British Isles

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British Isles
The British Isles in relation to mainland Europe
Geography
Location	Western Europe
Total islands	6,000+
Major islands	Great Britain, Ireland
Area	315,134 km² 121,673 sq mi
Highest point	Ben Nevis 1,344 m (4,409 ft)
Administration
Guernsey
Largest city	St Peter Port
Isle of Man
Largest city	Douglas
Republic of Ireland
Largest city	Dublin
Jersey
Largest city	Saint Helier
United Kingdom
Home Nations	England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales
Largest city	London
Demographics
Population	64.3 million
Indigenous people	Britons, Channel Islanders, Cornish, English, Irish, Manx, Scottish, Ulster-Scots, Welsh

The British Isles or British-Irish Isles ^[1] (French: Îles Britanniques, Irish: Éire agus an Bhreatain Mhór, meaning Ireland and Great Britain^[2] or Oileáin Iarthair Eorpa, meaning Islands of Western Europe,^[3] Manx: Ellanyn Goaldagh, Scottish Gaelic: Eileanan Breatannach, Welsh: Ynysoedd Prydain) is a group of islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe comprising Great Britain, Ireland and a number of smaller islands.^[4] There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.^[5] The group also includes the crown dependencies of the Isle of Man and, by tradition, the Channel Islands, although the latter are not physically a part of the archipelago.^[6] There are other common uncertainties surrounding the extent, names and geographical elements of the island group.

The term British Isles is controversial in relation to Ireland where its use is objected to by many people^[7] and by the government of the Republic of Ireland^[8]. Its use is also avoided in relations between the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, who generally employ the euphemism these islands.^[9][10]

The islands extend from Les Minquiers Reef, Jersey in the south (or Pednathise Head, Isles of Scilly if the Channel Islands are excluded), to Out Stack, Shetland in the north; and from Tearaght Island, Ireland in the west, to Lowestoft Ness, England in the east. There are more than 6,000 islands, amounting to a total land area of 315,134 km² (121,674 square miles).

Much of the British Isles is low lying and fertile, although there are mountainous areas in all regions except southern England and East Anglia. The islands are characterised by an unusually temperate climate for their latitude, due to their location in the Gulf Stream. The regional geology is complex, formed by the drifting together of separate tectonic plates and subsequent orogenic, glacial and weather erosion.

Alternative names and descriptions

Main articles: British Isles (terminology) and British Isles naming dispute

Several different names are currently used to describe the islands. The most common is the British Isles, but the complex history make names a difficult topic with regard to the many islands and states within the group.^{[citation needed]}

Dictionaries, encyclopaedias and atlases that use the term British Isles define it^{[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]} as Great Britain, Ireland and adjacent islands, typically including the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, Shetland, Orkney. Some definitions include the Channel Islands.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Many major road and rail maps and atlases use the term "Great Britain and Ireland" to describe the islands, although this may be ambiguous regarding the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.^{[22][23][24][25]}

In addition, the term "British Isles" is itself used in widely varying ways, including as an effective synonym for the UK or for Great Britain and its islands, but excluding Ireland.^{[26][27][28][29][30]} Media organisations like the The Times and the BBC have style-guide entries to try to maintain consistent usage,^[31][32] but these are not always successful.

Encyclopædia Britannica, the Oxford University Press - publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary - and the UK Hydrographic Office (publisher of "Admiralty" brand charts) have all occasionally used the term "British Isles and Ireland" (with Britannica and Oxford contradicting their own definitions of the "British Isles"),^[33][34][35] and some specialist encyclopedias also use that term.^[36] The BBC style guide's entry on the subject of the British Isles remarks, "Confused already? Keep going." The Economic History Society style guide suggests that the term should be avoided.^[37]

Other descriptions for the islands are also used in everyday language, examples are: "Great Britain and Ireland", "UK and Ireland", and "the British Isles and Ireland". Some of these are used by corporate entities and can be seen on the internet, such as in the naming of Yahoo UK & Ireland,^[38] or such as in the 2001 renaming of the British Isles Rugby Union Team to the current name of the "British and Irish Lions".

