ABSTRACT
In Britain, land was the basis of wealth and prestige. The landlord–tenant relationship in eighteenth-century Britain stimulated productivity. The assessment, made in the mid-1760s by Pierre Jean Grosley, a much-travelled and perceptive French lawyer, is typical of the views of many diplomats and visitors to Britain. 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. Britain was more 'open' to both wealth and talent than any European society, but fine gradations of hierarchy and status survived. For a few years in the third quarter of the late-seventeenth-century Little Whitehaven's shipping tonnage cleared was the third largest in Britain. Domestic industrial production was widespread in Britain but dominated by cloth manufacture based on wool and various woollen-based mixtures.
