Story · Land & heritage map · about 6 min
From empire to Commonwealth
This is not a map of the empire itself: no open dataset of its historical borders exists without a non-commercial licence attached (see the layer's own notes). Instead, this tells the story in words, one region and one decade at a time, and shows what is real and mappable today: the Commonwealth of Nations, an association that countries chose to join after independence. It is a short story, not a history, and it leaves out far more than it can include. The empire was built on conquest, the slave trade and the taking of land and wealth, and the independence it ended with was often fought for, not handed over. Every join year you read comes from the layer, so click any shaded country as you go.
A quarter of the world's land
At its territorial peak around 1920, the British Empire covered roughly 35.5 million km² (about a quarter of the Earth's land surface) and ruled over some 412 million people, commonly cited as around a quarter of everyone alive at the time. It was the largest empire in history. It was built by conquest, settlement and trade and run for Britain's benefit: land was taken, labour was forced or badly paid, and most of the people ruled had no vote over the government that ruled them. The shaded countries are not that empire; they are the club it left behind. Over the next eleven steps the map shows who is in that club today, while the words keep hold of what happened on the way.
1926: equals, but only some
In 1926 Britain and its self-governing Dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa among them) agreed that they were equal in status, each free to run its own affairs while sharing the Crown. That is the earliest join year in the layer: 5 members carry 1926 (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom). "Self-governing" meant governed by the settlers. Aboriginal Australians, First Nations in Canada, the Maori of New Zealand and the Black majority in South Africa had been pushed off much of their land and had little or no say in those governments. The rest of the empire, with most of its people, was still ruled directly, from London or by a governor on the spot.
1943: the Bengal famine
In 1943 a famine in Bengal killed an estimated two to three million people. It was not only a failed harvest: the war had cut off rice from Burma, prices had soared, and Britain's wartime government put shipping and supplies for the war first. That year Winston Churchill's War Cabinet turned down the Viceroy's request for emergency grain, saying there were not enough ships, a reason many historians reject. Critics say Churchill made the famine worse by refusing to divert grain from Australia and Canada that was bound for Europe, while his defenders point to the large grain shipments that did reach Bengal from late 1943. The charge usually made is that he made it worse rather than that he caused it; many historians say British wartime policy turned a bad shortage into a catastrophe.
1947-49: Partition, and a new rule
In 1947 British India was divided into two independent countries, India and Pakistan, and Pakistan came in two parts, West and East, about 1,600 km apart, until East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh in 1971. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) followed in 1948. Independence came after decades of campaigns, strikes and arrests, and with Britain exhausted by the Second World War. The border was drawn in about five weeks by a British lawyer who had never been to India before. Some 12 to 20 million people fled across it, and estimates of the dead run from about 200,000 to two million. The decision that made the modern Commonwealth came in 1949: the London Declaration let a country stay in the club as a republic, without the Crown as head of state, and the word "British" was dropped from the name.
1957: Ghana leads Africa
Ghana became independent on 6 March 1957, the first of Britain's sub-Saharan African colonies to do so, and joined the Commonwealth the same year, after a long campaign led by Kwame Nkrumah, whom the colonial government had jailed. Nigeria followed in 1960, then Sierra Leone and Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) in 1961. These countries were drawn by Europeans: their borders were set in the 1880s by colonial powers with little regard for the peoples inside them, and the colonies were run to ship out cash crops and minerals. Click Ghana and Nigeria and compare their join years.
East and southern Africa
Uganda joined in 1962, Kenya in 1963, Zambia and Malawi in 1964, Botswana and Lesotho in 1966, Mauritius and eSwatini in 1968. Not every road was smooth. In Kenya the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s was put down with mass detention camps where torture and killing were later documented; in 2013 the British government agreed to compensate 5,228 survivors and expressed regret. In Southern Rhodesia the white minority government declared independence on its own in 1965 to keep power from the Black majority, and a long war followed. The country only joined as Zimbabwe, after majority rule, in 1980.
The 1960s: the busiest decade
20 of today's 56 members joined in the 1960s, more than in any other decade; the 1970s come second with 14. The wave ran from Nigeria in 1960 to Mauritius in 1968, after the prime minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa's parliament in February 1960 that a "wind of change" was blowing through the continent. Independence was rarely a gift. It was won by strikes, protests and, in places, armed struggle, and Britain gave way once holding on cost more than letting go; it had fought long wars to hold on in Malaya and Kenya. In 1950 the club had a handful of members.
The Caribbean: sugar colonies to island nations
Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966, then the Bahamas (1973), Grenada (1974), Dominica (1978), Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (1979), Belize and Antigua and Barbuda (1981) and Saint Kitts and Nevis (1983). Most had been sugar colonies worked by enslaved Africans. British ships carried more than three million people across the Atlantic. When slavery was ended across most of the empire in 1833, the government paid 20 million pounds, about 40 percent of its yearly spending, to the slave owners, and nothing to the people who had been enslaved. Barbados became a republic in 2021, replacing the monarch with its own president, and stayed in the Commonwealth, exactly as the 1949 rule allows.
The Pacific and the Indian Ocean
The last wave was made of small islands: Fiji, Tonga and Samoa in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1975, the Seychelles in 1976, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu in 1978, Kiribati in 1979, Vanuatu in 1980 and the Maldives in 1982. Several are low coral atolls where a rise in sea level is a question of survival, which is why small island states often speak with one voice in Commonwealth meetings on climate. Independence did not close every wound. Britain tested nuclear weapons on Kiritimati, in what is now Kiribati, in 1957 and 1958. In 1965, before Mauritius became independent, Britain split off the Chagos Islands and later removed their people to make way for a US military base; their future is still disputed, despite a 2025 treaty to hand them to Mauritius.
Five that were never British colonies
5 members were never British colonies in the usual sense: Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Rwanda, Togo. Mozambique, Rwanda, Gabon and Togo had no constitutional tie to Britain at all and joined for trade, language and regional links; Cameroon had only a slice that Britain ran under an international mandate. All five joined from 1995. They are the one part of this story that was a free choice from the start: joining the club today is something a country opts into, which no colony could say of becoming part of the empire.
Who left, and who never came
Membership today is a choice, and some have used it to leave. Ireland left in 1949 when it became a republic outside the club, after a war of independence and a partition that is still argued over; South Africa left in 1961 as other members criticised apartheid, and returned in 1994; the Gambia left in 2013, calling the club a colonial institution, and returned in 2018; the Maldives left in 2016 and returned in 2020; Zimbabwe left in 2003 after being suspended over elections and human rights, and its bid to return is still pending. Myanmar chose not to join on independence in 1948, and the United States left the empire long before, in 1776, after a war. Under the empire itself, most peoples were never asked: they were not members who could leave.
A club of 56, with one King in common
Today 56 countries share a secretariat in London, a Commonwealth Games every four years and a ceremonial head, King Charles III. Fifteen of them, the United Kingdom included, have the King as head of state; the rest are republics or have monarchs of their own. The club is what the empire left behind, not a measure of it, and the harm is still argued over: several Caribbean governments are asking for reparations for slavery, and the UK government has not agreed to pay them. Click countries you know and compare each join year with when you thought it became independent: they are often years apart.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Why is the Commonwealth today not a map of the old empire?
- Independence was often fought for, not given. What can a map of today's membership not show about how it happened, and how would you find out?
Try it on the map: Switch on the Commonwealth layer and click a country. When did it join, and does that match when it became independent?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.