As mentioned above, the term "British Isles" is controversial in relation to Ireland. One map publisher recently decided to abandon using the term in Ireland while continuing to use it in Britain.^[39][40] The Irish government is opposed to the term "British Isles" and says that it "would discourage its usage".^[41]

Geography

Main articles: Geography of the United Kingdom, Geography of Ireland, and Geography of the Isle of Man

Satellite Image of the British Isles (excluding Orkney and Shetland); close to the coast of France

There are more than 6,000 islands in the group, the largest two being Great Britain and Ireland. Great Britain is to the east and covers 216,777 km² (83,698 square miles), over half of the total landmass of the group. Ireland is to the west and covers 84,406 km² (32,589 square miles). The largest of the other islands are to be found in the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland to the north, Anglesey and the Isle of Man between Great Britain and Ireland, and the Channel Islands near the coast of France.

The larger islands that constitute the British Isles include:

• clockwise around Great Britain from the north:
  • Northern Isles
    • Orkney
    • Shetland
    • Fair Isle
  • Lindisfarne
  • Farne Islands
  • Mersea Island
  • Isle of Sheppey
  • Portsmouth Islands
    • Hayling Island
    • Portsea Island
  • Isle of Wight
  • Isle of Portland
  • St Michael's Mount
  • Isles of Scilly
  • Islands of the Bristol Channel
    • Lundy
    • Steep Holme
    • Flat Holme
  • Islands in St George's Channel
    • Caldey Island
    • Skokholm
    • Skomer
    • Ramsey Island
  • Bardsey Island
  • Anglesey
  • Islands of Furness
  • Islands of the Clyde
    • Isle of Arran
    • Bute
    • the Cumbraes
  • Hebrides
    • Inner Hebrides
      • Small Isles
    • Outer Hebrides
      • St Kilda

• clockwise around Ireland from the north:
  • Rathlin Island
  • Lambay Island
  • Ireland's Eye
  • Great Island
  • Sherkin Island
  • Cape Clear
  • Valentia Island
  • Blasket Islands
  • Aran Islands
  • Inishark
  • Inishbofin
  • Inishturk
  • Clew Bay islands
  • Achill Island
  • Arranmore
  • Tory Island

• Isle of Man
• Channel Islands
• Rockall

See also:

• List of islands of England
• List of islands of Ireland
• List of islands of Isle of Man
• List of islands of Scotland
• List of islands of Wales

The islands are at relatively low altitudes, with central Ireland and southern Great Britain particularly low lying: the lowest point in the islands is the Fens at −4 m (−13 ft). The Scottish Highlands in the northern part of Great Britain are mountainous, with Ben Nevis being the highest point in the British Isles at 1,344 m (4,409 ft). Other mountainous areas include Wales and parts of the island of Ireland, but only seven peaks in these areas reach above 1,000 m (3,281 ft). Lakes on the islands are generally not large, although Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is an exception, covering 381 km² (147 square miles); the largest freshwater body in Great Britain is Loch Lomond at 71.1 km² (27.5 square miles). Neither are rivers particularly long, the rivers Severn at 354 km (219 miles) and Shannon at 386 km (240 miles) being the longest.

The British Isles have a temperate marine climate, the North Atlantic Drift ("Gulf Stream") which flows from the Gulf of Mexico brings with it significant moisture and raises temperatures 11°C (20°F) above the global average for the islands' latitudes.^[42] Winters are thus warm and wet, with summers mild and also wet. Most Atlantic depressions pass to the north of the islands, combined with the general westerly circulation and interactions with the landmass, this imposes an east-west variation in climate.^[43]

Transport

Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in Europe in terms of passenger traffic and the Dublin-London route is the busiest air-route in Europe,^[44] and the second-busiest in the world. Europe's two largest low-cost airlines, Ryanair and easyJet, operate from Ireland and Britain respectively.

The English Channel and the Southern North Sea are the busiest seaways in the world ^{[citation needed]}. The car ferry, M/F Ulysses, traveling the Irish Sea is the largest in the world. The Channel Tunnel, opened 1994, links Great Britain to France and is the second-longest rail tunnel in the world. The idea of building a tunnel under the Irish Sea has been raised since 1895,^[45] when it was first investigated, but is not considered to be economically viable^{[citation needed]}. Several potential Irish Sea tunnel projects have been proposed, most recently the Tusker Tunnel between the ports of Rosslare and Fishguard proposed by The Institute of Engineers of Ireland in 2004.^[46][47] A different proposed route is between Dublin and Holyhead, proposed in 1997 by a leading British engineering firm, Symonds, for a rail tunnel from Dublin to Holyhead. Either tunnel, at 80 km, would be by far the longest in the world, and would cost an estimated €20 billion. A proposal in 2007,^[48] estimated the cost of building a bridge from Country Antrim in Northern Ireland to Galloway in Scotland at BGP£3.5bn (€5bn). However, none of these are thought to be economically viable at this time.

