Isolation Of England In The 18th Century

The case of the Britain in the eighteenth century seems a strange one. How did a small island country, isolated from mainland Europe, become a world power? It did not have a high population, many resources, or a large area under control. Some other reason must be found to explain the dominance that Britain enjoys for centuries. It was not their raw power, as these things are measured, that ensured British supremacy, but their greater efficiency. Their isolation actually worked to their advantage by excusing them from most continental wars, and even then they were able to pay other people to fight for them. This relative intactness of the infrastructure of the British state over a great period of time lead to the creation of a more efficient …show more content…
The lack of a frequent need to raise funds quickly also helped Britain develop a more efficient administration. Their rivals on the Continent, France were often in need of money to be raised quickly to fund their various wars, and one way of doing that was the selling of offices. This type of venality never achieved the same scale and scope in Britain as it did in France because of the lack of need . The selling of offices was a short-term expedient that produced long-term negative consequences, like most of the means that the French state tried to raise extraordinary revenues. The French crown got a lump sum of money at the beginning of the officeholder’s tenure, but the state then had to pay the salary of the official, and the end result was that the crown paid out more than they had ever been paid . In contrast, the percentage of expenditure on civil servants in Britain was 1.9% out of all state expenditures . In addition, they were in the middle of modernizing the administration in the eighteenth century. They couldn’t nullify the privileges granted to officeholders previously, but they could make sure that the new officials were held to stricter standards against …show more content…
War often “boiled down to how much money Britain could throw at it .” Even though war taxed the fiscal apparatus of the British state as much as it did any other, England was better able to handle the stresses. In an age that saw more wars ended not because of any decisive victory on one side, but because all of the combatants were broke, the one who went broke the slowest might have been able to create a decisive victory when their enemy was exhausted. Britain was never much of a land power and a Eurocentric view instead of an Anglocentric view of the king and other political leaders always faced opposition. Tories were usually proponents of the “blue water” strategy, thinking that it would cut costs as well as appealing to the traditionally isolationist character of Britain . There were also fears that a large standing army would be the tool of absolutism and increase the authority of the king as well as decrease the rights that were considered essential to Englishmen