British Isles

The **British Isles** are a group of islands in the North Atlantic off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides and over six thousand smaller isles. They have a total area of about 315,159 km2 (121,684 sq mi) and a combined population of almost 72 million, and include two sovereign states, the Republic of Ireland (which covers roughly five-sixths of Ireland), and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Channel Islands, off the north coast of France, are sometimes taken to be part of the British Isles, even though they do not form part of the archipelago.

The oldest rocks are 2.7 billion years old and are found in Ireland, Wales and the northwest of Scotland. During the Silurian period, the north-western regions collided with the south-east, which had been part of a separate continental landmass. The topography of the islands is modest in scale by global standards. Ben Nevis, the highest mountain, rises to only 1,345 metres (4,413 ft), and Lough Neagh, which is notably larger than other lakes in the island group, covers 390 square kilometres (151 sq mi). The climate is temperate marine, with cool winters and warm summers. The North Atlantic drift brings significant moisture and raises temperatures 11 °C (20 °F) above the global average for the latitude. This led to a landscape that was long dominated by temperate rainforest, although human activity has since cleared the vast majority of forest cover. The region was re-inhabited after the last glacial period of Quaternary glaciation, by 12,000 BC, when Great Britain was still part of a peninsula of the European continent. Ireland, which became an island by 12,000 BC, was not inhabited until after 8000 BC. Great Britain became an island by 5600 BC.

Hiberni (Ireland), Pictish (northern Britain) and Britons (southern Britain) tribes, all speaking Insular Celtic, inhabited the islands at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. Much of Brittonic-occupied Britain was conquered by the Roman Empire from AD 43. The first Anglo-Saxons arrived as Roman power waned in the 5th century, and eventually they dominated the bulk of what is now England. Viking invasions began in the 9th century, followed by more permanent settlements and political change, particularly in England. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 and the later Angevin partial conquest of Ireland from 1169 led to the imposition of a new Norman ruling elite across much of Britain and parts of Ireland. By the Late Middle Ages, Great Britain was separated into the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland, while control in Ireland fluxed between Gaelic kingdoms, Hiberno-Norman lords and the English-dominated Lordship of Ireland, soon restricted only to The Pale. The 1603 Union of the Crowns, Acts of Union 1707 and Acts of Union 1800 aimed to consolidate Britain and Ireland into a single political unit, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands remaining as Crown Dependencies. The expansion of the British Empire and migrations following the Irish Famine and Highland Clearances resulted in the dispersal of some of the islands' population and culture throughout the world, and a rapid depopulation of Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. Most of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom after the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Anglo-Irish Treaty (1919–1922), with six counties remaining in the UK as Northern Ireland.

