ABSTRACT
The war ministries were able to draw upon a much wider pool of talent in their attempts to create a national military and imperial effort. The ideological inheritance of Britain's new imperial age contained important internal contradictions. The dominant historical interpretation of the differences between human societies remained that of the Scottish Enlightenment: the idea that society moves through 'stages' of development from nomadism to high civilisation through the application of 'industry'. Ideas such as this became common currency in the second half of the eighteenth century as enlightenment admiration for oriental civilisation was extinguished. The roots of the ideas lay once again in the Whig, 'country' tradition, though they were immeasurably refined by the work of Adam Smith, Kames and their contemporaries among the English judges. Free-trade ideas were spreading; they were employed in support of empire and sometimes complemented the case of the 'agrarian' patriots.
