A brief history of Britain!

I have been out of action for almost a year now and the numerous emails and friend requests I have received in Facebook, Orkut and Twitter is a testimony to the fact that some people are still interested in my blog! Well, a big thank you to all readers and apologies for being in the shadows. But now that I am back to blogging, I wonder where do I start?

I think for all of you who want to do an MBA in Britain and work here after graduation, its vitally important that you know a bit about the history, culture, stereotypes etc of this country. That I hope will help you adapt much better. So I am going to write a three part series starting with a bit about British history.

When I first moved to this country it was quite interesting to observe the distinct differences between people in Scotland, England Wales and Northern Ireland. They differ widely in culture, food, language, political views and the general way of life. I started thinking what is that which makes one ‘British’ and whether it makes sense to talk of a single ‘British’ culture at all? I wondered whether there is a range of shared beliefs, values and behaviours that the majority of people who live in the UK would recognise as being traditionally ‘British’, even if there is an equal recognition that not every person in the UK necessarily shares them.

A good place to begin to understand who the British are is to look at the nation’s history.

For over 10,000 years people have been moving into – and out of –Britain, sometimes in substantial numbers, yet there has always been a basic continuity of population. The original British settlers came from Europe about 7000 BC, while an Ice Age land bridge still connected it to the continent.

In about 700 BC, Celtic peoples began arriving from central Europe. They lived in tribes and included the Gaels, who moved into the northern and western areas of England, and the Brythons, who settled in the south and east. Celtic influences still remain in southwest England, Wales and Scotland. Until the end of the 18th century, people in Cornwall – the county on England’s extreme south-western tip – spoke a Celtic language, and Celtic languages are still spoken in north west Wales (Welsh), and north west Scotland (Gaelic).

As Caesar expanded the Roman Empire, he tried but failed to conquer the Celts. When Claudius succeeded in 43 AD he defeated a multitude of tribal groups, but there is little sign such groups had any sense of collective identity as ‘Britons’. The Romans occupied the lowlands of what was to be England for almost four centuries and by AD 300, almost everyone in ‘Britannia’ was Roman, legally and culturally, even though of indigenous descent and still mostly speaking ‘Celtic’ dialects. Roman rule saw profound cultural change, however by AD400 the Roman legions had pulled out.

Over the next hundred years, Germanic tribes fought and conquered the Celts. These tribes consisted of Jutes from around what is now Denmark, Frisans from the present-day Netherlands area, Angles from the region around today’s Hamburg, Germany, and Saxons from north Germany. The Brythons fought the invading tribes over the next century; however, by 550 the Germanic invaders had conquered and subdued most of England, pushing many of the Celts into what today is Scotland and Wales.

By the 7th century, the Angles and Saxons had established seven tribal states throughout the country. And the Angles gave their name to both the land – Angle-land or England – and the language.

By the sixth century, most of Britannia was taken over by ‘Germanic’ kingdoms. The tribal states, each with its own king, were called East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex; all names that you will find on a current map of Great Britain.

During the 8th and 9th centuries, Vikings from Norway and Denmark swept into England. While they did not conquer the entire country, by the end of the ninth century there were large-scale settlements of Scandinavians in various parts of Britain, and they had achieved political domination over a significant territory.

The Norwegians took to the northern sections of England while the Danes occupied the east.

Early in the 9th century, some of the individual Anglo-Saxon kingdoms became united under the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex, forming the nucleus of the England we know today. By the time of the Normandy French invasion of England in 1066, both England and Scotland existed as unified territories under a single Anglo-Saxon king. The victor of the 1066 invasion, William the Conqueror, assumed the throne and brought a new aristocracy to England from Normandy and some other areas of France. The Normans also expanded into Scotland and Wales, although in a very different way from the conquest of England. While the concept of being ‘British’

was far from being created, the centuries following the Norman conquest saw the beginnings of growing English nationalism and an awareness that the fate of the various peoples inhabiting Great Britain was interlinked. Despite French manners and names, the English aristocracy in particular became increasingly conscious of their Englishness, while Scotland and Wales also saw the growth of national identity.

In 1455, another struggle for the throne broke out, this time between the House of York and the House of Lancaster. The War of the Roses ended at Bosworth Field in 1485 when a Tudor named Henry killed Richard III of York in battle. He took the throne as Henry VII. Elizabeth I was crowned in 1558, and under her rule England entered a golden age. When Elizabeth died in 1603, James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England, uniting the two kingdoms. Although England and Scotland had shared a joint monarch since 1603, they were not united politically until 1707.

