George III

George III, the third king of the house of Hanover, ruled Great Britain from 1760 until his death in 1820. During his reign, however, his son, the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, ruled the country as regent briefly in 1787-88 and again in 1811-20, when the king was rendered mentally incapable by illness: the cause of the king's incapacity is now thought by many to have been porphyria.

George III's reign saw the revival of two-party politics after half a century of Whig dominance of political life, the loss of the thirteen British colonies of North America, protracted war with France, and the beginning of Britain's most rapid phase of industrialisation.

Whig political supremacy under the earlier Hanoverians was challenged by the king's promotion of supporters of greater royal control of government, who came to be styled Tories (the name attached to earlier opponents of the Whigs in 1680-1715). The Whigs subsequently became the party increasingly of the country's newer commercial and industrial interests, becoming in the latter stages of the reign the party of limited social and political reform.

The king's experiment (1770-82) in government through the ministry of Lord North ended in the disastrous loss of Britain's North American colonies in the American War of Independence (1775-83).

The subsequent premiership of William Pitt, the Younger (1783-1801 and 1804-06) started the restoration of Britain's fortunes and the successful prosecution (largely through subsidies to European allies) of war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1802 and 1803-1814) and the final defeat of Napoleon I in 1815.

Founded largely on technical advances in cotton manufacture from the 1760s onwards, Britain's industrialisation took off with the revival of trade in the 1780s, transforming the country within half a century from a predominantly rural society still earning its principal income from agriculture into the "workshop of the world" through its reliance on steam power and factory production.