Emergence of the Nation: The United Kingdom was formed by Acts of Union between England and Wales and England, Wales, and Scotland , uniting the three nations under a single monarchy and legislative council. After 1169, the island of Ireland came under British influence, and it became a colonial dependency in 1690. The British and Irish parliaments were united in 1801. A separatist movement led to the dissolution of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1920, twenty six of Ireland's thirty two counties became the independent Irish Free State, with six of the nine counties of Ulster remaining within the United Kingdom. The present-day nation also includes the Channel Islands off the coast of France and the Isle of Man between Britain and Ireland, which are substantially self-governing. Northern Ireland and Scotland have separate legal and educational systems and issue their own currency; Wales is fully incorporated within the English legal, educational, and banking systems. Recent referendums in Scotland and Wales have resulted in the establishment of a Scottish Parliament which is still under the general jurisdiction of London but has limited local taxraising powers, and the Welsh Assembly, which does not have tax-raising powers.
The native tribes in the central and eastern parts of England were conquered by the Romans in 55 B.C.E. , and permanent Roman settlements were established in 43 B.C.E. and continued for four hundred years. The numbers of Romans were never great, but the indigenous upper classes became Romanized and spoke Latin. The principal Roman towns had baths, temples, amphitheaters, and forums and some of the roads designed to connect Roman towns are still in use. With the departure of the Romans, the British Isles were invaded by a succession of warlike peoples from the European mainland, including the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; there were also persistent Danish raids. All migrations influenced the native Britons, as can be seen in the English language, which is an amalgam of the languages spoken by the waves of colonists. This turbulence ended with the Norman Conquest in 1066. A new line of kings attempted to extend control into the farthest reaches of Wales and Ireland, and struggles for supremacy between rival chieftains and princes culminated in the Magna Carta of 1215, which eventually led to the establishment of Parliament and representative democracy. A period of consensus and stability followed the accession to the throne of the Tudor king Henry VII in 1495. His successor, Henry VIII, broke with the Catholic church in Rome and declared himself the head of the Church of England. The dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the property of the Roman Catholic church occurred during the Reformation, leading to challenges to the monarchy by rivals who supported Catholicism. Instability and competition with other European powers over claims to overseas territory continued for much of the seventeenth century.
Commerce and manufacturing developed rapidly and the authority of Parliament over the monarchy was consolidated by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Capitalism existed before the Industrial Revolution, but its development was hampered by technologies limited to water power and a lack of surplus labor. During the period of the Enclosures,
A castle overlooks the water in Scotland. Castles dot the countryside in all parts of the United Kingdom.
Landlords cleared the peasantry from the rural landscape to create fields enclosed by hedgerows and fences and began to derive profit from new, scientific methods of intensive agricultural production rather than relying the meager tithes and rents paid by peasant smallholders. This displaced large numbers of rural people, who were forced to emigrate to the overseas colonies or migrate to the new sites of industrial production.
The impetus for the Industrial Revolution came from trade with the expanding colonies by a growing middle class of entrepreneurs and investors whose wealth was not derived from land but from commerce; those entrepreneurs reinvested their wealth in new forms of manufacturing and trade rather than in ways that imitated the consumption patterns of the landed gentry. The Industrial Revolution began at the end of the seventeenth century, specifically in the machine-driven manufacturing processes made possible by the steam engine, which was first used in 1698 to draw water from an underground tin mine, and then was adapted to drive power looms in textile mills. Overseas colonization and wars with other European powers stimulated the further development of mining and metallurgy, precision machine tools, navigational instruments, cartography, and managerial and logistical organization, which were exploited for commercial gain by private entrepreneurs. By 1815, Britain had the world's largest and most powerful navy, and within twenty years steam railways and steam-powered ships designed by British engineers were carrying passengers and cargo for profit, allowing British shipping companies to dominate world trade. By midcentury, the country was the world's leading power in business and finance, science and medicine.
The Industrial Revolution created a new social order as entrepreneurship and factory production resulted in new forms of wealth and work that were added to the agrarian social order dominated by aristocratic landowners. The 1832 Reform Act ended the political privileges of landed wealth by extending the vote to middle-class male heads of household. The country would be governed by the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the middle class rather than by those of the landed aristocracy. One dimension of this new social order was urbanization: as dispersed cottage industries such as weaving were replaced by mills in central locations, nearby housing was needed for the workers; that housing frequently was built by the mill owner and rented to the workers. The populations of Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham doubled or tripled between 1801 and 1841, and many major towns and cities grew up around mines, smelting works, ports and railway junctions.
Work in the dark, satanic mills brought new levels of exploitation and hardship. Rapid industrialization caused overcrowding and disease; cholera epidemics between the 1830s and 1860s provoked public unrest and forced the government to improve public health. Another consequence of Victorian working conditions was the rise of trade unionism. A socially stratified and politically divided society, that was preoccupied with distinctions of social class and the rival ideologies of laissez faire capitalism and state socialism soon crystallized.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom was one of the world's wealthiest and most influential nations. Machine tools, locomotives, and steamships built in Scotland and the industrial Midlands were exported worldwide, textile products from Lancashire, Staffordshire china and pottery and finished steel products from Sheffield, dominated world markets for a century. British mining, manufacturing, transportation technology; legal, banking and parliamentary systems, and scientific discoveries and advances were exported worldwide. The nation's wealth was further underwritten by its position as the chief European colonial power and extensive sources of cheap labor and raw materials in Australasia, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The country's position as a world power was reduced in the second half of the twentieth century by two world wars and the gradual decline of its advantages in manufacturing and business and expensive experiments with state socialism. By the late 1970s, the nation was in debt to the International Monetary Fund. The discovery of oil in the North Sea in the 1970s saved the country from bankruptcy and stimulated economic recovery. Tax revenues from the oil industry provided the means to restructure the economy away from an obsolescent manufacturing base and toward a base dominated by service and knowledge based industries.
National Identity: The United Kingdom is made up of four interdependent nations with many common institutions. While differences in everyday modes of sociality and consumer behavior are not great from one part of the nation to another, some aspects of culture are symbolic of national or local difference on the level of everyday practice or on special occasions. Support for the monarchy, political parties, and soccer teams are the most obvious expressions of contemporary localism, religious adherence and ethnic differentiation are also significant. Support for the monarchy and the Conservative Party is highest in England, while in Scotland and Wales it is substantially lower. In Scotland and Wales, there are minority nationalist parties. The Scottish National Party's political program is dominated by economic issues, particularly tax revenues from North Sea oil. The political agenda of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, is mainly concerned with linguistic and cultural matters. In both Scotland and Wales, the Labour Party is dominant, drawing strength from its critique of the class privilege traditionally associated with London and southeastern England. The dominance of the Labour Party in much of Wales and Scotland provides conditions for patronage-style politics.
Ethnic Relations: A high degree of spatial integration is generally held to be indicative of social integration and acculturation, while spatial segregation is indicative of social pluralism. Non European immigration in Britain has not moved toward a pattern of sharply-defined urban ethnic ghettoes. Nevertheless, many non European immigrants continue to be subject to discriminatory practices in employment and in other spheres, even if systematic marginalization cannot be inferred from their spatial distribution within the towns and cities of the nation.
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