Political historians working on the early Tudor period have traditionally concentrated on institutions – monarchy, council, parliament, courts, and administrative bodies – that excluded women. The very definition of politics underlying the dominant historiography has thus made it seem both natural and inevitable to write history as if the world of high politics, the world that really counted, were exclusively male.

When his colleagues at the beginning of the 1621 session were puzzling over whether supply should precede redress of grievances or vice versa, Sir George More rose to give them the benefit of his considerable experience. The question could best be resolved, he suggested, if redress and supply were thought of ‘as twins, asJacob and Esau’ which ‘should go hand in hand, for though grievances go first, yet the blessing may be upon subsidies’. The biblical analogy was quite clear. Although grievances like Esau had precedence as the elder of the twins, the two should in fact ‘go hand in hand’ through the House; at the closing, the order would be reversed and the subsidy would first receive the blessing just as the younger of Isaac's twins eventually did.

The history of economic ideas in Britain is dominated by a great tradition which in its early stages focuses on Adam Smith. For the century before the publication of the Wealth of nations in 1776, economic ideas are most often studied in relation to the ‘arrival’ of Smith and commented on with regard to the degree to which they may be considered precursors of his ideas. Though this imposes a sense of order and establishes some principles with which to select from the vast range of economic writings, the dangers of certain whiggishness in this approach are readily apparent. Writers can appear to be winners or losers depending on the extent to which their ideas were denied, adapted or adopted by Smith and the other classical economists.1 Such problems have been acknowledged by many historians, not least by those who have fruitfully examined the political and philosophical bases of the emergence of political economy, particularly with regard to the Scottish enlightenment. Despite this, the force of the great tradition remains very strong. The authors and ideas that are examined are the ‘major’ ones, that is to say contributions that were, or attempted to be, either comprehensive or clearly attached to what, with hindsight, were the main strands of development. The emphasis has been upon theories or systematic explanations of the economic order. Not surprisingly the unsystematic and more casually formulated reflections of non-economists and ‘amateurs’, such as Defoe, are often swept under the carpet, even if their ideas on economic matters were more widely disseminated (and perhaps more influential) at the time. Consequently, our perception of economic ideas between the Restoration and the Wealth of nations continues to be highly and perhaps atypically selective.

Scottish philosophical history has received its characterization from the programme of social enquiry typical of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed recently, the historical thinking of two of its philosophers, Hume and Smith, has been seen as the superstructure of their philosophies of mind.

Few works of economic thought have such a close association with the intellectual and economic history of their period as Adam Smith's An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Three recent careful assessments of the ‘influence’ of Smith's work, however, have found little direct evidence for its positive significance for economic policy in the 1780s and 1790s. Parliamentary debate seldom referred to the Wealth of nations, and then usually negatively unless by Smith's friends, or ‘radicals and Foxite whigs’. John Locke, David Hume, Charles Davenant, Sir Josiah Child, William Petty, Josiah Tucker and Arthur Young were all cited more frequently. A wide range of parliamentary leaders read Smith carefully, and several ministers knew him well and sought his advice, but with the exception of Shelburne they appear to have applied Smith's thought eclectically. Salim Rashid has noted that in 1776 there were already influential economic authorities, notably Arthur Young and Josiah Tucker, who advocated freer markets. Conversely, for over a decade after the publication of the Wealth of nations, articles on economic matters in the major periodical reviews made scanty reference to Smith's work, while the protectionist views of Sir James Steuart, whom Smith had ignored, were often authoritative. Smith's views became respectable among the political after negotiation of the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, but it was this liberal economic policy which gave the wealth of nations currency, not the reverse.

This investigation and my ability to describe alien office structure is due more to chance than prior intention as it arose out of a difficult examination of the life of Thomas Pitt, second Lord Camelford (1775–1804). Lacking direct sources about him, I turned to an examination of his friends and associates and gradually a pattern emerged: an international network of secret agents. But who directed them, and from where? For a time the answer eluded me, and I was not helped by the statement in the guide to the public record office, that no alien office correspondence remains. In fact there is a considerable quantity, but with the exception of H.O. 5, which is entirely alien office, it is scattered in other H.O. classes as well as various F.O., W.O., and A.D.M. classes. But the late Alfred Cobban provided a lead and he had clearly recognized 1792 as a turning point in secret service. Others who have written before on this subject limited themselves to an examination of one of William Wickham's principal agents, Dandré, no doubt chiefly because at the time they wrote, much material that I have been able to consult was not then available to the public; i.e. a large part of the Wickham collection; the Talbot papers and the residue of Lord Grenville's papers.

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.