'The Projecting Age' - William Paterson and the Bank of England

Every schoolchild once knew that Britain rose to greatness with a roll of revolutions, variously English and Glorious, Puritan and Scientific, Financial and Industrial. Yet quite which did the most to propel Britain to pre-eminence has been as much a matter of contention as whether any of them took place at all. Revisionists and sceptics have cut Britain's revolutions down to size as rebellions or evolutions, but this pruning has left one revolution flourishing all the more vigorously. The Financial Revolution in England – first so called by P.G.M. Dickson in 1967 – was a late-comer onto the historiographical stage, but in recent times it has stolen the show. The undeniable fact that by the mid-eighteenth century England had grown from a bystander in European power- politics to the major player demands explanation: the strength of Britain's institutions of public finance and revenue-collection provides a large part of the answer.