United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the state created by the Acts of Union, which joined the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland and abolished the separate Irish Parliament in Dublin. Irish representatives sat instead at Westminster, and Catholic emancipation, which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament, followed in 1829. The state was the centre of the British Empire at its height and the first industrial power, but Ireland was a source of constant conflict, with the Great Famine of the 1840s, campaigns for Home Rule and, in 1916, the Easter Rising. After the Irish War of Independence, the treaty of 1921 created the Irish Free State, and the United Kingdom was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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