Geology

Main article: Geology of the British Isles

A data-generated image showing the British Isles sitting on the north-west of the European continental shelf.

The British Isles lie at the juncture of several regions with past episodes of tectonic mountain building. These orogenic belts form a complex geology which records a huge and varied span of earth history.^[49] Of particular note was the Caledonian Orogeny during the Ordovician Period, ca. 488–444 Ma and early Silurian period, when the craton Baltica collided with the terrane Avalonia to form the mountains and hills in northern Britain and Ireland. Baltica formed roughly the north western half of Ireland and Scotland. Further collisions caused the Variscan orogeny in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, forming the hills of Munster, south-west England, and south Wales. Over the last 500 million years the land which forms the islands has drifted northwest from around 30°S, crossing the equator around 370 million years ago to reach its present northern latitude.^[50]

The islands have been shaped by numerous glaciations during the Quaternary Period, the most recent being the Devensian. As this ended, the central Irish Sea was de-glaciated (whether or not there was a land bridge between Great Britain and Ireland at this time is somewhat disputed, though there was certainly a single ice sheet covering the entire sea) and the English Channel flooded, with sea levels rising to current levels some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, leaving the British Isles in their current form.

The islands' geology is highly complex, though there are large amounts of limestone and chalk rocks which formed in the Permian and Triassic periods. The west coasts of Ireland and northern Great Britain that directly face the Atlantic Ocean are generally characterized by long peninsulas, and headlands and bays; the internal and eastern coasts are "smoother".

Demographics

A population density map of the British Isles. Dublin and London, with respective population densities of 1,288 and 4,761 are shaded blue.

The demographics of the British Isles show dense population in England, which accounts for almost 80% of the total population of the region. In Ireland, Northern Ireland. Scotland, Wales dense populations are limited to areas around, or close to, their respective capitals. Major populations centers (greater than one million people) exist in the following areas:

• Greater London Urban Area (8.5 million) (Metropolitan area: 12 - 14 million)
• West Midlands conurbation (2.28 million)
• Greater Manchester Urban Area (2.24 million)
• Greater Dublin Area: (1.7 million)
• West Yorkshire Urban Area (1.5 million)
• Greater Glasgow (1.2 million)

The population of England has risen steadily throughout its history, while the populations of Scotland and Wales have shown little increase during the twentieth century - the population of Scotland remaining unchanged since 1951. Ireland, which for most of its history comprised a population proportionate to its land area, one third of the total population, has since the Great Famine fallen to less than one tenth of the population of the British Isles. The famine, which caused a century-long population decline, decimated the Irish population and permanently altered the demographic make-up of the British Isles. On a global scale this disaster led to the creation of an Irish diaspora that number fifteen-times more than the current population of the island.

Population of Ireland since the Great Famine vs. total for British Isles

	Ireland	British Isles	% of total	Graph
1841	8.2	26.7	30.7%
1851	6.9	27.7	24.8%
1891	4.7	37.8	12.4%
1951	4.1	53.2	7.7%
1991	5.5	62.9	8.7%
2006	6.0	64.3	9.3%

Political co-operation within the islands

Between 1801 and 1922, Great Britain and Ireland together formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.^[51] In 1922, twenty-six counties of Ireland left the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom following the Irish War of Independence; the remaining six counties, mainly in the northeast of the island, became known as Northern Ireland. Both states, but not the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, are members of the European Union.

