Sinews of Power

Under the later Stuarts, England became a major European military power, English armies and navies grew to an unprecedented size, civilian administration burgeoned and taxation, public borrowing and spending on war reached new heights. This work examines the causes of the emergence in England of this fiscal-military state and the features which distinguished it from European powers. It also charts the effect of these developments on society at large: their impact on the economy, on social structure and politics and their role in developing special interest groups and lobbies. Thus it provided an interpretative framework which links adminstration with politics, public finance with the economy and foreign policy with domestic affairs.

`The book is a distinguished work - of importance not just to eighteenth-century specialists but also to students of governmental development generally. Though authoritative and historically sophisticated, it is written in a fluent and non technical manner that should reach a wide audience. It even has a first-rate index.' - American Historical Review` ... a radical, but wholly convincing, reinterpretation of the Georgian state ... Brewer's elegant analysis shows how parliament itself, then as today, readily serves as a most effective engine for the centralisation of power.' - New Statesman and Society

John Brewer is Director of the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and Director of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California at Los Angeles.