In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognise the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use. **Britain and Ireland** is used as an alternative description, and **Atlantic Archipelago** has also seen limited use in academia.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "British Isles", *Encyclopædia Britannica*
2. ↑ Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `area`
3. ↑ The diplomatic and constitutional name of the Irish state is simply *Ireland*. For disambiguation purposes, *Republic of Ireland* is often used although technically not the name of the state but, according to the *Republic of Ireland Act 1948*, the state "may be described" as such.
4. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary: "British Isles: a geographical term for the islands comprising Great Britain and Ireland with all their offshore islands including the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands."
5. ↑ . Elsevier (2008). “The British Isles comprise more than 6,000 islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe, including the countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. The group also includes the United Kingdom crown dependencies of the Isle of Man, and by tradition, the Channel Islands (the Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey), even though these islands are strictly speaking an archipelago immediately off the coast of Normandy (France) rather than part of the British Isles.”
6. ↑ Woodcock, Nigel H. (2012). pp. 49–50. John Wiley & Sons.
7. ↑ Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `highestpoint`
8. ↑ The Island of Ireland: Drowning the Myth of an Irish Land-Bridge?. Retrieved on 2 February 2019.
9. ↑ Celtic Culture: Aberdeen breviary-celticism (2006).
10. ↑ British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study SaysJames Owen for National Geographic News, 19 July 2005 [1]
11. ↑ Social work in the British Isles by Malcolm Payne, Steven Shardlow When we think about social work in the British Isles, a contentious term if ever there was one, what do we expect to see?
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Davies, Alistair; Sinfield, Alan (2000), *British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999*, Routledge, p. 9, ISBN 978-0-415-12811-7, Some of the Irish dislike the 'British' in 'British Isles', while a minority of the Welsh and Scottish are not keen on 'Great Britain'. ... In response to these difficulties, 'Britain and Ireland' is becoming preferred official usage if not in the vernacular, although there is a growing trend amongst some critics to refer to Britain and Ireland as 'the archipelago'.
13. ↑ "Written Answers – Official Terms"
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] (archived {{#var:YEAR}}/{{#var:MONTH}}/{{#var:DAY}} {{#var:HOURS}}:{{#var:MINUTES}}:{{#var:SECONDS}}), Dáil Éireann, Volume 606, 28 September 2005. In his response, the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs stated that "The British Isles is not an officially recognised term in any legal or inter-governmental sense. It is without any official status. The Government, including the Department of Foreign Affairs, does not use this term. Our officials in the Embassy of Ireland, London, continue to monitor the media in Britain for any abuse of the official terms as set out in the Constitution of Ireland and in legislation. These include the name of the State, the President, Taoiseach and others."
14. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Sharrock, David (3 October 2006), "New atlas lets Ireland slip shackles of Britain", *The Times*, UK, archived from the original on 16 February 2007, retrieved 24 April 2020, A spokesman for the Irish Embassy in London said: 'The British Isles has a dated ring to it as if we are still part of the Empire. We are independent, we are not part of Britain, not even in geographical terms. We would discourage its useage [*sic*].'
15. ↑ Hazlett, Ian (2003). . Continuum International Publishing Group. “At the outset, it should be stated that while the expression 'The British Isles' is evidently still commonly employed, its intermittent use throughout this work is only in the geographic sense, in so far as that is acceptable. Since the early twentieth century, that nomenclature has been regarded by some as increasingly less usable. It has been perceived as cloaking the idea of a 'greater England', or an extended south-eastern English imperium, under a common Crown since 1603 onwards. ... Nowadays, however, 'Britain and Ireland' is the more favoured expression, though there are problems with that too. ... There is no consensus on the matter, inevitably. It is unlikely that the ultimate in non-partisanship that has recently appeared the (East) 'Atlantic Archipelago' will have any appeal beyond captious scholars.”
16. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>"Guardian Style Guide", *Guardian*, London, 19 December 2008, A geographical term taken to mean Great Britain, Ireland and some or all of the adjacent islands such as Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man. The phrase is best avoided, given its (understandable) unpopularity in the Irish Republic. The plate in the National Geographic Atlas of the World once titled British Isles now reads Britain and Ireland.
17. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Norquay, Glenda; Smyth, Gerry (2002), *Across the margins: cultural identity and change in the Atlantic archipelago*, Manchester University Press, p. 4, ISBN 978-0-7190-5749-6, The term we favour here—Atlantic Archipelago—may prove to be of no greater use in the long run, but at this stage, it does at least have the merit of questioning the ideology underpinning more established nomenclature.
18. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Schwyzer, Philip; Mealor, Simon (2004), *Archipelagic identities: literature and identity in the Atlantic Archipelago*, Ashgate Publishing, p. 10, ISBN 978-0-7546-3584-0, In some ways 'Atlantic Archipelago' is intended to do the work of including without excluding, and while it seems to have taken root in terms of academic conferences and publishing, I don't see it catching on in popular discourse or official political circles, at least not in a hurry.
19. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Kumar, Krishan (2003), *The Making of English National Identity*, Cambridge University Press, p. 6, ISBN 978-0-521-77736-0, Some scholars, seeking to avoid the political and ethnic connotations of 'the British Isles', have proposed the 'Atlantic Archipelago' or even 'the East Atlantic Archipelago' (see, e.g. Pocock 1975a: 606; 1995: 292n; Tompson, 1986) Not surprisingly this does not seem to have caught on with the general public, though it has found increasing favour with scholars promoting the new 'British History'.
20. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>David Armitage; Michael Braddick (2002), *The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800*, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 284, ISBN 978-0-333-96340-1, British and Irish historians increasingly use 'Atlantic archipelago' as a less metro-centric term for what is popularly known as the British Isles.

## Further reading

* Allen, Stephen (2007). Lords of Battle: The World of the Celtic Warrior. Osprey Publishing.
* Collingwood, Robin George (1998). Roman Britain and the English Settlements. Biblo & Tannen Publishers.
* Norman Davies (2000). . Macmillan.
* Niall Ferguson (2004). Empire. Basic Books. Retrieved on 22 July 2009.
* The Oxford History of Ireland. Oxford University Press (1 November 2001).
* Harley, John Brian (1987). The History of Cartography: Cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Humana Press.
* Maddison, Angus (2001). The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Retrieved on 22 July 2009.
* Markale, Jean (1994). King of the Celts. Bear & Company.
* Snyder, Christopher (2003). The Britons. Blackwell Publishing.
* A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500 B.C. – 1603 A.D. by Simon Schama, BBC/Miramax, 2000 ISBN: 978-0-7868-6675-5

* A History of Britain—The Complete Collection on DVD by Simon Schama, BBC 2002
* Shortened History of England by G. M. Trevelyan Penguin Books ISBN: 978-0-14-023323-0

## External links

* An interactive geological map of the British Isles.