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Article: British Empire, Concept of
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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BRITISH EMPIRE, CONCEPT OF
BRITISH EMPIRE, CONCEPT OF.
The concept of the British Empire holds more coherence for historians than it did for eighteenth-century Americans. The idea of empire was not clearly thought out by Americans or Britons until the intensification of British-colonial relations between 1763 and 1776 and the subsequent onset of the revolutionary war. The idea of empire initially connoted mercantilism, a nexus of political, military, and economic considerations directed toward the creation of a self-sufficient imperium where the colony would supply the mother country with raw materials, and the mother country would provide for the military defense of the colony. This ...