Manufacturing employment and the fiscal-military state; textile manufacturers, global markets, and British state formation, 1688-1722
How did manufacturers and those who received wages in the textile industry understand global markets, and how did their understanding shape the emerging British state? In the last thirty-five years, since John Brewer built on the work of P.G.M. Dickson and Patrick O’Brien to define the concept of the ‘fiscal-military state’, our understanding of the growth of British fiscal capacity and the expansion of public credit to fund overseas conflict and colonial administration has become both full and deep. Yet there has been a comparative neglect of what Brewer defined as the ‘other half’ of state/society relations in early modern Britain - the role of local English society in exploiting that expanding state to further their own economic interests. In light of recent research into global textile markets and the ‘industrious revolution’, this paper explores the role of manufacturers seeking support in global markets in building consent for British state formation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After first considering how 1688 facilitated allowed manufacturing communities to take advantage of the developing customs and excise bureaucracy, the paper will consider the regulation of Indian textile imports as examples of the how state/society relations responded to changing global markets.
Dr Hugo Bromley is Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge.
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