Sustained warfare imposed considerable economic and social strain upon Britain between 1688 and 1815, and the far-reaching nature of government responses to a wide range of war-related pressures and problems denned many of the general features of the newly emerging British state. Indeed, one historian has recently argued that eighteenth-century Britain exhibited all the major characteristics of a ‘fiscal-military’ state (Brewer, 1989). John Brewer's formulation suggests that, from the Nine Years' War, the implementation of a wide range of war-driven policies had a profound and lasting effect upon the business of government and the activities of the state. This was perhaps most evident in the realm of finance and administration where the introduction of wartime measures was accompanied by necessary improvements and modifications to central government. As a result, an administrative machinery was established which was reasonably efficient by contemporary standards, not least because it was serviced by a growing range of specialist offices and departments staffed by an expanding number of professional public servants. The effects of increased levels of state activity upon the nation at large were felt in a variety of different ways as new taxes were gathered, troops were recruited, and rudimentary social policies were implemented, so that gradually relationships between central government, the state, and the individual were recast. As a result, by 1815 the state intruded into the lives of the civilian population to a much greater degree than had been the case in 1688.