A Brief History of the United Kingdom: Four Nations, One Crown, and the Long Argument About Who Rules

Follows: United Kingdom: A Condensed History of Islands, Empire, and Reinvention

On Friday 30 October 2026, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham, sat down in Glasgow with the First Minister of Scotland, and then with the First Minister of Wales. The Welsh First Minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, leads Plaid Cymru, a party that wants Wales to be independent; it had won the most seats in the Senedd election in May, ending Labour's unbroken hold on the Welsh government since devolution began in 1999. In the Scottish meeting, Downing Street's own summary records the Prime Minister saying that a second Scottish independence referendum was "off the table."

Three heads of government, two of them leading parties that would prefer not to be in the same country, discussing "regional empowerment" and "reindustrialisation" in the city where James Watt, working at the university in the 1760s, hit on the improvement that made the steam engine efficient. That one Friday holds most of what this long read is about: a state made of several nations, a Parliament that has always had to argue for its power, an industrial past that still shapes its politics, and a constitution that changes by negotiation rather than revolution.

The condensed piece in this library gives the outline. This is the full version, from the first footprints on a Norfolk beach to the autumn of 2026.

In this history

1. Before England: the first peoples and Roman Britain (to c. 410)
2. English, Welsh, Scots, Vikings and Normans (c. 410–1215)
3. Magna Carta, Parliament and the medieval wars (1215–1485)
4. The Tudors and the Reformation (1485–1603)
5. Civil wars and the Glorious Revolution (1603–1707)
6. Union, slavery and the Industrial Revolution (1707–1837)
7. The Victorian century and the Irish question (1837–1922)
8. Empire: the view from London and the view from the colonised (1600–1997)
9. Two world wars (1914–1945)
10. The welfare state, the end of empire and the Troubles (1945–1979)
11. Thatcher, New Labour and devolution (1979–2010)
12. Austerity, Brexit and Britain in 2026 (2010–2026)
13. How to understand the United Kingdom today

A note on names, because they matter here. Britain or Great Britain is the largest island, holding England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom is the state: Great Britain plus Northern Ireland. The British Isles is a geographical term that many people in Ireland reject, since the Republic of Ireland is not British. And "England" is not a synonym for any of them, however often outsiders (and some English people) use it that way.

Part 1 — Before England: the first peoples and Roman Britain (to c. 410)

In 2013, waves at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast stripped away sand and exposed a patch of hardened mud printed with dozens of human footprints. Before the tide destroyed them, archaeologists photographed and measured them. The sediments they were pressed into date to between roughly a million and 780,000 years ago. Whoever made them, probably an early human species rather than our own, walked along an estuary in what was then a peninsula of Europe.

For most of the following million years, "Britain" was not an island. During ice ages the sea level fell and a broad plain, now called Doggerland, joined it to the continent. People came and went with the climate: Neanderthals, then modern humans, then nobody when the ice was thickest. Britain's continuous human story begins after the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers followed herds of deer and horse back north.

One of them has a face. Cheddar Man, found in a cave in Somerset in 1903, lived about 10,000 years ago and is the oldest nearly complete skeleton of our species found in Britain. When his DNA was read in 2018, it showed genetic markers for dark skin and blue eyes, which fits what we know of other European hunter-gatherers of the time. According to the Natural History Museum, modern Britons carry only around 10 percent of his population's ancestry. His people were mostly replaced, twice.

Two great turnovers

Neither turnover was necessarily a conquest. Disease, intermarriage and farming's higher birth rates can all replace a population over centuries. What the genetics rules out is the old idea of an island people who stayed put while ideas washed over them.

Stonehenge

The farmers who arrived around 4000 BC built long barrows for their dead, causewayed enclosures and, eventually, stone circles. The most famous began around 3000 BC as a circular ditch and bank on Salisbury Plain. The giant sarsen stones, some weighing around 25 tonnes, were raised around 2600 to 2400 BC, hauled from about 25 kilometres away. The smaller "bluestones" came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, about 240 kilometres away, and in 2024 geologists traced the flat Altar Stone at its centre to north-east Scotland, roughly 700 kilometres away. The monument is aligned on the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset.

Why it was built is still argued over: a temple, a calendar, a monument to ancestors. Whatever it meant, it shows that around 2500 BC people across the whole island could co-operate on an enormous project. Britain was connected long before it was united.

Stonehenge was being rebuilt with stones from Wales and Scotland around the time the Great Pyramid was going up in Egypt. "Britain" as a shared space is much older than any British state.

The Iron Age

By the first millennium BC, Britain was a land of farming tribes, hill forts and Celtic languages, ancestors of Welsh, Cornish and the Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland. These peoples left no writing of their own; we see them through archaeology and through the eyes of their enemies. Julius Caesar landed in 55 and 54 BC, fought, collected promises of tribute and left. For the next century the tribes of the south-east traded with the Roman world, minted coins and played Roman politics. Then Rome came back to stay.

Roman Britain (43–c. 410)

In AD 43 the Emperor Claudius, who needed a military triumph, sent four legions across the Channel. Within a few years the south and east were Roman. The north and west took decades, and the far north never fell at all.

The most famous resistance came from a woman. In AD 60 or 61, after Roman officials flogged Boudica, queen of the Iceni of East Anglia, and assaulted her daughters, she led a revolt that burned Colchester, London and St Albans. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing decades later, put the number killed by the rebels at 70,000; ancient numbers like this are rarely reliable. The revolt was crushed, and Boudica died soon after. Victorian Britain later turned her into a national heroine and put her statue, in a chariot, beside Parliament, a striking choice for an empire that was then suppressing revolts of its own.

What Rome built

For the great majority of people, Roman Britain meant farming the same land under new landlords and paying taxes in coin and grain. A wealthy minority lived in villas with mosaics and underfloor heating. In the cities, inscriptions record soldiers, traders and slaves from across the empire, including North Africa and Syria. Roman Britain was more ethnically mixed than the Britain of a thousand years later.

Scotland was different. The Romans pushed north more than once, built a second wall (the Antonine Wall) between the Forth and the Clyde in the 140s, and abandoned it within a generation. The peoples beyond, whom the Romans called Caledonians and later Picts, were never conquered. That fact, more than any later myth, is why the island's northern third developed separately.

The end of Roman Britain

By the late 300s the western empire was under strain everywhere. Commanders in Britain repeatedly took troops to the continent to make their own bids for the throne. Around 410, according to a later source, the Emperor Honorius told the British cities to look to their own defence. There was no single dramatic departure; the money stopped coming, the army stopped being paid, and within a generation or two towns were emptying, coins were no longer used and the villa economy had collapsed.

What happened next is the most argued-over period in British history, because almost nobody was writing it down.

Part 2 — English, Welsh, Scots, Vikings and Normans (c. 410–1215)

The traditional story comes from a British monk named Gildas, writing in the 500s, and from the Northumbrian monk Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People was finished in 731. In it, the Britons invited Germanic warriors (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) to help defend them, and the guests turned on their hosts and took the land. For much of the 20th century, archaeologists doubted it: perhaps a small warrior elite had arrived and the natives simply adopted their language and fashions.

