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Kingdom of Great Britain


Flag Royal coat of arms
Location of  Great Britain in 1800  (green)

in Europe  (green & grey)

Capital London
Languages English, Scots, Norn, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic
Religion Christianity
Government Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
 -  1707–1714 Anne
 -  1714–1727 George I
 -  1727–1760 George II
 -  1760–1800 George III
Prime Minister
 -  1721–1742 Robert Walpole
 -  1742–1743 Spencer Compton
 -  1757–1762 Duke of Newcastle
 -  1766–1768 William Pitt the Elder
 -  1770–1782 Lord North
 -  1783–1800 William Pitt the Younger
Legislature Parliament
 -  Upper house House of Lords
 -  Lower house House of Commons
 -  Acts of Union 1 May 1707
 -  Union with Ireland 1 January 1801
 -  Total 230,977 km² (89,181 sq mi)
 -  1707 est. 7,000,000 
     Density 30.3 /km²  (78.5 /sq mi)
 -  1800 est. 10,500,000 
     Density 45.5 /km²  (117.7 /sq mi)
Currency Pound sterling
Today part of  United Kingdom
Part of a series on the
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The Kingdom of Great Britain was a sovereign state in western Europe from 1 May 1707 to 31 December 1800.[1] The state came into being following the Treaty of Union in 1706, ratified by the Acts of Union 1707, which united the kingdoms of England and Scotland to form a single kingdom encompassing the whole island of Great Britain and its outlying islands. It did not include Ireland, which remained a separate realm within the British Empire. The unitary state was governed by a single parliament and government, based at Westminster. The former kingdoms had been in personal union since James VI, King of Scots, became King of England and King of Ireland in 1603 following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, bringing about a "Union of the Crowns".

The early years of the unified kingdom were marked by Jacobite risings which ended with defeat for the Stuart cause at Culloden in 1746. Later, in 1763, victory in the Seven Years War led to the dominance of the British Empire, which was to be the foremost global power for over a century and later grew to become the largest empire in history.

On 1 January 1801, the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[2] In 1922, five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom, and the state was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the formal name of the current state.


  • Etymology 1
  • Extent 2
  • Political structure 3
  • Relationship with Ireland 4
  • Great Britain in the 18th century 5
    • Integration 5.1
    • Wars against France and Spain 5.2
    • Mercantilism 5.3
    • American Revolution 5.4
    • Canada 5.5
    • Second British Empire 5.6
    • India 5.7
    • Australia 5.8
    • Battling the French Revolution and Napoleon 5.9
  • Monarchs 6
  • Parliament of Great Britain 7
  • Peerage of Great Britain 8
  • See also 9
  • Notes 10
  • References 11
  • Further reading 12
  • External links 13



The Treaty of Union and the subsequent Acts of Union state that England and Scotland were to be "United into one Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain".[3] The websites of the UK parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the BBC, and others, including the Historical Association, refer to the state created on 1 May 1707 as the United Kingdom of Great Britain.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] Additionally, the term united kingdom is found in informal use during the 18th century to describe the state.[11][12] However, the state created by the union of England and Scotland in 1707 is named in the treaty as Great Britain; and is usually referred to by that name or as the Kingdom of Great Britain.[13][14][15][16][1][17]


The new state created in 1707 included the island of Great Britain, together with the many smaller islands that were part of the kingdoms of England and Scotland. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were never part of the kingdom of Great Britain, although by the Isle of Man Purchase Act 1765 the British Crown acquired suzerainty over the island from Charlotte Murray, Duchess of Atholl.[18]

Political structure

The kingdoms of England and Scotland, both in existence from the 9th century, were separate states until 1707. However, they had come into a personal union in 1603, when James VI of Scotland succeeded his cousin Elizabeth I as King of England under the name of James I. This Union of the Crowns under the House of Stuart meant that the whole of the island of Great Britain was now ruled by a single monarch, who by virtue of holding the English crown also ruled over the Kingdom of Ireland. Each of the three kingdoms maintained its own parliament and laws (although there was a brief attempted union during the Interregnum in the mid-17th century).

