Economic statecraft and economic progress

The middle years of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a new, enlightened approach to history. Underpinning this mode of writing was the assumption that the level of progress achieved in modern-day Europe distinguished it from any previous historical period.1 To an extent, the novel qualities of the present were conceived of in political terms. With regard to England in particular, there was support for the Tory/Court Whig argument that the nation’s much-celebrated liberty had its origins not in Saxon or preSaxon history, but rather in the constitutional and cultural shifts produced by the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. Equally, there was a growing belief that a range of intellectual and cultural fields – among them technology, manufacture, the arts and sciences, and, perhaps most importantly, manners – had been transformed over the past hundred years and that, in some sense, these developments were interconnected.2 Incorporating such diverse subject matter into a conventional narrative posed considerable challenges, and some writers, most famously the Scottish conjectural historians, dispensed with the chronological approach altogether.3 Neoclassical conceptions, however, as Philip Hicks’s account of the subject has shown, continued to shape the ways in which British writers and readers viewed history.4 Consequently, there was a desire to provide an account that conformed to the conventional understanding of history as ‘a continued Narration of things True, Great and Publick’, but that was able to explain and narrate the recent shifts which had transformed Europe’s nation states.5 Such ideas served to alter the emphasis of English narrative history in two important ways. On the one hand, they expanded the genre’s thematic range. And although