By the mid-late eighteenth century, mercantilist thinking continued to hold sway within Britain’s political, commercial, and economic establishment. But an embryonic science of political economy was also beginning to take shape. Prominent thinkers were beginning to conceive of the economy as centered on an autonomous market composed of rational utility-maximizers, and to denounce the tyranny and corruption they associated with monopolies. Simultaneously, the continued strengthening of government through major conflicts such as the Seven Years’ War solidified a more unitary and centralized conception of state sovereignty.
The establishment of a permanent Secretary of State for War and Colonies in 1794, responsible for planning and coordinating expeditionary operations and defending Britain’s overseas colonies, marked the capstone of this revolution in state capacity.
The spread of revolutionary new communication and transportation and communication technologies like the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph together propelled a profound compression of time-space.167 This revolutionary increase in interaction capacity further heightened European states’ aspirations to assert direct command and control of trans-continental empires. It held out the promise of enabling metropolitan states to effectively disintermediate relations between themselves and their colonial appendages, cutting out hybrid middlemen like company-states.