English Overseas Possessions

The English overseas possessions, sometimes called the English Empire, were the territories and colonies acquired by the Kingdom of England before 1707, when the Acts of Union merged England with Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. English settlement began in Ireland with the Norman invasion starting in 1169, but permanent colonies in the Americas were not established until the early seventeenth century, with Jamestown in Virginia founded in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in 1620, following failed attempts under Elizabeth I. Expansion accelerated through the seventeenth century, with more than two-thirds of English emigrants to the New World heading to the West Indies between 1640 and 1660, while the Crown also gained Asian trading posts and African holdings such as Bombay and Tangier through Charles II's 1661 marriage dowry. The 1707 union converted these English possessions into British colonies, marking the shift from an English to a British imperial project that expanded greatly in the centuries that followed.