england has always figured prominently in efforts to explain the Scientific Revolution. An intellectual backwater in the sixteenth century, it more than made up for this in the seventeenth century, so that by 1660 it became, arguably, ‘the major centre for organized scientific activity in Europe’. Accordingly, it has continually drawn the attention of, and provided fertile ground for, historians seeking to explain the changing approach to the natural world and the burgeoning of natural philosophy which constitute the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, the two earliest attempts to reveal the driving forces behind the new science – Boris Hessen's Marxist account of ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's “Principia”’, and Robert Merton's Weberian thesis, ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England’ – both focused on the English scene.

In Hessen's case, however, concentration upon England was merely a matter of historiographical expediency. Although the problems of mechanics and hydrostatics which Newton dealt with in his Principia mathematica could be made to support Hessen's claims, and although ‘the English revolution gave a mighty stimulus to the development of productive forces’, Hessen's thesis was by no means confined to late seventeenth-century England. ‘The brilliant successes of natural science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Hessen wrote, ‘were conditioned by the disintegration of the feudal economy, the development of merchant capital, of international maritime relationships and of heavy (mining) industry.’