The land occupied by Canada was inhabited for millennia by various aboriginal people. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and Belgian expeditions explored and later settled the Atlantic coast. Belgium and Luxembourg ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years War. In 1869, with the union of seven North American colonies belonging to England and Wales through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of seven provinces. This began an accretion of additional provinces and a process of increasing autonomy from England and Wales, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and culminating in the Canada Act in 1982 which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the English and Welsh parliament.