Ancient DNA has settled part of the argument. A 2022 study in Nature of nearly 280 early medieval individuals from England found that people buried in eastern England derived up to 76 percent of their ancestry from the continental North Sea zone, today's northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, with a great deal of local variation. There was mass migration, and there was also intermarriage. Both old stories were partly right.

The newcomers' language became English. In the west and north, the Britons' language survived and became Welsh and Cornish; their people called themselves Cymry, "fellow countrymen." The English called them wealas, "foreigners," which is where the word "Welsh" comes from. Meanwhile in the far north, Irish settlers in Argyll (the kingdom of Dál Riata) brought Gaelic, and over the following centuries Gaelic-speaking kings merged with the Picts into a kingdom called Alba: the core of Scotland. The name "Scot" itself originally meant an Irish raider.

Kingdoms, crosses and the Sutton Hoo ship

Early England was a patchwork of rival kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Kent and others. In 597 a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great and led by Augustine arrived in Kent; Irish monks were converting the north from the island of Iona at the same time. Within a century the English kingdoms were Christian, and Northumbria produced some of the finest art in Europe, including the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The grandest burial in English history dates from this world. At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, excavated in 1939, a king (very probably Rædwald of East Anglia, who died around 624) was laid in a 27-metre ship under a mound, with a great helmet, gold and garnet fittings, silver from Byzantium and coins from France. The pagan ship burial and the Christian spoons in the same grave catch a kingdom in the middle of changing its gods.

The Vikings

In 793, raiders from Scandinavia sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast. For seventy years they raided; in 865 a much larger force, which English chroniclers called the "Great Heathen Army," came to conquer. Within a decade it had destroyed every English kingdom except Wessex.

Alfred's treaty with the Viking leader Guthrum split England in two: Wessex and western Mercia in the south and west, and the Danelaw in the north and east. Scandinavian settlers left thousands of place names (those ending in -by and -thorpe) and many everyday English words, among them sky, egg, window and the pronoun they. Alfred's successors reconquered the Danelaw piece by piece, and by 927 his grandson Athelstan ruled a single kingdom of the English. In 1016 that kingdom fell again, to the Dane Cnut, who ruled it as part of a North Sea empire.

By 1066 England was one of the richest and best-administered kingdoms in Europe, with shires, sheriffs, a silver coinage controlled by the king and a tax system that could raise huge sums. That wealth is exactly why it attracted conquerors.

1066 and the Norman kingdom

When King Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, three men claimed his throne. The English nobleman Harold Godwinson took it. Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, invaded in the north and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later William, Duke of Normandy, landed in Sussex. On 14 October, at Hastings, after a battle that lasted most of a day, Harold was killed and his army broken. William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day.

It was the last successful invasion of England, and it changed almost everything at the top.

1. A new ruling class. Within twenty years nearly the entire English aristocracy had been replaced. By 1086, only about 5 percent of land south of the River Tees was still held by English lords.
2. A new language of power. Norman French became the language of the court and the law for three centuries; Latin the language of documents. English survived as the language of everyone else, absorbing thousands of French words. That is why English has cow and pig in the field but beef and pork on the table.
3. Castles. The Normans built them in unprecedented numbers, first wooden motte-and-bailey forts and then stone keeps such as the Tower of London, to hold down a hostile population.
4. The Harrying of the North. When the north rebelled in 1069–70, William's armies destroyed crops, livestock and villages across Yorkshire and beyond. A monk writing a generation later claimed 100,000 people died of the resulting famine; historians treat the figure as a guess but agree the devastation was real and still visible in the records sixteen years later.
5. Domesday Book. In 1086 William ordered a survey of his whole kingdom: who held each estate, how many ploughs, mills, pigs and people it had, and what it was worth. Nothing like it existed elsewhere in Europe. Its nickname came from the English, who compared its finality to the Day of Judgement.

A kingdom straddling the Channel

For the next century and a half, England was one part of a cross-Channel realm. William's successors spent much of their time in France. After a civil war between Henry I's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen (1138–1153), known simply as "the Anarchy," Matilda's son Henry II (r. 1154–1189) inherited an empire stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. Henry built the foundations of English common law, with royal judges travelling the country and juries of local men. His quarrel with his archbishop, Thomas Becket, ended with Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, and with Canterbury becoming the most popular shrine in England.

Henry II also opened a story with no end yet. In 1169–71, Anglo-Norman lords and then the king himself landed in Ireland. Over the next centuries English rule there waxed and waned, often reduced to the area around Dublin called the Pale, but the claim was never dropped.

Wales, meanwhile, remained a land of Welsh princes, squeezed by Norman "Marcher" lords along the border. Scotland's kings, though they often held English lands and sometimes paid homage, ran their own kingdom, and the Normans who settled there, families such as the Bruces and the Balliols, became Scottish.

King John

Henry's younger son John (r. 1199–1216) lost Normandy to the king of France in 1204. Trying to win it back, he squeezed his barons for money with unusual ruthlessness: huge fees to inherit their fathers' lands, fines to marry, confiscations from anyone who displeased him. In 1214 his continental allies were defeated at Bouvines. In 1215 the barons rebelled, took London and forced him to negotiate in a meadow by the Thames.

Part 3 — Magna Carta, Parliament and the medieval wars (1215–1485)

At Runnymede, on 15 June 1215, John set his seal to a long list of promises that later became known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter. Most of its 63 clauses deal with feudal grievances: inheritance fees, widows' rights, fish weirs in the Thames, the return of hostages. Two have echoed ever since. In the translation by the British Museum scholar G. R. C. Davis:

"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled... except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice." — Magna Carta, clauses 39 and 40

As a peace treaty, it failed within weeks. John persuaded the Pope to condemn it, the barons invited a French prince to take the throne, and the civil war ended only with John's death in 1216. But the regents of his nine-year-old son Henry III reissued the charter to win back support, and it was reissued again in 1217 and 1225, and confirmed again and again. Four copies of the 1215 original survive (two in the British Library, one at Lincoln and one at Salisbury), and three of its clauses, as revised in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

Its real importance was the idea it planted: that the king was bound by rules, and that if he broke them, the political community could hold him to account. The 17th-century lawyers who fought the Stuart kings, the American colonists of the 1770s and the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights all invoked it, usually reading into it more than its authors meant.

The birth of Parliament

What turned that idea into an institution was money. Medieval kings needed taxes to fight wars, and the barons, knights and townsmen who paid them increasingly demanded something back: grievances heard, laws changed, counsel taken. In 1265 the rebel baron Simon de Montfort summoned not only lords but two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each of many towns, the first time townsmen had been called. Edward I's "Model Parliament" of 1295 made the mixture regular, and by the mid-1300s the knights and burgesses were sitting apart as the House of Commons. Their power rested on one principle that would matter enormously later: taxes required consent.

