The 18th century was a boom time for building roads. At the beginning of the century it took over three days to make the journey from London to Ex­eter or Manchester. By the end of the century the same journey took about 24 hours by coach. That became possible thanks to the network of new […]

Long accustomed to a considerable degree of self-government and freed, after 1763, from the French danger, American colonists resented any attempts to make them pay a share of the cost of imperial defence in the form of assorted taxes and duties. They also resented British attempts to treat colonial legislatures as secondary to the government […]

Most workers lived in desperate poverty, just bare­ly surviving on the wages they earned. In cities, they paid high prices for both food and housing.

With the industrialization, the British middle class grew larger and more influential as the number of financiers, factory owners and capitalist farmers in­creased. The upper class still possessed the land and titles, but the industrial middle class had the money. During the whole of the 18th century, the landed aris­tocracy, which largely controlled Parliament, firm­ly […]

During the first half of the 18th century, the pop­ulation of Great Britain increased by less than 15 per­cent. Between 1751 and 1801, the year of the first of­ficial census, the number rose by two-thirds to 10.7 million. During the next fifty years, the population of the country doubled. The reasons include a decline of […]

The enclosures of earlier times had been made to turn arable lands into sheep pastures. The enclosures of the 18th century were different. They transformed the communally cultivated open fields into large farms on which the new and more scientific mixed farming could be profitably carried out. In addition, much com­mon land on which the […]

In early 1700′s, British farmers developed ways to improve crop yields. The invention of the seed-drill by Jethro Tull in 1701 became one of the earliest steps in making agriculture more productive. TuU’s device placed seeds in the soil in rows at even intervals, thereby using far less seed and leaving fewer bare spots than […]

In 1700 there was only a scatter of industries. Woolen manufacture, the most important, was depen­dent on the rural population spinning and weaving in their own homes. The word spinster is still used for an unmarried woman. Cloth was greatly valued.

The wars of the 18th century were almost all fol­lowed by the acquisition of new colonies. The colonies already established were growing rapidly both in wealth and population. The American colonies had about 200,000 inhabitants, and between one and two million fifty years later.