A strong and proud nation

During the reign of Queen Anne, from 1702 to 1714, particularly its early years, acceptance of the new system was encouraged by a sharp rise in England's international prestige.

A series of victories by English-Dutch armies under the command of Marlborough (made a duke by his old patroness) at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet between 1704 and 1709, showed that the balance of power in Europe had changed. Pride and gratitude were reflected in the gifts bestowed on the duke, including the building of a huge and opulent mansion, Blenheim Palace.

Fire-ravaged London was being rebuilt under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, and a new and vast St Paul's was rising above the Thames, with an Anglican dome whose scale surpassed that of Michelangelo's St Peter's in Rome.

In natural philosophy Newton had made England supreme. Fire and water had been harnessed in a new way, and from 1698, Thomas Savery's atmospheric steam engines, improved by Thomas Newcomen in 1705 and 1711, marked the opening of a new industrial age. It was a self-confident society, more mature than that of the Restoration, and more united.

The Atlantic had ceased to be a vast unknown and had become a network of trading routes to a string of colonial ports from Nova Scotia to the West Indies. In addition to the exchange of manufactured goods for the products of the New World, a new and lucrative business was growing fast in the acquisition of black African tribespeople and their transportation and

East India House, London, 1726

sale as slaves on the sugar plantations. The East India Company, its charter going back to 1600, was re-established and enlarged in 1708; its fleet of heavily armed merchant ships was a navy in itself.

With so much money in the country, and the government's need to borrow vast amounts to pay for the war, new ways of running the nation's economy were found. The Bank of England was established with government backing in 1694 by William Paterson, a Scot.

A few independent institutions were established to support and exploit the new developments. From 1692, Edward Lloyd's coffee house in the city of London had been a centre for ship-broking and marine insurance, and he had started a commercial journal of record, Lloyd's News. From 1726 this was reestablished as Lloyd's Lists, and Lloyd's Register of Shipping was begun at the same time. For over two hundred years, until the organisation's downfall and reform in the 1990s, Lloyd's underwriters would make large annual profits from an ever-enlarging insurance business in which shipping became merely a part. The Bank of England had a monopoly of all business operations that used the joint-stock principle - the South Sea Bubble was not forgotten – but the Stock Exchange began business in 1773, and local banks, like that begun by the ironware-making Sampson Lloyd in Birmingham in 1765, helped to finance expansion, many of them going bust in the process.