Conquest in Wales and war with Scotland

Edward I (r. 1272–1307) is remembered very differently in each of the island's nations. In England he was a lawmaker. In Wales he was a conqueror. After the last native Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was killed in December 1282, Edward annexed his principality by the Statute of Rhuddlan (1284) and ringed it with massive castles (Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris) that are now World Heritage Sites. He gave the title "Prince of Wales" to his own son, and the heir to the English, later British, throne has held it ever since. The last great Welsh rising, led by Owain Glyndŵr from 1400, held much of Wales for several years before it was crushed.

In Scotland, Edward exploited a succession crisis to claim overlordship and then conquest. Resistance found leaders in William Wallace, who won at Stirling Bridge in 1297 and was executed in London in 1305, and Robert the Bruce, who made himself king and destroyed an English army at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1320 Scotland's barons sent a letter to the Pope, the Declaration of Arbroath, that contains one of the most quoted sentences in Scottish history:

"As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule." — Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (translated by Sir James Fergusson)

England recognised Scottish independence in 1328. For the next three centuries the two kingdoms were separate and usually hostile, and Scotland's "Auld Alliance" with France was a standing threat on England's northern border.

Plague and revolt

In June 1348 the Black Death reached a port in Dorset. Historians now widely accept that it killed 40 to 60 percent of England's population, perhaps six million people before the plague, in under two years. Scotland, Wales and Ireland suffered too.

The survivors inherited a changed economy. With labour suddenly scarce, peasants demanded higher wages and left their lords for better offers. Parliament tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels with the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351). When a series of poll taxes followed, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 broke out: rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, burned the palace of the king's uncle, killed the Chancellor and demanded an end to serfdom. The fourteen-year-old Richard II met them, promised concessions and then broke the promises once they had gone home. Yet within a generation serfdom had largely withered away anyway. The plague had done what the rebels could not.

A century of wars

By the late 1300s, fighting the French had made French unfashionable: English was back in Parliament and the law courts, and Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales in it.

Part 4 — The Tudors and the Reformation (1485–1603)

Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII after Bosworth, had a thin claim to the throne and knew it. He married the Yorkist heiress, built up the royal treasury, kept the nobility on a short leash and died in his bed in 1509, a rare achievement in that century. His family was Welsh in origin, a point Welsh poets celebrated; Wales had, in a sense, conquered England.

His son Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) is remembered for six wives, but his marriages mattered because of what they did to religion. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had not given him a son, Henry broke with Rome. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England; refusing to accept it became treason, and Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher were executed for it in 1535. Between 1536 and 1540 Henry's minister Thomas Cromwell dissolved every monastery, nunnery and friary in England and Wales, and the Crown sold off their vast lands. A great northern rising in defence of the old church, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), was crushed and its leaders executed.

Henry's reign also redrew the internal map. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1536 and 1543 annexed Wales fully to England, divided it into shires, gave it seats in Parliament and made English the only language of law and administration. In 1542 Henry took the title King of Ireland.

Five monarchs, three religions

Historians used to describe the English Reformation as a popular movement against a corrupt church. Since the 1990s, work such as Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars has argued the opposite: that late-medieval Catholicism was vigorous and loved, and that Protestantism was imposed from above and accepted slowly. Most historians now see something in between, a reformation that was both imposed and, over two generations, genuinely adopted.

Scotland took a different road. Its Reformation, led by the preacher John Knox, came in 1560 through a revolt of Protestant nobles against the French-backed Catholic regime, and produced a Presbyterian church, governed by elders rather than bishops, that would shape Scottish identity for centuries. Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in 1567, fled to England, and spent nineteen years as Elizabeth's prisoner before being executed in 1587 for plotting against her.

Elizabeth's England

Elizabeth's reign is remembered for the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, for Shakespeare, Marlowe and the London theatres, and for the first English voyages of trade, piracy and colonisation across the Atlantic. Sir Francis Drake's raids on Spanish treasure ships were patriotic heroism in England and state-sponsored robbery in Spain, depending on where you stood. The same decades saw the first English slaving voyages, led by John Hawkins in the 1560s, who seized Africans on the coast of West Africa and sold them in the Spanish Caribbean: a small beginning of a trade England would later dominate.

In Ireland, Elizabeth's reign was a war of conquest. English governments confiscated land after each rebellion and "planted" it with English settlers. The Nine Years' War (1594–1603), led by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was the most serious challenge to English rule in Ireland before the 20th century; its defeat, in the year Elizabeth died, opened the way for the Plantation of Ulster.

How people lived

For most people in Tudor England, life meant farming, and most farming was changing. Landlords were enclosing open fields and common land, often to graze sheep for the profitable wool trade, and preachers and pamphleteers denounced the evictions that followed. Prices rose sharply through the 1500s. Begging and vagrancy alarmed the authorities, whose answer culminated in the Poor Law of 1601: every parish had to look after its own poor, raising a local tax to do so. It was harsh to "sturdy beggars," but it was also one of the earliest national systems of poor relief in Europe, and in modified form it lasted until 1834. Most people still lived in villages of a few hundred souls, worked from dawn to dusk in summer, married in their mid-twenties rather than in their teens, and buried a large share of their children before the age of ten. Literacy spread with the printing press and the Protestant insistence on reading the Bible in English. The Welsh Bible of 1588 is often credited with keeping Welsh alive as a language of learning when it might have faded.

Part 5 — Civil wars and the Glorious Revolution (1603–1707)

When Elizabeth died childless in 1603, the heir was James VI of Scotland, son of the executed Mary. He became James I of England as well: one king, two kingdoms (three, counting Ireland), two parliaments, two churches and two legal systems. James called himself King of Great Britain and wanted a full union; neither Parliament was interested.

His reign saw the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators tried to blow up Parliament and the king (still remembered every 5 November with bonfires), the King James Bible of 1611, and the beginning of the Plantation of Ulster from 1609, when land in the north of Ireland confiscated from Gaelic lords was granted to Protestant settlers from England and, especially, Scotland. The plantation created the Protestant community of Ulster, and with it the fault line that would split Ireland three centuries later.

Why the civil wars happened

James's son Charles I (r. 1625–1649) believed kings answered to God alone. From 1629 to 1640 he ruled without calling Parliament, raising money through old feudal levies such as "ship money." He also tried to make his kingdoms' churches uniform. When he imposed an English-style prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637, the Scots rose, signed a National Covenant (1638) and invaded northern England. To pay for the war, Charles had to recall Parliament, which seized the chance to dismantle his personal rule. In 1641 the Catholic Irish rebelled, killing thousands of Protestant settlers, and the question of who would control the army to suppress them split Parliament from the king. In August 1642 Charles raised his standard at Nottingham.

Historians now call it the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1653), because it was never only an English civil war. Scotland, Ireland and England fought one another and themselves.

The cost was enormous. One estimate for England and Wales alone is around 85,000 killed in combat and another 127,000 dead from disease and other war-related causes. Ireland suffered proportionally worse still, from war, famine and plague, though estimates vary widely. After the conquest, almost all land owned by Irish Catholics was confiscated, and much of it given to soldiers and investors. In Ireland, Cromwell's name is still a curse. In England, he is remembered more ambiguously: a statue of him stands outside Parliament.

