![]() ![]() ![]() The Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War marked the end of French imperial power in North America and South Asia. Its ghost lives on in the form of the Commonwealth its sole remains are the handful of United Kingdom Overseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In this account, the American Revolution, and its aftermath divided the two (supposedly distinct) Empires, chronologically, geographically and institutionally. William Pitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its Sexton and Winston Churchill was its chief-mourner in Britain. Its ascent began with British victory at the battle of Plassey in continued almost unabated in South Asia and the Pacific until the end of the Napoleonic Wars resumed momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, and then unraveled definitively during and after the Second World War. The history of the rise, decline, and fall of the British Empire has most often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally encompassed parts of south Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. ![]()
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