ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom of Great Britain, which was formed by an incorporating union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland in 1707, only modified in 1999, was controversial for much of the first half of the eighteenth century. In Ireland, with a parliament of its own which was far from powerless, and even the originally 'Anglo-Irish' new nobility beginning to acquire a stronger Irish identity, there were few magnates. The whole game of trying to find an over-arching explanation for 'British Imperialism' before 1783 or so rather presupposes that the phenomenon is a coherent one and that there is consistency in it over time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Brewer depicted the eighteenth-century British state, with its massive, well-sourced, permanent national debt, as just much more efficient at the game of competitive pursuit of wealth and power as rivals like the United Netherlands, France, or Prussia.
