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Looking West

The French victory over the English in the Hundred Years’ War created a strong and unified French kingdom that could easily defend itself from any future English invasion. This forced English monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth I and King James I in the 16th and 17th centuries to take advantage of the nation’s seafaring capabilities and transform England into an offshore empire.

Expeditions in the 16th century to the New World of the Americas led to the establishment of colonies, which attracted migrants from Britain seeking either prosperity or freedom from religious persecution. Migration from Britain to the colonies increased as England united with Scotland in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain. These colonies also became more profitable as the demand for New World crops, such as tobacco, increased. This encouraged even greater migration and the growth of a Royal Navy to protect the vast profits that were being made in the American colonies.

The greatest profits were being made in Britain’s Caribbean ‘sugar islands’. British ships in the 18th century gained a virtual monopoly on the transportation of captive Africans across the Atlantic to work in inhuman conditions on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations all over the Americas. This was the greatest forced migration in human history and it made Britain very wealthy. This wealth was used to increase Britain’s global trading presence and brought her into conflict with her old enemy France in the Seven Years’ War.

After this, Britain became the unchallenged global sea power, but the taxes it imposed on the colonists in America to pay for the Seven Years' War led to protests, and eventually the colonists defeated British forces in the American War of Independence in 1783.