even if we buy all of your claims about how beneficent the Roman occupation of Britain was, is that a reason to believe British occupation of (and catastrophic abandonment of) its former colonies was a good thing? When they left India, they fucked things up so badly that a hideously bloody war engulfed the whole subcontinent.

[R29] - Sure, every other place in the world was a haven for gays before the British got there . . .

R32, you have to realize that's the new politically correct way to make excuses for third world anti-gay laws.... blame it all on "colonialism".

Rome had the greatest empire. Our languages, our assumptions, our organization and our cultures are all carrying Rome.

Much more than the British Empire, which just dropped its latter-day Roman precepts on places the Romans didn't reach earlier.

The business here about the Roman effect on Great Britain and its early CE tribalism is not right. The Danes/Vikings were less touched by the Romans and left some cultural and much language impact in England and Scotland and even Ireland. But England and Ireland, thanks to religion (and remember that Christianity was a carrier of Roman culture) still developed Roman ways. Even the Normans further instilled its late take on Roman precepts further in England after the Conquest.

The myth of English culture and civilization as anything but a mix of components overlaid over a Roman base with some earlier fragments helping to keep the foundation firm is a hard one to give up. Remember, too, the importance of the Aenean mythos to Rome and how Britain embellished it with its Brutus postcedents.

R39 - "The myth of English culture and civilization as anything but a mix of components overlaid over a Roman base with some earlier fragments helping to keep the foundation firm is a hard one to give up."

I'm surprised to see that has to be stated, because frankly it's always what I was taught. I think the mythology really swirls around the last 500 years or so of British history, which is what we more commonly see as "English culture and civilisation".

Someone said that the Wars of the Roses was really Britain's longest-running and most successful soap opera - I think either when The Hollow Crown or The White Queen came out, can't remember which.

When Britons "remember" ourselves, it's really from the Norman Conquest on. The discovery of Richard III's remains was the most exciting thing to occur in British historical circles in God knows how long.

It's true that up north there are areas, like Orkney, that have stronger feelings of Scandinavian identity than British identity. But generally, what people mean when they say English culture and civilisation are much more recent developments.