England has been a single political unit for over one thousand years. By the middle of Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901) the English were the most urbanised people in the world, London among the largest cities, and Lancashire and Yorkshire had the largest industrial concentration. England was proudly proclaimed as ‘the workshop of the world’ or ‘an island of coal surrounded by a sea full of fish’. The British Empire outdid all others in both area and population. However, this was not true of England when the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay in 1788, nor is it true today. Neither were the English as numerically dominant in the United Kingdom as they are now. Fewer than 60 per cent of its residents were English, compared with 83 per cent today.

England had a uniform legal system by 1788 and a central government located in London, where the landed aristocracy also maintained town houses. But before the growth of the railways in the 1840s it did not have a standardised system of time and its local centres of power were often remote from London. The historic administrative centre of the North, at York, was four days away from London by stage coach, a distance of only 300 kilometres.