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HIST 251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts

Lecture 23 - England, Britain, and the World: Economic Development,
1660-1720
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Overview:

Professor Wrightson discusses the remarkable growth of the British economy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He examines the changed context of stable population and prices; regional agricultural specialization; urbanization; the expansion of overseas trade both with traditional European trading partners and with the Americas and the East; the growth of manufacturing industries which served both domestic and overseas markets, and the intensification of internal trade. He describes and explains the emergence of an increasingly closely articulated national market economy, closely linked to a nascent world economy in which Britain now played a core role.

Reading assignment:

Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire: Origins of Empire, chapter 18

Class lecture:

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