The British Empire and modern colonialism
What it is
From around 1600, Britain expanded through chartered trading companies such as the East India Company, settler colonisation and military conquest, assembling by the early twentieth century the largest empire in history, ruling roughly a quarter of the world's land and people. It governed alongside and in competition with other European colonial powers, extracting resources and restructuring local economies, law and property around imperial trade. Colonial administration imposed European legal and land-tenure systems and reorganised whole regions to serve metropolitan markets. Decolonisation through the mid-twentieth century dismantled formal rule but left deep institutional and spatial legacies.
Why it matters
It reorganised global trade, property and law on European terms and entrenched a world economy centred on the metropole. It also planted gridded colonial port cities, military cantonments, hill stations and racially segregated quarters whose layouts still structure many cities today.
Plans it shaped
- Pondicherry (Puducherry) Dual City (1674–1954)
- Savannah Ward Plan (1733)
- Adelaide (Light’s Plan) (1837)
- New Delhi (Lutyens’ Plan) (1911–1931)
- Rabat Prost Plan (1914–1920)
- Plan Obus for Algiers (unbuilt) (1931–1934)
- Nairobi Master Plan (1948) (1948)
- Dhaka Master Plan (1959)
- Burnham Plan for Baguio (summer capital) (1905)
- Shanghai Foreign Settlement & the Bund (1845)
- Tianjin Foreign Concessions (1860)
- Raffles Town Plan of Singapore (Jackson Plan) (1822)