Britain's fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century: Recent trends in historiography

Abstract

John Brewer's argument that eighteenth-century Britain developed a centralized and effective fiscal-military state that allowed it to become a great power has been instrumental in making early modern state-building an important field of inquiry for historians. New directions in the field explore conflicting eighteenth-century ideologies, the notion of a ‘naval-military’ state, the non-military dimensions of the state, the nature of the Irish and Scottish fiscal-military states, the relationship between Britain's central state and colonial states, and the relationship between the state and the informal actors who served it.