Economic statecraft and economic progress: William Guthrie’s General History

The middle years of the eighteenth century saw a shift in the historiography of commerce as Enlightenment-era historians became increasingly preoccupied with tracing processes of long-term economic change. As a result, individual incidents in England’s economic past came to be conceived not just as evidence of monarchical prudence or virtue, but rather as sections in a narrative of national commercial development. Chapter eight addresses the contribution to this approach made by William Guthrie in his General History of England (1744–51). The first part of the discussion explores the Tacitean and Harringtonian approaches to history that Guthrie employed when working as a political journalist in the 1740s. Part two looks at how these ideas shaped his historical writing.