However, despite independence of most of Ireland, political cooperation exists across the islands on some levels:

• Travel. Since Irish partition an informal free-travel area has continued to exist across the entire region; in 1997 it was formally recognised by the European Union, in the Amsterdam Treaty, as the Common Travel Area.
• Voting rights. No part of the British Isles considers a citizen of any other part as an 'alien.' This pre-dates and goes much further than that required by European Union law, and gives common voting rights to all citizens of the jurisdictions within the archipelago. Exceptions to this are presidential elections and referendums in the Republic of Ireland. Other EU nationals may only vote in local and European Parliament elections while resident in either the UK or Ireland.
• Diplomatic. Bilateral agreements allow UK embassies to act as an Irish consulate when Ireland is not represented in a particular country.
• Northern Ireland. The typical relations of nation states do not apply in Northern Ireland as the Irish Government is entitled to a consultative role in its government and citizens of Northern Ireland are entitled to the choice of Irish or British citizenship or both.
• The British-Irish Council was set up in 1999 following the 1998 Belfast Agreement. This body is made up of all political entities across the islands, both the sovereign governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom, the devolved governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. It has no executive authority but meets biannually to discuss issues of mutual importance, currently restricted to the misuse of drugs, the environment, the knowledge economy, social inclusion, tele-medicine, tourism, transport and national languages of the participants.
• The British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body (Irish: Comhlact Idir-Pharlaiminteach Na Bretaine agus Na hÉireann) was established in 1990. Originally it comprised 25 members of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, and 25 members of the parliament of the United Kingdom, with the purpose of building mutual understanding between members of both legislature. Since then the role and scope of the body has been expanded with the addition of five representatives from the Scottish Parliament, five from the National Assembly for Wales and five from the Northern Ireland Assembly. One member is also taken from the States of Jersey, one from the States of Guernsey and one from the High Court of Tynwald (Isle of Man). With no executive powers, it may investigate and collect witness evidence from the public on matters of mutual concern to its members, these have in the past ranged from issues such as the delivery of health services to rural populations, to the Sellafield nuclear facility, to the mutual recognition of penalty points against drivers across the British Isles. Reports on its findings are presented to the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

History

Main article: History of the British Isles

The British Isles have a long and complex shared history. While this tends to be presented in terms of national narratives, many events transcended modern political boundaries. In particular these borders have little relevance to early times and in that context can be misleading, though useful as an indication of location to the modern reader. Also, cultural shifts which historians have previously interpreted as evidence of invaders eliminating or displacing the previous populations are now, in the light of genetic evidence, perceived by a number of archaeologists and historians as being to a considerable extent changes in the culture of the existing population brought by groups of immigrants or invaders who at times became a new ruling élite.

Prehistory

At a time when the islands were still joined to continental Europe, Homo erectus brought Palaeolithic tool use to the south east of the modern British Isles some 750,000 years ago followed (about 500,000 years ago) by the more advanced tool use of Homo heidelbergensis found at Boxgrove. It appears that the glaciation of ice ages successively cleared all human life from the area, though human occupation occurred during warmer interglacial periods. Modern humans appear with the Aurignacian culture about 30,000 years ago, famously with the "Red Lady of Paviland" in modern Wales. The last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago, and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers spread to all parts of the islands by around 8,000 years ago, at a time when rising sea levels now cut off the islands from the continent. The immigrants came principally from the ice age refuge in what is now the Basque Country, with a smaller immigration from refuges in the modern Ukraine and Moldavia. Three quarters of the ancestors of people of the British Isles may have arrived in this wave of immigration.^[52]

Around 6,500 years ago farming practices spread to the area with the Neolithic Revolution and the western seaways quickly brought megalithic culture throughout the islands. The earliest stone house still standing in northern Europe is at Knap of Howar, in Orkney which also features such monuments as Maes Howe ranking alongside the Callanish stone circle on the Isle of Lewis, Newgrange in Ireland, and Stonehenge in southern England along with thousands of lesser monuments across the isles, often showing affinities with megalithic monuments in France and Spain.^[53] Further cultural shifts in the Bronze Age were followed with the building of numerous hill forts in the Iron Age, and increased trade with continental Europe.

