Forms of ‘government growth’, 1780–1830

This chapter probes some of the conceptual problems involved in assessments of government growth, with special reference to the case of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It returns to questions which interested welfare-state historians of the 1960s and 1970s, and offers some thoughts on the limited and specific, but nonetheless important ways in which the role of government on the domestic front could be said to have grown both during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The business of government is generated by the choices both of officials and of private persons. Pre-modern states were sometimes able to achieve surprising things with relatively little official involvement and next-to-no public spending. Hilton equates liberalism broadly with the desire to reduce, or enlighten people as to the necessary limits of, government's role, activities and impact.