United Kingdom

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United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Irish: Ríocht Aontaithe
Scots Gaelic: Rìoghachd Aonaichte
Welsh: Teyrnas Unedig
480px-United Kingdom (orthographic projection).svg.png

Map of United Kingdom
Flag of the United Kingdom (1-2).svg.png Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (Tudor crown).svg.png
Flag State Emblem

The United Kingdom (UK), in full the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is an imperialist and capitalist state in the Northwest of Europe. The United Kingdom has great historical significance as the birthplace of industrial capitalism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both spent much of their lives in England studying British capitalism as it grew to a world power of unseen proportions. Marx wrote Das Kapital, Wages, Price and Profit, and other major works while living outside London, where he would remain until his death in 1883.

History

Late Middle Ages

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?

— John Ball, English reformer executed in 1381[1]

Some[who?] historians propose that a "crisis of the Late Middle Ages" occurred in the 14th and 15th centuries which hastened the collapse of European feudalism. The application of this historiographic lens to English history highlights the role of the exhausting Hundred Years' War and the decimating Black Death outbreak—the latter reducing the English population by as much as one-half—in triggering the subsequent conflicts. But the crisis of feudalism was also a result of internal contradictions, such as the issues with primogeniture which were salient in the Wars of the Roses. In fact, all of these factors clearly contributed to the coming political and social crisis.

The Black Death and the war in France intensified existing economic contradictions. The landlord class chose to resolve these in their own favor by brutally suppressing the peasantry's wages and forcing them to pay a new poll tax in the form of money.[2] These tensions manifested in the Peasant Rising of 1381, which ended in the deaths of at least 2,000 rebels. The aristocracy, feeling that King Richard II was bungling the crisis and the war, usurped and imprisoned him in 1399. The Church laid blame on the heads of the Lollards, a religious reform movement, and in 1401 Parliament passed the first English law allowing for heretics to be burned at the stake.[3] The subsequent executions and general repression forced the dissenters underground until the Reformation of the 16th century, but their movement would serve as an example for the Bohemian Hussites and other religious reformers.

Tudor period

Enclosure and capitalist development

English Reformation

English Civil War

The power of enclosing land and owning propriety was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murther their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.

— Gerrard Winstanley [4]

Industrial Revolution

And did the countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

...

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant land.

— William Blake, 1804

The "social question"

Urbanization

British Empire

The British Empire did not formally begin until Queen Victoria crowned herself "Empress of India" in 1876. However, its history has obvious roots in the colonial period and the coinciding rise of British merchant capitalism over Habsburg Spain and Portugal.

Politics

Legacy

The British influence on modern capitalism is incomparable to that of any one country save for possibly the United States. Modern industry, police forces, political economy, liberal philosophy, strike actions and so on can all be traced to the British experience of capitalism.

References

  1. "AskOxford: Search Results". askoxford.com. 2001-01-27. Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2023-05-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  2. "The Peasants' Revolt 1381". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 2023-05-08.
  3. "De heretico comburendo". Oxford Reference. 1999-02-22. Retrieved 2023-05-08.
  4. "A Declaration from the Poor oppressed People of England". The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 2023-05-08.