The history of the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom is a union of four nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, each with a long history of its own before the union was built. England absorbed Wales in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, joined Scotland to form Great Britain in 1707, and added Ireland in 1801, though most of Ireland left again in 1922. From this island base grew the largest empire in history and the world's first industrial economy. In the twentieth century two world wars and the end of empire reduced Britain's global role, while devolution and the 2016 vote to leave the European Union reshaped the union at home.

People reached Britain long before it was an island. Stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh in Norfolk show that early humans were present more than 800,000 years ago, and a Neanderthal jaw from Bontnewydd in north Wales is around 230,000 years old. Ice sheets drove people out repeatedly, and continuous settlement dates only from the end of the last glaciation, roughly 11,500 years ago, when hunter-gatherers walked across the low plain that now lies under the North Sea. Rising seas cut Britain off from the continent around 6000 BCE.

Farming arrived around 4000 BCE, bringing cleared woodland, cattle and cereal fields, and the monumental landscape of the Neolithic. The stone village of Skara Brae in Orkney, the passage tombs of Anglesey and Stonehenge, built and rebuilt between about 3000 and 2500 BCE, all belong to this age. The Bronze Age began around 2500 BCE, with copper mined at the Great Orme in Wales and tin from Cornwall traded across Atlantic Europe. In the Iron Age, from about 800 BCE, Britain was a patchwork of tribes living in farmsteads and hillforts, speaking the Celtic languages that are ancestral to Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Historians now usually see this Celtic culture as spreading through trade and contact as much as by invasion.

Julius Caesar landed in Britain in 55 and 54 BCE but did not stay. The real conquest began in 43 CE under the emperor Claudius, and over the next forty years the legions overran the lowlands, Wales and much of the north. Resistance was fierce: Boudica, queen of the Iceni, led a revolt in 60 or 61 CE that burned Colchester, London and St Albans before it was crushed. Hadrian's Wall, begun in 122, marked the northern limit of the province of Britannia for most of its history; the Antonine Wall further north was held for only about twenty years.

For more than three and a half centuries southern Britain was part of the Roman Empire. Towns such as Londinium, the forerunner of London, grew up with forums, baths and stone walls, villas spread across the countryside, and Christianity arrived. Wales was held mostly through forts, and the land beyond the walls, home to the people the Romans called Caledonians and later Picts, was never conquered. Roman power faded as troops were withdrawn to fight usurpers' wars on the continent, and by around 410 the Britons were left to defend themselves.

In the fifth and sixth centuries Angles, Saxons and Jutes from what is now northern Germany and Denmark settled in eastern and southern Britain. Over two centuries their kingdoms, among them Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex, took most of what became England, and their language became Old English. The Britons kept the west: Wales with its kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys and Dyfed, Cornwall, and for a time the "Old North" of Cumbria and southern Scotland. Mercia's King Offa built a long earthwork along the Welsh border in the eighth century.

Christianity returned from two directions. Irish monks, heirs to Saint Patrick's mission to Ireland in the fifth century, founded Iona in 563 and later Lindisfarne, while Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine to Kent in 597. In Northumbria the scholar Bede wrote his history of the English church in 731. In the north, the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata spanned Argyll and northern Ireland, and the Picts ruled the east and north.

The Viking Age broke this order. The raid on Lindisfarne in 793 was followed by settlement, and by the 870s Danish armies had destroyed every English kingdom except Wessex. Alfred the Great defeated them at Edington in 878, leaving the north and east under Danish law. His heirs reconquered it, and in 927 his grandson Æthelstan took York and became the first king of all the English. In the north, Norse pressure helped draw Picts and Gaels together under Kenneth MacAlpin in the 840s, and by around 900 his successors were called kings of Alba, the Gaelic name for Scotland. England fell to the Danish king Cnut in 1016, linking it for a time with Denmark and Norway, before the old line returned under Edward the Confessor in 1042.

When Edward died in 1066, Harold Godwinson took the crown, beat a Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge, and was killed weeks later at the Battle of Hastings by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. The Normans replaced almost the entire English aristocracy, built castles across the country and recorded its wealth in the Domesday Book of 1086. French became the language of the court for three centuries, and the Kingdom of England became part of a cross-Channel realm that under Henry II stretched to the Pyrenees. His son Richard I spent most of his reign on crusade and in France. Under King John, rebel barons forced the Crown to accept Magna Carta in 1215, a charter limiting royal power that later generations treated as a founding text of English liberty. Parliament grew out of the king's councils in the thirteenth century.

Norman lords pushed into Wales from the 1070s, but native princes held out in the north and west. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd won recognition as Prince of Wales in 1267, but Edward I conquered his principality in 1282 to 1283 and ringed it with great castles such as Caernarfon and Conwy. Since then the title of Prince of Wales has gone to the English, later British, heir. Owain Glyndŵr's revolt, which began in 1400, was the last great Welsh rising. In Ireland, Anglo-Norman knights arrived in 1169 and Henry II claimed lordship in 1171, though over time English rule shrank to the area around Dublin known as the Pale.

