How Britain was assembled one settlement at a time

What was here before there was a Britain

The British Isles have been continuously inhabited since the Neolithic, and the monuments of that period are among the oldest built structures anywhere in northern Europe. What followed was a sequence of arrivals, each of which left a layer that is still visible in the language, the field boundaries and the place names.

The Roman conquest of Britain began in AD 43 and produced four centuries of provincial administration, roads, towns and a frontier wall across the north. Roman departure between 383 and 410 removed the administration and left the infrastructure, and Anglo-Saxon settlement began around 450, bringing the language that became English and a set of small kingdoms that gradually consolidated.

In 1066 the Normans conquered England. That date is the hinge of English history because the conquest replaced the entire landowning class, imported a French-speaking aristocracy whose vocabulary is still layered over the Germanic base of the language, and built a centralised administration more effective than anything else in Europe at the time.

The centralisation had a consequence its builders did not intend. A strong crown provoked organised resistance from the people it taxed, and in 1215 Magna Carta became the first document to state that no government was above the law and that citizens hold rights that protect them. Almost every later British constitutional argument has cited it.

How four countries became one state

England absorbed Wales by conquest and statute during the Middle Ages, and the castles built to hold it are still standing. The relationship with Scotland was different: two separate kingdoms, frequently at war, that acquired a shared monarch in 1603 and remained separate states for a further century.

The history of the United Kingdom as such begins in 1707, with the Treaty of Union and the Acts of Union that joined the kingdoms of England and Scotland into a single unitary state. Scotland kept its own legal system, its own church and its own education system through the union, which is why it still has all three and why devolution in 1998 had institutions to devolve to.

The union with Ireland followed in 1801, creating the state that the present United Kingdom formally dates from. It was a union in name and a colonial relationship in practice for much of its existence, and it did not hold.

Between the Reform Act of 1832 and the twentieth century, Parliament gradually widened the franchise, with the 1884 Reform Act extending it further, and the Victorian era from 1837 to 1901 was governed by political attitudes favouring free trade and laissez-faire. A state that began as a monarchy with a landowning parliament became a democracy by increments spread over a century, without a revolution and without a new constitution at any point.

How the vote was widened without a revolution

The British franchise was extended in stages across a century, and the staging is the reason the country never had a revolution and never wrote a constitution. Each extension was conceded when the pressure became greater than the cost of conceding, which produced a settlement nobody designed and everybody could live with.

The Great Reform Act of 1832 began it by redistributing seats away from constituencies with almost no electors and widening the franchise modestly. The 1884 Reform Act, championed by William Gladstone, extended it much further, and the sequence continued into the twentieth century until it covered the whole adult population.

Two features of that process shaped what came after. The first is that reform was always partial: each act enfranchised a defined group and left others out, so the argument restarted immediately at a new boundary. The second is that the monarch's role shrank alongside it without anyone legislating the change. The principle that the king accepts as prime minister whoever commands the confidence of the Commons became established during the reigns of George IV and his successors as a matter of practice rather than of law, and it is still a convention rather than a statute.

That is the pattern the whole constitution follows. Powers moved from the crown to ministers, from ministers to Parliament and from Parliament to the electorate, in each case by precedent that hardened into obligation, and at no point did anyone write down the result.

What the empire was and what it did

Britain built the largest empire there has been, and the two things that made it possible were naval power and the industrial revolution, which began here. Mechanised production, coal and the steam engine gave one small country a manufacturing advantage over the entire world for roughly a century, and the empire supplied the raw materials and the markets that advantage required.

The scale of that lead can be measured. The country's share of global manufacturing output rose from 9.5% in 1830 to 22.9% in the 1870s, which is a figure no state has matched relative to its population before or since.

The consequences ran in every direction. English became a world language. British legal and parliamentary forms were exported and are still in use across the Commonwealth. Populations were moved, in the case of the slave trade by force, and borders were drawn that still cause wars. The wealth that built the country's cities and institutions came substantially from that system, and how to describe the relationship between the two remains the most contested question in British public history.