Celts, Romans and Anglo-Saxons

Early historical records of the islands, notably descriptions from Pytheas and Ptolemy, portray numerous named tribes while using Priteni or Pretani as an overall collective term, Hiberni for the inhabitants of Ireland and Albiones for those of Great Britain, though it is questionable if these people identified themselves with any grouping larger than the tribe.^[54] Later scholars associated these tribal societies with the Celts the Ancient Greeks reported in what is now south-West Germany, and sub-grouped their Celtic languages in the British Isles into the Brythonic languages spoken in most of Great Britain, and Goidelic in Ireland. They perceived these languages as arriving in a series of invasions, but modern evidence suggests that these peoples may have migrated from Anatolia around 7000 BC through southern and then Western Europe.^[55] Genetic evidence indicates that there was not a later large-scale replacement of these early inhabitants^[56] and that the Celtic influence was largely cultural. In the Scottish highlands northwards the people the Romans called Caledonians or Picts spoke a language which is now unknown and extinct. It is also possible that southern England was settled by Belgic tribes.^[55]

During the first century the Roman conquest of Britain established Roman Britain which became a province of the Roman Empire named Britannia. It included most of the island of Great Britain but never consolidating control over the highlands of Caledonia, and around 180 drew back to Hadrian's Wall with tribes forming friendly buffer states further north to around the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth. The interaction of the Romans with Ireland appears to have been limited to some trade. From the 4th century raids on Roman Britain increased and language links have led to speculation that many Britons migrated across the English Channel at this time to found Brittany, but it has been contended that Armorica was already Brythonic speaking due to trade and religious links, and the Romans subsequently called it Brittania.^[57]

The end of Roman rule around 410 was followed by the formation of numerous kingdoms across most of Britain. Subsequent settlement in Sub-Roman Britain by peoples traditionally called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes created Anglo-Saxon kingdoms ("the Heptarchy") over much of what is now England and south-east Scotland. Between the 5th and 10th centuries England was divided into areas of British and Anglo-Saxon control, with the latter gradually expanding westward. The Irish raiders known as Scoti attacked many areas of Britain, and that name was also used for Gaels from Dál Riata in north eastern Ireland and later to settlers from Ireland in western Scotland.

National formation

The Vikings arrived in the British Isles in the 790's with raids on Lindisfarne, Iona, and the west of Ireland. They provided another wave of immigration, settling in Orkney and Shetland and then Western Isles, Caithness, Sutherland, Isle of Man, Galloway, Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia and founding the cities of Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, Arklow, and Dublin in Ireland. Wessex prevented the further expansion of the Vikings in England, and achieved a united Kingdom of England in 927, which was then ruled by both English and Viking kings until 1066. In 900 A.D. Donald II was the first king of Alba rather than king of the Picts. His successors amalgamated all the kingdoms north of the English border into the Kingdom of Alba, later known as the Kingdom of Scotland, and fixed its southern border on the Tweed in 1018 , approximating the current England-Scotland border. Wales, still divided following the Roman withdrawal, was divided into a number of Brythonic kingdoms, with the exception from one short period of unification, and also suffered from Viking raids in the tenth century.

Ireland, having like England and Scotland been divided among around eighty to a hundred petty kingdoms, began to slowly amalgamate into eight to ten provincial kingdoms by the tenth century. Nominally these were governed by a single High King, with the title floating between an ever fewer number of noble dynasties with increasing national authority. Viking influence in Irish affairs was crushed in the 980 Battle of Tara. Following the 1014 Battle of Clontarf, they turned their attention to Scotland and especially England, conquered by the Viking Canute the Great the following year. The same battle, however, resulted in the death Brian Boru, who had effectively united Ireland, causing a power vacuum and a series of bloody factional wars.

Norman immigration

The Norman Conquest of 1066 first brought England under Norman rule then extended their influence over the rest of the British Isles. The Normans were centralisers and expansionists. Their lands within the British Isles were part of extensive holdings across north-Western Europe held within a feudal framework. Wales was brought under their control by the end of the 11th century, but not successfully held until 1283. In 1072 the Normans forced the Scottish king to submit to their feudal overlordship, something they would regularly assert during the mediaeval period. The Normans did not supplant the Scottish political structure, but had great influence over it, eventually supplying the kings of the Scots from 1150 and then asserting independence of the Scottish Crown from that of England. The Scottish Crown gradually gained control of Norse areas, annexing the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles in 1266, and Orkney and Shetland from Norway in 1472. In 1069, the Normans were invited to Ireland to aid a provincial king whose lands had been confiscated by the High King. Papal permission was granted, by the only English head of the Catholic Church to sit in Rome, Pope Adrian IV, for the annexation of the country, to be a feudal possession of the English crown, as the Lordship of Ireland. Although immediately transferred to the king's second son, this reverted to the English crown with John's unexpected accession to the throne of his father.

