(Redirected from Great britain)
:''See also:
Kingdom of Great Britain''
Satellite Image of Great Britain
'Great Britain' is the largest island of the
British Isles. It lies to the northwest of
Continental Europe, with
Ireland to the west, and makes up the larger part of the territory of the
United Kingdom. It is the largest island in
Europe, and
eighth largest in the world. It is surrounded by over 1000 smaller
islands and
islets.
Geographical definition
With an area of 209,331
km² (80,823 square miles) the island of Great Britain is the largest of the
British Isles.
[1]
It is the largest island in Europe, and
eighth largest in the world.
1
It is the
third most populous island after
Java and
Honshū.
[2]
Great Britain stretches over approximately ten degrees of
latitude on its longer, north-south axis. Geographically, the island is marked by low, rolling countryside in the east and south, while hills and mountains predominate in the western and northern regions. Before the end of the last
ice age, Great Britain was a
peninsula of Europe; the rising sea levels caused by glacial melting at the end of the ice age caused the formation of the
English Channel, the body of water which now separates Great Britain from continental Europe at a minimum distance of 21 miles (34 km).
Political definition
Great Britain is no longer a country, but simply an island in the United Kingdom. Politically, "Great Britain" describes the combination of
England,
Scotland, and
Wales, and therefore includes a number of outlying islands such as the
Isle of Wight,
Anglesey, the
Isles of Scilly, the
Hebrides, and the island groups of
Orkney and
Shetland, but does not include the
Isle of Man or the
Channel Islands.
Great Britain has evolved politically from the gradual union of
England and
Scotland which started in
1603 with the
Union of Crowns under
James VI of Scotland and eventually resulted in the
Acts of Union in
1707 which merged the parliaments of each nation and thus resulted in the formation of the
Kingdom of Great Britain, which covered the entire island, to the situation following 1801 in which Great Britain together with the island of
Ireland constituted the larger
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK). The UK became the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1922 following the independence of five-sixths of Ireland as first the
Irish Free State, a
Dominion of the then
British Commonwealth, and then later as an independent republic outside the British Commonwealth as the
Republic of Ireland.
History
Great Britain was formed around 9000 years ago at the end of the
Pleistocene ice age when sea levels rose due to
isostatic depression of the crust and the melting of
glaciers. When this happened, the island was cut off from the
European mainland.
Great Britain was first inhabited by people who crossed over the land bridge from the European mainland. Its
Iron Age inhabitants are known as the
Brythons, a group speaking a
Celtic language, and most of it (not the northernmost part) was conquered to become the
Ancient Roman province of
Britannia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Brythons of the south and east of the island became assimilated by colonising
Germanic tribes (
Angles, Saxons and Jutes) who became known as the
English people. Beyond
Hadrian's wall, the major ethnic groups were the
Scots, who may have emigrated from
Ireland, and the
Picts as well as other
Brythonic peoples in the
south-west. The south-east of Scotland was colonised by the
Angles and formed, until
1018, a part of the
Kingdom of Northumbria. To speakers of Germanic languages, the Brythons were called ''Welsh'', a term that came eventually to be applied exclusively to the inhabitants of what is now
Wales, but which survives also in names like
Wallace. In subsequent centuries
Vikings settled in several parts of the island, and The
Norman Conquest introduced a French ruling élite who also became assimilated.
Since the
union of 1707, the entire island has been one political unit, firstly as the
Kingdom of Great Britain, later as part of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and then as part of the present
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Since the formation of this unified state, the adjective ''British'' has come to refer to things associated with the
United Kingdom generally, such as citizenship, and not the island of Great Britain.
As recently as 9,000 years ago, Great Britain was not an island at all. The end of the last
ice age saw the southeastern part of Great Britain still connected by a strip of low
marshes to the European mainland in what is now northeastern France. In
Cheddar Gorge near
Bristol, the remains of animals native to mainland Europe such as
antelopes,
brown bears, and
wild horses have been found alongside a human skeleton,
Cheddar Man, dated to about 7150 B.C. Thus, animals and humans must have moved between mainland Europe and Great Britain via a crossing.
