By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the British Empire comprehended the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, the islands of the Caribbean and the British mainland colonies of North America. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by a common religion and by the Royal Navy. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their free, white inhabitants enjoyed and produced the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with a decent reverence. The Hanoverian kings appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on their parliaments all the executive powers of government. During a crucial period of almost fourscore years (1688–1760), the public administration was conducted by a succession of Whig politicians.

The history of the rise, decline and fall of the British Empire has most often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally encompassed parts of South Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. Its ascent began with British victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757, continued almost unabated in South Asia and the Pacific until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, resumed momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the European 'scramble for Africa', and then unraveled definitively during and after the Second World War. William Pitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its sexton and Winston Churchill its chief mourner in Britain. Its ghost lives on in the form of the Commonwealth; its sole remains are the handful of United Kingdom Overseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In this account, the American Revolution and its aftermath divided the two (supposedly distinct) Empires, chronologically, geographically and institutionally. The Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War in 1763 marked the end of French imperial power in North America and South Asia. Twenty years later, in 1783, the Peace of Paris by which Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States of America marked the beginnings of a newly con figured British Atlantic Empire, still including the Caribbean islands and the remaining parts of British North America; it also signaled the British Empire's decisive 'swing to the east' into the Indian and Pacific oceans. Historians of the eighteenth-century British Empire have protested against any easy separation between the 'First' and 'Second' British Empires on the grounds that the two overlapped in time, that they shared common purposes and personnel, and that the differences between the maritime, commercial colonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorial colonies of conquest in India have been crudely overdrawn. Nevertheless, among historians, and more generally in the popular imagination, the British Empire still denotes that 'Second' Empire, which was founded in the late eighteenth century and whose character distinguished it decisively from the 'Old Colonial System' of the British Atlantic world that had gone before it.

The conflation of British Imperial history with the history of the Second British Empire has encouraged the separation of the history of Britain and Ireland from the history of the Empire itself. 'British' history is assumed to mean 'domestic' history; Imperial history implies extraterritorial history. This distinction was at least understandable, if not defensible, as long as the Empire was assumed to be divided from the metropole by vast physical distances, to be overwhelmingly distinct in its racial composition, and to be dependent upon, rather than formally equal with, Britain itself. The attributed character of the Second British Empire – as an empire founded on military conquest, racial subjection, economic exploitation and territorial expansion – rendered it incompatible with metropolitan norms of liberty, equality and the rule of law, and demanded that the Empire be eroticized and further differentiated from domestic history. The purported character of the First British Empire – as 'for the most part a maritime empire, an oceanic empire of trade and settlement, not an empire of conquest; an empire defended by ships, not troops'– assimilated it more closely to the domestic histories of the Three Kingdoms by making it the outgrowth of British norms, exported and fostered by metropolitan migrants. The revolutionary crisis in the British Atlantic world, between 1763 and 1783, revealed the practical and theoretical limits of any such assimilation. Thereafter, the former colonies became part of the history of the United States. This in turn facilitated the identification of the history of the British Empire with the history of the Second Empire and fostered the continuing disjuncture between 'British' and 'Imperial' histories.

Any search for origins is, of course, fraught with a basic conceptual ambiguity. An origin can be either a beginning or a cause, a logical and chronological terminus a quo, or the starting-point from which a chain of consequences derives. 'In popular usage, an origin is a beginning which explains', warned Marc Bloch. 'Worse still, a beginning which is a complete explanation. There lies the ambiguity, there the danger!' To discover the etymology of a word does nothing to explain its present meaning, though the gap between its etymological root and its current usage can be historically revealing, but only if approached contextually. 'In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. ' Similarly, the context within which a concept emerges does not determine its future usage, though the history of its usage across time will reveal a great deal about the history of the later contexts within which it was deployed. The origins of a concept, as of any other object of historical inquiry, are not necessarily connected to any later outcome, causally or otherwise: etiology is not simply teleology in reverse. Conversely, present usage or practice offers no sure guide to the origins of a concept or activity.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite) you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged … the whole history of a 'thing, ' an organ, a tradition, can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.

Meaning cannot therefore be identified with purpose, least of all in the case of a concept, of which '[t]he form is fluid, the “meaning” even more so'.

Confusion between origins as beginnings and origins as causes has bedeviled the history of the British Empire at least since the eighteenth century. The chronological origins of the British Empire have most often been traced back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and hence to the maritime exploits of her English sailors. This chronology de fined the Empire as Protestant, Anglo - British, benign and extra-European, because it originated in post-Reformation, specifically English activities, was the product of navies not armies, and was conducted across vast oceanic expanses, far from the metropolis. This was the vision of imperial origins emblematized in Millais's 'The Boyhood of Raleigh' (1870), itself inspired by the painter's reading of J. A. Froude's essay on the Elizabethan sea-dogs, 'England's Forgotten Worthies' (1852). More recent historians have espoused a similar chronology but for different reasons, by finding the origins of British imperialism in English colonialism on the Celtic crescent surrounding the English core-state. This was still an Anglo- British imperialism, though it was neither benign nor exotic. External 'imperialism' was the off spring of 'internal colonialism', as the English developed their ideologies of racial supremacy, political hegemony, cultural superiority and divinely appointed civilizing mission in their relations with a 'Celtic fringe', beginning in Ireland in the sixteenth century. Maintaining the content, but disputing the chronology, an alternative etiology for English imperialism – defined by its supremacist racism, its crusading national identity and its ideology of conquest – has instead been traced to the twelfth century, and the attempted Anglicization of Ireland, Scotland and Wales chronicled in the works of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales. This thesis in turn disrupts any continuity between state-formation and empire- building by making English imperialism a solely archipelagic phenomenon whose continuities with extra- British empire -building were tenuous and analogical. In reaction, other historians, attempting to save the chronology of origins but extend its scope forward from the sixteenth century, have 'unearthed in protestant religious consciousness a root, perhaps even the taproot, of English imperialism'; even more precisely, the 'origins of Anglo- British imperialism' have been located in the Anglo-Scottish propaganda wars of the mid-sixteenth century. . .