During the Middle Ages, the Normans slowly intermarried with the previous populations and adopted their language and customs. In England, the Anglicisation of the Norman elite was driven by the slow erosion of their lands elsewhere, but it was 1362 before Anglo-Norman gave way to Middle English to become the language of the law courts. In Ireland, a Gaelic resurgence at the close of the 13th century led the Norman to famously become "more Irish than the Irish themselves", adopting Gaelic customs, laws and language, intermarrying with the native nobility and rebelling against the English crown. The 1360 Statutes of Kilkenny were intended to stem this tide by legislating the death penalty for any Englishman (as the Normans were then known) who consorted with the Irish in this way. However, little could be done, save an expensive re-conquest, to bring Ireland back under English law and by the 15th century only a fortified twenty-mile radius around Dublin, known as the Pale, was loyal to the English crown.

Protestant reformation and civil wars

The feudal system decayed and by the end of the sixteenth century was replaced by a system of centralised states. The English throne had come under the Welsh Tudors, who centralised government in England, Ireland, and Wales. In 1603 James VI of Scotland brought England and Scotland into personal union and promoted the existence of a modern British identity.

These changes happened at the same time as the Protestant reformation where the Roman Catholic church had been replaced by national churches to which all people were expected to adhere to. Failure to do so resulted in prosecution for recusancy and heavy fines, and recusants laid themselves open to accusations of treason and loss of land. By 1600 there was a wide range of religious belief within the islands from Presbyterian Calvinists (who were the majority in much of Scotland) and Independents to episcopal Calvinists (in the Church of Ireland and parts of Scotland) to Protestant Episcopalians that retained formal liturgy (especially the Church of England) to Roman Catholicism (which retained a large majority in Ireland).

James, and his son, Charles I, favoured political and religious centralisation and uniformity throughout the British Isles. They favoured episcopal, Armininian churches with a formal liturgy, which antagonised many Protestants. In addition, James, although he followed a policy of relative religious toleration, worsened the position of Irish Catholics by expanding the policy of plantation in Ireland, most notably in the Plantation of Ulster where forfeited lands from Catholics were settled by Scottish and English Protestants and by barring Catholics from serving in public office. Charles tried to force central, personal government. He attempted to bypass institutions he could not control and impose a uniform non-Calvinistic settlement throughout the islands.

The result was the First Bishops War in Scotland in 1639, when the Scottish Presbyterians rebelled against Charles' religious policies. The crisis rapidly spread to Ireland, in the form of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and then to England, where Parliament refused to raise an army for Charles to fight in Scotland or Ireland, fearing that it would next be used against them. The English Civil War broke out in 1642. Collectively, these conflicts are known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a shifting series of conflicts and alliances within Britain and Ireland. The King's supporters were known as the Royalists and had forces in England, Scotland (mostly episcopalian and Catholic highlanders), and Ireland. The English Parliamentary forces (mostly presbyterian and independents) fought against them, but were defeated in England by 1645. The Scottish presbyterians (the Covenanters) were allied to the English Parliament, while the Irish Catholic Confederates were loosely allied with the Royalists.

By 1649 Parliamentary forces ruled England and executed Charles and the Covenanters had secured Scotland. An alliance between the Catholic Confederates and the Royalists in Ireland resulted in the parliamentary conquest of Ireland, followed by a brutal guerrilla campaign which officially ended in 1653. Charles II repudiated the Irish alliance in 1650 in order to enter one with the Covenanters instead and invaded England. He was defeated in 1651 and the result was that the entire British Isles were brought under the English parliamentary army. There was religious toleration of Protestant denominations (though no episcopalian church), but Catholics were strongly repressed. In Ireland they were disenfranchised and dispossessed with Catholic land ownership dropping from 60% to 8% and their land was confiscated to pay off the Parliament's debts. Some of the land was given to another wave of Protestant immigrants, especially former soldiers, but these were not sufficient to replace the existing Irish, so Ireland became a land largely owned by Protestant landlords with Catholic tenants.

