Oh boy, here we go. British history is famously kind of impossible. The individual sagas of the isles up to 1600 were already plenty complex on their own, but after England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland became a geopolitical megazord, those stories interlock, and then things get really tricky. But that's just the British part, because we also have the little subject of their empire, as the following four centuries see a globetrotting whirlwind of exploration and colonization that culminates in the single most cartoonishly humongous empire in human history. So in a noble but fundamentally doomed attempt to recount the interwoven stories of Britain and her empire, let's do some history. When last we left the isle, Scotland's king James inherited the English crown in 1603 and luckily avoided being exploderized by the diabolical John Johnson and his fellow gunpowder junkies. Their plan was certainly extreme and their idiocy was correspondingly immense, but their religiously motivated discontent was broadly reflective of the public's mood. The protestant reformation took various shapes across Europe, and this very recently - albeit loosely - unified Britain was running the full spectrum. Ireland was still majorly catholic, Scotland was presbyterian protestant, and England was a right mix. The anglican church was firmly protestant but maintained catholic style ceremonies, and administration. This sat poorly with England's catholic and non-conformist protestant minorities as well as almost all Scots and Irish. A century earlier this wouldn't have been a problem, but now that Ireland, Scotland and England were ruled by the same king, they needed to play nice, and none of them wanted to. Add to this tension that the king and parliament were now openly antagonistic, as in 1629 king Charles dismissed parliament entirely for 11 years, and when he begrudgingly brought them back to raise taxes to finance a war against Scottish protestants, parliament allied with the Scots against the king, defeated him in war in 1646, and executed him on charges of treason in 1649. Parliament then abolished the monarchy and for the next decade they governed the isles as a republic. Catholic Ireland disliked the fiercely protestant English government and the Scots were understandably upset to hear that the English parliament had murdered their Scottish king, so another round of war ensued. Scotland was straightforwardly beaten into submission, but Ireland was devastated, with between 10 and 25 percent of the population killed and all but Connacht fully confiscated by England. And this was not the first such conquest, as king James sent British colonists to Northern Ireland to establish the Ulster plantations in 1609. By the late 1600s Ireland was blatantly treated as a colony: not protestant, not Britain, very exploitable. And we see that same logic applied to the Virginia colony in 1607 and other new world endeavors thereafter. Back in Britain, lord protector Cromwell died in 1658, and in his absence the republic started floundering. So here's a swerve for you: they asked the king to come back. In 1660 the Stuarts returned, but they wouldn't stay for long because king James II was - uh oh - super catholic, so in 1688 parliament swerved yet again by extending an invitation to the king's anglican daughter Mary and her very protestant husband prince William of orange to throw a coup. A coup is better than an outright civil war, but Scotland and Ireland did rebel in discontent, and England brought the hammer down hard. Meanwhile, in deposing and replacing a monarch, parliament had all new leverage over the state and essentially invented the concept of constitutional monarchy. The hefty political implications of that will unfold over the next few centuries, but an immediate consequence was Dutch boy William's hometown rivalry with France becoming England's business. And this geopolitical deja vu will define the long 18th century, as France and Britain compete in a second hundred years war, both in Europe and all across their brand new empires. Inspired by the maritime mastery of Spain and Portugal, Britain sailed across the Atlantic to snag some colonies of their own, founding Virginia in 1607 and continuing with a flurry of expeditions from the Caribbean all the way up the Atlantic coast and around Hudson's Bay. In 1664 they captured the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, renamed it New York, and by the end of the century Britain was running a solid operation. London and west British ports were bustling with imported furs, tobacco, cotton and sugar. Seeing the opportunity to literally grow money, Britain took a page out of Portugal's colonial playbook and began buying up vast amounts of Africans to work as slaves over in the new world. And this was the infamous triangle trade. British guns and textiles pay for slaves, who then staff increasingly massive plantations, and those crops sell in Europe for boatloads of money. Rinse, repeat, buy more slaves. Africans were treated as little more than the raw materials of empire: overworked, given nothing and brutally abused. A fifth would die crossing the Atlantic and the average life expectancy upon arrival was just seven years. This was almost abhorrent enough to make people think twice before they remembered how obscenely rich it was making them. Slaves made money, money made armies, armies made empire. Rinse, repeat, buy more slaves. In Britain, this cycle paid for improvements in government bureaucracy and overhauled all of finance with innovations like the central bank, and during the 1700s these early successes just kept on compounding. 1702: France tries out for the Spanish crown and Britain makes them pay for it with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, plus they take Gibraltar from Spain, so now Britain decides who gets in and out of the Mediterranean. 