ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the range of conceivable political alternatives tended to narrow down to despotism and republicanism. Rapid political and economic change had brought about a world of larger, more populous states than those in which republican thought had emerged. Ever-growing commerce was increasingly replacing land as the basis of wealth. It was widely assumed that modern states, like older empires, would have to be governed on autocratic lines; thus despotism was justified on the pragmatic grounds of efficiency or ‘enlightened’ government rather than in terms of supernatural divine right or natural authority.