The return of the Stuarts

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 reversed many of the Commonwealth measures: the three kingdoms were separated again, the episcopalian Churches of England and Ireland re-established, a Presbyterian Church of Scotland established, and Protestant nonconformism repressed. A small proportion of the confiscated lands in Ireland were restored, bringing Catholic ownership up to 20%. In1685 brought Charles' brother, James II, a Catholic, to the thrones. James suspended the laws discriminating against those not adhering to the national churches; but he attempted personal rule with a large standing army and heavy-handedly attempted to replace Anglicans with Catholics. This alienated the English establishment who invited the Dutch William, Prince of Orange to depose James in favour of his daughter, Mary. On William's landing, James fled first to France and then to Ireland where the government remained loyal to him. Here he was defeated, and the position of the Protestant Ascendancy cemented with the imposition of Penal Laws there that effectively denied nearly all Catholics (75% of the population) any sort of power or substantial property.

James and his descendants attempted to recover the throne several times over the next sixty years, but failed to gain sufficient active support and were consistently defeated.

Kingdom of Great Britain and social revolutions

The 1707 Act of Union united England and Scotland in the Kingdom of Great Britain. The next century saw the start of great social changes. Enclosure had been taking place over a long period in England, but the British Agricultural Revolution accelerated the process by which land was privatised, commercialised, and intensively exploited, and caused it to spread throughout the British Isles. This resulted in the displacement of large numbers of people from the land and widespread hardship, including the Highland Clearances in which many of the residents of the Scottish highlands were systematically removed to make the land available for sheep farming.^[58] In addition, the industrial revolution saw the displacement of cottage industries by large-scale factories and the rapid growth of industrial towns and cities. The British Empire grew substantially, stoking the growth in industrial production, bringing in wealth, giving rise to large-scale emigration, and making London the largest city in Europe.

Social unrest and repressive government accompanied these upheavals. The ideals of the French Revolution were widely supported and led to a full-scale rebellion in Ireland. A result of the rebellion was the start of the end of Ascendancy hegemony in Ireland and its political unification with Great Britain in 1801. Unrest throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland continued well into the 19th century, but was increasingly legitimised and able to find an outlet in Parliament from the Great Reform Act of 1832 onwards. The role of religion in determining political markedly decreased from the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 onwards. The social upheavals continued with widespread migration from the countryside to towns and cities and abroad. Ireland suffered a famine from 1845 until 1849 which resulted in its population dropping by a third through death and migration. This included large-scale movements to Great Britain, especially to the north west of England and western Scotland. Emigration from the whole of the British Isles overseas continued, especially to the English-speaking parts of the British Empire, the United States, and other countries such as Argentina.

The twentieth century

Prosperity increased in England through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century and politics became increasingly popular and democratic. The suspension of the Home Rule Act 1914, the subsequent Easter Rising, and the Anglo-Irish War led to the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, which subsequently survived the Irish Civil War. The Irish Free State existed until a new constitution in 1937. The Irish state held dominion status until 1949, when it became a republic. During World War II, the Irish Free State stayed officially neutral under a state of emergency.

Six counties in the north-east were politically separated from the rest of Ireland in 1920, forming Northern Ireland. They remained part of the United Kingdom with a devolved government until 1972 [15], when direct rule was imposed from London following the failure of a power-sharing assembly. There have been extensive periods of unrest in Northern Ireland which has seen several periods of direct rule in the subsequent decades as the parties within Northern Ireland failed to reach practical agreement on power sharing.

Within the United Kingdom there are devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, and in Northern Ireland although each has different powers.

Attempts at long-needed economic reforms by the UK government in the wake of the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849) resulted in mass migration from Ireland to Great Britain. Despite attempts by the Irish governments, north and south, to stem the tide, the pattern continued following independence, with notable post-independence spikes in the 1950s and 1980s. Since the mid-1990s Ireland has grown more prosperous and the Irish Gross Domestic Product per capita now exceeds that of the United Kingdom. Both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1973.

The end of the British Empire in the latter half of the twentieth century saw the end of large-scale emigration from Great Britain; instead, there was new non-Irish imigration to Great Britain, especially from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent. Recently, with the accession of Poland and other former communist states to the European Union, there has been significant migration to both Britain and Ireland from eastern Europe.

Names of the islands through the ages

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into British Isles naming dispute. (Discuss)

A 1490 Italian copy of Ptolemy's Geography showing Ibernia Britannica Insula ("Hibernia, Island of Britannia", Ireland), Albion Insula Britannica ("Albion, Island of Britannia", Great Britain) and Mona Insula (Isle of Man) separated from the European mainland by Oceanus Germanicus ("Germanic Ocean", North Sea) to the east and Oceanus Britann