opposition, and, on the other, the decades following the accession of the
house of Hanover, in 1714 , in which whig politicians constructed secure
administrations based on patronage and favour. But stability in politics did not
mean that there was an imperviousness to change in other areas of life. A great
deal of recent work has shown that while the idea of stability may be appropri-
ate with respect to the structure of government at Westminster in the first half of
the eighteenth century, the settlement of political conflict at the top did not re-
sult in a stultifying torpor settling over the entire political and social landscape.
A shift of focus from the structure of politics towards the question of what gov-
ernments did, the problems they confronted, and the relationship between the
central administration and other centres of power and authority in the country
has revealed an early eighteenth century in which there was a vital and ener-
getic engagement with problems of all kinds—the consequence in part of the
Revolution of 1689 , particularly the establishment of parliament as an essential
element in the government of the country. One result of recent work on social
and economic issues in this period and on the character and importance oflocal
centres of power has been to reveal the responsiveness of the state to domestic
problems and to show that many of the reform campaigns of the second half of
the century had been initiated in the decades after the Revolution of 1689.^2
Among other investigations that are changing our view of the early eight-
eenth century have been analyses of the way the resources of the state were en-
larged in support of the much more active foreign policy that followed William
III’s accession to the throne and the long and expensive European wars that
were its consequence.^3 And not unconnected with the creation of a system of
public credit underpinned by statute, attention has also turned to parliament as
a legislating body and the role that it came to play in the management of do-
mestic social problems.^4 A parliament that now came regularly into session
every year was more than ever open to interest groups of private citizens anxious
to obtain legislation that would protect or advance their concerns, as well as to
local authorities seeking authority to help them deal with problems they had
been left largely on their own to solve. The first half of the eighteenth century
has emerged in recent work as a period in which important changes were taking
place in the nature of governance and in the relationship of an increasingly
powerful central state and active local authorities.^5
Such developments in the wider political environment help to explain the timing
of changes in policing, prosecution, and punishment in the City in the decades after
1689 , particularly those that depended on legislative action and the commitmentConclusion 465(^2) For an excellent discussion of the themes of this paragraph and a full bibliography, see the intro-
duction to Davison, et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, especially pp. xi–xvi. And see also, Nicholas Rogers,
Whigs and Cities(Oxford, 1989 ).
(^3) P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688 – 1756
(Oxford, 1967 ); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688 – 1783 (London, 1988 ).
(^4) See the work ofJulian Hoppit and Joanna Innes cited above, ch. 7 , n. 2.
(^5) Davison, et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, xv–xvi, xxxv–xxxviii.
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