This book examines the cultural, economic, and social forces that shaped the development of the British empire in the eighteenth century. The empire is placed in a broad historiographical context informed by important recent work on the 'fiscal-military state', and 'gentlemanly capitalism'. This allows the empire to be seen not as a series of discrete, unconnected geographical regions scattered across the world, but as a commercial, cultural, and social body with its roots very firmly planted in metropolitan society.