ABSTRACT
The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of great economic and political change in Britain. The United Kingdom was both a European power and a trading nation with a rapidly developing global empire. In north America and the Indian sub-continent, British traders, soldiers, administrators and in some places settlers, were taking the language and some of the culture of the offshore islands across the globe. Another continent was opened up by Cook’s voyages of discovery in the Pacific and the unknown southern oceans between 1768 and 1779; the first British convict fleet sailed to Australia in 1787 carrying men and women who were to form the basis of another part of the rapidly expanding empire. At home, too, there was change. Raw materials from the colonies were being made into goods both for domestic use and for export. New forms of industrial organisation were being created in factories whose machinery was driven first by water power and then by steam engines. The lives of millions of people were transformed by a movement from the countryside to the towns. The towns became very different places; an urban working class developed to provide the labour for the factories. A new middle class whose power was economic rather than social was just as challenging to the traditional social order.
