ABSTRACT
The emergence of the modern developmental state was, we are told, a nineteenthand twentieth-century phenomenon. While scholars agree and disagree vociferously about the causes of that emergence, they are largely in agreement that theirs is a story that begins after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. All across Europe, in a variety of different ways, states sought for the first time to improve the condition of the vast majority of their populations. This developmentalism would have been unthinkable in earlier periods. Most accounts simply begin their stories in the late nineteenth century,2 while others like David Roberts explain that ‘students of the eighteenth century can certainly discover little evidence in the Whiggish government of Sir Robert Walpole or the Tory government of William Pitt that the central government or even the justices of the peace, did much for the lower classes besides dispense poor relief ’.3