This disposition changed dramatically when the Acts of Union 1707 came into force, with a single unified Crown of Great Britain and a single unified parliament.[19] Ireland remained formally separate, with its own parliament, until the Acts of Union 1801. The Treaty of Union provided that succession to the British throne (and that of Ireland) would be in accordance with the English Act of Settlement of 1701; rather than Scotland's Act of Security of 1704, which ceased to have effect.[20] The Act of Settlement required that the heir to the English throne be a descendant of the Electress Sophia of Hanover who was not a "Papist"; this brought about the Hanoverian succession only a few years after the Union.

Legislative power was vested in the Parliament of Great Britain, which replaced both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland.[21] In practice it was a continuation of the English parliament, sitting at the same location in Westminster, expanded to include representation from Scotland.



Relationship with Ireland


Great Britain in the 18th century

The 18th century saw England, and after 1707 Great Britain, rise to become the world's dominant colonial power, with France its main rival on the imperial stage.[25] The pre-1707 English overseas possessions became the nucleus of the British Empire.


The deeper political integration of her kingdoms was a key policy of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch of England and Scotland and the first monarch of Great Britain. A Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 following negotiations between representatives of the parliaments of England and Scotland, and each parliament then passed separate Acts of Union to ratify it. The Acts came into effect on 1 May 1707, uniting the separate Parliaments and crowns of England and Scotland and forming a single Kingdom of Great Britain. Anne became the first occupant of the unified British throne, and in line with Article 22 of the Treaty of Union, Scotland sent 45 Members to join all of the existing members of the Parliament of England in the new House of Commons of Great Britain.[26]

Lord Clive meeting Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, by Francis Hayman (c. 1762)

Wars against France and Spain

The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its colonial empire to Philip of Anjou, a grandson of the King of France, had raised British fears of the unification of France, Spain and their colonies. In 1701, England, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The conflict lasted until 1714, until France and Spain finally lost. At the concluding Treaty of Utrecht, Philip renounced his and his descendants' right to the French throne. Spain lost its empire in Europe, and although it kept its empire in the Americas and the Philippines, it was irreversibly weakened as a great power. The new British Empire, based upon what until 1707 had been the English overseas possessions, was enlarged: from France, Great Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia, and from Spain Gibraltar and Minorca. Gibraltar, which is still a British overseas territory, became a major naval base and allowed Great Britain to control the strait connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.[27]

The Seven Years' War, which began in 1756, was the first war waged on a global scale and saw British involvement in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and coastal Africa. The signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had important consequences for Great Britain and its empire. In North America, France's future as a colonial power was effectively ended with the ceding of New France to the British, leaving a sizeable French-speaking population under British control, and Louisiana to Spain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. In India, the third Carnatic War had left France still in control of its enclaves, but with military restrictions and an obligation to support the British client states, effectively leaving the future of India to Great Britain. The British victory over France in the Seven Years War therefore left Great Britain as the world's dominant colonial power.[28]



American Revolution

During the 1760s and 1770s, relations between the Treaty of Paris. The war was expensive but the British financed it successfully.[31]


After a series of "French and Indian wars," the British took slices of France's North American colonies, finally acquiring all of them (except two small islands) in 1763. London's policy was to respect Quebec's religious heritage—even though it was Catholic—as well as its legal, economic and social systems. By the Quebec Act of 1774, Canada was enlarged to include the western holdings of the American colonies. In the American Revolutionary War starting in 1775, the British made Canada its major base for naval action and for an invasion in 1777 that led to the surrender of General Burgoyne's army. However American efforts to invade Canada also failed.[32]

After the American victory between 40,000 and 60,000 defeated Loyalists migrated, some bringing their slaves. Most were given free land to compensate their losses. The 14,000 Loyalists who went to the Saint John and Saint Croix river valleys, then part of Nova Scotia, were not welcome by the locals. Therefore London split off New Brunswick as a separate colony in 1784. The Constitutional Act of 1791 created the provinces of Upper Canada (mainly English-speaking) and Lower Canada (mainly French-speaking) to defuse tensions between the French and British communities, and implemented governmental systems similar to those employed in Great Britain, with the intention of asserting imperial authority and not allowing the sort of popular control of government that was perceived to have led to the American Revolution.[33]

Second British Empire

The loss of the Thirteen Colonies, Great Britain's most populous overseas possessions, which became the United States, marked the transition between the "first" and "second" empires, in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa.[34] Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had argued that colonies were redundant, and that free trade should replace the old mercantilist policies that had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, dating back to the protectionism of Spain and Portugal. The growth of trade between the newly independent United States and Great Britain after 1781[35] confirmed Smith's view that political control was not necessary for economic success.






