So here it is. The
2 Year Anniversary of the Thread and the
4 Year Anniversary of the Series 
Thanks as always for your continuing support! I really think this series has gone from strength to strength through your contributions and support.
But without further ado, perhaps the most anticipated wikibox of this entire series -
The United Empire:
The
United Kingdom and Empire of Great Britannia (
U.K.E.), commonly known as the
United Empire (
UE), the
United Kingdom (
UK), the
Imperial Federation, the
British Empire, or simply
Britain, is a transcontinental sovereign state comprising 32 constituent countries, and various overseas possessions. At 26.3 million square kilometres (10.1 million sq mi), it is the largest country in the world by surface area, covering nearly one-fifth of the Earth’s inhabited area, and the third most populous, with over 410 million people as of the 2011 census. Seven constituent countries are located in Europe, fifteen in continental America and the Caribbean, four in Oceania, three in Asia, and three in Africa, stretching across fifteen official time zones. The British overseas possessions are scattered throughout the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United Empire make it one of the world's megadiverse countries.
The origins of the modern British state are traced by many historians to 1603, when the Three Kingdoms – England, Scotland and Ireland – were united in personal union when James VI, King of Scots inherited the English and Irish crowns from Queen Elizabeth I of England. The
Union of the Crowns tied the three kingdoms closer together under a single monarch, although each country remained a separate political entity with their own political, legal and religious institutions. Tensions over religious and civil issues led to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the mid-17th century leading to the Interregnum, the republican Commonwealth, and the subsequent Restoration, all of which helped establish the three kingdoms as constitutional monarchies with political power centred on the Parliament, a fact consolidated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The development of naval power, particularly in England, led to the acquisition and settlement of overseas colonies, particularly in North America. In 1607, the first permanent English settlement had been established in the Americas at Jamestown, in what is now Virginia. Throughout the 17th century the British Empire began to take shape with the settlement of Bermuda, the New England colonies, and Carolina, as well as the seizure of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, renamed to New York, and the establishment of sugar plantations across the West Indies. The African slave trade was extremely profitable, and formed the basis of the growing British colonial empire in the West Indies and North America, providing labour in the financially lucrative sugar plantations. A failed Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama was a financial disaster for Scotland, and contributed to the eventual political union of the two countries.
In 1707, the kingdoms of England (which included Wales) and Scotland were united by the
1707 Acts of Union to form the single kingdom of Great Britain, whilst Ireland remained in personal union. After the accession of George I to the British throne in 1714, the kingdom was in personal union with the Electorate of Hanover, a state of the Holy Roman Empire. The early years of the unified kingdom were marked by the Jacobite risings, which sought unsuccessfully to restore the Catholic monarchs of the House of Stuart to the British and Irish thrones. The final rising ended in defeat at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746, ending any significant backing of the Jacobite cause and leading to the brutal suppression of the Scottish Highlands. Following the death of George II in 1751, the resulting succession crisis between his two sons, Frederick and William, the former having been exiled to North America, threatened to drive the country to civil war. On 16 July 1751, after receiving news of his father’s death, the British American colonies proclaimed Frederick as Emperor of All Britain, and following his return to London, the British Parliament proclaimed him as King of Great Britain. In 1753, the Crown of Virginia Act raised the Colony of Virginia to the status of kingdom, in personal union with Great Britain, but with similar legislative independence to that of Ireland.
Victory in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 led to the emergence of the British Empire as the world’s preeminent colonial power, with the 1763 Treaty of Paris transferring much of the French colony of New France to Britain, as well as Spanish Florida, and the Third Carnatic War in India reducing French control to a handful of enclaves. Although France held its Caribbean islands and the colony of Louisiana in continental North America, its future as a colonial power effectively ended after the war, leaving Great Britain as the world’s dominant power. During the 1760s and early 1770s, relations between the British colonies on the east coast of North America – later known as the United Colonies – and Britain became increasingly strained as a result of British taxation of the colonies without representation in Parliament. The American Colonial Unrest began with the assertion that “no taxation without representation” was a violation of the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen, and British American political leaders sought redress from Parliament. Attempts by the British military to suppress the growing movements for self-government in the colonies, and the colonists’ violent responses to attempts to enforce laws of the British Parliament almost led to the outbreak of war in the colonies, culminating with the uprisings at Lexington and Concord. Delegates from the British American colonies met at a colonial congress in Philadelphia, and adopted a “Petition to the Emperor”, which sought self-government for the colonies and representation in London. The passage of the First American Reform Act of 1777 laid the foundations of the modern British form of government, with the British Parliament legislating for limited self-government in the colonies, whilst the colonies would send members and peers to sit in the Houses of Parliament. The 1781 Williamsburg Convention, convened between representatives from Great Britain and the colonial leadership, agreed to the creation of the Colonial Congress as a subservient parliament to the British House of Commons, with gradual self-government granted to the British American colonies. On 4 March 1783, the United Colonies of Britain-in-America was created as a semi-autonomous confederation of provinces and territories in personal union with Great Britain.
