History of the United Kingdom First British Empire. With the defeat by the United States, France and Spain in the War of American Independence, Britain lost its 13 American colonies and rebuilt a Second British Empire based in Asia and Africa. As a result, British culture, and its technological, political, constitutional, and linguistic influence, became worldwide. Politically, the central event was the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from 1793 to 1815, which British elites saw as a profound threat, and worked energetically to form multiple coalitions that finally defeated Napoleon in 1815. The Tories, who came to power in 1783, remained in power (with
Human rights in the United States in the Declaration of Independence of the United States, when a group of representatives from the various states signed a declaration of independence citing charges against King George III. As the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 expressed it, natural law taught that the people were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and could alter or abolish government "destructive" of those rights. The United States government has declared martial law, suspended (or claimed exceptions to) some rights on national security grounds, typically in wartime and conflicts such as the United States Civil War, Cold War or the War