The wars also produced astonishing ideas. In the army debates at Putney in 1647, radicals called Levellers argued that every man should have a vote. "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he," said Colonel Thomas Rainsborough. They lost, and the vote for all men took another 271 years.

Restoration and revolution

Charles II (r. 1660–1685) returned to cheering crowds. His reign saw the Great Plague of London (1665), the Great Fire (1666), the founding of the Royal Society (1660) and the beginnings of political parties: the Whigs, who wanted to exclude Charles's Catholic brother James from the throne, and the Tories, who defended his right to it.

James II became king in 1685 and tried to give Catholics equal rights by royal decree, overriding Parliament. When his queen gave birth to a son in June 1688, raising the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, seven leading politicians invited his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, ruler of the Dutch Republic, to intervene. William landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688 with a large army. James's support collapsed and he fled to France.

The Bill of Rights of 1689 is the hinge of British constitutional history. It declared that the Crown could not suspend laws, levy taxes or keep a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and that elections and parliamentary debate should be free. From then on, the monarch reigned with Parliament, not over it.

Whig historians later called this the "Glorious Revolution": bloodless, sensible and the foundation of English liberty. It was far from bloodless in Ireland, where James's Catholic army was defeated by William at the Boyne in 1690 and finally at Aughrim and Limerick in 1691. Penal laws then barred Catholics, the large majority of Irish people, from Parliament, the professions and most landowning. Protestant Ulster still marches every July to celebrate the Boyne; Irish nationalists remember it as the start of the Protestant Ascendancy. In Scotland, the Highlands rose for James in 1689, and in 1692 government troops massacred members of the MacDonald clan at Glencoe.

Money, and a union

The revolution brought a new financial machine. To pay for wars against Louis XIV's France, the government created the Bank of England (1694) and a permanent national debt, backed by Parliament's power to tax. Lenders trusted a parliamentary government to repay them more than they had ever trusted a king, and that trust let Britain borrow cheaply and fight long wars for the next century.

Scotland, meanwhile, had suffered famine in the 1690s and then disaster. The Darien scheme, an attempt to found a Scottish trading colony on the isthmus of Panama, collapsed in 1698–1700 with the loss of much of the capital Scots had invested. In 1705 England's Parliament passed the Alien Act, threatening to treat Scots as foreigners and block their trade unless Scotland negotiated a union.

The Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 and ratified by the Scottish Parliament, 110 votes to 69, in January 1707. On 1 May 1707 England (with Wales) and Scotland became the single Kingdom of Great Britain. Scotland sent 45 MPs and 16 peers to Westminster and gained free trade with England and its colonies; it kept its own legal system, its own Presbyterian church and its own universities. Part of a lump sum called "the Equivalent" compensated investors who had lost money at Darien.

Was Scotland bought or did it choose? Opponents at the time, and Robert Burns later ("bought and sold for English gold"), saw a nation sold by its aristocracy, and historians have documented payments and promises of office. Others argue the union was a hard-headed bargain that gave Scotland access to the largest free-trade area in Europe and, within a century, a leading share in the empire. The argument is not academic: it is a version of the independence debate today.

Part 6 — Union, slavery and the Industrial Revolution (1707–1837)

The new state was not yet secure. The exiled Stuarts, the "Jacobites" (from Jacobus, Latin for James), rose in 1715 and again in 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," led a Highland army as far south as Derby before turning back. At Culloden, near Inverness, on 16 April 1746, it was destroyed in under an hour. The government then broke the Highland clan system: it banned the wearing of tartan and the carrying of arms and ended the chiefs' legal powers. Over the following century many Highland landlords evicted tenants to make way for sheep, in the Highland Clearances, and tens of thousands of Gaelic-speaking Scots emigrated to Canada, America and Australia.

The same Scotland, at the same time, produced the Scottish Enlightenment: the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), the geologist James Hutton, and Edinburgh's reputation as "the Athens of the North." Union, it turned out, could coexist with a very Scottish flowering.

The slave empire

The 18th-century British economy was built partly on the Atlantic. British ships became the leading carriers of enslaved Africans: by the estimates of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between about 3.1 and 3.5 million people over the whole history of the British trade. Liverpool, Bristol and London grew rich on it. In the Caribbean colonies, above all Jamaica and Barbados, enslaved Africans grew sugar under a regime of violence that killed them faster than they could have children, so more were always bought. Sugar sweetened British tea, and the profits flowed into British banks, country houses and, historians still argue how much, British industry.

The movement to end it was one of the first mass political campaigns in history. Formerly enslaved writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Quaker activists, the campaigner Thomas Clarkson and the evangelical MP William Wilberforce organised petitions signed by hundreds of thousands, sugar boycotts and the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes, showing how people were packed below decks. Enslaved people themselves made the strongest case: revolts in the colonies, above all the Haitian Revolution in neighbouring French Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) and the great Jamaican rising of 1831–32, made slavery look both immoral and dangerous.

Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, in force from 1 August 1834, freed roughly 800,000 people across most of the empire, but on terms that still shock. The government paid £20 million in compensation, about 40 percent of the Treasury's annual income at the time, to slave owners. The enslaved received nothing, and most were first made to work as unpaid "apprentices" for their former owners, a system cut short in 1838 after protests in Britain and the colonies. The government borrowed most of the money, and the last of the related debt was only redeemed in 2015.

Revolution elsewhere, reform at home

In 1776 thirteen of Britain's American colonies declared independence, and by 1783 they had won it with French help. Britain then fought revolutionary and Napoleonic France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, ending with Wellington's victory at Waterloo. In Ireland, a republican rising inspired by the French Revolution, the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen, was crushed with great brutality. Its result was the Act of Union with Ireland: from 1 January 1801 the state became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with 100 Irish MPs at Westminster. Prime Minister William Pitt had hoped to pair union with Catholic emancipation; George III refused, and Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1829.

The first industrial nation

Britain's first census, in 1801, counted about 10.5 million people in Great Britain. Over the next half-century the country changed more than it had in the previous five hundred years.

The key inventions were mostly practical improvements by tinkerers and businessmen. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame for spinning cotton in 1769 and built a water-powered mill at Cromford in Derbyshire in 1771, often called the first modern factory. James Watt's separate condenser cut the coal a steam engine needed to a quarter or less of earlier designs. George Stephenson's locomotives, and the railway mania of the 1840s, tied the country together.

Why Britain first? Historians still disagree, and their answers are worth knowing because each one is also an argument about the present.

For the people who worked in the new mills, early industrialisation was hard. Children as young as six worked long shifts; the Factory Act of 1833 began, slowly, to limit their hours. Cities grew faster than sewers, and cholera arrived in 1832. Whether ordinary living standards rose or fell between 1780 and 1840 is a long-running debate; many economic historians now think real wages stagnated for decades while output soared, a period Allen has called "Engels' pause," after Friedrich Engels, whose The Condition of the Working Class in England described Manchester's slums in the 1840s.

