“sphere of influence” in 1893, and have been since taken under a closer protectorate. The increase of British India itself between 1871 and 1891 amounted to an area of 104,993 square miles, with a population of 25,330,000, while no reliable measurement of the formation of new native States within that period and since is available. Many of the measurements here given are in round numbers, indicative of their uncertainty, but they are taken, whereever available, from official publications of the Colonial Office, corroborated or supplemented from the Statesman’s Year Book. ‘They will by no means comprise the full tale of our expansion during the thirty years, for many enlargements made by the several colonies themselves are omitted. But taken as they stand they make a formidable addition to the growth of an Empire whose nucleus is’ only 120,000 square miles, with 40,000,000 population.
For so small a nation to add to its domains in the course of a single generation an area of 4,754,000 square miles[1] with an estimated population of 88,000,000, is a historical fact of great significance.
Accepting Sir Robert Giffen’s estimate[2] of the size of our Empire (including Egypt and the Soudan) at about 13,000,006 square miles, with a population of some 400 to 420 millions (of whom about 50,000,000 are of British race and speech), we find that one-third of this Empire, containing quite one-fourth of the total population of the Empire, was acquired within the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. This is in tolerably close agreement with other independent estimates.[3]
