The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (usually shortened to the United Kingdom, the U.K., or Britain) is a country and sovereign state that lies to the northwest of mainland Europe. It extends over all of the island of Great Britain and the north-east part of the island of Ireland. Northern Ireland is the only part of the country with a land border, sharing it with the Republic of Ireland
The United Kingdom is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, and its ancillary bodies of water, including the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea, St George's Channel, and the Irish Sea. The United Kingdom is linked to France and Continental Europe by the Channel Tunnel.
(Location of United Kingdom (orange) – on the European continent (camel & white)
– in the European Union (camel) [Legend])
The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy composed of four constituent countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who is also the Queen and Head of State of fifteen other Commonwealth Realms, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica. The Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, formally possessions of the Crown, form a federacy with the United Kingdom collectively known as the British Islands. The UK also has fourteen overseas territories,all remnants of the British Empire which at its height encompassed more than a quarter of the world's surface and population.
History Of United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is the sovereign state or realm that covers England, Scotland, Wales (the island of Great Britain) and Northern Ireland and which for over one hundred years included the whole of the island of Ireland.
The state actually began to take its present shape with the Acts of Union 1707, which united the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland to create a unified "Kingdom of Great Britain". Subsequently, the Act of Union 1800 joined the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to create the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
In 1922, the Irish Free State gained independence, leaving Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. As a result, since 1927 Britain's formal title has been "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". It is usually shortened to "Britain" or "the UK".
Early history
In Britain's earliest history agriculture was overwhelmingly dominant. The most important export was cassiterite, which gave the country its name (cassiterite being called tin in Anglo Saxon). Much of the impetus behind the Roman invasion of Britain was the desire to control the exports of this useful metal.
Middle ages
Initially started to support William the Conqueror's (c. 1029–87) holdings in France, England's policy of active involvement in continental European affairs endured for several hundred years.
The Black Death which has become more recently known as the Black Plague, struck England and Europe particularly hard during the 14th Century and its effects were felt well into the 15th Century. England also suffered from a bullion famine as the silver mines of Europe either closed or fell to the Ottoman Empire, as in Serbia. By the end of the 14th century, foreign trade, originally based on wool exports to Europe, had emerged as a cornerstone of national policy.
England conducted extensive trade with the Low Countries and Italy, exporting vast quantities of wool to those countries' textile industries. For many years England did not have the skilled workforce or the population density to itself participate in manufacturing, but turmoil on the continent as a result of the end of the Italian Renaissance and the wars of religion caused by the Protestant Reformation led to an influx of skilled dyers and weavers. By the 17th century England was a leader in textile production.
In contrast Scotland's main trading partners were France and the Baltic towns of the Hanseatic League.
England had long been a naval power, dependent on a fleet for the defence of the British Isles. The revolution in ship design of the Age of Navigation aided this immensely. For the first time ships were large and sturdy enough to safely ply the Atlantic Ocean, and the oceanic trade became the primary one in Europe, replacing the Mediterranean trade as wealth shifted from southern to western Europe.
Slavery and overseas expansion
In 1562 John Hawkins (also Hawkyns), a pirate and also a cousin of Francis Drake, was given permission by Queen Elizabeth I to take Africans and sell them as slaves. On his voyages, Hawkins encountered several disputes with the Spanish and Portuguese over slave trading rights, animosity between British, Spanish and Portuguese slave traders was bitter. Hawkins helped secure the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 which firmly established England as the major slave trade power. Britain's interests outside Europe grew steadily. It was also attracted by the spice trade, English mercantile interests spread first to the Far East. In search of an alternate route to the Spice Islands, John Cabot reached the North American continent in 1498.
The usual British practice was to take control of an area and rule it with a governor supported by military forces. In most colonies fewer than 1% of the people were British (that is, the administrators, soldiers, traders and missionaries); they were on temporary duty and concentrated in a few leading cities. Beginning about 1600 an entirely different approach began in selected areas, whereby large numbers of British settlers moved permanently to a new area, raising families and creating a new society that was a replica of village life in the motherland. Thus Sir Walter Raleigh set up the first colony on Roanoke Island in 1584, but its 100 or so residents mysteriously disappeared in 1587. The first surviving English settlement began in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. During the next two centuries, England, and after the 1707 Act of Union, Britain, extended its influence abroad and consolidated its political development at home.
Great Britain, through the wealth generated by its extensive slave (and slave-related) trading, its cut-throat competition with the Dutch (which lead to a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars). British leadership in the Industrial Revolution produced the wealth and the new technology--especially steamships and telegraphy--that facilitated the creation and routine maintenance of a worldwide empire. Meanwhile London developed a system of finance and insurance that provided the economic basis for trade, shipping and imperial administration. British scientists played a role--inventing new navigation aids, for example, and in botany investigating all sorts of exotic plants for their economic value.
