The Georgian Era

The Georgian Era, 1714 to 1830, named for the four successive Hanoverian King Georges who reigned across the period, spans a transformative century in British history stretching from the Hanoverian succession to the throne through the loss of the American colonies, the Napoleonic Wars, and the early Industrial Revolution. The period saw the political power of the monarchy continue to give way to Parliament and an increasingly professionalized cabinet system of government, most visibly under Robert Walpole, generally considered Britain's first prime minister, while Britain fought a long sequence of major wars, including the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence and the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, that made it the era's preeminent global naval and colonial power. Georgian Britain developed a distinctive elegant architectural and decorative style, seen in the townhouses of Bath and London, alongside a flourishing print culture of newspapers, novels and satirical caricature. The era is often subdivided by historians, with its final decade, 1811 to 1820, distinguished as the Regency, when the future George IV ruled as Prince Regent for his incapacitated father George III.