An Empire on Which the Sun Never Set, and Rarely by Design

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The famous line about the empire on which the sun never set describes a real fact, by the height of its reach the British Empire held territory in every time zone, but it implies a coherence the Empire's own growth rarely had. Rather than a single planned programme of conquest, the Empire grew for nearly three centuries as an accumulation of separate, often uncoordinated ventures: royal charters granted to private trading companies, most consequentially the East India Company in 1600, which acquired Indian territory and revenue as a side effect of protecting its trade rather than as a colonial policy; settler colonization in North America and the Caribbean driven largely by private and religious initiative; naval bases and coaling stations seized for strategic reasons with little interest in governing the people who lived there; and, in Africa especially, a late nineteenth century scramble driven as much by rivalry with other European powers as by any considered plan. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the Empire notes that this piecemeal growth meant Britain often found itself governing territories, and inheriting the administrative and financial burden of doing so, that no single body in London had actually decided to acquire. The result, by the empire's early twentieth century peak, was not one empire but several overlapping systems of rule, direct Crown colonies, self-governing settler dominions, princely states under indirect rule, League of Nations mandates, stitched together more by administrative improvisation than by any unified imperial design.