As a commentator on the politics and social relations of his age it would have been hard for Jonathan Swift to ignore economic circumstances. The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a commercial revolution in the British Isles, transforming patterns of trade - both foreign and domestic, raising living standards, and permeating human relationships with commercial values. On its heels came the financial revolution associated with the European wars of the 1690s, with the emergence of an embryonic stock market, and the growth of new forms of credit both public and private, developments which would culminate a quarter of a century later with the world's first stock market boom and crash in the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Company debacle of 1720. The financial innovations to which the Wars of Grand Alliance gave birth led to the establishment of new forms of wealth and a class of financial interests, known as the “moneyed men,” who challenged the hitherto established predominance of the landed gentry and aristocracy. These developments transformed the world of politics, creating opportunities - sometimes rather questionable ones - for enrichment for wider circles than the financiers themselves and bringing into existence forms of wealth that were not merely intangible but to many people barely comprehensible. Amongst those drawn into such activities were leading ministers and military commanders. In the later stages of theWar of Spanish Succession even the Duke of Marlborough, England's greatest general since the Hundred Years War, came to be seen as putting self-enrichment through war before the interests of his country, corruption for which he was memorably satirized by Swift, along with his inordinate political ambition, in The Conduct of the Allies in 1711.