Before Jamestown, After St. Kitts

The culmination of a three installment that began with "Keeping out the Riff-Raff" that was inspired by a BTB podcast that Cricket was a sorting and training mechanism for British military leadership from the upper echelons of society. That was followed up with "Play up, Play up", where cricket was really expanded to build a similar sorting for the colonials to augment the British military.

Those two posts got me thinking about the British Empire, and when it started, and when it ended (there are caveats to both those), and that led to this.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed the digging into this meaty topic.

The word existed before the thing did

Before England had an empire, it had a magician who said it already deserved one.

In 1577, a mathematician and occultist named John Dee, better known today as Elizabeth I's court astrologer, published the phrase "British Empire" in print, arguing for a maritime empire built on naval supremacy. He didn't frame it as a new project. He framed it as recovering something England already owned by right, an inheritance from the legendary empire of King Arthur. At the point Dee wrote that sentence, England had no stable overseas colony anywhere on earth. The word came a full generation before the thing it named had anything real to point to.

That gap between the story and the record is the subject of this piece, on both ends. Everyone assumes the empire has a clean starting point and, since it no longer exists, a clean finishing point too. Neither one holds up.

The instinct, and why it's reasonable

Most people would say Jamestown, or India. Both answers are wrong for interesting reasons, not careless ones.

Ask most people when the British Empire began and you'll get Jamestown in 1607, or something Georgian or Victorian tied to India, since the Raj is the empire's most recognizable chapter, the one with maharajas and viceroys and a whole cricket mythology built around it. That instinct isn't lazy. India genuinely is the empire's dominant cultural memory, the setting most of what people know about British colonialism actually comes from. The problem is that dominant memory and chronological origin turn out to be two different things, and conflating them erases four centuries sitting quietly in front of both dates.

Four centuries earlier, and closer to home than anyone expects

The empire's first colony wasn't across an ocean. It was across the Irish Sea.

Henry II landed at Waterford in October 1171, two years after Anglo-Norman barons had crossed at the invitation of a deposed Irish king, and the result was the Lordship of Ireland, the start of roughly 750 continuous years of English and British involvement in Ireland that didn't end until 1922. What makes this more than a historical curiosity is that Ireland functioned as the actual proving ground for everything that came after. The technique of confiscating land from an existing population and replanting it with loyal settlers was tested and refined there for centuries, most intensively in the Munster Plantation of the 1580s and the Ulster Plantation beginning in 1609, before anyone tried it on a different continent.

It's not just a conceptual template, either. Some of the same investors and colonial administrators who ran the Irish plantations moved directly into the Virginia Company. Jamestown wasn't a fresh invention in 1607. It was Ireland's playbook, exported.

The India correction, and it cuts against itself twice

India gives you two different answers depending on what you're counting, and neither one is "first."

The East India Company received its royal charter from Elizabeth I on the last day of 1600, seven years before Jamestown existed. If you're counting chartered companies, India beats the Americas outright. But that charter created a trading monopoly, not an empire. For a century and a half the Company operated coastal factories under license from Mughal and local rulers, with zero territorial sovereignty of its own. The moment India actually becomes empire, in the sense of the Company functioning as a sovereign power rather than a licensed trader, is the Battle of Plassey in 1757, or the 1765 grant of revenue-collection rights over Bengal that followed it.

So India is either earlier than Jamestown, as a chartered trading operation with no territory, or a century and a half later, as actual dominion. It's never genuinely first by either measure, and the popular instinct to name it as the starting point is really just naming the chapter people remember best.

Why the confusion is basically structural

There isn't one empire here. There are two, and the second one is doing all the remembering.

Historians generally split this into a First British Empire, running from Ireland and the Atlantic colonies through roughly 1783, and a Second British Empire that pivots hard toward Asia and Africa after the American Revolution severs the first one. That pivot is exactly why India feels like the obvious beginning. It's the dominant story of the empire's most famous and most recent phase, the one with the most surviving documentation, the most familiar vocabulary, the most movies made about it. It is a second act mistaken for an opening scene, and the mistake is understandable given how much louder the second act was.