1740: Britain dunks on the French navy because they can. 1754: British and French colonists fight over who gets North-America and two years later all of Europe is throwing hands at each other. Britain's massive pocketbooks let them throw infinity money at the problem, so they take French Quebec and the Mississippi river valley, push France out of India, and with this field to themselves begins steamrolling all of India. The seven years war doubled the size of the British empire and knocked out every outside threat. So now they just needed to keep it together, and naturally they didn't. See, when the British imposed new taxes on stamps and tea to pay for the ludicrously expensive war they just fought, American colonists were furious to be treated like - gasp - a colony. So they started asking the philosophical questions at the heart of self-determination, such as “Hey king George, what's the opposite of tea? Yeet!” Worse yet, France was egging them on. And then they got ideas. Of course the French revolution is a philosophical and political doozy all on its own, but what matters for us is that France threw down the gauntlet with basically everyone and conquered nearly all of mainland Europe. Britain withstood a continental trade embargo and even blocked an attempted invasion, but their greatest weapon was Napoleon's own hubris, as his empire evaporated in 1815 and the second hundred years war was firmly in the books. Point Britain. While the empire was gearing up to become the master of the world, Britain still needed to be the master of itself, and that was a tricky prospect. After the revolution of 1688, catholic and pro-Stuart uprisings in Ireland and later in Scotland threatened to untie the delicate knot that kept the kingdoms together. So England solved the issue by two means: legal mechanisms and violence. In 1707 England formally unified with Scotland to create the kingdom of Great Britain and again in 1800 to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. What was once a complex web of personal unions and technically independent states, were now just the same kingdom. Nice and easy. This was enforced forcefully, as a slew of penal laws in Ireland systematically deprived catholics of property, religious freedom and political rights. These laws were repealed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but as we see with the unchecked devastation of the potato famine in the middle of the century, the government still didn't really care all that much. As is the case from earlier, Scotland got off quite a bit easier. While the agriculture of the highlands was entirely overhauled with mass evictions, the complete disassembling of the clan system and a little titch of cultural erasure, the cities in the south had a grand old time, as Edinburgh was the brains of the empire and Glasgow's ships were the heart of Britain's maritime power. And speaking of power, the turn of the century brought the industrial revolution, which gave Britain the tools and the technologies to single-handedly dunk on the entire rest of the planet. The advent of mechanized industry and steam power changed the lives of everyday Britons by bringing them affordable consumer goods while cramming them into cities - and, in the case of the poor, factories -, but that in turn made Britain the manufacturer to the world and, increasingly, its owner. With cool new gizmos like steam ships Britain could hold a network of colonies no matter how far they were. To reach the vast riches of India, British sailors could pass along Sierra Leone, Saint Helena, the Cape Colony, Mauritius and the Maldives. But by the end of the century, after the Suez canal opened, you could pass Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Aden and Somaliland and then keep going past India to Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand without once making port on a coast that didn't belong to Queen Victoria. In 1921 you could walk from South Africa to Mesopotamia and never leave British territory. The raw scope and diversity of locales at play here is frankly absurd, as it's dizzying to distinguish what's behind this blanket of red draped over a quarter of the world. And while that diversity found its way into Britain itself through communities and art and food from all over, it raises some rather thorny questions about belonging and ownership. There was a tangible dissonance between the idea of all these disparate cultures coming together and the reality of Britain sitting at the top. Still, British and other European empires knew that outright colonization was not necessary to squeeze out wealth, and the prime example is China, which Britain ransacked in the opium wars to get better trading rights and a tiny little island called Hong Kong. Because why bother colonizing all of China when you can just smack them into letting you trade whatever and wherever you want. Of course keeping these far-flung territories safe from other prying empires produced a cycle of “take it now so no one else can”, leading the Europeans to carve up all of Africa in just 20 years. As we know, it wasn't long before they pointed those carving knives at each other, and so the world wars happened. Yes they're very important, we're not getting into it. What matters to Britain is that although it did win both wars, it lost heavily in that process. Despite scoring some prizes from the losing empires along the way, it became clear that these colonies which fought so hard for the British cause and were sometimes in the theaters of war themselves needed the big reward. Much of the British public was for this, as the wheels of national sovereignty had been turning since Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa became self-governing dominions around the turn of the century and the republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922. But after the second world war those idea were finally trickling out to the other colonies, so over the next few decades the empire dismantled itself, mostly non-militarily but very irresponsibly. As a rule, Britain didn't care where they drew the borders nor how bad of a mess they left behind. Exhibit A: India. This continued through the 1900s and culminated somewhat tragically with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Built from the ground up in the span of a century and a half, Hong Kong had an international identity and a true blend of cultures that despite centuries of lofty ambitions no other colony had ever achieved. Far be it from me of all people to bemoan the death of the British empire, but I will mourn Hong Kong. Meanwhile, in the closing hours of the century, the United Kingdom allowed Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to form their own parliaments and govern themselves more directly. What that means for the future of Britain? We're not there yet. And that is the history of the British empire. What it all meant and what we should take away from it are the subjects of vigorous academic and public debate. I can go on and on from my comfy top-down perspective, but the consequences of this history play out in the lives of billions of people, in the isles and around the world. It's constitutional government, industrialization, global networks, bitter postcolonial rivalries, treasures missing from their home cultures and a very very contested picture of British identity: who belongs, who benefits. Even just inside of Britain that is a lot to unpack. And with the topic as broad as “the British empire”, there are no universal answers. What can I say? That's empire for you. Thank you for watching. This video was a long time coming and I hope that I was able to do some justice to a subject as broad and complex as this. Thanks as always to our community of patrons who support the work we do and an extra special thank you to our community members on discord who helped me fine-tune my script. I'll see you all in the next video.