11 - Afterword: State Formation, Political Stability and the Revolution of 1688

Summary

On the eve of the Seven Years' War in 1756 Britain was a very different state and nation compared with a century earlier. The British state itself had been created in 1707 by the Union between England and Scotland. A constitutional monarchy had been firmly established, in which parliament met for several months every year, and the focus of political power had shifted from Whitehall to Westminster. Both the Test Act of 1673 and the Toleration Act of 1689 had come to be regarded as almost as fundamental parts of the constitution as the Bill of Rights, the one guaranteeing the privileges of the Church of England and the other the rights of protestant dissenters, and creating, in effect, a de facto religious pluralism, which went far beyond the indulgence envisaged in 1689. Eighteenth-century Britain was also a remarkably successful military state. For almost half of the period between 1689 and 1756 it had been at war, mainly with France, an experience which had transformed it into a great European power and had necessitated the creation of a permanent naval and military establishment that was not only unprecedented in its scale but also gave government a novel peacetime coercive power. Britain's newfound status as a ‘great power’ was underpinned by fiscal and economic developments. War was funded by the ability of the government to raise enormous sums of money through taxation and borrowing, to manage its finances effectively through an expanded bureaucracy, and to keep on raising money as war was followed by war.