IF you go to a movie house this weekend and movie trailers are shown, you will have probably noticed that most of these movies have websites ending in the .co.uk domain. These mean they are not Hollywood movies but flicks whose first country of production is the United Kingdom, the capital of which is London. Even settings of most Hollywood movies have radically shifted to Great Britain, a very small country not even worth included in the world atlas as compared to other places in the world.

The United Kingdom if you may recall has been a world naval superpower even up to this day. For the last 2,000 years, only Native Americans ruled what is now the United States and Rome ruled Europe. But for the last 500 years, the Europeans had set out to sea to conquer new lands. That’s when the Spaniards and the Portuguese excelled. But what is even more amazing is the entry of the United Kingdom into the fray. The United Kingdom is a very little country and it is an archipelago at that – so frail and so vulnerable from open sea-based attacks. That is why their foray into naval expeditions was belittled by the European mainlanders.

To the shock of the entire planet, the British prevailed. A little country as they are (the island of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man), they have succeeded in conquering such huge countries as India (which then included what is now as Pakistan and Bangladesh), South Africa and Australia. That is the might of the empire in what is now known as the United Kingdom.

Every empire has its end though. It saw its doom with the rise of independent-minded Caucasian people in the United States. The United States drove the British back and erected their own country. But after the War of Independence, US-British relations flourished back again. It can best be described in the dividing of the memento coming from HMS Resolute. One memento sits at the Buckingham Palace, the seat of the Queen herself, while the other sits at the Oval Office.

But now, there is a resurgence of English imperialism and world dominance over the United States, at least in the movie industry. In late 2007 when the Hollywood writers’ guild had a strike, British film productions took advantage of the situation by hiring these writers and making superb quality movies. Now they are slowly being released.