History of the British Isles
During the British Bronze Age, large megalithic monuments similar to those from the Late Neolithic continued to be constructed or modified, including such sites as Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and Must Farm.
Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, the conqueror of Mauretania (modern-day Algeria and Morocco), then became governor of Britain, where he spent most of his governorship campaigning in Wales.
Between 77 and 83 AD the new governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola led a series of campaigns which enlarged the province significantly, taking in north Wales, northern Britain, and most of Caledonia (Scotland).
Proclaiming himself to be King William I, he strengthened his regime by appointing loyal members of the Norman elite to many positions of authority, building a system of castles across the country and ordering a census of his new kingdom, the Domesday Book.
In 1805 Lord Nelson's fleet decisively defeated the French and Spanish at Trafalgar, ending any hopes Napoleon had to wrest control of the oceans away from the British.
After Napoleon's surrender and exile to the island of Elba, peace appeared to have returned, but when he escaped back into France in 1815, the British and their allies had to fight him again.
The Duke of Wellington argued that an outright victory over the U.S. was impossible because the Americans controlled the western Great Lakes and had destroyed the power of Britain's Indian allies.
Peace was agreed to at the end of 1814, but unaware of this, Andrew Jackson won a great victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 (news took several weeks to cross the Atlantic before the advent of steam ships).
Her long reign saw Britain reach the zenith of its economic and political power, with the introduction of steam ships, railroads, photography, and the telegraph.
Using the imperial tools of free trade and financial investment,[38] it exerted major influence on many countries outside Europe, especially in Latin America and Asia.
[43] Despite its alliance with the French in the Crimean War, Britain viewed the Second Empire of Napoleon III with some distrust, especially as the emperor constructed ironclad warships and began returning France to a more active foreign policy.
The rise of the German Empire since its creation in 1871 posed a new challenge, for it (along with the United States), threatened to usurp Britain's place as the world's foremost industrial power.
Germany acquired a number of colonies in Africa and the Pacific, but Chancellor Otto von Bismarck succeeded in achieving general peace through his balance of power strategy.
The Boer republics were merged into the Union of South Africa in 1910; this had internal self-government, but its foreign policy was controlled by London and it was an integral part of the British Empire.
[48][page needed] Part of the agreement which led to the 1800 Act of Union stipulated that the Penal Laws in Ireland were to be repealed and Catholic emancipation granted.
[49][50] British politicians such as the Prime Minister Robert Peel were at this time wedded to the economic policy of laissez-faire, which argued against state intervention.
After Butt's death the Home Rule Movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party as it had become known, was turned into a major political force under the guidance of William Shaw and a radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell.
Two Home Rule Bills (1886 and 1893) were introduced by Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, but neither became law, mainly due to opposition from the Conservative Party and the House of Lords.
In order to avoid another European conflict, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to appease German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who was expanding his country's territory across Central Europe.
Winston Churchill, who had been leader of the wartime coalition government, suffered a surprising landslide defeat to Clement Attlee's Labour party in 1945 elections.
Eden's successor, Harold Macmillan, split the Conservatives when Britain applied to join the European Economic Community, but French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed the application.
Labour returned to power in 1964 under Harold Wilson, who brought in a number of social reforms, including the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of capital punishment and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
Wilson, having lost the 1970 election to Heath, returned to power in 1974; however, Labour's reputation was harmed by the winter of discontent of 1978-9 under Jim Callaghan, which enabled the Conservatives to re-take control of Parliament in 1979, under Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister.
[58] Tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland came to a head in the late 1960s, when nationalist participants in a civil rights march were shot by members of the B Specials, a reserve police force manned almost exclusively by unionists.
From this point the Provisional Irish Republican Army, also known as the Provos or simply the IRA, began a bombing campaign throughout the U.K., beginning a period known as The Troubles, which lasted until the late 1990s.
Subsequent UK headlines focussed upon the calamitous Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 in North Kensington on 14 June 2017, the deadliest structural fire in nearly three decades, which prompted an ongoing public inquiry; the novichok nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his wife Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March 2018, raising diplomatic tensions between the UK and Russia; and May's authorisation of air strikes against Bashar al-Assad's Syria in the ongoing civil war.
May's Irish backstop plan to keep Northern Ireland partially in the EU single market until a deal was made was consistently defeated in the House, forcing her to postpone the UK's scheduled departure date.
The economy suffered greatly in both cases, but rebounded quickly; the two nations now face high inflation, economic cooldown and fears of recession.
Johnson was greatly damaged by a string of scandals between November 2021 and July 2022, including over his attendance earlier in the pandemic of numerous parties which flouted the government's own lockdown restrictions, a string of electoral defeats, controversy involving several Tory MPs, including Owen Paterson and Sir Geoffrey Cox, and his awareness of allegations of sexual misconduct against former chief whip Chris Pincher.
[61] He was replaced as prime minister by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss 5 September, three days before the accession of King Charles III on the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