The late 17th century saw further colonial expansion, with British America no longer receptive to the transportation of convicts, the British government turned to the newly discovered lands of Australia, with the first shipment of convicts arriving in 1788 and claiming the eastern part of the continent for Britain. The transport of convicts to the Australian colonies continued to the 1860s, and they became profitable exporters of wool and gold. Ireland gained a greater degree of self-government in 1782, with Henry Grattan becoming the kingdom’s first prime minister, although the island remained closely tied to the British Empire. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, followed by the Revolutionary Wars (1789-1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), drew the British Empire into a struggle for global pre-eminence with the French Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century before the final defeat of Napoleon by a coalition of European powers. Following the wars, Britain was a major beneficiary with the acquisition of Louisiana, Malta, Mauritius, several Caribbean islands and the Dutch Cape Colony, securing its position as the world’s preeminent military power and turning the country’s colonial ambitions towards Africa and India. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, the importance of slavery and the African slave trade to the British economy declined. Abolitionist movements in Great Britain and North America pushed Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807, with slavery itself abolished throughout the Empire on 1 August 1834. The abolition of slavery almost led to full-scale civil war in the Carolina colonies, due to their dependence on the institution for labour and industry, but the British government compensated slave-owners. The Industrial Revolution continued to change the political and social landscape of the country, with political power gradually shifting from landowning aristocracy to the new mercantile and industrialist middle classes. Unchallenged at sea, the British Empire was the principal naval and imperial power, acting as the global hegemon and policeman, and by the end of the Mexican War in 1848 British territory had expanded to include North America, India, large parts of Africa and Oceania. Alongside formal control through its colonies and protectorates, such as California and Texas, British dominance of world trade meant the Empire effectively controlled the economies of many regions.
In the midst of Britain’s “imperial century”, unresolved issues from the 1760s and 1830s in North America led to the outbreak of the Republican Rebellion in several of the British American colonies in 1848. Although short-lived, the uprisings resulted in the dissolution of the Colonial Congress in 1852 and the beginning of the confederation of the American colonies into larger dominions of the British Crown. This process consolidated continental British America into eleven dominions, which, following growing concerns in London about the possible fragmentation of the Empire, adopted the
1876 Acts of Union, merging the British American dominions, excluding Newfoundland, with the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland to form the
United Kingdom and Empire of Great Britannia. In 1858, British India came under the direct control of the new British Imperial Parliament, as the British Raj, with Queen-Empress Victoria crowned Empress of India. Revitalised, several periods of successive British imperial expansion saw victory in the Boer Wars and the Scramble for Africa, and by 1914 the Empire had expanded across much of Africa and parts of Asia to cover more than a quarter of the world’s land area and nearly half a billion people. In 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia was admitted to the Union, followed in 1907 by Newfoundland and New Zealand, and plans were drawn up for the accession of Patagonia and Britain’s South African colonies.
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Britain quickly invaded and occupied most of Germany’s overseas colonies and territories. The British Empire provided invaluable military, financial and material support to the Entente during the war, with British and colonial soldiers serving in Europe and the Middle East theatres. Closer to home, British Americans fought with distinction in the Mexican theatre, which culminated with the collapse of the Mexican Republic. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, the British Empire reached its greatest extent, with many German and Ottoman colonies and territories transferred to British control. However, the high fatalities of trench warfare caused the loss of much of a generation of men, with lasting social effects in the nation, such as the 1928 granting of suffrage to women, and a great disruption in the social order and contribution to the economic and social unrest in Britain leading up to the Great Depression. The 1930s were a period of considerable economic and industrial hardship, as well as political and social unrest, throughout Britain and the Empire. During this period, Britain strengthened its alliance with Japan, in the hopes of reducing military commitments in the Pacific Ocean as the issue of imperial security was a serious concern in Britain as militaristic governments rose to power across Europe. The
1931 Statue of Westminster agreed the rights of Patagonia, Capeland and the Philippines to set their own foreign policy as “autonomous Communities within the British Empire”, establishing their legislative independence and beginning the transition of the British colonial empire into the modern Commonwealth of Nations. In 1935, the British Raj gained
de facto legislative independence from the Empire as a self-governing dominion, marking a further step in the evolution of the colonial empire into an association of states. In 1937, the East Asian War broke out when Kuomintang China invaded British and Japanese territories along with Korea, forcing Britain into a war in the Pacific, Sir Walter F. George adopted a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, in order to avoid fighting a war on two fronts and preserve the British colonial empire.
Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 led to Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, marking the official outbreak of the Second World War. Although the British declaration included the crown colonies, it did not automatically commit the semi-independent dominions of Patagonia, Capeland, India, and the Philippines, although all soon declared war on Germany, followed by the British client states of California, Texas and Egypt. After the Fall of France in June 1940, the British Empire stood alone against Germany and in September, the Kuomintang government of China officially joined the Axis powers, leaving Britain as the only country militarily opposing them. Over the course of the war Britain led Allied efforts in every global military theatre, with Commonwealth forces totalling close to 30 million serving men and women fighting German, Italian, Chinese and other Axis armed forces across Europe, Africa, Asia, and in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Throughout the course of the war, the British Commonwealth suffered nearly half a million military deaths as their forces engaged the Axis powers across the globe, most notably in the three-year siege of Singapore where the island fortress held out against Chinese invasion. The United Empire emerged from the Second World War as one of the two global superpowers, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Though Britain and the empire emerged victorious, the effects of the conflict were profound, both at home and abroad. Allied forces occupied much of Europe and the United Empire found itself jockeying with the Soviet Union for power during a geo-political conflict later known as the Cold War. At home, the aftermath of the war severely weakened Britain’s economy and industrial capacity, leading to successive Social Democratic and Liberal governments nationalising industries and public utilities, and establishing the modern welfare state, which triggered sustained economic expansion and recovery in the 1950s and 60s.
The rise of anti-imperial and anti-colonial sentiment in Britain and across the empire meant that the British Empire’s days were numbered. The 1949 London Declaration, which recognised India’s intention to replace the British monarch with a native head of state after the death of King-Emperor George VI, whilst remaining part of the Commonwealth, represented a significant step away from a colonial empire to a free association of equal states. Motivated by a policy of containment and anti-communism towards the expansion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, the 1950 Houston Agreement established the Common Defence Pact, a military alliance led by the United Empire and its close allies in opposition to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Throughout the Cold War, the Empire and the Soviets engaged in several proxy wars, notably the Chinese Civil War, the Second Indochina War, and the Malayan Emergency, and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, though the two countries avoided direct military conflict. The 1960 Treaty of Mumbai established the Commonwealth Economic Community, a continuation of the imperial preference policies of the interwar period, which continues to be the largest global free trade area and economic bloc in the world and secured the continued economic dominance of Britain, even as its political control over the colonial empire dissolved. Overseas, the British began the process of decolonisation gradually compared to the rapid collapse of the French colonial empire, with the transition of its African and Asian colonies first to associated states and then to fully independent sovereign states. Throughout the 1960s most British colonies were granted a degree of self-government, with many smaller colonies federalising, as in Katanga, or merging with larger dominions, as in Southern Africa, and by 1980 all of Britain’s major colonies had gained independence. On the world stage, the 1979 Iranian Revolt led to a strain in British relations with Iran, escalated by the 63 British hostages taken when nationalists stormed the British Embassy. Although the hostages were released after seven months, the incident did irreparable damage to Anglo-Iranian relations and led to Iran becoming more aligned with the Soviet Union.
At home, the United Empire experienced sustained economic expansion and rapid growth, aided by the construction of the Motorway System across North America. Constitutional changes brought home rule to Scotland and Wales in 1950 and England in 1967, whilst the Empire admitted several new dominions from former colonies including Malta in 1955, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Gibraltar and Mauritius in 1964, Jamaica and the West Indies in 1972, and Hong Kong and Fiji in 1984. From the late 1960s, Louisiana suffered communal and paramilitary violence (sometimes affecting other parts of North America) conventionally known as the Troubles, that lasted until the signing of the Saint-Louis "Good Friday" Agreement of 1999. Throughout the 1960s and 70s the growing Civil Rights movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, particularly in Carolina and the Ohio Country, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader. His assassination in 1971, along with a combination of court decisions and legislation, culminated in the 1978 Civil Rights Acts, which sought to end racial discrimination and enforce equal rights laws upon the entire Empire, which almost resulted in Carolina’s secession from the Union. Following a period of widespread economic slowdown and industrial strife in the 1970s and 80s, which saw the onset of stagflation, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government introduced radical free-market oriented reforms, involving deregulation of the financial sector and labour markets, contributing to the growth of London and New York as world financial hubs. Whilst the economy boomed through deregulation and the inflow of substantial revenues from the Empire’s oil and gas reserves, many of the country’s manufacturing industries collapsed and a series of bitter strike actions heralded the death knell of the state-run coal industry.