The organizational skills and new wealth enabled Britain to defeat its great continental rival, Napoleon's France. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain was the foremost global power; the Royal Navy ruled the waves. Peace in Europe allowed the British to focus their interests on more remote parts of the world; by 1923 the British Empire reached its peak. The reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) witnessed the spread of British technology, commerce, language, and government throughout the world. The Empire at its height encompassed roughly one quarter of the world's area and population. British colonies contributed to Britain's extraordinary economic growth and strengthened its voice in world affairs, but they were expensive and probably were a net economic loss to the mother country. The dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) on the other hand were economic assets to the mother country, and tightened their ties during the Great Depression by a system of favourable tariffs inside the Empire. [1]
une 1815, was Napoleon Bonaparte's last battle. His defeat put a final end to his rule as Emperor of France. The Battle of Waterloo also marked the end of the period known as the Hundred Days, which began in March 1815 after Napoleon's return from Elba, where he had been exiled after his defeat at the battle of Leipzig in 1813.
After Napoleon returned to power, many countries which had previously resisted his rule began to assemble armies to oppose him. The principal armies of Napoleon's opponents were commanded by the United Kingdom's Duke of Wellington, and Prussia's Gebhard von Blücher. These armies were close to France's north east frontier, and Napoleon chose to attack them rather than wait for them to cross into France.
While the campaign hung in the balance for most of its duration, the decisive battle became the Battle of Waterloo. Allied forces, under Wellington, withstood a final French attack, and counter-attacked while the Prussians, arriving in force, broke through on Napoleon's right flank.
The Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland had existed as separate sovereign and independent states with their own monarchs and political structures since the 9th century. The once independent Principality of Wales fell under the control of English monarchs from the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284. Under the Acts of Union 1707, England (including Wales) and Scotland, which had been in personal union since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, agreed to a political union in the form of a unified Kingdom of Great Britain. The Act of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland, which had been gradually brought under English control between 1541 and 1691, to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.Independence for the Republic of Ireland in 1922 followed the partition of the island of Ireland two years previously, with six of the nine counties of the province of Ulster remaining within the UK, which then changed to the current name in 1927 of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.(The term Great Britain in a political sense still refers to the three of the four constituent countries, namely England, Scotland and Wales, on the island of Great Britain. The United Kingdom however always formally includes Northern Ireland).
Britain was an important part of the Age of Enlightenment with philosophical and scientific input and an influential literary and theatrical tradition.Over the next century the United Kingdom played a leading role in developing Western ideas of parliamentary democracy with significant contributions to literature, the arts and science. The wealth of the British Empire, like other Great Powers, was also partly generated by colonial exploitation, including the industrialisation after 1750 of the slave trade, with Britain's 18th century shipping fleet, the largest in the world, taking African slaves to the Americas as part of the infamous triangular trade. At the beginning of the 19th however, Britain passed the Slave Trade Act and became the first nation to permanently prohibit trade in slaves.
After the Industrial Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain became the principal power of the 19th century. At its peak, the British Empire, which is considered to be both the United Kingdom and areas that are legally separate entities from, but controlled by, the UK, stretched to almost one-third of the earth and encompassed a third of its population, making it in terms of population and territory the largest in history.
Over the 19th century the country played an important role in the development of parliamentary democracy, partly via the emergence of a multi-party system. Developments of science and the arts, building on an 18th century inheritance of figures such as Isaac Newton, and particularly its earlier tradition of literature, were influential.
The age of mercantilism
The basis of the British Empire was founded in the age of mercantilism, an economic theory that stressed maximizing the trade inside the empire, and trying to weaken rival empires. The modern British Empire was based upon the preceding English Empire which first took shape in the early 17th century, with the English settlement of the eastern colonies of North America, which would later become the original United States, as well as Canada's Maritime provinces, and the colonisations of the smaller islands of the Caribbean such as Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica.
These sugar plantation islands, where slavery became the basis of the economy, were part of Britain's most important and successful colonies. The American colonies also utilized slave labour in the farming of tobacco, cotton, and rice in the south. Naval material and furs in the north were less financially successful, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of British immigrants who would also utilize slave labor to farm agricultural commodities.
Britain's American empire was slowly expanded by war and colonization. The ever growing American colonies pressed westward in search of new agricultural lands. Conflict arose with the Dutch over trade and empire; First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654); Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667); Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674); England gained control of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York, but ceded Suriname. They defeated the French, first expanding their hold over the maritime provinces. Then during the Seven Years' War the British defeated the French at the Plains of Abraham and captured all of New France in 1760. This gave Britain control over almost all of North America. Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784); Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814; Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824.
The Industrial Revolution
Economy of Britain during the Industrial Revolution
Slave trading had generated astounding wealth for Britain. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a series of technological advances led to the Industrial Revolution. Britain's position as the world's pre-eminent trader helped fund research and experimentation. The nation was also gifted by some of the world's greatest reserves of coal, the main fuel of the new revolution.
It was also fueled by a rejection of mercantilism in favour of The predominance of Adam Smith's laissez-faire capitalism. The fight against Mercantilism was led by a number of liberal thinkers, such as Richard Cobden, Joseph Hume, Francis Place and John Roebuck.
