British Empire Trivia
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79 free British Empire trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This British Empire trivia quiz covers four centuries of the largest empire in history, from Henry VII sending John Cabot across the Atlantic in 1497 to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. The early questions deal with Tudor privateers, the first colonies in Virginia and the Caribbean, the sugar and slave economies of Barbados and Jamaica, Scotland's disastrous Darien scheme, and the trading companies that ran the fur trade in Canada and the textile trade in India. From there the quiz moves through the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the founding of Australia as a penal colony, the Napoleonic settlement, the abolition of slavery, the East India Company's conquest of India and the Raj that replaced it, the Great Game with Russia, the Scramble for Africa and the Boer republics. The final third covers the two world wars, the League of Nations mandates, Irish and Indian independence, the Suez Crisis, the 'wind of change' in Africa, the Falklands, and what remains of the empire today. Difficulty ranges from questions any history student can answer to details only an imperial-history enthusiast will know. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia article on the British Empire, and each explanation adds one more detail worth remembering.
30 of 79 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By 1920, roughly what share of Earth's land area did the British Empire cover?
About 25 per cent
About 25 per cent: at roughly 35.5 million square kilometres in 1920, it was the largest empire in history, bigger even than the Mongol Empire at its peak.
Q 02The British Empire was famously described as 'the empire on which the sun never' does what?
Sets
The sun never sets on it because some territory was always in daylight, a boast first made about Spain's empire under Charles V and Philip II and applied to Britain in the 19th century.
Q 03Which explorer did Henry VII commission in 1496 to find a Northwest Passage to Asia?
John Cabot
John Cabot, an Italian-born navigator sailing from Bristol, reached North America in 1497, though exactly where he landed is disputed; the fate of his 1498 expedition is unknown.
Q 04Which Elizabethan scholar and adviser to Elizabeth I is credited with coining the term 'British Empire'?
John Dee
John Dee, Elizabeth I's astrological and scientific adviser, argued for a maritime empire in 1577, though Welsh scholar Humphrey Llwyd is also credited with first using the term.
Q 05Which Elizabethan courtier sponsored the Roanoke Colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina?
Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh held the royal charter, and when John White's relief voyage reached Roanoke in 1590 the settlers had vanished, leaving 'CROATOAN' carved on a post.
Q 06Founded in 1607, what was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas?
Jamestown
Jamestown nearly died in the 1609–10 'Starving Time': only about 60 settlers survived, and they were already sailing away when a relief fleet turned them back.
Q 07Which Shakespeare play is linked to the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck?
The Tempest
The Tempest is widely thought to draw on accounts of the Sea Venture, whose survivors spent about nine months on Bermuda, built two new ships and sailed on to Virginia in 1610.
Q 08Which colony was established in 1634 as a haven for English Roman Catholics?
Maryland
Maryland was named for Henrietta Maria, the devoutly Catholic wife of Charles I, who granted the colony's charter in 1632.
Q 09The capture of New Amsterdam in 1664 gave England which Dutch colony?
New Netherland
At the 1667 Treaty of Breda each side kept what it held, so England kept New Netherland while the Dutch kept Suriname and the nutmeg island of Run.
Q 10On which Caribbean island were England's first large sugarcane plantations established in the 1640s?
Barbados
Barbados learned sugar-making from Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews from Brazil, and slave-grown sugar made it the most successful colony in the Americas.
Q 11Which island did England annex from Spain in 1655?
Jamaica
Jamaica was a consolation prize: Cromwell's fleet had been sent to take Hispaniola, was repulsed at Santo Domingo, and seized the weakly defended island instead.
Q 12The Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, was granted a fur-trade monopoly over which territory?
Rupert's Land
Rupert's Land, named for Prince Rupert, the company's first governor, covered the whole Hudson Bay drainage basin, and the company gave it up for £300,000 before it passed to Canada in 1870.
Q 13Some captives shipped by the Royal African Company were branded with the initials of which future king?
