Society and the economy in the eighteenth-century: I – Population and the land, c. 1720–c. 1780

This chapter explains the three most prolific sources of non-landed wealth in mid-Georgian Britain: trade and finance, the professions, and industry. Harold Perkin characterised English society in the eighteenth century, in a much-quoted phrase, as an 'open aristocracy', with fundamental implications then and later for industrial growth, it was the revitalisation of the landed classes by the non-landed wealth which flowed into it, as well as the 'downward flow of their younger sons into the middle ranks', which he chiefly had in mind. Most compellingly, a place in an urban patriciate remained excellent material reasons why men of non-landed capital should choose to grow even richer by keeping the great bulk of their economic involvement outside land altogether. The 'Commercial Revolution' did not end in 1689. But between then and 1745 the pace of its advance did slacken, with much momentum lost in the early 1690s and in the 1720s, especially, and with only intermittent spurts.