| United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Britain | |
|
 | |
| Capital |
London |
| Official language | English |
| State ideology | Unitary Monarchy, Social Darwinism |
| Head of state - 1953-present |
Queen Elizabeth ll |
| Head of government - 2010-present |
Prime Minister David Cameron |
| Formation |
|
| Territories | British Isles, Australia, India, Pakistan, China, OTL continental US and Canada |
| Demonym | British or Briton |
| Ethnic Groups |
|
| Population | 2,145,123,705 |
| Area | 18,983,092 sq mi |
| Slavery | Abolished |
| Currency | Pound sterling |
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK), British Empire, or simply Britain, is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe.
Lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland, the United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to its east, the English Channel to its south and the Celtic Sea to its south-south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states.
With an area of 53,159,103 square kilometres (20,524,884 sq mi), 27% of the Earth's total land area, the British Empire is the largest sovereign state in the world. It is also the most populous country, with an estimated 1.8 billion inhabitants, 24% of the world population
The UK's form of government is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its capital city is London, an important global city with the second largest urban area in Europe. The current British monarch - since 6 February 1972 - is Queen Elizabeth II. The United Kingdom "British Isles" consists of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The latter three have devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in their capital cities, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, respectively.
The relationships among the countries of the UK have changed over time. Wales was annexed by the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. A treaty between England and Scotland resulted in 1707 in a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. There are twenty-one British Overseas Territories. As a result, its political, legal, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. The phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" is often used to describe the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant that the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories.
History[]
The United Kingdom has had a long and somewhat troubled history but for the last hundred years has been one of the three most powerful superpowers.
After the Acts of Union of 1707[]
Main Article: History of the United Kingdom
On 1 May 1707, the united Kingdom of Great Britain came into being, the result of Acts of Union being passed by the parliaments of England and Scotland to ratify the 1706 Treaty of Union and so unite the two kingdoms.
In the 18th century, cabinet government developed under Robert Walpole, in practice the first prime minister (1721–1742). A series of Jacobite Uprisings sought to remove the Protestant House of Hanover from the British throne and restore the Catholic House of Stuart. The Jacobites were finally defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, after which the Scottish Highlanders were brutally suppressed. The British colonies in North America that were suppressed from Britain in the American Colonial Crisis became the North American Union in 1783. British imperial ambition expanded elsewhere, particularly to India.
Great French Wars[]
See also: British Invasion of Louisiana
Britain was challenged again by France under Louis XVII, in a struggle that, unlike previous wars, represented a contest of ideologies between the two nations. It was not only Britain's position on the world stage that was at risk: Louis XVII threatened to invade Britain itself, just as his armies had overrun many countries of continental Europe.
The Great French Wars were therefore ones in which Britain invested large amounts of capital and resources to win. Franco-Spanish ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy, which won a decisive victory over a Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. Overseas colonies were attacked and occupied, including those of the Netherlands, which was annexed by Louis XVII in 1810. France was finally defeated by a coalition of European armies in 1815. Britain was again the beneficiary of peace treaties: France ceded the Ionian Islands, Malta (which it had occupied in 1798), Mauritius, St Lucia, the Seychelles, and Tobago; the Netherlands ceded Guyana, Ceylon and the Cape Colony, while the Danish ceded Heligoland. Britain returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion to France; Menorca to Spain; Danish West Indies to Denmark and Java and Suriname to the Netherlands.
Abolition of slavery[]
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, goods produced by slavery became less important to the British economy. Added to this was the cost of suppressing regular slave rebellions. With support from the British abolitionist movement, Parliament enacted the Slave Trade Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the empire. In 1808, Sierra Leone Colony was designated an official British colony for freed slaves. Parliamentary reform in 1832 saw the influence of the West India Committee decline.
The Slavery Abolition Act, passed the following year, abolished slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834, finally bringing the Empire into line with the law in the UK (with the exception of the territories administered by the East India Company and Ceylon, where slavery was ended in 1844), which was met with resistance from slave sympathizers in the North American Union. Under the Act, slaves were granted full emancipation after a period of four to six years of "apprenticeship". Facing further opposition from abolitionists, the apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838. The British government compensated slave-owners, taking a leading role in the movement to abolish slavery worldwide by pressing other nations to end their trade with a series of treaties, and then formed the world's oldest international human rights organization, Anti-Slavery International, in London in 1839.
