I have completely mapped the British Empire, here is my journey.

I started mapping on OpenHistoricalMap in 2019 because of things I had to erase on OpenStreetMap that I wanted recorded for histories sake.

In August 2024 I mapped the boundaries of Central America. Then I read on the forum about a project to map the HRE. I thought of helping, but I didn’t really know much about mapping large relations yet, so instead I opted to start mapping the British Empire.

So from September 2024 - February 6 2025 I spent a crazy amount of time researching the boundaries and border changes of the British colonies. I created a spreadsheet to generate the tags for the relations and another formula to generate the chronologies. This made it very easy and efficient to map the Empire.

In the process of mapping the British Empire I’ve almost completely mapped the other European empires, the Spanish, Dutch and French empires. I might try to complete some of these empires in the near future.

Stats

The chronology has 323 members.

The largest relation has 1817 members.

Examples

Largest extent in 1920

Before American Revolution in 1776

Last relation in 1997

Relation with most pieces (1817) in 1900

British Empire Chronology