Adam Smith tells us in The Wealth of Nations that the capital of a society‘is the same with that of all the individuals who compose it’ and that any growth in a society's wealth is the sum of the accumulations made by such individuals. Such an emphasis on the accumulation of the individual may read strangely to us who have been brought up in a world of corporations and bureaucracy, but it makes perfectly good sense when seen against the background of the economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an economy which was composed overwhelmingly of individual sole traders and small family businesses. It follows that, if we want to understand why the wealth of England expanded in the early modern period, we will need to investigate the conditions which encouraged or discouraged accumulation by individual men and women. The most obvious place to make such an investigation is amongst the London business community. Here, in the largest city in western Europe, was concentrated the great majority of the ‘middle sort of people’, the merchants, tradesmen and shopkeepers whose eager search for profit provided the enterprise which kept much of the rest of the English economy going. Great landowners might be individually richer, but they would be unlikely to match the rate of accumulation of these London businessmen whose whole ethos was directed towards the augmentation of their fortunes.

This London business community has been rather unevenly studied.