Scotland took a different path. Its kings encouraged Norman settlement but kept their independence. When the royal line failed in 1286, Edward I tried to make Scotland a dependency, provoking the Wars of Scottish Independence. William Wallace won at Stirling Bridge in 1297, and Robert the Bruce, crowned in 1306, defeated the English at Bannockburn in 1314. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 asserted the kingdom's freedom to the pope, and England recognised it in 1328. The Kingdom of Scotland passed to the Stewart dynasty in 1371 and kept its "Auld Alliance" with France.

England meanwhile fought France in the Hundred Years' War from 1337 to 1453, winning at Crécy and Agincourt but losing almost all its French lands by the end. The Black Death of 1348 to 1349 killed perhaps a third or more of the population, and the labour shortage that followed helped spark the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In 1290 England had become the first European kingdom to expel its Jews. The dynastic Wars of the Roses ended in 1485 when Henry Tudor, of Welsh descent, defeated Richard III at Bosworth.

Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 when the pope refused to annul his first marriage, making himself head of the Church of England and dissolving the monasteries. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 merged Wales into the English legal and parliamentary system, and in 1541 Henry declared himself King of Ireland. The Protestant Reformation swung back and forth under his children until Elizabeth I, queen from 1558 to 1603, settled a moderate Protestant church. Her reign saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the first English colonial ventures and the theatre of William Shakespeare. In Scotland, a Calvinist reformation led by John Knox abolished the Mass in 1560, and Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in 1567 and later executed in England.

When Elizabeth died childless in 1603, Mary's son James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland. The Union of the Crowns put three kingdoms under one monarch, but each kept its own parliament, laws and church. In Ireland, the Tudor conquest was completed after the battle of Kinsale in 1601, and the Plantation of Ulster from 1609 settled English and Scottish Protestants on land confiscated from Gaelic lords, laying the foundations of the religious divide in the north.

Charles I's attempts to rule without Parliament and to impose a new prayer book on Scotland set off the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Scots rose in 1638, Irish Catholics in 1641, and civil war broke out in England in 1642. Parliament's New Model Army won, Charles was executed in 1649, and Oliver Cromwell ruled a short-lived republic, first as general and from 1653 as Lord Protector. His conquest of Ireland from 1649 included the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford and was followed by large-scale confiscation of Catholic land. The monarchy was restored in 1660 under Charles II.

When the Catholic James II produced a male heir, leading politicians invited the Dutch prince William of Orange to intervene. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 replaced James with William and Mary, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 confirmed that the Crown could not suspend laws or raise taxes without Parliament. Ireland was secured for William after the Boyne in 1690, and Penal Laws then excluded Irish Catholics from land, office and the professions. The age also produced Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and much of the Scientific Revolution, and John Locke's theories of consent and government.

Scotland's failed attempt to found a colony at Darien in Panama in the late 1690s ruined many investors and strengthened the case for closer ties with England, which in turn wanted to secure the Protestant succession. The Acts of Union took effect on 1 May 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain with one parliament at Westminster, while Scotland kept its own law, courts and Presbyterian church. The Catholic Stuarts' supporters, the Jacobites, rose several times, most seriously in 1715 and 1745, until their defeat at Culloden in 1746 was followed by harsh repression of the Highland clans.

The eighteenth century brought cabinet government, with Robert Walpole usually counted as the first prime minister from 1721, and a German royal house, the Hanoverians, from 1714. Edinburgh became a centre of the Enlightenment, home to David Hume and Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776.

Overseas, colonies spread along the Atlantic coast of North America and across the Caribbean, where sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans. British ships carried some 3.3 million captives across the Atlantic, making Britain one of the leading nations in the Atlantic slave trade. Victory over France in the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763) gave Britain Canada and supremacy in India, where the East India Company became a territorial power after the battle of Plassey in 1757. The thirteen American colonies broke away in the American Revolution and became the United States, but the British Empire turned eastward and into the Pacific, where the voyages of James Cook prepared the way for the colonisation of Australia from 1788.

The Irish rebellion of 1798, inspired by revolutionary France, was suppressed with heavy loss of life, and the government in London responded by abolishing the Irish parliament. The Acts of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 1 January 1801. Catholic emancipation, the right of Catholics to sit in Parliament, followed only in 1829, after Daniel O'Connell's mass campaign.

