when did the name great britain come about
Great Britain After the Anglo-Saxon period, Britain was used as a historical term only. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical Historia Regum Britanniae (c.Â 1136) refers to the island as Britannia major ("Greater Britain"), to distinguish it from Britannia minor ("Lesser Britain"), the continental region which approximates to modern Brittany, which had been settled in the fifth and sixth centuries by migrants from Britain.[23] The term Great Britain was first used officially in 1474, in the instrument drawing up the proposal for a marriage between Cecily the daughter of Edward IV of England, and James the son of James III of Scotland, which described it as "this Nobill Isle, callit Gret Britanee". It was used again in 1604, when King James VI and I styled himself "King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland".
British Empire Between 1815 and 1914, a period referred to as Britain's "imperial century" by some historians,[98][99] around 10,000,000 square miles (26,000,000Â km2) of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire.[100] Victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in Central Asia.[101] Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica,[9] and a foreign policy of "splendid isolation".[102] Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain's dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been described by some historians as an "Informal Empire".[103][104]