Great Britain

Origins and formation

The British Empire was the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with overseas possessions and trading posts established by England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and with Scottish colonization attempts in the seventeenth century. At its height in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, the foremost global power. The page says it was described as the empire on which the sun never sets. The guide uses that same image and adds factories fed by colonial raw materials, diplomacy backed by the threat of war, and a navy that dominated the sea. The sun sentence is a description both pages record. It is not a climate fact.^{[1] [3]}

Portugal and Spain had pioneered overseas empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. England, France, and the Netherlands followed. Wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Netherlands and France left Britain the dominant colonial power in North America. Britain became a major power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company’s conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The guide names the East India Company as a tradition. Plassey is the dated event this essay can attach to that name. It is not a gold bonus.^{[1] [3]}

Defining periods

The height and the end are both on the empire page. By 1913 the empire held sway over a very large share of the world’s people, and by 1920 over a very large share of its land. This essay does not repeat those percentages as if they were a yield. Parliament was the supreme law-making authority for the possessions. The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain’s decline as a global power, and the handover of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997, symbolized for many the end of the empire, although fourteen overseas territories remain. A civilization screen that stops at “the sun never set” drops 1956 and 1997. They belong in the same file as Plassey.^[1]

Ada Lovelace lived from 1815 to 1852, inside the nineteenth-century height, and wrote on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The published essay under her name is those notes. She is not the East India Company and not the parliament of the empire. The link keeps a mathematician from being asked to personify the whole state. Her death in 1852 comes before the Suez Crisis and long before the Hong Kong handover. A nineteenth-century writer can sit inside an empire and still not explain its twentieth-century contraction. The catalog link is a door between those scales.^{[1] [2]}

The published Nepal essay is the Himalayan kingdom and its treaty with the East India Company. That relationship is not Plassey, and Nepal is not a British town.^[1]

Legacy and interpretation

The legacy the empire page names is constitutional, legal, linguistic, and cultural, and it is widespread because Parliament legislated for the possessions. The guide’s legacy is industry at home and command abroad, under a phrase it shares with the history page. Both can be true and still not be one factory. Workshop of the World makes buildings cheaper and city conversions dearer, and it adds science on coastal buildings. Cost ratios are rules. They are not the 1757 battle and not the 1997 handover.^{[1] [3]}

Battersea Power Station is the guide’s wonder, and these pages do not date its construction. A power station that duplicates a naval unit is a twentieth-century industrial image attached to a civilization whose apex the guide places in the modern age. The attachment is design. It is not evidence that the Tudor trading posts were power stations.^[3]

A closer look

The ship is named Revenge in English and given a battleship-class name in Chinese. This essay does not supply a service history the pages do not give. A naval unit with splash damage is not the navy that the guide says dominated the sea, and it is not the East India Company’s army at Plassey.^{[1] [3]}

No Eternal Allies, the tradition, grants food and gold in towns and reduces the capital’s gold for every alliance. The empire page describes wars with the Netherlands and France and does not define a penalty per alliance. A diplomacy tax is a rule. It does not explain 1757. The antiquarian, paid culture for distance from the capital when an artifact is excavated, is another modern image. Distance from London is not a measure the empire page uses for the East India Company, and an excavated artifact is not Plassey. The financial centre that pays for every connected settlement borrows the idea of an imperial network. The network on the history page is made of wars, a company conquest, a parliament, and a handover. Connection on the guide is a gold adjacency.^{[1] [3]}

In Civilization VII

The English guide names the ability Workshop of the World, traditions including the East India Company, No Eternal Allies, Proceedings, and the Royal Society, the quarter Financial Centre, the buildings Royal Exchange and Manufactory, the civilian Antiquarian, the ship Revenge, and the wonder Battersea Power Station. The simplified Chinese guide names the same slots in its own words and titles the civilization Great Britain. The apex age on the page is Modern, which is the codex age. The page places the civilization in the paid Crossroads of the World Collection. Yields stay on the guide.^{[3] [4]}

The published Ada Lovelace essay is the mathematician inside the nineteenth century, not this empire. The published Nepal essay is the other party to the company’s Himalayan treaty. The published Lakshmibai essay is the queen of Jhansi, and the published Qajar essay is an Iranian dynasty. Both meet this empire from outside it. Neither is Lovelace, and neither is the Nepal border. The first step back from the sun sentence is to keep the Tudor posts, Plassey in 1757, Lovelace’s notes, and the Hong Kong handover of July 1, 1997, from becoming one factory.^{[1] [2] [3]}