Britain also developed a series of colonies in West Africa: the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and Nigeria, by far the largest.

The growth of the British Empire was due in large part to the ongoing competition for resources and mar­kets which existed over a period of centuries between England and other European countries — Spain, France, and Holland. During the reign of Elizabeth I, England set up trading companies in Turkey, Russia, and the East Indies, […]

The fifties celebrated the triumph of British pros­perity in the Great Exhibition. With all this went pow­erful activity — intellectual, literary and religious, but not military. Yet England was about to become in­volved in European war for the first time in almost forty years. Tzar Nicholas I of Russia wished to profit from what he […]

With Napoleon out of the way William Pitt was able to form the Second Coalition with Russia and Austria. The Russian army drove the French out of North Italy, and the king of Naples effected a counter­revolution in the South with the support of Horatio Nelson’s fleet. In the autumn of 1798 Napoleon left his […]

  In the 1790′s, the wars of the French Revolution merged into the Napoleonic Wars, as Napoleon Bonaparte took over the French revolutionary gov­ernment. At first the war did not go well for Britain. The First Coalition with Prussia, Austria, and Rus­sia against the French col­lapsed in 1796, and in 1797 Britain was beset by […]

In the wake of the American war, many old insti­tutions were reexamined. The Economical Reform Act of 1782 reduced the patronage powers of the king and his ministers. The Irish Parliament, controlled by Anglo-Irish Protestants, won a greater degree of inde­pendence.

The wars of the 18th century were almost all fol­lowed by the acquisition of new colonies. The colonies already established were growing rapidly both in wealth and population. The American colonies had about 200,000 inhabitants, and between one and two million fifty years later.

French and British possessions lay alongside each other in India, North America and the West Indies. That made Britain concentrate on a profitable war upon the French colonial possessions.

Walpole thought it important to avoid foreign wars, and during his administration Great Britain was kept out of war, and even the relations with France re­mained cordial. That made some people in the Parlia­ment accuse him of pro-French foreign policy. In the late 1730′s, however, a war party emerged in Parlia­ment. Its members wanted to […]

The connection with Holland brought England into wars with France. These wars were fought under con­ditions created by two factors, the rising power of France and the rapid decomposition of the Spanish Empire.