The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State Government and society in eighteenth-century Britain

How did the eighteenth-century British state’s increasing orientation towards interstate rivalry, war and empire affect the ways in which the central institutions of government addressed themselves to the task of ordering and governing British society, when something other than the mobilization of armed force and associated revenues was in question? And was Britain’s recurrent involvement in major wars itself a source of social problems? This chapter supplies some tentative answers to both these questions.