I hope this book has told John and Elizabeth's story in rich and compelling detail. One of my aims has simply been to reclaim their story from the dust and silence of the archives as something vivid, moving, and worth telling for its intrinsic value, for its quiet dramas and joys, for the way in which it may resonate with our own lives. Is it, though, anything more than the story of one couple's marriage and business? John and Elizabeth's lives, individually and together, were prisms through which passed and were refracted some of the most powerful forces coursing through English society of their day – a period as significant as any other in the nation's history.

Across the eight tumultuous decades through which they lived the economy, international ties, politics, social structures and relations, the material world, and more were all fundamentally remade. Perhaps the first amongst those was economic change, whether or not we label it as ‘revolutionary’. Certainly, in his economic life, John did little that was revolutionary. People had been trading in similar patterns and using similar methods for decades, perhaps centuries. Nor was he one of a small band of brave pioneers. By the later eighteenth-century England's road system teemed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar travellers and factors, many of them pushing the very same sorts of goods. But he saw and seized the openings that were being created to take and make new opportunities.