[3]
Albion (Alouion in
Ptolemy) is the most ancient name of Great Britain. It is sometimes used now to refer to England specifically. Occasionally, it refers to Scotland, which is called Alba in Gaelic, Albain in Irish, and Yr Alban in Welsh.
Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (iv.xvi.102) applies it unequivocally to Great Britain. The name Britain may be derived from the Brythonic 'Prydyn' (Goidelic: Cruithne), a name used to describe some northern inhabitants of the island by Britons or pre-Roman Celts in the south. "It was itself named Albion, while all the islands about which we shall soon briefly speak were called the Britanniae." The name Albion was taken by medieval writers from Pliny and Ptolemy. For etymology, see
below.
The term was used officially for the first time during the reign of
King James VI of Scotland, I of England. Though England and Scotland each remained legally in existence as separate countries with their own parliaments, on
20 October 1604 King James proclaimed himself as 'King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland', a title that continued to be used by many of his successors.
[4] In 1707, an
Act of Union joined both parliaments. That Act used two different terms to describe the new all island nation, a 'United Kingdom' and the 'Kingdom of Great Britain'. However, the former term is regarded by many as having been a ''description'' of the union rather than its name at that stage. Most reference books therefore describe the all-island kingdom that existed between 1707 and 1800 as the ''Kingdom of Great Britain".
In 1801, under a new
Act of Union, this kingdom merged with the
Kingdom of Ireland, over which the monarch of Great Britain had ruled. The new kingdom was from then onwards unambiguously called the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922, 26 of Ireland's
32 counties attained independence to form a separate
Irish Free State. The remaining truncated kingdom has therefore since then been known as the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Use and nomenclature
Use of the term ''Great Britain''
"Great Britain" is often used to mean the "
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (UK). However, Great Britain is only the largest island within the United Kingdom, which includes numerous surrounding smaller islands, as well as
Northern Ireland in the island of
Ireland. In the introduction to his history book ''The Isles'',
Norman Davies explains how confusion persists about what "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom" actually denote in even some eminent educational institutions.
[5]
Terms associated with Great Britain – such as ''Britain'' or ''British'' – are generally used as short forms for the United Kingdom or its citizens respectively.
Great Britain and its abbreviations 'GB' and 'GBR' are used in some international codes as a synonym for the United Kingdom, largely due to potential confusion with "UA" or "UKR" for
Ukraine[6]. Examples include:
Universal Postal Union, the
International Olympic Committee, international sports teams,
NATO, the
International Organization for Standardization, and other organisations. (See also ,
international licence plate codes, and technical standards such as the ISO 3166
geocodes and
GBR.)
On the
Internet, '
.uk' is used as a
country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. A '
.gb' top-level domain was also used to a limited extent in the past, but this is now effectively in because the domain name registrar will not take new registrations. The
Republic of Ireland has its own separate
Internet code -
.ie .
Nomenclature
The name ''Britain'' is derived from the name ''Britannia'', used by the Romans from ''circa''
55 BC and increasingly used to describe the island which had formerly been known as ''insula Albionum'', the "island of the Albions".
[ The Britons, , Christopher A., Snyder, Blackwell Publishing, , ISBN 0-631-22260-X ] The name ''Britannia'' derived from the travel writings of the
ancient Greek Pytheas around
320 BC, which described various islands in the North Atlantic as far North as Thule (probably Iceland)
[7]. Although Pytheas' own writings do not survive, later Greek writers described the islands as the αι Βρεττανιαι or the ''Brittanic Isles''.
[ The Oxford History of Ireland, , R F, Foster (editor), Oxford University Press, , ISBN 0-19-280202-X ] The peoples of these islands of ''Prettanike'' were called the Ρρεττανοι, ''Priteni'' or ''Pretani''.[ These names derived from a Celtic name which is likely to have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who may have used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.][[8] ''Priteni'' is the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, ''Britain'', which has the same source as the Goidelic term Cruithne used to refer to the early Brythonic speaking inhabitants of Ireland and the north of Scotland.][ The latter were later called Picts or Caledonians by the Romans. ]
During Roman times, the term ''Britannia'' was applied to the Roman province of Britain, which occupied most of the island of Great Britain, and to the island as a whole.
