A View of the Internal Policy of Great Britain. In Two Parts. Part I. Of the Alterations in the Constitution, from the Reign of Henry the Seventh to the End of George the Second; Representing the Reciprocal Effects, Which These and Commerce Have...
- Robert Wallace (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is a wide-ranging political and historical treatise by the Scottish minister and philosopher Robert Wallace, a prominent figure in Edinburgh’s intellectual circles alongside contemporaries such as Henry Home and Hugh Blair.
The work is divided into two parts: Part I traces the constitutional transformations of England from the reign of Henry VII through the end of George II, examining how shifts in governmental structure and the growth of commerce reciprocally shaped one another over roughly two and a half centuries. Part II broadens the scope to consider the general principles underlying the different stages of political society, drawing on both history and natural philosophy, before applying those lessons to argue for the considerable potential for improvement in Great Britain.
Along the way, Wallace addresses topics including the discovery of America and its economic consequences for Britain, the role of Parliament under Cromwell, the banking model of Holland, urbanisation, the Darien scheme, and the national debt. The work is also notable for Wallace’s sympathetic treatment of the American colonial position — a stance that would place him within the tradition of British writers who questioned imperial overreach in the years leading up to the Revolution.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.