James II
James II governed the company as Duke of York, and some captives were branded with his initials; the company shipped more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than any other.
Q 21Which 1776 book argued that colonies were redundant and free trade should replace mercantilism?
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the same year Britain's American colonies declared independence.
Q 22Which colony was split from Nova Scotia in 1784 for Loyalists in the Saint John valley?
New Brunswick
New Brunswick was carved out because about 14,000 Loyalists in the Saint John valley felt too far from Nova Scotia's government in Halifax.
Q 23Which 1814 treaty ended the War of 1812 and reaffirmed the pre-war US–Canada boundaries?
Ghent
The Treaty of Ghent was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but news took a month to reach America, so Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans after peace had been agreed.
Q 14By the late 18th century, ships from which port handled most of Britain's Atlantic slave trade?
Liverpool
Liverpool ships accounted for about 80 per cent of Britain's slave trade by 1800, in a trade in which British vessels carried about 3.5 million Africans.
Q 15Scotland's Company of Scotland founded its disastrous Darien settlement in 1698 on which isthmus?
Panama
Panama's Darién coast killed most of the colonists within a year, and the collapse, which cost Scotland a large share of its capital, helped push it into union with England in 1707.
Q 16Which two territories did Britain gain from Spain under the Treaty of Utrecht?
Gibraltar and Menorca
Gibraltar and Menorca were both prized naval bases, but Britain ceded Menorca back to Spain at Amiens in 1802, while Gibraltar is still British.
Q 17The asiento, ceded by Spain to Britain in 1713, was the right to do what?
Sell African slaves in Spanish America
The asiento let Britain sell African slaves in Spanish America, and trade rows under it led to the War of Jenkins' Ear, named for a captain whose ear Spanish coastguards allegedly cut off.
Q 18Which 1757 battle left the East India Company in control of Bengal?
Plassey
Plassey was decided by a plot: Robert Clive had promised to make Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander, ruler of Bengal, and his cavalry refused to fight.
Q 19Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Spain ceded which territory to Britain?
The Floridas
Spain gave up the Floridas to win back Havana, which Britain had captured in 1762.
Q 20Britain began peace talks with its American colonies after a decisive defeat at which 1781 battle?
Yorktown
When news of Yorktown reached Lord North he cried 'Oh God! It is all over!', and he resigned as prime minister in March 1782.
Q 24What name did James Cook give the eastern coast of Australia when he claimed it for Britain in 1770?
New South Wales
New South Wales's first colony was meant for Botany Bay, but the First Fleet found it unsuitable and settled at Sydney Cove on Port Jackson in January 1788.
Q 25Which botanist from Cook's first voyage later urged Britain to send convicts to Botany Bay?
Joseph Banks
Joseph Banks knew the site first-hand: Cook named Botany Bay for the great quantity of plants Banks and Daniel Solander collected there in 1770.
Q 26Which Australian colony received the last British convict ship, in 1868?
Western Australia
Western Australia was founded for free settlers, yet it only began taking convicts in 1850.
Q 27Alexander Mackenzie, who reached the Pacific overland in 1793, worked for which fur-trading firm?
North West Company
Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company painted 'from Canada, by land' on a rock at the Pacific, more than a decade before Lewis and Clark crossed the continent.
Q 28Tipu Sultan died in 1799 during the siege of which city?
Seringapatam
Seringapatam fell on 4 May 1799, and Tipu's Tiger, his near life-size automaton of a tiger mauling a British man, was seized there and is now in London's V&A.
Q 29Which country ceded Heligoland to Britain in the settlement after the Napoleonic Wars?
Denmark
Denmark ceded Heligoland by the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, and in 1890 Britain handed the island to Germany in return for recognition of British rule in Zanzibar.
Q 30Which West African colony was designated in 1808 as an official British colony for freed slaves?
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, was founded in 1792 by about 1,200 Black Loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American Revolution and sailed from Nova Scotia.