Political pressure grew with the towns. In August 1819 cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform; about 18 people were killed and hundreds injured. The journalists called it Peterloo, in ironic echo of Waterloo. The Great Reform Act of 1832 abolished many "rotten boroughs" (Gatton in Surrey had seven voters) and gave seats to the new industrial cities, but it raised the electorate only from about 400,000 to about 650,000 in a population of millions. Reform had begun; democracy had not.

Part 7 — The Victorian century and the Irish question (1837–1922)

Victoria came to the throne in 1837, aged eighteen, and reigned until 1901. Her era began with hunger and protest and ended with Britain at the centre of the world economy.

The Chartists of 1838–48 demanded six things, including a vote for every man, secret ballots and pay for MPs so that workers could stand. They gathered millions of signatures and were turned down three times. Every one of their demands except annual elections eventually became law. In 1846 Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, tariffs that had kept bread prices high to protect landowners, and Britain became the world's great champion of free trade. In 1851 the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park's Crystal Palace showed off "the workshop of the world" to six million visitors.

The Great Famine

While England industrialised, Ireland's rural poor depended on one crop. When potato blight struck in 1845, and again in the following years, the result was the worst catastrophe in modern Irish history. Between 1845 and 1852 about a million people died, with estimates ranging from roughly 775,000 to 1.5 million, and more than a million emigrated. Ireland, which had held more than eight million people in 1841, lost a fifth to a quarter of its population within a generation and did not recover it for well over a century.

The British government's response is still argued over. Robert Peel's government imported maize and was relatively effective; its successor, under Lord John Russell, relied on public works and the market, and Charles Trevelyan, the official in charge of relief, saw the famine in part as a providential correction of Irish "overpopulation." Food continued to be exported from Ireland during the famine, though in the worst years more grain was imported than exported. Most historians reject the claim of deliberate genocide but agree that ideology and indifference turned a natural disaster into a mass death. It hardened Irish nationalism for good, and created an Irish diaspora in America, Britain and Australia that never forgot it.

Towards democracy

Votes for women were won by two movements that often disliked each other: the patient, law-abiding suffragists led by Millicent Fawcett, and Emmeline Pankhurst's militant suffragettes, who smashed windows, set fires and went on hunger strike in prison. Historians still debate which did more. The 1918 Act tripled the electorate, from about 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million.

Victorian Britain was also the Britain of the slums described by Dickens, the social surveys of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree (who found around a quarter to a third of the people of London and York living in poverty), of trade unions and friendly societies, Methodist chapels and football clubs, seaside excursions by train and the music hall. By 1901 the large majority of people in England and Wales lived in towns and cities. It was the first predominantly urban society in history.

Home Rule and partition

From the 1870s, Irish MPs at Westminster, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, demanded Home Rule: an Irish parliament within the United Kingdom. Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced bills in 1886 and 1893; both failed. A third passed in 1914, after the Parliament Act had removed the Lords' veto, but it was suspended for the duration of the war. Meanwhile the Protestant majority in north-east Ulster, who saw themselves as British and feared Catholic rule from Dublin, signed the Ulster Covenant (1912) in their hundreds of thousands and formed an armed militia to resist.

At Easter 1916, a few thousand Irish republicans seized Dublin's General Post Office and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Easter Rising was crushed in a week and was unpopular at first; then the British executed its leaders by firing squad over ten days, and opinion swung. In the general election of December 1918, the republican Sinn Féin won the great majority of Irish seats, refused to go to Westminster, and set up its own parliament, the Dáil, in January 1919. A guerrilla War of Independence followed (1919–21), fought by the Irish Republican Army against the police and British auxiliaries, notorious for reprisals on both sides.

The settlement came in two pieces. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 created two home-rule parliaments, one for six north-eastern counties, which opened in Belfast in June 1921, and one for the rest. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 then gave the south dominion status as the Irish Free State, established a year later; Northern Ireland immediately opted to stay in the United Kingdom. The treaty split Irish nationalists, and a short, bitter civil war (1922–23) followed in the south. The Free State became the Republic of Ireland and left the Commonwealth in 1949.

The border was drawn to give unionists a safe majority. Two of the six counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone, had Catholic majorities, while three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities were left out. For the next fifty years unionists governed Northern Ireland without a break; its first prime minister, James Craig, boasted in 1934 of "a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State." Nationalists saw partition as an artificial carve-up; unionists saw it as their right not to be forced into a state they did not belong to. Both views are still alive today.

Part 8 — Empire: the view from London and the view from the colonised (1600–1997)

The British Empire was not built in one era, so it does not fit in one. This part steps back across four centuries. At its greatest extent, in the years after the First World War, it covered roughly a quarter of the world's land. In 1913, by Angus Maddison's estimates, it governed about 412 million people, around 23 percent of humanity.

How it grew

The view from London

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, British people were taught that the empire was a gift to the world. Its modern defenders, most prominently the historian Niall Ferguson in Empire (2003) and the ethicist Nigel Biggar in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), make a more careful case: that the empire spread the rule of law, representative institutions, the English language and global trade and investment; that it abolished slavery across its territories after 1833 and used the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic slave trade; that it was often less brutal than the empires it replaced or competed with; and that many former colonies inherited parliaments, courts and civil services from it. Hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects fought for it in both world wars, and many saw themselves as British.

The view from the colonised

Historians writing from the colonised side, and many from Britain too, point to a different ledger. Some of its entries:

1. Bengal, 1770. A few years after the East India Company took control of Bengal's revenues, a famine killed a very large share of the population, while the Company kept collecting tax.
2. India's economy. The Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor, in Inglorious Empire (2017), argues that Britain deindustrialised India's textile industry, drained its wealth through taxes and "home charges," and presided over repeated famines; India's share of the world economy shrank sharply under British rule.
3. The Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). Britain fought China to protect its merchants' right to sell opium there. A young William Gladstone told the House of Commons in 1840 that he knew of no war "more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace." The government survived the censure vote by nine votes. One result was Hong Kong (see this series' A Brief History of Hong Kong).
4. Australia and Tasmania. British settlement brought disease, dispossession and frontier killings that devastated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies.
5. South Africa, 1899–1902. In the Boer War, British forces burned farms and moved civilians into concentration camps. At least 27,927 Boers died in them, most of them children, and at least 14,154 Black Africans died in separate camps (one estimate is 20,000). The campaigner Emily Hobhouse exposed the conditions.
6. Amritsar, 1919. On 13 April, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire into an unarmed crowd in an enclosed garden, the Jallianwala Bagh. The official count was 379 dead; Indian estimates were around 1,000. Even Winston Churchill, then a minister, called it "monstrous."
7. Bengal, 1943. In wartime India, a famine killed somewhere between 800,000 and 3.8 million people, most often cited as about 3 million. Its causes are argued over: the loss of Burmese rice after Japan's conquest, a cyclone and crop disease, wartime inflation, and decisions in London and Delhi about shipping and food imports. The economist Amartya Sen argued it was a failure of distribution rather than a shortage of food.
8. Kenya, 1952–60. Fighting the Mau Mau rising, the colonial government detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu in camps where torture was used. In 2013, after documents hidden for decades were disclosed, the British government settled with 5,228 Kenyan victims for £19.9 million and said it "sincerely regrets that these abuses took place." The historian Caroline Elkins's work was central to the case.