Battling the French Revolution and Napoleon

With the regicide of King Louis XVI in 1793, the French Revolution represented a contest of ideologies between the two nations.[39] It was not only Britain's position on the world stage that was threatened: Napoleon, who came to power in 1799, threatened invasion of Great Britain itself, and with it, a fate similar to the countries of continental Europe that his armies had overrun. The Napoleonic Wars were therefore ones in which the British invested large amounts of capital and resources. French ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy.[40]

The French Revolution revived religious and political grievances in Ireland. In 1798, Irish nationalists launched the Irish Rebellion of 1798, believing that the French would help them to overthrow the British.[41][42]

William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister, firmly believed that the only solution to the problem was a union of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the defeat of the rebellion, which had had some assistance from France, he advanced this policy. The union was established by the Act of Union 1800; compensation and patronage ensured the support of the Irish Parliament. Great Britain and Ireland were formally united into a single realm, as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, on 1 January 1801.[43]


  • George I (1714–1727)
  • George II (1727–1760)
  • George III (1760–1801) (Continued as King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death in 1820.)

Parliament of Great Britain

Pitt addressing the Commons in 1793


During the 18th century, the British Constitution developed significantly.

Peerage of Great Britain


See also



  2. ^ The Acts of Union 1801, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, came into effect on 1 January 1801.
  3. ^ a b Article 1 in each of:"The Treaty (act) of the Union of Parliament 1706". Scots History Online. Retrieved 18 July 2011.  /7/contents "Union with England Act 1707". The national Archives. Retrieved 18 July 2011.  "Union with Scotland Act 1706". Retrieved 18 July 2011. :
  4. ^ Acts of Union 1707, accessed 31 December 2010
  5. ^ Making the Act of Union 1707, accessed 31 December 2010
  6. ^ England – Profile BBC, 10 February 2011
  8. ^ Uniting the kingdom?, accessed 31 December 2010
  9. ^ The Union of the Parliaments 1707 Learning and Teaching Scotland, accessed 2 September 2010
  10. ^ The Creation of the United Kingdom of Great britain in 1707 Historical Association, accessed 30 January 2011
  11. ^  
  13. ^ Prakke, L.; Kortmann, C. A. J. M.; van den Brandhof, J. C. E. (2004). Constitutional law of 15 EU member states. p. 866.  
  14. ^ Home Office (2007). Life in the United Kingdom: a journey to citizenship.  
  15. ^ Dickinson (ed.), H.T. (2002). A companion to eighteenth-century Britain. p. 381.  
  18. ^ V. E. Hartley Booth & Peter Sells, British extradition law and procedure: including extradition between the United Kingdom and foreign states, the Commonwealth and dependent countries and the Republic of Ireland (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1980; ISBN 978-90-286-0079-9), p. 5
  19. ^ Act of Union 1707, Article 1.
  20. ^ Treaty of Union 1706, Article 2.
  21. ^ Act of Union 1707, Article 3.
  22. ^ Act of Union 1707, Article 22.
  24. ^ Costin Watson (1952), p. 147
  32. ^ Phillip Buckner, Canada and the British Empire (2010) ch 2
  33. ^ Desmond Morton, A short history of Canada (2001).
  36. ^ Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, eds., Australia's Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (2010), ch 1
  38. ^ Alan Atkinson, "The first plans for governing New South Wales, 1786–87", Australian Historical Studies, vol.24, no.94, April 1990, pp. 22–40, p.31.
  39. ^ James (2001), p. 152
  42. ^ Daniel Gahan, Rebellion!: Ireland in 1798 (1998)
  43. ^ John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle (1996), vol 3 cover 1797 to his death in 1806.

Further reading


External links

  • Media related to at Wikimedia Commons
  • The Treaty of Union, the Scottish Parliament
  • Text of Union with England Act
  • Text of Union with Scotland Act
Preceded by
Kingdom of England
12 July 927 – 1 May 1707
Kingdom of Scotland
c. 843 – 1 May 1707
Kingdom of Great Britain
1 May 1707 – 31 December 1800
Succeeded by
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
1 January 1801 – 6 December 1922
