where did the british empire get sugar from
British Empire The Caribbean initially provided England's most important and lucrative colonies,[37] but not before several attempts at colonisation failed. An attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years, and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits.[38] Colonies in St Lucia (1605) and Grenada (1609) also rapidly folded, but settlements were successfully established in St. Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628).[39] The colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations successfully used by the Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labour, and—at first—Dutch ships, to sell the slaves and buy the sugar.[40] To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led to hostilities with the United Dutch Provinces—a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars—which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at the expense of the Dutch.[41] In 1655, England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas.[42]
New Delhi Calcutta (now Kolkata) was the capital of India during the British Raj until December 1911.
History of the United Kingdom A further Act of Union in 1800 added the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
British Empire Between 1815 and 1914, a period referred to as Britain's "imperial century" by some historians,[98][99] around 10,000,000 square miles (26,000,000Â km2) of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire.[100] Victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in Central Asia.[101] Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica,[9] and a foreign policy of "splendid isolation".[102] Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain's dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been described by some historians as an "Informal Empire".[103][104]