The wars of civilised nations make very slow changes in the system of empire … If he that shared the danger shared the profit; if he that bled in battle grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy. But at the conclusion of a ten years war how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expence of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors and whose palaces rise like exhalations. These are the men, who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich as their country is impoverished; they rejoice when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh from their desks at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

Dr Johnson thus poured withering scorn on war contractors in 1771 at the time of the mobilisation of the fleet against Spain in the dispute over the Falkland Islands. In the same year Tobias Smollett published Humphrey Clinker in which his indignation was similarly directed. Both were incensed by some well-publicised cases of corruption in the Seven Years War, principally in supplying the British army in Germany. Both commissaries and contractors were satirised in plays. Zachary Fungus is the central character of The Commissary, Samuel Foote's drama of 1756, in which Fungus's humble origins and eventual great wealth were duly mocked. The post-war frustration with the great increase in the National Debt led to popular resentment, ‘an inevitable consequence,’ comments Gordon Bannerman, the most recent historian of army contracting in the Seven Years War, ‘of the obvious tension existing between performing contracts in the “national” interest whilst making private profit, a tension most acute in wartime … Military success did not bring gratitude and goodwill towards those supplying the troops, quite the reverse’. Suspicion of contractors continued through the American war, particularly of their potential to win contracts through bribes and political influence, resulting in Clerke's Act of 1782 which excluded those with influence from the letting of contracts, and prevented those holding government contracts from sitting in Parliament.