ABSTRACT
The distinctive feature of the British Empire is the diversity of its forms of society and of the economic structure of its loosely knit component parts. Being a maritime empire, its founders were explorers who traversed the seas and planted settlements in every kind of climate and amidst every kind of human society. Arising out of this difference between the type of early colonial Imperialism in Asia on the one hand and in America on the other, there developed a difference in the type of capital investment of the Mother Country in these areas. This chapter aims to study the growth of British capital export in undeveloped lands, and find that in Asia the capital invested abroad in the early days of mercantile capital was almost entirely in the transport trade in goods. The new colonies which England acquired in the eighteenth century gave a great impetus to scientific invention and paved the way for the industrial revolution.