(See British Isles (terminology) for further discussion of etymology).
''Great Britain'' may well be a translation of the French term ''Grande Bretagne'', which is used in France to distinguish Britain from Brittany (in French: ''Bretagne''), which had been settled in late Roman times by Romano-Celtic troops from Maximus' army and later by refugees from Roman Britain, who were then under attack by the Anglo-Saxons. Since the English court and aristocracy was largely French-speaking for about two centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the French term may have naturally passed into English usage. The term "Bretayne the grete" was used by chroniclers as early as 1338, but it was not used officially until James I proclaimed himself "King of Great Britain" on 20 October 1604 to avoid the more cumbersome title "King of England and Scotland". Sources such as the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) define ''Great Britain'' as "England, Wales, and Scotland considered as a unit" and ''Britain'' as "an island that consists of England, Wales, and Scotland." Thus, ''Britain'' is the name of the island, while ''Great Britain'' is the name of the geopolitical unit. NOAD advises that while ''Britain'' "is broadly synonymous with Great Britain ... the longer form is usual for the political unit." However, in the United Kingdom itself, "Britain" is usually taken to be synonymous with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland [9].
'Minor' Britain
In Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudohistorical ''Historia Regum Britanniae'' (''circa'' 1136), the island of Great Britain was referred to as ''Britannia major'' ("Greater Britain"), to distinguish it from ''Britannia minor'' ("Lesser Britain"), the continental region which approximates to modern Brittany.
In Irish, Wales is referred to as ''An Bhreatain Bheag'' which means, literally, ''Little Britain'', although a truer translation would be ''Britain Minor''. On the other hand, the closely-related language, Scottish Gaelic, uses the term, ''A'Bhreatainn Bheag'', to refer to Brittany.
''Little Britain'' is also the name of a BBC radio and television sketch show, and the name of streets in the City of London and in Dorchester. The street in London was named in honour of the former embassy of the Duchy of Brittany, which was located there.
Capital cities
★ England: London
★ Scotland: Edinburgh
★ Wales: Cardiff
Other major settlements
★ England: Bath, Birmingham,Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Derby, Exeter, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Reading, Sheffield, Sunderland, Truro, York.
★ Scotland: Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Inverness, Stirling.
★ Wales: Bangor, Newport, Swansea, Wrexham.
Other islands of the archipelago
★ Anglesey
★ Hebrides
★ Ireland
★ Isle of Man
★ Isle of Wight
★ Lundy
★ Mull
★ Orkneys
★ The Shetland Islands
★ Skye
References
1. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) ISLAND DIRECTORY TABLES "ISLANDS BY LAND AREA". Retrieved from http://islands.unep.ch/Tiarea.htm on August 25, 2006.
2. See Geohive.com Country data; Japan Census of 2000; United Kingdom Census of 2001. The editors of List of islands by population appear to have used similar data from the relevant statistics bureaux, and totalled up the various administrative districts that comprise each island, and then done the same for less populous islands. An editor of this article has not repeated that work. Therefore this plausible and eminently reasonable ranking is posted as unsourced .
3. Lacey, Robert. ''Great Tales from English History''. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-316-10910-X.
4. Proclamation styling James I King of Great Britain on October 20, 1604
5. Davies, Norman (1990) ''The Isles. A History''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513442-7
6. Ukraine has ISO 3166 codes and UKR
7. "See summary of Pytheas' Voyage" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Voyage
8. Encyclopedia of the Celts: Pretani
9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184840,00.html
External links
★ Interactive map of Great Britain
★ Coast – the BBC explores the coast of Great Britain
★ Administrative map of Great Britain – from the Ordnance Survey; various formats
★ BBC Nations
★ The British Isles
★ CIA Factbook United Kingdom
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