ABSTRACT
It is a little uncomfortable – or at least I find it so – to talk about one’s own work, not least if it is more than a quarter of a century old. But in response to the editors’ request to reflect on e Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English state, 1688-1783, I have thought it best to try to explain my broad agenda in writing the book. As I worked on Sinews, it became clear to me that, regardless of its particular contents, there were a number of general aims and objectives I wished to achieve. (Like a lot of projects this one took shape slowly and, in fact, grew out of a (never completed) commission to write a general book about eighteenth-century England. I cut that project up, like Caesar’s Gaul, into three parts, state, society and culture, but never got beyond the state.)
In the following discussion I set out what became my general aims; I then go on to consider what I feel to have been the limitations of my analysis, and reflect – somewhat incompletely – on the directions of scholarship since the late 1980s. But before I begin, I want to emphasize three general points. The first is that, as an exercise in synthesis, Sinews was enormously beholden to an existing body of historical scholarship, much of it quite technical, almost all remarkably distinguished. The project would have been impossible without the pioneering work of Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien on taxation, the astonishingly erudite scholarship of Peter Dickson on public finance, Geoffrey Holmes, Gerald Aylmer and Colin Brooks and a raft of researchers at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London on administrative matters, John Childs and Alan Guy on the army and, as Roger Morriss points out in his chapter in this book on the naval perspective, the numerous research monographs on the British navy. Such work made 1989 a happy moment for some sort of synthesis.