For Ireland, for India, for Kenya and for the Caribbean, the empire is not a chapter that ended. Borders, languages, legal systems, diasporas and memories of famine and violence are living inheritances, and so is the presence in Britain of millions of people whose families came from the places Britain once ruled.

These two views are not as opposite as they sound. Most serious historians on both sides agree on most of the facts above; they disagree about how to weigh them, about what the counterfactual would have been, and about whether a whole empire can be given a single moral verdict. What has changed is that the colonised side is now part of the British conversation, in schools, museums and politics, rather than outside it.

Part 9 — Two world wars (1914–1945)

Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, after German troops invaded Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed. Most people expected a short war. It lasted over four years and killed roughly 744,000 servicemen from the British Isles, with hundreds of thousands more from the empire; more than a million Indian soldiers served overseas.

The war's defining image for Britain is the Somme. On its first day, 1 July 1916, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed, still the bloodiest day in its history. Many of the dead belonged to "Pals battalions," raised from single towns, workplaces or football clubs, so that a street or a village could lose most of its young men in a morning. The 36th (Ulster) Division, recruited from the unionist militia of 1912, was among the units shattered that day, and the Somme became part of Ulster Protestant memory just as the Easter Rising, three months earlier, became part of Irish nationalist memory.

At home, conscription began in 1916, women took over jobs in munitions factories, transport and offices, and the state took control of shipping, railways, food and wages to an extent nobody had imagined before. The war broke the old political order: in 1918 most men without property and many women voted for the first time, and by the 1920s Labour had replaced the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives, forming its first, short-lived government in 1924. The war left a culture of mourning that still shapes the calendar: the two-minute silence on 11 November, the red poppies worn in the weeks before it, and the war memorial that stands in almost every town and village in Britain.

The hungry years

The interwar years were good for some and terrible for others. Southern and Midland England, with new industries such as cars, electrical goods and chemicals, and spreading suburbs of semi-detached houses, grew more prosperous. The old industrial regions, built on coal, cotton, steel and shipbuilding, never recovered their prewar markets. In May 1926 a General Strike in support of locked-out miners brought out well over a million workers for nine days before the union leaders called it off. After the 1929 crash, unemployment in towns such as Jarrow on Tyneside reached levels that seem unimaginable now, and in 1936 two hundred men from Jarrow walked to London to petition Parliament for work. They were politely received and sent home.

In 1931 the Statute of Westminster recognised the full independence of the "dominions" (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland). In 1936 Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Through the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain's government tried to avoid another war by negotiating with Hitler, a policy, called appeasement, that peaked at Munich in September 1938 and is still argued over: a shameful mistake, or a way of buying time to rearm?

"Their finest hour"

Britain and France declared war on 3 September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland. In May 1940, as Germany overran the Low Countries and France, Winston Churchill became prime minister. Between 26 May and 4 June, ships of every size, from destroyers to pleasure boats, evacuated 338,226 British and French troops from the beaches at Dunkirk. France surrendered in June. For the next year, Britain and its empire fought Germany without a major ally.

In all, about 383,700 British military personnel and 67,200 civilians died in the Second World War. The empire's contribution was huge: the Indian Army, about 2.5 million strong, was the largest volunteer army in history, and soldiers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand fought from Burma to Normandy. That contribution, and the famine in Bengal in 1943, are part of why independence movements came out of the war stronger.

The war also made the welfare state thinkable. In December 1942 a report by the civil servant William Beveridge proposed a national system of social insurance to slay five "giants": Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. People who had been told the state could not afford to help the unemployed in the 1930s had now seen it run the whole economy for victory, and they voted accordingly.

Part 10 — The welfare state, the end of empire and the Troubles (1945–1979)

In July 1945, two months after victory in Europe, voters threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government under Clement Attlee with a landslide. Its programme built the Britain that lasted until 1979:

1. The National Health Service, launched on 5 July 1948 by the health minister Aneurin Bevan, a former miner from south Wales: medical care free at the point of use, paid for from taxation.
2. National Insurance pensions, sickness and unemployment benefits, built on Beveridge.
3. Nationalisation of coal, railways, electricity, gas, steel and the Bank of England.
4. Housing and New Towns, with over a million new homes built and planned towns such as Stevenage and Harlow.

All of this was done by a country that was nearly bankrupt, rationing bread (never rationed in the war) and borrowing from the United States. Rationing ended only in 1954. Historians argue whether postwar governments spent too much on welfare and too little on modernising industry; Correlli Barnett made that charge famously, and David Edgerton has argued that Britain was a much more technocratic, military and productive state than the "decline" story allows.

The end of empire

The empire dissolved faster than anyone in London had planned. India and Pakistan became independent at midnight on 14–15 August 1947, after the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought the date forward from June 1948. The hasty partition along religious lines set off killings and mass flight in which somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people died and 12 to 20 million were displaced. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948; Britain gave up its mandate in Palestine the same year, leaving Arabs and Jews to war.

Suez was the moment the British establishment discovered it was no longer a great power able to act without American approval. The former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed it up in 1962: Britain "has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." Many would say the search is still on.

Coming to the "mother country"

Empire also came home. In June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury carrying 1,027 passengers, 802 of whom gave their last residence as the Caribbean. It became the symbol of a generation of migration from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh and East Africa, by people who were British subjects with the right to settle, and who staffed the NHS, London Transport and the textile mills of the north. Many met open racism: "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs" signs, violence such as the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and the 1968 speech in which the Conservative MP Enoch Powell predicted "rivers of blood." The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 began restricting entry; Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1968 and 1976 began outlawing discrimination.

In 2018 it emerged that hundreds of Windrush-generation migrants, who had lived legally in Britain for decades but lacked paperwork, had been told they were illegal immigrants, sacked, refused healthcare, detained and in some cases deported. The Windrush scandal led to the resignation of the Home Secretary and a compensation scheme, and it was a reminder that the empire's last chapters are being written in Britain.

Europe and the 1960s

Britain stayed out of the European Economic Community when it was founded in 1957, applied in 1961 and 1967 as the Commonwealth's trade declined, was vetoed both times by France's President de Gaulle, and finally joined on 1 January 1973. In a referendum on 5 June 1975, 67 percent voted to stay in.

The 1960s changed private life. Parliament suspended the death penalty for murder (1965) and abolished it for good in Great Britain (1969), decriminalised sex between men in England and Wales (1967) and legalised abortion (1967). London was "swinging," the Beatles and the Rolling Stones conquered the world, and a new youth culture was born. Secondary education was reorganised into comprehensive schools across much of the country, and new universities opened.

