The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [84]
When good weather struck in 1720 England, and to a certain extent Wales and Scotland, was filled with people who had money looking for something to invest in. Those who owned the great estates and had begun to profit from land improvements bought out the smaller landowners at attractive prices. These then had surplus cash to spend. So did the merchants, as the growth of the colonial markets increased their profits year by year.
The landowners and merchants used some of their money to buy their way into the upper classes by providing generous dowries for their daughters. More often than not, their profits went on constructing large country houses in the fashionable Palladian style. Between 1690 and 1730 there was a boom in the building of stately homes, with the talents of men such as Capability Brown brought in to give a new house the required elegance of landscape.
Yeomen farmers made profit from the good harvests, too. Here, a cartoon lampoons 'Farmer Giles', anxious to impress his neighbours with the talent of his sixteen-year-old daughter Betty, just returned from a fashionable school.
The mid-century stately home boom, during which so many of the great English houses were built. Palladian and classical styles were all the rage. Here a couple examine plans presented by their architect. Note the fragments of Roman columns bottom right, ready for use.
The change in the weather, and the subsequent increase in the yields of corn and money, also helped the poor. Higher yields brought prices down and that meant an effective rise in real wages. Labourers began to have considerably more surplus cash to spend. Much of it went at the village store, an innovation dating from the early eighteenth century. Demand was such that the stores soon needed more than the basic supplies of tobacco, shoes and clothes.
The growing home market beckoned at a time when, both politically and institutionally, Britain was well placed to handle the effects of expanding trade. Besides a healthy bank and a market for stocks in the City, there was insurance, mortgages, company legislation and a growing number of businesses, all of which augured well for the future.
England at this time was firmly in the grip of the philosophy of the son of a country lawyer. Seldom can a philosopher have had greater power than that enjoyed by John Locke, the so-called apostle of the revolution which had brought William III to England and reason to government. In 1683 Locke was fifty-one years old, with a distinguished academic career at Oxford and years as adviser to Lord Shaftesbury who had been both Chancellor of the Exchequer and a political refugee from Charles II. During that time Locke had fled to Holland, where, under the alias of Dr van der Linden, he stayed until the accession of William to the English throne.
In the meantime he wrote several philosophical and political works that were to have profound influence on the whole of eighteenth-century Europe. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding was finished in Utrecht in 1684. After his return to England he published the controversial Letter Concerning Toleration and a year later Two Treatises on Government. A number of basic tenets of government still held today were set out in these publications. Locke thought it was essential to remove the right of the king to grant monopolies. He also wanted taxation to be the right of Parliament, to provide for liberty of religious worship, to free judges of royal pressure, to end arbitrary arrest, and to ensure regular sessions of Parliament.
Locke believed that men were fundamentally driven by self-interest and that to enable them to pursue it would lay the ‘foundation of all liberty’. He called the ‘natural state’ that of living together in pursuit of happiness