The Sun Never Sets

Geography is history, and it is geography that made one of the most powerful and enduring empires the world has ever seen.  The British Empire is now largely dissolved as a result of the convulsions of the Great War.

British mastery of  the seas goes back to the time of Henry VIII (who ruled between 1509 and 1547) and even before.  The island nation understood perfectly well that the most efficient way to protect itself from foreign domination, especially from France, was to maintain control of the waters that separated her  from the  continent of Europe.  The powerful sea presence she built had been the pre-eminent factor in her world dominance, over North America, over India, in southern Africa.

The Boer war, in a sense, prefigured WWI.  Rising power in Germany, the result of a smashing victory in the Franco-Prussian War, had resulted in her demanding her rights to hold sway over foreign colonies, like that other great empire.  Germany, engaged in expansion into African territory herself, looked on as the British Army subdued a native force of white Germanic settlers, the Boers, in South Africa.  This brought home to the Germans the importance of a strong navy to the maintenance of a global empire