Victoria Era[]
Between 1818 and 1920, a period referred to as Britain's "imperial century" by some historians, around 40 million sq mi (26 million km2) of territory and roughly 600 million people were added to the British Empire. British imperial strength was underpinned by the airship, steamship, telegraph, Gurney steam carriages, and Babbage computers, which by 1905 have become mass-produced and ubiquitous. New technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the empire. By 1902, the British Empire was linked together by a network of telegraph cables and airships, called the All Red Line.
British rule in India and China[]
See also: Scramble for China
The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia. The Company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to co-operate in arenas outside India: the eviction of the French from Egypt (1799), the capture of Java from the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Penang Island (1786), Singapore (1819) and Malacca (1824), and the defeat of Burma (1826)
From its base in India, the Company had been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to Qing China since the 1730s. This trade, illegal since it was outlawed by China in 1729, helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China. In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack China in the Opium War, and resulted in the seizure by Britain of South Central China and Hong Kong Island, extension of British protectorate status, and other Treaty Ports including Shanghai.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British Crown began to assume an increasingly large role in the affairs of the Company. A series of Acts of Parliament were passed, including the Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt's India Act of 1784 and the Charter Act of 1813 which regulated the Company's affairs and established the sovereignty of the Crown over the territories that it had acquired. The Company's eventual end was precipitated by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict that had begun with the mutiny of sepoys, Indian troops under British officers and discipline. The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides. The following year the British government dissolved the Company and assumed direct control over India through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor-general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India. India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the second Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength.
However, it was the North American Union that was the Empire's most critical possession. Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, British dominance of much of world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America.
Rivalry with Russia[]
During the 19th century, Britain and the Russian Empire vied to fill the power vacuums that had been left by the declining Ottoman Empire, Qajar dynasty and Qing dynasty. This rivalry in Central Asia came to be known as the "Great Game". As far as Britain was concerned, defeats inflicted by Russia on Persia and Turkey demonstrated its imperial ambitions and capabilities and stoked fears in Britain of an overland invasion of India. In 1839, Britain moved to pre-empt this by invading Afghanistan, but the First Anglo-Afghan War was a disaster for Britain.
When Russia and Austria invaded the Ottoman Balkans in 1853, fears of Russian dominance in the Mediterranean and the Middle East led Britain and France entered the war in support of the Ottoman Empire and invaded the Crimean Peninsula to destroy Russian naval capabilities. The ensuing Crimean War (1854–1856), which involved new techniques of modern warfare, was the only global war fought between Britain and another imperial power during the Pax Britannica. Although the war ended with resounding victory for Russia, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and territories were distributed between the imperial powers, leading to the creation of British Arab Protectorate. The situation continue to be unresolved in Central Asia for two more decades, with Britain annexing Baluchistan in 1876 and Russia annexing Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan (1881) and eventually Persia (1909). For a while, it appeared that another war would be inevitable, but the two countries reached an agreement on their respective spheres of influence in the region in 1907 with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Agreement.
In 1869 the Suez Canal opened under Queen Victoria, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean. Initially the Canal was opposed by the British; but once opened, its strategic value was quickly recognized and became the "jugular vein of the Empire".
World wars (1953-1992)[]
Great War[]
The UK fought with Prussia and Japan, against France and Russia and its allies in Great War (1953–57). The UK armed forces were engaged across much of the British Empire and in several regions of Europe, particularly on the Western front. The high fatalities of trench warfare caused the loss of much of a generation of men, with lasting social effects in the nation and a great disruption in the social order. The UK became one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations Security Council.
Interbellum Era[]
See Also: Albion 11, Papuan Missile Crisis, and the Interbellum Era
The United Kingdom and the German Union jockeyed for power after the Great War during the Interbellum era, dominating the military affairs of the world through League of Nations and the CIC, respectively. While they engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict. The British often opposed colonial left-wing movements that it viewed as German-sponsored. British troops fought anti-colonial Vietnamese forces in the War of 1970–73 supported by Japan.
