Kingdom of Great Britain

State · 1709–2026 CE · at its largest around 1956 CE

The state formed by the 1707 union of England and Scotland and governed from London; it merged with Ireland in 1801 to create the United Kingdom.

Its battles, in Battle View

On its lands while it lasted

Isaac Newton (1643 CE – 1727 CE): English mathematician and physicist at Cambridge who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, co-invented calculus and advanced optics.
Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840 CE): The shift from hand production to machines, factories and steam power that began in Britain around 1760, centred on textile towns such as Manchester. It spread to Europe and North America and transformed work, cities and the world economy.
Napoleon (1769 CE – 1821 CE): Corsican-born general who seized power in France in 1799 and crowned himself Emperor in 1804. He conquered much of Europe before his defeat in 1815 and died in exile on Saint Helena.
Watt steam engine (1769 CE): James Watt patented his separate condenser in 1769, greatly improving the steam engine's efficiency. Built with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham from 1775, it powered the Industrial Revolution.
Storming of the Bastille (1789 CE): On 14 July 1789 a Paris crowd seized the Bastille fortress-prison. The event became the symbol of the French Revolution, which overthrew the absolute monarchy.
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812 CE): Napoleon’s Grande Armée of over 600,000 crossed the Niemen in June 1812, fought at Borodino and occupied Moscow, but was forced into a winter retreat in which the great majority of the army was lost.
Battle of Waterloo (1815 CE): On 18 June 1815 Wellington's Anglo-allied army and Blücher's Prussians defeated Napoleon near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, ending the Napoleonic Wars.
On the Origin of Species (1859 CE): Charles Darwin, working at Down House in Kent, published his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859. It founded modern evolutionary biology.
Joseph Stalin (1878 CE – 1953 CE): Georgian-born dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death. He drove forced industrialisation and collectivisation, led the country to victory in World War II, and oversaw mass repression.
Albert Einstein (1879 CE – 1955 CE): German-born theoretical physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and explained the photoelectric effect, for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Adolf Hitler (1889 CE – 1945 CE): Austrian-born dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He started World War II in Europe and bears chief responsibility for the Holocaust. He died by suicide in Berlin.
Einstein's special relativity (1905 CE): In 1905, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity and, in a follow-up paper, E = mc². It transformed ideas of space and time.
World War I (1914–1918 CE): A global war from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies and the Central Powers, fought largely in trenches on Europe's Western and Eastern Fronts. Around 9 million soldiers died, and four empires collapsed.
October Revolution (1917 CE): In November 1917 (October in the old calendar) Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd, storming the Winter Palace and creating the first communist state.
Russian Revolution (1917–1923 CE): The February Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd ended the rule of the tsars, and the October Revolution brought Lenin’s Bolsheviks to power. After a civil war they founded the Soviet Union in 1922.