The largest empire in history by land area, encompassing at its peak in the 1920s approximately 25% of the world’s land surface and governing roughly 458 million people — whose creation, governance, and dissolution shaped the modern world’s economic structures, political institutions, national borders, and racial ideologies.
At its peak, the British Empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface. The phrase ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ was literally true. Understanding how one island nation came to govern a quarter of humanity — what it built, what it destroyed, and what it left behind — is essential for understanding the modern world.