The Transatlantic World and East India (the Long Eighteenth Century)

This chapter discusses the process of the formation of the British Empire in the “long eighteenth century”. The British Empire in the eighteenth century was formed mainly in the “Transatlantic World”, which included North and South America, West Africa, and Ireland. First, it discusses the origins of the formation of the Empire in the seventeenth century, and then consider the “Atlantic Triangular Trade” centred on the slave trade and slave plantations for sugar production, the development of the British Commercial Revolution, North American immigration, and the American Revolution within the framework of the Transatlantic World. At the same time, the eighteenth century was also a period when imports of tea and Indian cotton textiles, mainly through the English East India Company, increased significantly. The Industrial Revolution that occurred at the end of the century was also made possible time against the backdrop of the formation of this Empire.