The Industrial Revolution saw a rapid transformation in the British economy and society. Previously large industries had to be near forests or rivers for power. The use of coal-fuelled engines allowed them to be placed in large urban centres. These new factories proved far more efficient at producing goods than the cottage industry of a previous era. These manufactured goods were sold around the world, and raw materials and luxury goods were imported to Britain.
During the Industrial Revolution the empire became less important and less well-regarded. The British defeat in the American War of Independence (1775-1783) deprived it of one of its most populous colonies. This loss of the southern American colonies was coupled with a realisation that colonies were not particularly economically beneficial. It was realised that the costs of occupation of colonies often exceeded the financial return to the taxpayer. In other words, formal empire afforded no great economic benefit when trade would continue whether the overseas political entities were nominally sovereign or not. The American Revolution helped demonstrate this by showing that Britain could still control trade with the colonies without having to pay for their defence and governance. Capitalism encouraged the British to grant their colonies self-government. The end of the old colonial system was most evident in the repeal of the Corn Laws, the agricultural subsidies on colonial grain. The end of these laws opened the British market to unfettered competition, grain prices fell, and food became more plentiful. The repeal greatly injured Canada, however, whose grain exports lost a great deal of their profitability.
Some argue that this push for free trade was merely because of Britain economic position and was unconnected with any true philosophic dedication to free trade. Roughly between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War, Britain reaped the benefits of being the world's sole modern, industrialised nation. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Britain was the 'workshop of the world', meaning that its finished goods were produced so efficiently and cheaply that they could often undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods in almost any other market. If political conditions in a particular overseas markets were stable enough, Britain could dominate its economy through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule or mercantilism. Britain was even supplying half the needs in manufactured goods of such nations as Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States.
Britain, in this sense, continued to adhere to the Cobdenite notion that informal colonialism was preferable — the established consensus among industrial capitalists during the age of Pax Britannica between the downfall of Napoleon and the Franco-Prussian War.
Sovereign areas already hospitable to informal empire largely avoided formal rule, even often during the shift to New Imperialism. China, for instance, was not a backward country unable to secure the prerequisite stability and security for western-style commerce, but a highly advanced empire unwilling to admit western (often drug-pushing) commerce, which may explain the West's contentment with informal 'Spheres of Influence'. China, unlike tropical Africa, was a securable market without formal control.
The victory of forces of the British East India Company at Plassey (1757) opened the great Indian province of Bengal to British rule, though later (1770) famine exacerbated by massive expropriation of provincial government revenues aroused controversy at home. The nineteenth century saw Company rule extended across India after expelling the Dutch, French and Portuguese. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1858 India became a crown colony. The territory continued to expand as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma were added to Britain's Asian territories, which extended further east to Malaya and (1841) to Hong Kong following a successful war in defence of the Company's opium exports to China.
Second Industrial Revolution
Second Industrial Revolution
During the First Industrial Revolution, the industrialist replaced the merchant as the dominant figure in the capitalist system. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when the ultimate control and direction of large industry came into the hands of financiers, industrial capitalism gave way to financial capitalism and the corporation. The establishment of behemoth industrial empires, whose assets were controlled and managed by men divorced from production, was a dominant feature of this third phase.
New products and services were also introduced which greatly increased international trade. Improvements in steam engine design and the wide availability of cheap steel meant that slow, sailing ships could be replaced with steamships, such as Brunel's SS Great Western. Electricity and chemical industries also moved to the forefront. In many of these sectors Britain had far less of an edge than other powers such as Germany and the United States, who both rose to equal and even surpass Britain in economic heft.
Amalgamation of industrial cartels into larger corporations, mergers and alliances of separate firms, and technological advancement (particularly the increased use of electric power and internal combustion engines fuelled by coal and petroleum) were mixed blessings for British business during the late Victorian era. The ensuing development of more intricate and efficient machines along with monopolistic mass production techniques greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. Among the new conditions, more markedly evident in Britain, the forerunner of Europe's industrial states, were the long-term effects of the severe Long Depression of 1873-1896, which had followed fifteen years of great economic instability. Businesses in practically every industry suffered from lengthy periods of low — and falling — profit rates and price deflation after 1873.
Long-term economic trends led Britain, and to a lesser extent, other industrialising nations such as the United States and Germany, to be more receptive to the desires of prospective overseas investment. Through their investments in industry, banks were able to exert a great deal of control over the British economy and politics. Cut-throat competition in the mid-1800s caused the creation of super corporations and conglomerates. Many companies borrowed heavily to achieve the vast sums of money required to takeover their rivals, resulting in a new capitalist stage of development.
By the 1870s, financial houses in London had achieved an unprecedented level of control over industry. This contributed to increasing concerns among policymakers over the protection of British investments overseas — particularly those in the securities of foreign governments and in foreign-government-backed development activities, such as railroads. Although it had been official British policy to support such investments, with the large expansion of these investments in the 1860s, and the economic and political instability of many areas of investment (such as Egypt), calls upon the government for methodical protection became increasingly pronounced in the years leading up to the Crystal Palace Speech. At the end of the Victorian-era, the service sector (banking, insurance and shipping, for example) began to gain prominence at the expense of manufacturing.
Foreign investment Twentieth century
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