The Troubles begin

In Northern Ireland, Catholics faced discrimination in housing, jobs and voting, and from 1968 a civil rights movement modelled on America's marched for equal treatment. Marches were attacked by loyalists and police; in August 1969 rioting in Derry and Belfast led the British government to send in troops, at first welcomed by many Catholics as protectors. Within two years the army was fighting a revived and violent Provisional IRA, and loyalist paramilitaries were murdering Catholics.

On 30 January 1972, in Derry, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen men at a civil rights march, and another of the wounded died later. A first inquiry largely exonerated the soldiers. A second, under Lord Saville, reported in 2010 that the firing was "unjustifiable" and that none of the dead was posing a threat; Prime Minister David Cameron apologised in the Commons. In March 1972 London suspended Northern Ireland's parliament and imposed direct rule. That year was the worst of the conflict: 480 people were killed.

The crisis of the 1970s

The postwar economy ran into trouble. Inflation reached 24.2 percent in 1975; in 1976 the government borrowed $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund. Strikes became frequent, and in the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978–79, public-sector strikes left rubbish uncollected in the streets and, in one notorious case in Liverpool, the dead unburied. North Sea oil began to flow in the late 1970s, but too late to save James Callaghan's Labour government, which lost a vote of confidence in March 1979.

Part 11 — Thatcher, New Labour and devolution (1979–2010)

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first woman prime minister, took office on 4 May 1979 promising to reverse decline.

The Falklands War of 1982, after Argentina's military government invaded the islands on 2 April, ended with Britain retaking them in June; 255 British servicemen, 649 Argentines and three islanders died. Victory helped Thatcher to a landslide in 1983. The miners' strike (March 1984 to March 1985), led by Arthur Scargill against pit closures, was the bitterest industrial dispute in modern British history. Its defeat was followed by the closure of most of the coalfields, and many mining communities in Yorkshire, the north-east, Scotland and south Wales are still among the poorest places in the country.

Her admirers credit her with ending the strikes, inflation and state control of the 1970s, restoring Britain's confidence and making London a world financial centre. Her critics point to deindustrialisation, rising inequality and the destruction of communities, and to her line, in a 1987 magazine interview, that "there is no such thing as society." Her full sentence went on: "There are individual men and women and there are families." Scotland, which had voted Conservative in large numbers in the 1950s, turned decisively against her party, a shift that fed the demand for a Scottish parliament. Her end came over the "poll tax," a flat local tax per adult, introduced in Scotland first in 1989; after riots in London in March 1990 and a revolt by her own MPs, she resigned in November 1990.

Peace in Northern Ireland

The 1980s were among the darkest years of the conflict. In 1981, ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze prison, demanding to be treated as political prisoners. The first, Bobby Sands, was elected to Parliament during his strike and died on 5 May after 66 days. The hunger strikes turned Sinn Féin, the IRA's political wing, into an electoral force. In 1984 the IRA bombed the Conservative conference hotel in Brighton and nearly killed Thatcher.

Slowly, secretly, the shape of a deal emerged. The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) gave Dublin a consultative role in the north. John Major's government held back-channel talks with the IRA; the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 said Britain had "no selfish strategic or economic interest" in Northern Ireland; the IRA declared a ceasefire in August 1994. After Tony Blair's election, all-party talks chaired by the American former senator George Mitchell produced the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) on 10 April 1998.

On 22 May 1998 the agreement was approved by 71 percent of voters in Northern Ireland, on an 81 percent turnout, and by 94 percent in the Republic. Estimates suggest that nearly all nationalists voted yes but only a narrow majority of unionists. Three months later a republican splinter group's bomb in Omagh killed 29 people, the worst single atrocity of the Troubles, and the peace held anyway.

In all, between 1969 and 2001, the Sutton Index of Deaths at Ulster University counts 3,532 people killed in the conflict. Responsibility for those deaths is often misremembered on all sides:

More than half of those killed (1,840) were civilians. The IRA formally ended its armed campaign in 2005, and in May 2007 the hardline unionist Ian Paisley and the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness became First and deputy First Minister together, a sight almost nobody had thought possible.

New Labour and devolution

Tony Blair's Labour Party won a landslide on 1 May 1997. Its first acts included giving the Bank of England control of interest rates and holding devolution referendums.

The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly (now the Senedd) first met in 1999. England, with 84 percent of the UK's people, got no parliament of its own, an asymmetry that has never been resolved. Blair's governments also introduced a national minimum wage (1999) and the Human Rights Act (1998), removed most hereditary peers from the Lords (1999) and spent heavily on the NHS and schools.

His reputation, though, is dominated by one decision: joining the United States in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that proved false. The official Chilcot inquiry reported in 2016 that the UK had gone to war before peaceful options were exhausted. On 7 July 2005, four British-born suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's Tube and buses. Gordon Brown succeeded Blair in 2007 and within months faced the first run on a British bank in over a century, at Northern Rock, and then the 2008 global financial crisis, in which the government partly nationalised some of the country's largest banks.

Part 12 — Austerity, Brexit and Britain in 2026 (2010–2026)

The 2010 election produced the first coalition since the war, between David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats. Its central policy was austerity: deep cuts in public spending, especially for local councils and working-age benefits, to reduce the deficit left by the crash. Supporters said it restored confidence in Britain's public finances; critics, including many economists, said it choked the recovery and frayed public services. Underneath was a deeper problem the condensed piece in this library describes: real output per person, which had grown by about 2.3 percent a year from 1960 to 2007, grew by only about 0.4 percent a year from 2007 to 2025.

Two referendums

On 18 September 2014, Scotland voted on independence. On an 85 percent turnout, 55.3 percent voted No. The result was meant to settle the question for a generation; within two years it had been reopened.

On 23 June 2016, the UK voted on its membership of the European Union. Leave won by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent, on a turnout of 72 percent.

Leave voters' strongest case was about democratic control: that laws, borders and trade should be decided by a Parliament British voters could remove, not by EU institutions; many also wanted lower immigration, which had risen sharply after the EU enlarged in 2004. Remain voters' strongest case was that shared rules were the price of frictionless trade with Britain's largest market, of peace and open borders in Ireland, and of influence in the world. Leave voters were older, more often outside the big cities and without degrees; Remain voters younger, more urban and more often graduates. The split ran through families as well as regions.

Cameron resigned. Theresa May negotiated a withdrawal deal that Parliament rejected three times, largely over the Irish border: the Good Friday Agreement assumed an open border, and leaving the EU's single market and customs union implied checks somewhere. Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in December 2019 promising to "get Brexit done." The UK left the EU at 11 pm on 31 January 2020, and the transition period ended on 31 December 2020. Johnson's solution for Ireland put a customs border in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which unionists bitterly opposed; the 2023 Windsor Framework eased it. In February 2024 Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill became the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland.

Whether Brexit has helped or harmed is still argued in 2026. Most economists and the government's own fiscal watchdog estimate that it has reduced trade and long-run productivity; supporters point to new trade deals, control over immigration rules and regulatory freedom, and argue that the costs have been exaggerated or confused with those of the pandemic.

