The Treaty of Union led to a single united kingdom encompassing all Great

Britain.
On 1 May 1707, the united Kingdom of Great Britain came into being, the
result of Acts of Union being passed by the parliaments of England and
Scotland to ratify the 1706 Treaty of Union and so unite the two
kingdoms.[76][77][78]
In the 18th century, cabinet government developed under Robert Walpole,
in practice the first prime minister (17211742). A series of Jacobite
Uprisings sought to remove the Protestant House of Hanover from the
British throne and restore the Catholic House of Stuart. The Jacobites
were finally defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, after which the
Scottish Highlanders were brutally suppressed. The British colonies in
North America that broke away from Britain in the American War of
Independence became the United States of America, recognized by Britain
in 1783. British imperial ambition turned elsewhere, particularly to
India.[79]
During the 18th century, Britain was involved in the Atlantic slave
trade. British ships transported an estimated 2 million slaves from
Africa to the West Indies before banning the trade in 1807, banning
slavery in 1833, and taking a leading role in the movement to abolish
slavery worldwide by pressing other nations to end their trade with a
series of treaties, and then formed the world's oldest international
human rights organisation, Anti-Slavery International, in London in
1839.[80][81][82] The term "United Kingdom" became official in 1801 when
the parliaments of Britain and Ireland each passed an Act of Union,
uniting the two kingdoms and creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland.[83]
Painting of a bloody battle. Horses and infantry fight or lie on grass.
The Battle of Waterloo marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the
start of Pax Britannica.
In the early 19th century, the British-led Industrial Revolution began to
transform the country. It slowly led to a shift in political power away
from the old Tory and Whig landowning classes towards the new
industrialists. An alliance of merchants and industrialists with the
Whigs would lead to a new party, the Liberals, with an ideology of free
trade and laissez-faire. In 1832 Parliament passed the Great Reform Act,
which began the transfer of political power from the aristocracy to the
middle classes. In the countryside, enclosure of the land was driving
small farmers out. Towns and cities began to swell with a new urban
working class. Few ordinary workers had the vote, and they created their
own organisations in the form of trade unions.
After the defeat of France at the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars (17921815), the UK emerged as the principal naval and imperial
power of the 19th century (with London the largest city in the world from
about 1830).[84] Unchallenged at sea, British dominance was later
described as Pax Britannica ("British Peace"), a period of relative peace
in Europe and the world (18151914) during which the British Empire
became the global hegemon and adopted the role of global
policeman.[85][86][87][88] By the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851,
Britain was described as the "workshop of the world".[89] The British
Empire was expanded to include India, large parts of Africa and many
other territories throughout the world. Alongside the formal control it
exerted over its own colonies, British dominance of much of world trade
meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such
as Asia and Latin America.[90][91] Domestically, political attitudes
favoured free trade and laissez-faire policies and a gradual widening of