ABSTRACT
This assessment by a much travelled and perceptive French lawyer in the mid-l 760s is typical of the views of many diplomats and visitors to Britain. Grosley, it is true, was taken aback at the high level of prices in the capital which rendered the relative balance of advantage for the Londoner over the Parisian less great. High prices, however, as envious British tourists to Switzerland, much of Germany or Scandinavia in our own day are well aware, are frequently indicative of superior general levels of prosperity. Grosley confirmed that ordinary Englishmen ate more meat than their French counterparts, consuming far less bread in consequence and increasingly confining themselves to the superior wheaten varieties. Although in the generally harsher and colder climate of Scotland, oats were the staple arable crop, many Scots enjoyed the benefits of economic growth, especially from the 1740s onwards. Scottish farmhouses in the second half of the eighteenth century increasingly sported additional rooms and slate roofs, while Scottish town-dwellers, like their English counterparts, were
established tea-drinkers. It is tolerably certain that Britain in the early 1780s was already the most advanced nation in the world and that its superiority was reflected in higher living standards and more diverse patterns of consumption than elsewhere.
