English overseas possessions

The English overseas possessions, sometimes referred to as the English Empire, comprised a variety of overseas territories and colonies that were conquered or otherwise acquired by the Kingdom of England before 1707 when the Acts of Union joined England with the Kingdom of Scotland and created of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Formerly Scots were excluded from English overseas possessions, but following 1707 they could participate in the expanding British Empire.

The first English overseas settlements were established in Ireland and patterns of rule over a subordinated populated territory developed following the sixteenth-century Tudor conquest. There were initial English voyages of exploration during the reign of Henry VII of England, and further settlement in Ireland. During the reign of Elizabeth I(1558-1603) there were unsuccessful attempts at North American colonization. Not until the succession in 1603 of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England (ruling as James I) were permanent overseas settlements successfully established in North America, first at Jamestown, Virginia (1607), the West Indies, and the Plymouth Colony of religious dissenters in New England (1620). All these were in areas already occupied by indigenous populations and claimed by the Spanish Empire, but not settled by it. During the 17th century, Maine, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Salem, Massachusetts Bay, Nova Scotia, Connecticut, New Haven, Maryland, and Rhode Island and Providence were settled. In 1664, New Netherland and New Sweden were taken from the Dutch, becoming New York, New Jersey, and parts of Delaware and Pennsylvania.

In Asia, trading posts called "factories" in the East Indies, such as Bantam, and in the Indian subcontinent, beginning with Surat. In 1639, a series of English fortresses on the Indian coast was initiated with Fort St George. In 1661, the marriage of King Charles II to Catherine of Braganza brought him as part of her dowry new possessions which until then had been Portuguese, including Tangier in North Africa and Bombay in India.