6. British ports expanded from the sugar and slave trades.
While London remained the center of British trade, the western port cities of Bristol and Liverpool expanded rapidly, their docks forming one point of what became the Triangle Trade routes. Near the end of the 17th century, the Parliament of Scotland established the Company of Scotland, which tried and failed to create a profitable colony on the Isthmus of Panama. The failure was a financial disaster for Scotland, and was one of the prime factors in the union of the governments of England and Scotland in 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain through the Treaty of Union. By that time, England’s colonial ambitions had already extended into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.