To What Extent Should We Be Proud Of The British Empire

The British Empire was a collection of colonies which were ruled by Britain in the late 16th to 18th century. The empire had expanded to extremes by the 18th century making them filthy rich and powerful.By 1924 the British Empire was at its peak, with it owning 14million square miles of land and having a 450million population. The empire used two main tactics to achieve this; trade and conflict. Both of these methods caused serious problems in the colonies they had fought hard to maintain. Many of these problems were inhuman and had terrible consequences which we should not be proud. Over time some of the things that the British Empire accomplished has left an incredibly good impact on the modern world, this we should definitely be proud of. …show more content…
This is shown by our relationship with Canada, we originally got Canada from conquering France in 1763 due to beating the French in the Seven Years' war. After the conquering of Canada we began collecting 'the treasured resource' which was beaver pelt; at the time we were using this material to make hats that were popular to show how wealthy or how high their status was. During trading with Indians they got equipment like pots, pans and guns which was definitely beneficial for them to help them to develop easier ways of survival.India is also an example of a country which was added to the empire in 1757 due to trade.They exported lots of things like Cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt petre, tea, and opium were the main goods supplied to The East India Company. India was 'the jewel in the crown' of the British Empire because it was the richest Colony the British had at the time which is not surprising due to the amount of expensive things they traded. However Britain didn’t actually rule India until 1857, up to that point the East India …show more content…
An example of this is China, this was due to the opium wars which went on during 1839 – 1842 for the first war and then 1860 for the other. The Opium war started due to the Chinese trying to stop Opium being smuggled into the country. Opium is a highly-addictive drug which is extracted from poppies and by the 1830s, millions of Chinese were hooked on opium, causing significant damage to the health and productivity of the nation. At this time British people were demanding things like porcelain and tea however China were not prepared to trade unless we paid in silver so instead of paying using the country's silver supply we smuggled opium which was grown in India, already controlled by the Empire, into the country to get money for it and taking advantage of the corrupt Chinese officials in the process who continued to let it happen even though it was illegal. In 1839 the government decided to crack down on smuggling so the government seized massive amounts of opium from traders and decided to block off ports so they couldn’t trade.Due to this the traders got angry and complained to the government causing a 1840 navel fleet to attack the ports. After that, war continued to go on and off until November of 1860 when they finally made it legal to trade opium.Another of a country which was consumed by conflict