<P> Ireland had been ruled from London since the Middle Ages . After the Protestant Reformation the British Establishment began a campaign of discrimination against Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Irish, who lacked many rights under the Penal Laws, and the majority the agricultural land was owned the Protestant Ascendancy . Great Britain and Ireland had become a single nation ruled from London without the autonomous Parliament of Ireland after the Act of Union of 1800 was passed, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland . In the mid-19th century, Ireland suffered a devastating Potato Famine, which killed 10% of the population and led to massive emigration: see Irish diaspora . </P> <P> Throughout the 19th century, Britain's power grew enormously and the sun quite literally "never set" on the British Empire, for it had outposts on every occupied continent . It consolidated control over such far flung territories as Canada and British Guiana in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand in Oceania; Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore in the Far East and a line of colonial possessions from Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope through Africa . All of India was under British rule by 1870 . </P> <P> In 1804, the Shah of the declining Mughal Empire had formally accepted the protection of the British East India Company . Many Britons settled in India, establishing a ruling class . They then expanded into neighbouring Burma . Among the British born in India were the immensely influential writers Rudyard Kipling (1865) and George Orwell (1903). </P> <P> In the Far East, Britain went to war with the ruling Qing Dynasty of China when it tried to stop Britain from selling the dangerous drug opium to the Chinese people . The First Opium War (1840--1842), ended in a British victory, and China was forced to remove barriers to British trade and cede several ports and the island of Hong Kong to Britain . Soon, other powers sought these same privileges with China and China was forced to agree, ending Chinese isolation from the rest of the world . In 1853 an American expedition opened up Japan to trade with first the U.S., and then the rest of the world . </P>

Who did lords look to for protection after the fall of the roman empire