The phrase “the sun never sets on this empire” or words to that effect have been used to describe the Spanish colonial empire of the sixteenth century and the British empire of the nineteenth.
My question: Is the statement literally true? I can buy it for the British since they had colonies all over the place, but the Spanish Empire (unless I am mistaken) was basically Spain and South America, and it seems that there may have been times when the whole thing was in darkness.
I’m just wondering if the phrase is a mere rhetorical claim or if it was actually true. Ideally, I would like to know if was true year-round. For example, the sun may have never set in the summer for various reasons, but in winter it may not have worked out.
Spain had the Phillipines and the Spanish East Indies, parts of Africa (Spanish Guinea, etc.) and, during the Iberian Union with Portugal, parts of south-east Asia (in and around modern day India).
Spanish Empire. During the Iberian Union, its pretty clear that the sun would’ve indeed never set on the Spanish Empire.
IIRC, during the early age of discovery, the Pope basically gave the entire non-Christian world west of Brazil to the Spanish, though obviously they never actually gained control over a fraction of that.
Ah, I forgot about the Phillipines. That, Spain, and Peru is enough to guarantee sunsetlessness, at least according to visual inspection of this Day and Night map.
Thanks. I love the SDMB. It’s slowly hacking away at things I’ve wondered about for ages.
For comparison purposes, does anyone know the proportion of the time that the United States (just the states and DC) has sun shining on some part of it? It would seem to be a lot more than the 50% minimum, at least in the summer because of Alaska, but I have no idea how to even begin getting a ballpark figure on this.
If you’re going to include Alaska, the sun doesn’t set in Barrow, Alaska in June.
If you want to stick with the contiguous 48 states, in June, the sun rises at ~4:40AM Eastern in in West Quoddy Head, Maine and set at about 9:20PM Pacific (12:20AM Eastern) in Cape Alava, WA.
But the point of the saying is that countries had territory all around the globe.
If we neglect the tilt of the Earth, then you can get a ballpark answer just by looking at longitude extremes. Disregarding the Aleutian islands (because they’ll get dark pretty quick in the winter), we have Hawaii extending a little past 160 degrees, and Maine extends a little past 67 degrees, for a span of 93 degrees. That means that the Sun would be shining on some part of the US for 273 degrees out of 360, or a little more than 18 hours a day.
If you include Alaska in the summertime, then it’s 24 hours, since Alaska extends above the Arctic Circle. But those same places that get midnight sun in the summer never get any sun at all in the winter, and so probably shouldn’t be counted.
The other thing is that even thought British Empire no longer exists :(, Britain still has a lot of Overseas Territories scattered all over the place, so the claim is probably still technically true- the sun is presumably always shining over some part of Great Britain & Her Dependent Territories.
If you want to consider the Commonwealth the successor to the Empire, then the saying is still true.
Of course, Guam is where America’s day begins. At 146º E, the sun (on the equinox) sets there before it reaches the Virgin Islands (65º W), but it does mean the US spans a region that gets daylight for about 22 hours.
I don’t know. Since the UK gave up Hong Kong, there’s a pretty big gap. There’s no British possession now between the Chagos Archipelago (73 degrees east) and the Pitcairn Islands (130 degrees west). That’s 157 degrees of longitude, which is over ten hours of solar movement. The sun may not have completely set but it’s very low on the horizon.
Uh… mate, look up Commonwealth Realms. There’s a couple of REALLY big places smack in between Chagos and the Pitcairns who still have Aunt Betty as their head of state.
Didn’t say they were British possessions. Made it clear (by naming them, bit of a clue there) that they were Commonwealth Realms. Even explained exactly what the link was (the old woman). But they still count for the purposes of some old saying.
But I specifically said “There’s no British possession now between the Chagos Archipelago (73 degrees east) and the Pitcairn Islands (130 degrees west).”
You have the wrong longitude for Hawaii, because you were only looking at the eight main islands. The westernmost point in Hawaii is Kure Atoll, at about 178 W. It’s uninhabited, but still part of the state. Eighteen more degrees should add just over an hour to the time the sun is shining on the US.
I think tomorrow we begin the process of informing Australians that a little urn of fire residue (and by extention their country) is an English possession.
I always heard it as “The Sun never sets on the Union Flag. Because God doesn’t trust an Englishman in the dark.”
My mistake. I thought we were talking about the old saying, and whether by any stretch it was still true. I read what you said; I never said it wasn’t true; it just didn’t seem to allow for places which still have the British head of state as their head of state, in the context of the saying we were talking about. Weren’t talking about, right, sorry.
This reminds me vaguely of one of my favourite stories from the age of exploration: when Magellan’s expedition completed the circumnavigation of the globe (minus Magellan, of course, who had been killed some time before), they found that despite careful record-keeping, their calendar differed from that on shore by one day (owing to the effect we now standardize using the International Date Line). The phenomenon caused such a stir that a delegation was sent to the Pope to explain it to him.
