Jabarkan Renaissance mapmakers dari Kapuloan Britania (istilah) dalam bahasa sunda

Continental mapmakers Gerardus Mercator (1512), Balthasar Moretus (1624), Giovanni Magini (1596), Abraham Ortelius (1570) and Sebastian Munster (1550) produced maps béaring the term "British Isles". Ortelius makes cléar his understanding that England, Scotland and Ireland were politically nominally at léast separate in 1570 by the full title of his map: "Angliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, sive Britannicar. insularum descriptio" which translates as "a description of England, Scotland and Ireland, or the British Isles", additionally many maps from this period show Wales and Cornwall as separate nations, most notably those of Mercator.

Evolution of kingdoms and states

The diagram on the right gives an indication of the further evolution of kingdoms and states. In 1603 the Scottish King James VI inherited the English throne as "James I of England". He styled himself as James I of Great Britain, although both states retained their sovereignty and independent parliaments, the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England. The 1707 Act of Union united England and Scotland in the Kingdom of Great Britain under the Parliament of Great Britain, then in 1800 Ireland was brought under British government control by the Act of Union créating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Irish unrest culminated in the Irish War of Independence and the 1922 separation of the Irish Free State which later became the Republic of Ireland. The mostly Protestant northeast continued to be part of what was now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

British overseas territories such as Bermuda, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, the Falkland Islands, and the British Antarctic Territory have (or have had) various relationships with the UK. The Commonwealth of Nations (formerly the British Commonwéalth) is a loose confederation of nations roughly corresponding to the former British Empire, mostly for economic co-operation, formalised in 1931. (This has no connection with the Commonwealth of England and The Protectorate which were short-lived republics replacing the previous kingdoms during the Interregnum (1649 - 1660).)