with the rest of the metropolis, it was also a centre of increasingly conspicuous
consumption, a massive consumer of food and stimulant of a national market in
foodstuffs and other products.^18 But it was on overseas trade, and particularly
the exploitation of the new colonies in the West Indies and North America, and
the range of financial activities that it supported, that the wealth and influence
of the City ofLondon was increasingly to be built. By 1700 it was entering a new
era at the centre of the British financial world. This was a result ofboth the rapid
growth of trade in the second half of the seventeenth century and of the polit-
ical and military consequences of the Revolution of 1689 , which had pitched
England into what was to be a series oflong and expensive wars in Europe. The
demands of warfare in the quarter century after 1689 generated a revolution in
public finance by establishing a National Debt, creating through parliament a
system of taxes to service that debt, and spawning a network of private interests
to make the system work. That network was centred on the wealthy financiers
of the City of London, particularly on the Bank of England, an institution cre-
ated in 1694 to act as the agent for the funnelling of money to the central
government.^19
The City’s expansion as a mercantile and financial centre served over time to
diminish it as a desirable residential area. Those who could afford to do so aban-
doned its bustle and cramped conditions for the fashionable elegance of the
West End, or, if not that, for a villa in the suburbs or the villages beyond. The
City did not cease to be a significant residential area until the second half of the
nineteenth century, but the tendency for those who made their money there to
live elsewhere was well underway by the early eighteenth and clearly con-
tributed to the stabilizing of the population. Even more, as we shall see, it had a
direct effect on the way the area under the jurisdiction of the Corporation was
governed.
By the late seventeenth century and increasingly in the eighteenth the City
contained a plutocracy of vast wealth. Its social, economic, and political char-
acter was also shaped by an extensive and broadening middle class of merchants
and shopkeepers, and larger numbers of more modestly prosperous masters
and journeymen in skilled trades, in manufacturing, and in retail trades. A con-
siderable proportion of the adult male householders (some 80 per cent^20 ) were
freemen of the City—not all prosperous by any means, but men none the less
with an established place in their local communities who could play some role
in the governance of their precincts and wards.^21 Families of middling fortune
Introduction: The Crime Problem 9(^18) Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance’, 55 – 63 ; and for an earlier period, see F. J.
Fisher, ‘The Development of the London Food Market, 1540 – 1640 ’ and ‘The Development of London
as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in his London and
the English Economy, 61 – 79 , 105 – 18.
(^19) P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England( 1967 ); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War,
Money and the English State, 1688 – 1788 ( 1988 ).
(^20) De Krey, A Fractured Society, 40 – 1 and n. 60.
(^21) De Krey, A Fractured Society, 39 – 44 , 171 – 6 , 186 – 90 ; Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 145 – 50.