The first English Empire.

Britain is now called England, thereby assuming the name of the victors. This, the most noble of islands, 800 miles long and 200 broad, was first called Albion, then Britain and is now known as England. Crossing the deep sea, he [Henry the Second] visited Ireland with a fleet, and gloriously subdued it; Scotland also he vanquished, capturing its king, William … He remarkably extended the kingdom's limits and boundaries [until they reached] from the ocean on the south to the Orkney islands in the north. With his powerful grasp he included the whole island of Britain in one monarchy, even as it is enclosed by the sea. The English and others The historian A. J. P. Taylor once argued that the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century was brought about not by nationalist forces but through a series of wars against other countries – Denmark, Austria, France. The substance of German unity and German national consciousness was not, as the liberals claimed, a deep sense of German culture but the deposit of wars and conflicts that forged a Germany confident of its strength and eager to expand its power. Prussia, which of all the German states had the least interest in German nationalism, was the agency through which Germany achieved this self-definition as a ‘crusading’ power, charged with the mission especially of civilizing the East (Taylor 1945: 114–5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]