ABSTRACT
The expansion of overseas trade and the emergence of an investing society, the commercial bourgeoisie have been consistently relegated to a subordinate position. More recently the client status of the bourgeoisie has been extended to the social sphere. Historians who have wished to emphasize the underlying continuity of the pre-modern period have suggested that the bourgeoisie habitually deferred to the landed aristocracy. Marxist historians have implied that the question of mobility is in reality marginal to the question of power. It does not address itself to the structural limitations of aristocratic rule, to the fact that the leadership of the great landed proprietors was circumscribed by the imperatives of an ebullient capitalist economy. 'The Whig grandees', Eric Hobsbawm has claimed, 'knew quite well that the power of the country, and their own, rested on a readiness to make money militantly and commercially.
