

CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



1 HE period with which my preceding volumes closed, a 

 little beyond the middle of Elizabeth's reign, had been 

 marked by a general exaltation of prices, due, as I am in- 

 creasingly convinced, to the form which the restoration of the 

 currency took in the early years of the queen's reign. I am 

 continuing my enquiry down to a little after the accession of 

 Anne, i.e. to the end of the agricultural year 1702-3. It is 

 during this period that the new discoveries of silver produced 

 their effect on England ; of course, as such accessions of the 

 currency only can, through trade and the foreign exchanges, 

 the process having been accelerated, first by the prolonged 

 war between the Spanish king and the United Netherlands, 

 and next by the development of English commerce. We 

 shall see in the course of the hundred and twenty years com- 

 prised in the present volume, that no period throws more light 

 on the general theory of prices than that which I am dealing 

 with at present. 



The political problems which affected English life at this 

 time were almost entirely domestic. The English Govern- 

 ment had abandoned the idea of continental conquest, even 

 though dominion was offered, nay even pressed on it, for 



ibeth would have been gladly acknowledged as soveu 

 of the Dutch confederation. The epoch of colonial and com- 

 mercial conquest had not begun, though England made some 

 of her earliest acquisitions in the last half of the seventeenth 



VOi r, 



