The Rise of the British Empire: From Obscurity to Center Stage

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Why did Spain and Portugal decline in power? How did England take their place as the economic center of Europe?

As the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern period, Europe began to enjoy global economic dominance. One power, in particular, emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries: England. Historian Peter Frankopan explains how this small nation became so powerful.

Read more to learn about the rise of the British Empire.

The Rise of the British Empire

England was a second-rate commercial and naval power next to the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. These countries (Spain especially) dominated the European political scene in the 16th and early 17th centuries, thanks to their early discovery, conquest, and exploitation of Central and South America, which brought unprecedented stores of gold and silver bullion into their treasuries.

But, while this influx of money financed Spain’s lavish military campaigns across Europe, it also sparked massive inflation. These economic woes led Spain to repeatedly default on its foreign loans, precipitating its decline as a world power and, ultimately, the rise of the British Empire.

The Failure of the Mercantilist System

Part of the reason for Spain’s poor economic management of its gold and silver reserves was its adherence to the theory of mercantilism. Mercantilism saw national wealth in purely zero-sum terms: The country that accumulated the greatest supply of precious metals like gold and silver was the wealthiest.

This economic theory saw the global economy as a competition between European states for who could extract the most revenue from the rest of the world. Under the logic of the mercantilist system, rival countries sought to boost their supplies of gold and silver by exporting more than they imported (to earn more gold and silver) and establishing overseas colonies whose sole economic purpose was to serve as markets with demand for manufactured goods and supplies of raw materials to ship back to the mother country.

However, mercantilism proved a counterproductive strategy for the nations that made it their commercial policy. Even as early as 1752, writers like the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume were arguing that mercantilism produced gross distortionary effects on a nation’s economy: Hume wrote that increasing a nation’s money supply through mercantilist policies would decrease the value of that money, leading to runaway inflation.

This, historians argue today, was a major culprit in the decline of the Spanish Empire. As gold and silver from the New World poured in, inflation skyrocketed in Spain, making the nation’s exports uncompetitive in international markets. Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown failed to adjust the level of taxation to account for the growing money supply, meaning that the treasury was actually collecting a smaller share of national wealth as time went on. To cover the difference, the Crown took on new debts to cover the old ones, leading to a centuries-long cycle of ever-accumulating debt.

The decline of Spain, argues Frankopan, opened the door for the economic center of Europe to shift north and west to the British Isles by the 17th century. The English seized the opportunity to modernize and professionalize their Royal Navy, enabling them to secure new trading outposts on the Indian subcontinent in Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay (the British East India Company would eventually seize India as a colony in 1757), as well as establish burgeoning colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. This was the germ of the soon-to-be mighty British Empire.

How Did Britain Become a World Power?

Scholars have debated what precisely made the British Isles—previously on the periphery of European politics—such a global force beginning in the 17th century. English historian Simon Schama argues in The Wars of the British (Volume 2 of his A History of Britain series) that the unification of the once-distinct kingdoms of England and Scotland under the same crown in 1603 was a pivotal moment in the creation of the modern British state—and, ultimately the British Empire. Schama writes that Scots played a powerful role in the founding, settlement, and governance of the burgeoning empire, providing crucial manpower as they fanned out across Asia, Africa, and the Americas as soldiers, merchants, and settler-farmers.

Other historians note that Britain, as an island on Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, was naturally in a prime position to tap into the new wealth of the rising transatlantic economy, especially once technological advances in shipbuilding in the 15th and 16th centuries made transoceanic voyages more feasible.

The Rise of the British Empire: From Obscurity to Center Stage