Crown colony

A Crown colony was a type of colonial administration of the British Empire.

Crown colonies were ruled by a governor appointed by the Monarch (and, later, the Secretary of State for the Colonies).Jenks, p.70 Though the term was not used at the time, the first of what would later become known as Crown colonies was the Colony of Virginia in the present-day United States, after The Crown took control from the Virginia Company in 1624.Porter, p.477

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the term was primarily used to refer to those colonies which had been acquired through wars, such as Trinidad and Tobago and British Guiana, but after this point it was more broadly applied to any colony other than the Presidencies and provinces of British India and the colonies of British settlement such as The Canadas, Newfoundland, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and New Zealand, later to become the Dominions.Olson, p.343

The term continued to be used up until 1981, when the British Nationality Act 1981 reclassified the remaining British colonies as "British-Dependent Territories". From 2002 they have been known as British Overseas Territories.

Types of Crown colony

There were three types of Crown colony as of 1918, with differing degrees of...
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