The empire also created the modern British population. Post-war migration from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa rebuilt the workforce and then the culture, and the cities most people now live in are products of that movement as much as of the industrial one.

How two wars ended the position

Britain was one of the principal Allies that defeated the Central Powers in the First World War from 1914 to 1918, alongside French, Russian and, after 1917, American forces, with British armed forces engaged across much of the empire. The cost in lives and in debt was enormous and the political consequences were immediate.

The most important of them was Irish. The rise of Irish nationalism and disputes within Ireland over the terms of independence produced partition, and by 1922 most of Ireland had left while six counties in the north-east remained, which is the settlement the state still lives with.

The Second World War completed the process the first had begun. Britain fought it to the end and emerged victorious, bankrupt and no longer a military or economic superpower, a fact demonstrated publicly in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Independence was granted to almost all remaining possessions in the two decades that followed, and the new states typically joined the Commonwealth of Nations.

What replaced the imperial project at home was the welfare state. The Labour government elected in 1945 under Clement Attlee nationalised major industries and public utilities, established a welfare system and created a health service free at the point of use, and that programme set the shape of British society for the four decades that followed it.

What the twentieth century added at home

Two institutions built between the wars changed the country as much as any statute. By the mid-1920s most of the British population could listen to radio programmes from a national broadcaster, experimental television broadcasts began in 1929, and the first scheduled television service commenced in 1936.

A single broadcaster reaching the whole population had effects nobody planned. It standardised a prestige accent, created a national audience for events that had previously been local, and gave the state an instrument of enormous influence that was deliberately placed at arm's length from it. The arrangement was copied widely afterwards.

The other addition was the health service. Created by the post-war Labour government alongside the nationalisation of major industries and utilities and the establishment of a welfare state, a health service free at the point of use became the institution the country is most attached to and the one most consistently argued about. Expenditure on healthcare has risen substantially since 1979, and by 2018 the country was spending £3,121 per person on figures that include some of what Britain classifies separately as social care.

Both institutions share a characteristic with the constitutional arrangements above. They were built for a set of conditions that has since changed completely, they have been reformed repeatedly without being replaced, and no proposal to replace either has ever survived contact with how much the public wants them kept.

What the second half of the century decided

The post-war decades produced a settlement that both main parties accepted: a mixed economy, full employment as an objective, a large public sector and a welfare state. It held for roughly thirty years and then broke under inflation, industrial conflict and the end of the long post-war expansion.

What replaced it from 1979 was the opposite programme. Nationalised industries were privatised, financial markets deregulated, union power curtailed and manufacturing left to contract, and the argument about whether that was necessary, excessive or both has structured British politics ever since. The industrial regions that lost their employers in that period have still not recovered relative to the south-east.

Europe ran alongside as the other unresolved question. Britain was a founding member of the Western European Union in 1954 and of the European Free Trade Association in 1960, joined the European Communities in 1973, and spent the following four decades as a member that argued about membership. That argument was settled by referendum in June 2016 and the country left.

What was settled and what was not

Two constitutional changes arrived in 1998 and both are still working themselves out. Legislative powers were devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, creating parliaments and an assembly where none had existed, and leaving England as the only part of the state without one.

The Northern Ireland settlement was the larger achievement. Three decades of violence, which began when attempts to reform a system that disadvantaged the Catholic population were blocked in the 1960s, were ended by an agreement resting on consent from both communities and both governments. It rebuilt policing, power-sharing and the relationship between the two states on the island.

Departure from the European Union then reopened part of it, because the settlement had been reached when both states were inside the same economic arrangements and a border between different regulatory regimes had to be managed without a hard border on the island.

The pattern across the whole history is consistent enough to state plainly. The United Kingdom has never redesigned itself at a single moment, and every arrangement it now has was reached by adding a settlement to the previous one without removing what was already there. United Kingdom: politics covers the institutions that accumulated, and United Kingdom: overview what the state looks like now.