The formation of the united kingdom

The process of creating ‘The United Kingdom’ from a group of island nations on the North-West edge of Europe took several centuries to complete. After long-term conflict across local borders, the union between England and Wales in the mid-1500s was followed, a century and-a-half later, by the union with Scotland in 1707, consolidating the unity of mainland ‘Great Britain’.

With its much larger population and financial clout, England remained the dominant partner. The smaller nations, surrendering national governance to London, continued their struggle for identity. An internal empire was thus growing apace as the wider British Empire took shape across the globe.

The Complex Unity of the United Kingdom

In 1800 Ireland became the final member of what would henceforth be called ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. But this latecomer, separated by the seas, remained very much its own island. Here the tensions of Union led to stronger forms of resistance which in the early decades of the 20th century erupted into an armed insurgency against the British, and then Civil War.

The outcome was the political partition of the country, in 1920, into the ‘north’ – the ‘Northern Ireland’ which would continue as the fourth region of the UK – and the ‘south’, modern-day Ireland. This contentious division, heralding the break-up of the British Empire which would accelerate in the post-WWII years, would create bitter and violent conflict in Northern Ireland - the 'Troubles'' - from the 1960s until the 1990s.

National and Regional Geographies

The United Kingdom was thus, from the outset, a complex of identities caught between the impulses of unity – ‘Britishness’ – and independence

(Welshness’, ‘Scottishness’, ‘Irishness’). The most powerful player, ‘England’,

inevitably found itself conflated with ‘Britain’ and hence, to widespread

confusion at home and abroad, ‘Englishness’ was erroneously conflated with ‘Britishness’ itself.

The four nations, of course, continued to experience their own internal

differences – in Wales, between the rapidly industrialising south and the more

rural north; in Scotland, between the urban arc of the lowlands and Eastern

coast, and the northerly and western Highlands and Islands; and across the sea,

by the intense artificiality of the divided Ireland. England began to bear the marks of its own north-south divide, between the de-industralised North and the South-East, dominated by the political and economic power of the capital, London.

Britain’s history

Great Britain was the dominant industrial and maritime power of the 19th century and played a leading role in developing parliamentary democracy and in advancing literature and science.

At its peak, the British Empire stretched over one-fourth of the earth's surface. The first half of the 20th century saw the UK's strength seriously depleted in two World Wars. The second half witnessed the dismantling of the Empire and the UK rebuilding itself into a modern and prosperous European nation. As one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, a founding member of NATO, and of the Commonwealth, the UK pursues a global approach to foreign policy.