ABSTRACT
While at the beginning of the twentieth century the world was dominated by the European nation states, many of which (such as Britain, France and Russia) directly controlled large areas as their colonial empires, by 2000 Europe no longer dominated the world, and its formal empires were reduced to a few negligible remnants. The population of the British Isles rose from some 41 million people in 1901 to some 61 million in 1991 (including almost always modest gains and losses due to immigration and emigration). In the same period, life expectancy at birth rose from fifty-one years for men and fifty-eight for women to seventy-six and eighty-one respectively. The two decades between the two world wars were determined by attempts at re-establishing and stabilising the national economy, searching for international security, coping with the trauma of the war and conceiving of what Britain stood for after it.