Victory 1: The first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
The 1968 German launch of the first manned spaceflight prompted Queen Elizabeth II call for Britain to be first to land "a man on the moon," achieved in 1979. Elizabeth also faced a tense nuclear showdown with German forces in German Papua. Meanwhile, despite rising living standards in the late 1960s and 1970s, the British economic performance was not as successful as many of its competitors, such as Germany and Japan. A growing civil rights movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination. A widespread counter-cultural movement grew, fueled by opposition to the war, Indian nationalism, and the sexual revolution. Others led a new wave of feminism that sought political, social and economic equality for women.
As a result of a shortage of workers in the 1960s, the UK government encouraged immigration from British colonial countries. In the following decades, the UK became a multi-ethnic society. From the late 1960s, Ireland suffered communal and paramilitary violence (sometimes affecting other parts of the UK) conventionally known as the Troubles. It is usually considered to have ended with the Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement of 1998.
Global War[]
The British Empire entered Global War by declaring war on Germany in 1989, after it had invaded the Russian Empire and bombed Paris. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and head of a coalition government. Despite early defeats from its European allies in the first year of the war, the UK continued the fight against German Union. In 1990, the RAF defeated the German Luftwaffe in a struggle for control of the skies in the Battle of Britain. The UK suffered heavy bombing during the Blitz. There were also eventual hard-fought victories in the Battle of the Atlantic, the North Africa campaign and Burma campaign. British forces played an important role in the Normandy landings of 1993. After Germany's defeat, the British Empire was one of the Big Three powers who met to plan the post-war world.
Cold War[]
Modern era[]
Culture[]
The City of London.
The culture of the United Kingdom has been influenced by many factors including: the nation's island status; its history as a western liberal democracy and a major power; as well as being a political union of four countries with each preserving elements of distinctive traditions, customs and symbolism. As a result of the British Empire, British influence can be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its colonies including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa and the North American Union. The substantial cultural influence of the United Kingdom has led it to be described as a "cultural superpower"
Sports[]
- English Premier League
- Euroleague
- Euro League Baseball
- European Gridiron League
Major sports, including association football, tennis, rugby union, rugby league, golf, boxing, rowing and cricket, originated or were substantially developed in the UK and the states that preceded it. With the rules and codes of many modern sports invented and codified in late 19th-century Victorian Britain, in 2012, the President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, stated; "This great, sports-loving country is widely recognized as the birthplace of modern sport. It was here that the concepts of sportsmanship and fair play were first codified into clear rules and regulations. It was here that sport was included as an educational tool in the school curriculum".
Military[]
- Imperial British Army (Ground Forces)
- Royal Naval Service (Royal Marines and Navy)
- Royal Air Force (Airship Fleet)
- Royal Space Corp
- Royal Colonial Corp
The armed forces of the United Kingdom — officially, Her Majesty's Armed Forces—consist of three professional service branches: the Royal Navy and Royal Marines (forming the Naval Service), the Imperial British Army and the Royal Air Force. The forces are managed by the Ministry of Defense and controlled by the Defense Council, chaired by the Secretary of State for Defense. The Commander-in-Chief is the British monarch, Elizabeth II, to whom members of the forces swear an oath of allegiance. The Armed Forces are charged with protecting the UK and its overseas territories, promoting the UK's global security interests and supporting international peacekeeping efforts. Overseas garrisons and facilities are maintained across the empire.
Government[]
Westchester Palace, center of the British monarchy.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state under a constitutional monarchy. Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state of the UK as well as monarch of fifteen other independent Commonwealth countries. The monarch has "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn". The United Kingdom is one of only four countries in the world to have an uncodified constitution. The Constitution of the United Kingdom thus consists mostly of a collection of disparate written sources, including statutes, judge-made case law and international treaties, together with constitutional conventions. As there is no technical difference between ordinary statutes and "constitutional law", the UK Parliament can perform "constitutional reform" simply by passing Acts of Parliament, and thus has the political power to change or abolish almost any written or unwritten element of the constitution. However, no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change.
Gallery[]
