34. Winston Churchill was the epitome of the British Empire.
Born in 1874, Winston Spencer Churchill (who was half American), symbolized the English upper-class and what became known as the White Man’s Burden after Rudyard Kipling published a poem of that name. Churchill was a lifelong advocate of British imperialism, who managed to convince the western world that, despite controlling the largest empire in world history, Great Britain was but a small island battling the Germans alone during World War II. Following the war, he advocated suppression of the independence movements which erupted throughout the empire, especially in India and Singapore. For Churchill, World War II had been about saving the British Empire as much as defeating Nazism.