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80 free British Empire trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01By 1920 the British Empire covered roughly what share of the Earth's total land area?
24 per cent
That was about 35.5 million square kilometres, and by 1913 the empire already ruled 412 million people, 23 per cent of the world's population.
Q 02The British Empire was famously described as 'the empire on which the sun never' does what?
Sets
The phrase captured the fact that the sun was always shining on at least one British territory somewhere on the globe.
Q 03Which explorer did Henry VII commission in 1496 to find a Northwest Passage to Asia?
John Cabot
He sailed in 1497, five years after Columbus, made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland and believed he had reached Asia; his second voyage in 1498 never returned.
Q 04Which Elizabethan writer was the first to use the term 'British Empire'?
John Dee
Dee, a mathematician and occultist as well as an advocate of English expansion, coined the phrase while pressing Elizabeth I to build an empire of her own.
Q 05Who founded the ill-fated Roanoke Colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina in 1584?
Walter Raleigh
Raleigh was granted his patent after his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert died on the voyage home from claiming Newfoundland; Roanoke failed for lack of supplies.
Q 06Founded in 1607, what was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas?
Jamestown
It was managed by the Virginia Company until the Crown took direct control in 1624, creating the Colony of Virginia.
Q 07How did England come to settle and claim Bermuda in 1609?
A shipwreck
The Virginia Company's flagship was wrecked there on its way to Jamestown, and the survivors' stay is often cited as an inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Q 08Which colony was established in 1634 as a haven for English Roman Catholics?
Maryland
Rhode Island followed in 1636 as a colony tolerant of all religions, and Connecticut in 1639 for Congregationalists.
Q 09The capture of New Amsterdam in 1664 gave England which Dutch colony?
New Netherland
New Amsterdam itself was renamed New York, and the annexation gave England a continuous strip of Atlantic seaboard.
Q 10On which Caribbean island were England's first large sugarcane plantations established in the 1640s?
Barbados
Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews fleeing Portuguese Brazil helped set them up, and slave-produced sugar soon made the island the most successful colony in the Americas.
Q 11Which island did England annex from Spain in 1655?
Jamaica
The Bahamas followed in 1666, and Parliament's 1651 rule that only English ships could trade with English colonies triggered a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars.
Q 12The Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, was granted a fur-trade monopoly over which territory?
Rupert's Land
Named for Prince Rupert, the company's first governor, the territory would later form a large proportion of the Dominion of Canada.
Q 13Under the Royal African Company, England's share of the Atlantic slave trade rose from 33% in 1673 to what by 1683?
74%
The company transported more slaves across the Atlantic than any other, and the end of its monopoly after 1688 let independent traders expand the trade further still.
Q 21Which 1776 book argued that colonies were redundant and free trade should replace mercantilism?
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith's view seemed vindicated when trade with the newly independent United States grew after 1783 without any political control.
Q 22Which colony was split from Nova Scotia in 1784 for Loyalists in the Saint John valley?
New Brunswick
Around 14,000 Loyalists in the Saint John and Saint Croix river valleys felt too far from the government in Halifax.
Q 23Which 1814 treaty ended the War of 1812 and reaffirmed the pre-war US–Canada boundaries?
Ghent
The war began when Congress objected to Britain boarding American ships to impress men into the Royal Navy, and ended with Canada's future confirmed as separate from the United States.
Q 14Roughly how many Africans were carried across the Atlantic by British ships before abolition in 1807?
3.5 million
That was about a third of all slaves shipped across the Atlantic, and the average mortality rate on the Middle Passage was one in seven.
Q 15Scotland's Company of Scotland founded its disastrous Darien settlement in 1698 on which isthmus?
Panama
Besieged by Spanish colonists and ravaged by malaria, it was abandoned after two years, having swallowed a quarter of Scotland's capital and helped push Scotland into the 1707 union with England.
Q 16Which two territories did Britain gain from Spain under the Treaty of Utrecht?
Gibraltar and Menorca
Newfoundland and Acadia came from France in the same settlement, and Gibraltar became the naval base controlling the Atlantic gateway to the Mediterranean.
Q 17The asiento, ceded by Spain to Britain in 1713, was the right to do what?
Sell African slaves in Spanish America
Britain lost these slave-trading rights in Latin America again under the 1750 Treaty of Madrid.
Q 18Which 1757 battle left the East India Company in control of Bengal?
Plassey
Robert Clive's victory over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies made the company a major military and political power in India.
Q 19Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Spain ceded which territory to Britain?
The Floridas
France simultaneously ceded New France to Britain and Louisiana to Spain, ending its future as a North American colonial power.
Q 20Britain began peace talks with its American colonies after a decisive defeat at which 1781 battle?
Yorktown
French and Spanish entry into the war had tipped the balance, and American independence was formally acknowledged at the Peace of Paris in 1783.
Q 24What name did James Cook give the eastern coast of Australia when he claimed it for Britain in 1770?
New South Wales
The Dutch had sighted the Australian coast in 1606 but never tried to colonise it; the first shipload of British convicts arrived in 1788.
Q 25Which botanist from Cook's voyage recommended Botany Bay as a penal settlement in 1778?
Joseph Banks
Britain needed a new destination for convicts after losing the American colonies, where about a thousand a year had been transported since 1718.
Q 26Britain continued transporting convicts to Western Australia until which year?
1868
Transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840 and to Tasmania in 1853, but Western Australia kept accepting convicts for another fifteen years.
Q 27Alexander Mackenzie, who reached the Pacific overland in 1793, worked for which fur-trading firm?
North West Company
He was the first European to reach the Pacific overland north of the Rio Grande, twelve years ahead of Lewis and Clark.
Q 28Tipu Sultan died in 1799 during the siege of which city?
Seringapatam
His death in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War turned Mysore into a protectorate of the East India Company.
Q 29Which country ceded Heligoland to Britain in the settlement after the Napoleonic Wars?
Denmark
The same settlement brought Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon and the Cape Colony under British rule, while Java and Suriname went back to the Dutch.
Q 30Which West African colony was designated in 1808 as an official British colony for freed slaves?
Sierra Leone
It followed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished the trade itself; slavery in the colonies was not ended until 1 August 1834.