Following England’s political union with Scotland, the two countries plus Wales, which England had conquered in 1535, formally became the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Ireland was made part of the UK in 1801 and the country became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was at this stage, accompanied by the birth of a new colonial Empire, that the concept of being ‘British’ was actually born. Being British created a new identity designed to merge the diverse people of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and a badge to attach to the new imperial nation.

The Victorian Era marked the height of the British industrial revolution (the first in the world) and the height of the British Empire. Although commonly used to refer to the period of Queen Victoria’s rule between 1837 and 1901, the Victorian period really began with the passage of the Reform Act in 1832, which established the foundations of the UK’s modern democratic system. Queen Victoria had the longest reign in British history, and the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were astonishing. When Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was essentially agricultural and rural; when she died, the country was highly industrialised and urbanised, with large manufacturing and financial centres connected by an expansive railway network. By 1897 Britain’s colonial Empire controlled a population of about 460 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s population, and covered about 37 million km2, about a quarter of Earth’s total land area. The international influence of the Imperial period remains apparent in modern-day economic practices across the world, as well as legal and governmental systems, society, sports (such as cricket and football), and the English language. A significant North-South split in England came about during the Victorian era and still exists to a certain extent today.

The reign of King Edward VII succeeded the Victorian period. Although Edward VII’s period as King lasted just 9 years from 1901 to 1910, the Edwardian era is often assumed to include the period up to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the start of World War I in 1914, or even the end of the war in 1918. Socially, the Edwardian era was the period during which the British class system was at its most rigid, although paradoxically, changes in social thought, particularly the rising interest in socialism, attention to the plight of the poor and the status of women, expressed in, for example, the issue of women’s suffrage, together with increased economic opportunities as a result of rapid industrialisation, created an environment in which there could be more social mobility and people would become more liberal. These changes were to become more obvious following the end of the First World War in 1918. Although Britain emerged victorious from World War I, it marked the beginning of the end for the British Empire. In Australia and New Zealand, the First World War became known as the nations’ ‘Baptism of Fire’, as it was the first major war in which the newly established countries fought, and it is one of the first cases in which Australian troops fought as Australians, not as subjects of the British Crown. When Canada entered the war, it was a Dominion of the British Empire; when the war came to a close Canada was an independent nation. In 1921, Britain gave up control of Ireland except for the northeast corner where the English and Scottish Protestants had settled. The UK’s name underwent another change as it became today’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The First World War also saw absolute losses for Britain’s economy. It is estimated that she lost a quarter of her total wealth in fighting the war. Failure to appreciate the damage done to the British economy by the war plunged the country into economic dislocation with high unemployment and sluggish growth. In the 1930s, Britain suffered from significant economic problems and relative decline in comparison with the US and Germany, particularly as the cheap resources, labours and vital strategic locations provided by Colonial possessions were no longer readily available. At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, Britain was militarily under-prepared and economically weak, however the early years of the war in which Britain “stood alone” and the Blitz spirit which developed as Britain suffered under aerial bombardment helped pull the nation together, and still represent a psychologically important symbol of national spirit for many older UK residents.

The end of the Second World War saw a landslide General Election victory for Clement Atlee and the Labour Party. They were elected on a manifesto of social justice and left wing policies such as the creation of a National Health Service and the provision of public housing. The UK at the time was poor, relying heavily on loans from the United States of America (which were finally paid off in December 2006) to rebuild its damaged infrastructure. Rationing and conscription dragged on into the post war years, and the country suffered one of the worst winters on record. Nevertheless, morale was boosted by events such as the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1947 and the Festival of Britain. The 1950s and 1960s were relatively prosperous times after the Second World War, and saw the beginning of a modernisation of the UK, with the construction of its first motorways. The 1970s and 1980s saw the UK’s integration to the European Economic Community and the traumatic modernisation of the economy instituted by Margaret Thatcher, and known as the Thatcher revolution. The 1980s were a time of high unemployment.


Deindustrialisation saw the end of many of the country’s manufacturing industries, including most notably, following the miners’ strike of 1984-1985, the end of centuries of British coal mining. In 1997, the Labour Party swept to power with a huge majority in the House of Commons. Since 1997 the British economy enjoyed an unbroken period of economic growth, with British per capita GDP exceeding that of either France or Germany. (http://www.economist.com/countries/

Britain/index.cfm). Recently however Britain went through a period of recession – the worst of its kind since World War 2. It is however officially over and Britain once again is in the path of recovery. Growth is still sluggish and predicted to be not more than 3% till 2015. The new Conservative government is trying to ensure that a double-dip recession does not hit Britain and that the recovery is continued. On 22nd June an emergency budget was presented to outline the spending cuts in the public sector and a higher tax structure to reduce the deficit within British economy.

So, hopefully we will see more jobs being created in the next 5 years, a revitalization of the financial sector and an upbeat market. Fingers crossed!