Britain fought revolutionary and Napoleonic France almost without pause from 1793 to 1815. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805 ended any threat of invasion, and Wellington's army, with Prussian help, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, closing the Napoleonic Wars. The UK emerged as the dominant naval and commercial power of the nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the later eighteenth century, driven by coal, iron, steam power and mechanised cotton spinning. Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and the valleys of south Wales grew at extraordinary speed, and the world's first public steam railway opened between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Industry brought great wealth and grim working conditions, recorded in the novels of Charles Dickens, and political pressure for reform. The Great Reform Act of 1832 began a slow widening of the vote, followed by further acts in 1867 and 1884. Campaigning by abolitionists led Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in most of the empire from 1834, with large compensation paid to former slave owners and none to the enslaved.

Under Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901, the empire grew to cover around a fifth of the world's land. After the Indian rebellion of 1857 the Crown took direct control of India, creating the British Raj. The First Opium War of 1839 to 1842 forced China to open its ports and cede Hong Kong, and in the late nineteenth century Britain took a leading share of Africa in the European scramble for the continent. Canada, Australia and New Zealand became self-governing dominions. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was one product of an era of confident scientific inquiry.

Ireland fared very differently. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, caused by potato blight and worsened by the government's inadequate relief and continued food exports, killed about a million people, and a million more emigrated. Ireland's population kept falling for decades. Demands for Home Rule dominated British politics from the 1880s; Gladstone's bills of 1886 and 1893 failed, and a third, passed in 1914, was suspended when war broke out, amid armed opposition from Ulster unionists.

Britain entered the First World War in August 1914 after Germany invaded Belgium. Millions served from Britain and the empire, and around 880,000 British servicemen died, many on the Western Front at battles such as the Somme in 1916. The war expanded the state and the franchise: the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over 21 and most women over 30, with equal voting following in 1928. The empire reached its greatest extent with League of Nations mandates over former Ottoman and German lands, but colonial violence such as the Amritsar massacre of 1919, when troops killed hundreds of unarmed Indians, fuelled nationalist movements.

In Ireland the Easter Rising of 1916 was quickly crushed, but the execution of its leaders turned opinion towards the republicans of Sinn Féin, who won most Irish seats in 1918. The War of Independence of 1919 to 1921 ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Ireland was partitioned: six north-eastern counties with a Protestant majority remained in the UK as Northern Ireland, and the rest became the Irish Free State in 1922, later the fully independent Republic of Ireland. The state was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1927.

The interwar years saw the General Strike of 1926, the rise of the Labour Party to government and mass unemployment in the old industrial regions during the Depression. Britain appeased Nazi Germany until its invasion of Poland, then declared war in September 1939. In the Second World War, after France fell in 1940, Britain and its empire fought on under Winston Churchill. The Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain, while the Blitz killed over 40,000 civilians. British forces fought in North Africa, Italy, Burma and the Atlantic, and alongside the Americans and Canadians in the Normandy landings of 1944. In India, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed around three million people, and wartime British policy is widely blamed for making it worse.

Labour under Clement Attlee won a landslide in 1945, nationalised coal, rail and steel, and built a welfare state whose centrepiece, the National Health Service, opened in 1948. Britain became a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a founder of NATO in 1949 and the third nuclear power in 1952, and was a close American ally through the Cold War. Elizabeth II began a seventy-year reign in 1952.

Decolonisation came quickly. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, in a partition that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions, and Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948. The Suez crisis of 1956 exposed the limits of British power. Most African and Caribbean colonies became independent in the late 1950s and 1960s, some peacefully and some after violent conflicts such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, where colonial forces held tens of thousands of suspects in detention camps marked by torture and killings. Most former colonies joined the Commonwealth. Immigration from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa, beginning with the Windrush generation in 1948, made Britain a far more diverse society.

The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, and voters confirmed membership in 1975. In Northern Ireland, a civil rights movement among Catholics met violent resistance from the late 1960s, beginning the Troubles, three decades of conflict between republican and loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces that killed about 3,500 people. After the economic troubles of the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, privatised state industries, curbed trade unions and fought the Falklands War of 1982 against Argentina. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 largely ended the Troubles, and under Tony Blair devolved parliaments and assemblies opened in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast in 1999.

British troops fought in Afghanistan from 2001 and in the Iraq War from 2003, a deeply divisive decision. The financial crisis of 2008 was followed by recession and, under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010, by years of austerity. Scotland voted to stay in the UK by 55 to 45 per cent in a 2014 independence referendum, but the Scottish National Party continued to dominate politics there.

In June 2016 the UK voted by 51.9 per cent to leave the European Union, and it left on 31 January 2020 after years of political deadlock. The COVID-19 pandemic followed, and the UK became the first country to deploy an approved vaccine in December 2020. Elizabeth II died in September 2022 and was succeeded by her son, Charles III. A rapid turnover of Conservative prime ministers, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, ended when Labour under Keir Starmer won a landslide in July 2024. After falling poll ratings and heavy Labour losses to a populist anti-immigration party in the May local elections, Starmer resigned as Labour leader in June 2026, and Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, became prime minister on 20 July 2026, the seventh since the Brexit vote.