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From“The English Bourgeois Revolution”to the Age of Revolutions, the Anglo-American,or the transatlantic English world, has witnessed constant drastic changes in the former in its expanding colonisation and the latter in its dependent national formation. The“Bourgeois Revolution”, as argued in the former chapter, had been“discrediting of the idea of the divine right of kings, the belief that parliament was supreme in political matters, and that the English monarch had to rule in a manner which was limited by the idea of a constitutional monarchy.”But the revolutionary in the 1640s and 1650s seemed reactionary in the 1680s. After the death of Oliver Cromwell (1599—1658), Charles II resumed the royal power and became the king in 1660, initiating those years of backlash as had been called the“The Restoration”, until another national attempt to“secularise”the political power. The“Glorious Revolution”, or“Revolution of 1688”, or“Bloodless Revolution”, results in the abolition of the absolute power of the King and establishment of the constitutional monarchy as represented by such historic documents of the English Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and the Mutiny Act, having accomplished the settlement of the fundamental questions of power between king and Parliament with the monarchs to respect Parliament and Parliament's laws. After 1688, the monarchy that emerged in Britain was limited by a constitution. It also created a body of ideas that were to be very influential in the development of Anglo-American political and constitutional thought in the 18 th century.
Once the internal or domestic power division was balanced, Britain began to wage its wars to the outside, becoming from a once-being-colonised territory to a colonizing nation. In fact, its colonisation had begun much earlier: Britain colonised Ireland in 1169; Queen Elizabeth I (1533—1603) established England as a fiercely independent Protestant nation and built up her navy to keep invading, while encouraging her native adventurers to sail west and set up colonies in North America; from about 1600 on, Protestant Fundamentalists to join these adventurers successively appeared in Boston, Virginia and the Caribbean, together with Bombay and Calcutta in India. In 1707, the Act of Union brought together Scotland and England to form“Great Britain”; in 1770, Captain Cook claimed Australia for Britain.
As the British Empire expanded, the first hostile factor to deter is France, while rubbing with the Spanish. From 1650 to 1750, the Empire was almost continuously fighting with the French in America and India as well as the high seas for global domination. It defeated the French in both America at Quebec in 1759, dividing North America into three: Canada to the north, the thirteen colonies on the eastern coast, and a native Indian reservation on the west.In 1776,“English”settlers in North America were much larger in number, ten times larger than the French colony in Quebec, Canada. But this did not bring fortune to the Empire. These well-educated American colonists objected to the new taxes placed on them as they had no representatives in London. They declared themselves independent while many loyalists moved north into Canada, creating the current east-west split of French and English speakers. Around 1800, The Empire continued to expand with the help of a navy that knew no boundaries, even making the Pacific Ocean an“English lake”with Australia, New Zealand, India, including Burma, and Malay added to its Empire mapping without opposition. Back with France, Britain showed its overwhelming supremacy and finally defeated France at Waterloo in 1815, making the French and English remain at peace but stay culturally very different. From the end of the 18 th century, Britain had emerged as an empire dominating both the transatlantic and global territories, entering into a period of aggressive imperialism.