It is a second act mistaken for an opening scene, and the mistake is understandable given how much louder the second act was.

The stated ending, and it's genuinely satisfying

One island, opening act and closing act, 360 years apart.

The traditional answer for when the empire finished decolonizing is Saint Kitts and Nevis, independent as of September 19, 1983. There's a detail here almost too clean to be real: the first successful English colony in the Caribbean was founded on that same island in 1623. The empire's Caribbean project opens and closes on the same patch of ground, three hundred and sixty years apart, which is the kind of symmetry a novelist would get accused of forcing.

The correction to the ending, still running as this gets written

The word "colony" didn't retire. It got renamed twice, and fourteen of them are still on the books.

The premise that there are no colonies left isn't quite true. The UK currently holds fourteen British Overseas Territories, home to roughly a quarter million people, from Bermuda and the Falklands to Gibraltar and the Pitcairn Islands. The term "colony" was formally dropped in 1981, replaced with "British Dependent Territory," then replaced again by the British Overseas Territories Act in 2002. Most of these are internally self-governing now, with London retaining defense and foreign affairs. So there's no clean final date, because the category didn't end. It shrank and got a new name.

And one entry on that list is genuinely unresolved as this is being written. In May 2025, the UK signed a treaty to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, held as the British Indian Ocean Territory since 1965, over to Mauritius, in exchange for continued rights to operate the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia. Britain had detached the islands from Mauritius specifically to build that base, forcibly removing the Chagossian population in the process, a dispute the International Court of Justice found in Mauritius's favor in a 2019 advisory opinion. As of mid-2026, ratification has stalled in Parliament amid opposition objections over the Diego Garcia arrangement, and reporting on whether the deal survives at all has been genuinely mixed in recent months.

Whatever the outcome, the honest answer to "when did the last one happen" is that the process that would produce the next one is open right now, and has been for over a year.

The mirror in French, and it doesn't resolve either

Same empire-shaped problem, different language, equally unwilling to end cleanly.

France's version of this same non-ending is worth a final look, because it splits the same way. Indochina collapsed relatively fast once Japan removed the Vichy administration during the war and Ho Chi Minh declared independence the moment Japan surrendered, with France's attempt to reclaim it by force ending at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Washington had been funding that fight since May 1950, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson committed the first $15 million in military and economic aid; by the time Dien Bien Phu fell, almost exactly four years later, the United States had paid nearly $3 billion and was covering more than 80 percent of the war's material cost. Mark Atwood Lawrence's Assuming the Burden [1] traces that 1950 decision as the real hinge point, and not simply Washington bailing out Paris: hawkish factions inside the American, French, and British governments made common cause with each other, against more skeptical colleagues inside their own bureaucracies, to recast a colonial war as a Cold War one. Dien Bien Phu didn't end American involvement in Vietnam. It just meant there was no French army left standing between Washington and a war it had already bought a stake in, and the decade and a half that followed, ending with Lyndon Johnson committing American ground troops, is the part of this story most Americans actually remember. Algeria was an entirely different order of conflict, since it was legally three French departments rather than a colony, home to over a million European settlers who considered themselves as French as anyone in Paris, and the war to keep it, 1954 to 1962, nearly triggered a coup and remade the French constitution in the process of losing. Most of French sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, went almost peacefully, fourteen colonies gaining independence in a single year, 1960, after a 1958 referendum offered continued association and most territories opted out of it instead.

And France has its own unfinished Chagos sitting in plain sight. It still holds overseas departments and territories today, and New Caledonia specifically has run an active independence movement through repeated referenda in 2018, 2020, and 2021, plus serious unrest as recently as 2024. Same live wire, different empire, same refusal to hold still at the ending anyone would prefer to write for it.

Empires like a clean date on each side. The paperwork never quite cooperates.

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[1] - I highly recommend the pair of books by Mark Atwood Lawrence, "Assuming the Burden" and "The Vietnam War" as essential to understand how we got into the conflict (mopping up for the French) and how it escalated.