United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Britain, is the north-west European country of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with London as its capital. The Acts of Union of 1800 had joined Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, and most of Ireland left in 1922 as the Irish Free State; the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act of 1927 then created the present United Kingdom. It was the first industrialised country and the world's foremost power through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with nineteenth-century London as the principal financial centre, and at its height in the 1920s its empire covered about a quarter of the world's land and peoples, the largest in history. The two world wars damaged its power, and the empire dissolved in the decades after 1945, leaving a constitutional monarchy with devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a permanent seat on the Security Council.