The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and the 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated the “Space Race”, a competition between the two rivals during the Cold War, in which a British-led Commonwealth mission landed a man on the moon in 1966. The Soviet Union launched the first space station in 1969, followed by the British in 1973, whilst the United Empire established the first manned lunar base in 1971, followed by the Soviets in 1974. Since then both countries have maintained a permanent presence in Earth orbit, since 2000 as part of the International Space Station, and on the lunar surface, alongside several dozen countries and organisations. The late 1980s brought a “thaw” in relations with the USSR, and its reorganisation in 1991 finally ended the Cold War and led to a warming of relations between the two superpowers. British-Soviet cooperation resulted in a cosmonaut participating in the 1993 Mars landing, and the international Hermes Mars missions have been an important part of international cooperation since then. Despite the peaceful end to the Cold War, with democratic revolutions and elections contributing to the end of communist governments in Europe and Africa, unrest in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990 when Hasa under King Fahd invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, the later three members of the United Gulf Emirates. As both Kuwait and the UGE were allies of Britain under the Common Defence Pact, the United Empire and a military coalition launched the Gulf War in response to the invasion, which successfully expelled Hasanian forces and restored the
status quo ante bellum. The Gulf War marked the beginning of a period of British overseas military interventions, including in the Somali Civil War, where the Commonwealth was sporadically involved throughout the 1990s, and the Third Balkan War, where a Franco-British bombing campaign led to the 1999 Svernitsa Accords which ended the conflict.
The outbreak of the War in West Africa in 1991, with a coup that toppled the elected government of Sierra Leone, an independent Commonwealth realm, began Britain and the Commonwealth’s military involvement in the West African conflict. Sierra Leone was stabilised in 1998, with a British peacekeeping force remaining in the country, and in 2001 the country and Empire voted to admit Sierra Leone to the Union alongside the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 2002. On 11 September 2001 (“9/11”), the United Empire was struck by a terrorist attack al-Qaeda hijackers commandeered seven airliners to be used in suicide attacks. Two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, a third struck the Palace of Westminster in central London and the fourth into the Pentagon in suburban London, killing 4,172 victims. Passengers and crew successfully retook control of two of the three remaining planes, and they crashed in Allegheny, Columbia and West Berkshire, England respectively, whilst air defences brought down the seventh plane outside of Fredericksburg when it targeted the Triskelion. In response, Prime Minister George W. Bush announced a “War on Terror”, and in October the United Empire and CDP invaded Somalia to end the civil war, which had provided a haven for al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, and eliminate the alleged chemical weapons in the country. In the Arabian Peninsula, tensions between Nejd and Hasa erupted into war over control of vital oil reserves and unresolved border tensions and the Saudis support for Islamic extremists, forcing British involvement in the region. Despite initial successes in both theatres, the continued overseas deployment of the British military fuelled international protests and led to the collapse of the Bush government under domestic and international pressure. The Nejd-Hasa War ended in 2011 under a negotiated ceasefire, leading to the withdrawal of British forces from the region, whilst in Somalia the country was reorganised as a unitary republic in 2005, although Commonwealth troops have remained in the country to the present day as part of the ongoing insurgency, much as in West Africa. On 22 July 2019, the formerly independent State of Accra, a Commonwealth realm in West Africa, and Tierra del Fuego, a former British territory incorporating the Falkland Islands, were admitted to the Union.
A multicultural country, the United Empire is the world’s oldest surviving confederation, although it is a constitutional monarchy and representative democracy with many traits common to a federal state. The United Empire is a founding member of the Commonwealth of Nations, United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international organisations. The United Empire is a highly developed country, ranking highly in measures of socioeconomic performance, with the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP and second largest by PPP, and the British economy is largely post-industrial, dominated by the service and knowledge-based industries, although the manufacturing sector remains the second largest in the world. The United Empire is the world’s foremost military power, and is the leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.
