The English language is now the first language of roughly 400 million people and is the most common second language learnt in the world.
Roughly one third of English words are derived from Latin, one third from French, one quarter from German, Norse and Dutch, and one fifteenth from Greek.

English Common Law has formed the basis for the legal systems of Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States of America.

English parliamentary government - where the executive is answerable to elected legislative assemblies - has been the model for that of many other countries.

The protection provided by the sea also helped to encourage political unification, as did other geographic factors. Wales and the North of England have some mountainous terrain, but for the most part the country is flat and communications are easy.
The South-East, Midlands and East Anglia contain good arable land; the poorer terrain of the North and West has led to the prevalence there of pastoral agriculture - especially sheep-farming.

The close proximity of South-East England to the European Continent long made this area the center of foreign trade. When Atlantic trade expanded from the later seventeenth century onwards, the ports of Bristol and Liverpool became increasingly important.

England and Wales also had accessible mineral deposits - coal in the Northeast; iron in the West Midlands; tin in Cornwall; lead in Derbyshire, and limited amounts of gold and silver in Wales.

Road transport was difficult until the 19th century, so goods were moved by water. London stood in the center of the prosperous Southeast of England, on the River Thames with easy access to the sea, and was the largest and most important city in England from Roman times.

Most of English history took place before science and technology gave us the revolutions in agricultural and industrial production that created the modern world.
Throughout the period to 1688:

	Agriculture was extremely inefficient - the vast majority of the population was involved in food production, yet very little surplus was produced. Even minor climatic fluctuations led to famine. As a consequence, populations were very low. The population of England and Wales did not exceed ten million until after the Industrial Revolution.   AD 400 600 1086 1230 1300 1450 1620 1700 1800 1900 2000 Population in millions 3.5 1 2.25 5.75 6.5 2.25 5 5.5 9 32.5 51.9
	Hygiene and medicine were appalling by modern standards, and disease was rife. Plague - the Black Death - killed over one third of England's population in the mid-14th century, but even in normal times infant mortality rates approached one in ten, and towns were so unhealthy that they had to be continually replenished by immigration - more people died than were born there.
	Apart from watermills and windmills. almost the only sources of power were humans and animals - backbreaking effort was necessary for tasks where oil, gas and electricity now provide the required energy.
	Because of low productivity, almost everyone had to work. Only a tiny proportion of the population received full-time education - child labor was normal and at least 90% of the population was illiterate until the sixteenth century.