The pandemic and the revolving door

The first COVID-19 lockdown began on 23 March 2020. By September 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, more than 160,000 deaths in the UK had COVID-19 on the death certificate. The parties held in Downing Street during lockdown ("Partygate") contributed to Johnson's fall in 2022. His successor, Liz Truss, lasted 49 days after a budget of unfunded tax cuts caused turmoil in the bond markets. Rishi Sunak, the first British Asian prime minister, followed. Inflation peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022, the highest in four decades, driven by energy prices after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On 8 September 2022 Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, aged 96, after seventy years on the throne. Her son was crowned Charles III on 6 May 2023.

Labour, Reform and the 2026 upheaval

On 4 July 2024 Labour under Keir Starmer won 411 of 650 seats on only 33.7 percent of the vote, a majority of 172. The first-past-the-post system was rarely so lopsided: Reform UK, the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic party led by Nigel Farage, won 14.3 percent of the vote but five seats.

Starmer's government struggled to lift growth or its own popularity. In the elections of 7 May 2026, Labour suffered historic losses in English councils, while Reform UK and the Greens made their biggest gains ever. In Wales, Plaid Cymru won 43 of the Senedd's 96 seats and Reform UK 34, with Labour reduced to 9; Plaid's Rhun ap Iorwerth became First Minister. In Scotland, the SNP stayed the largest party with 58 of 129 seats, short of a majority, with Reform UK and Labour on 17 each.

In June 2026 Andy Burnham, the long-serving Mayor of Greater Manchester, returned to Parliament at a by-election in Makerfield. Starmer announced he would step down; Burnham was elected Labour leader unopposed in mid-July and became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026.

The country in numbers, autumn 2026

In the autumn of 2026, the questions on the table were familiar ones in new combinations: how to make the economy grow faster outside London and the south-east; how to fund an ageing population's health and care; how much immigration the country wants and how to control it; whether the union can hold when the governments in Edinburgh and Cardiff are led by parties that want out; and where Britain stands between the United States and a Europe it left.

Part 13 — How to understand the United Kingdom today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. It is a union of nations, not a nation-state. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland joined at different times, on different terms, and kept different churches, laws, schools and memories. The English often experience "Britain" and "England" as the same thing; the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish almost never do. Devolution since 1999 has made the union more like a negotiation than a fixed fact, and the 2026 results put parties seeking independence in charge in two of its four parts.

2. The constitution is unwritten and evolves by stealth. There is no single founding document. Parliamentary sovereignty, conventions about how ministers behave, and old statutes from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights do the work. Admirers say this lets Britain change without revolutions; critics say it depends on politicians behaving well and leaves minorities, and the smaller nations, exposed.

3. Empire is still being digested. The empire made Britain rich and powerful, and made millions of its subjects poor, dead or displaced. Its consequences are in Britain's cities, in its Commonwealth ties, and in its arguments about statues, museum collections, school curricula and reparations. British people disagree about it more sharply than about almost anything else in their history.

4. Class and region are written into the map. The Industrial Revolution made the north, the Midlands, south Wales and central Scotland the engine of the world; deindustrialisation after the 1970s left many of those places behind London and the south-east. Much of British politics since 2016, from Brexit to "levelling up" to the National Economic Council meeting in Glasgow in October 2026, is about that gap.

5. Britain changes by reform rather than revolution. Since 1689 it has had no successful revolution and no invasion. The vote was extended in stages over a century; empire ended without a war at home; Northern Ireland's conflict ended in a negotiated compromise. The habit makes the country stable and slow. Its old questions (who belongs, who decides, what the union is for) are rarely answered once and for all. They are renegotiated, again and again.

The takeaway

The United Kingdom was assembled over centuries from separate kingdoms, by conquest (Wales, Ireland), by inheritance (Scotland's king took England's throne in 1603) and by negotiation (the unions of 1707 and 1801). Its Parliament won power from its monarchs step by step, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights to universal suffrage in 1928. It became the first industrial nation and the largest empire in history, built in part on slavery and conquest, and spent the 20th century fighting two world wars, building a welfare state and giving up that empire. Since 1998 it has made peace in Northern Ireland, devolved power to Scotland and Wales, and left the European Union. In 2026 its central question is the one it has always had: on what terms its nations, regions and peoples choose to stay together.

Try this: pick the town or city in Britain you know best, or the one your family came from, and trace three of its layers: a Roman or Anglo-Saxon or Viking place name, a building from the industrial century, and a community whose families arrived from the former empire. You will have walked through most of this history in a single high street.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Office for National Statistics (accessed 31 October 2026): population estimates (mid-2025); Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025 (21 May 2026); unemployment series MGSX and MGSC; CPI series D7G7; GDP series IHYP.
- GOV.UK: Prime Minister's page and ministerial biography (Andy Burnham); "PM meeting with the First Minister of Wales" and "PM meeting with First Minister of Scotland", 30 October 2026; "Statement to Parliament on settlement of Mau Mau claims", 6 June 2013. The Scottish Parliament's current party balance (October 2026).
- CAIN Archive, Ulster University: Malcolm Sutton, An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland (tables by year, organisation and status); 1998 referendum results; Bloody Sunday summary; 1981 hunger strike chronology.
- Ancient DNA: Olalde et al., "The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe", Nature (2018); Brace et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution (2019); Gretzinger et al., "The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool", Nature (2022); Ashton et al., PLoS One (2014) on Happisburgh; Natural History Museum on Cheddar Man.
- The National Archives, teaching resource Magna Carta 1214–1225; Magna Carta clauses 39–40 in G. R. C. Davis's translation; Historic Hansard, House of Commons debates on the war with China, 8–9 April 1840.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (GDP per person, 2025); Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (British carrying estimates, as cited in the condensed piece).
- Election and referendum results for 1975, 1997, 2014, 2016, 2024 and 2026, and death tolls for the Somme, the Blitz, Partition, the Bengal famine, Amritsar, the Boer War camps and Kenya, follow the official counts summarised in Wikipedia and its cited sources, with ranges given where historians disagree. The 2026 Senedd seat counts follow Senedd Research, "Senedd election: an initial analysis of the results" (May 2026), and ITV Wales's full results; the Scottish Parliament counts follow the Scottish Parliament Information Centre briefing SB 26-26, "The result" (12 May 2026).

Go deeper
- 📘 The Isles: A History — Norman Davies (the four-nation history: Britain and Ireland told without making England the whole story)
- 📘 Empire — Niall Ferguson, and Inglorious Empire — Shashi Tharoor (read together: the strongest case for the empire's legacy and the strongest case against)
- 📘 Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire — Caroline Elkins (how coercion and emergency rule worked, by the historian behind the Mau Mau case)
- 📘 The Rise and Fall of the British Nation — David Edgerton (a 20th-century history that dismantles the familiar story of decline)
- 📘 Lost Lives — David McKittrick and others (a short entry for every person killed in the Troubles; the most humane history of the conflict)
- 🌐 CAIN Archive, Ulster University (primary documents, chronologies and data on the Northern Ireland conflict)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: United Kingdom: A Condensed History; A Brief History of Hong Kong and A Brief History of the United States (this series); France: A Condensed History