BRITISH EMPIRE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of British Empire

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/brˈɪtɪʃ ˈɛmpaɪər/ Listen

British Empire

noun

A former empire consisting of Great Britain and all the territories under its control; reached its greatest extent at the end of World War I; it included the British Isles, British West Indies, Canada, British Guiana; British West Africa, British East Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand.

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Etymology of 'British Empire'

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"British empire" Quotes from Famous Books

... literature for his well-known work, The Constitution of England, written in French, and translated into English in 1775. He also wrote a comparison of the English Government with that of Sweden, a History of the Flagellants (1777), and The British Empire in Europe (1787). He came to England in 1769, lived in great poverty, and having inherited a small fortune, returned to his native ...

— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... Sanjak, the magnificent orb, slowly and regretfully, sinks into the west. On the south, where the soil is more fertile and where the land begins to be worth occupying, the Sanjak is, or will be, bounded by the British Empire. ...

— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... of one or more of England's enemy nations. Desperate though these plans seemed, it is possible that they might have succeeded, had not an untimely death overtaken him. Holland, with bitter recollections of two recent wars with England, might have welcomed a chance to break up the British Empire and regain her lucrative tobacco trade. In its essential points it was the same plan which brought independence to America a century later almost ...

— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker

... The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely corners of historic counties from ...

— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any third party, ...

— The Unity of Civilization • Various

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