This chapter probes some of the conceptual problems involved in assessments of government growth, with special reference to the case of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It returns to questions which interested welfare-state historians of the 1960s and 1970s, and offers some thoughts on the limited and specific, but nonetheless important ways in which the role of government on the domestic front could be said to have grown both during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The business of government is generated by the choices both of officials and of private persons. Pre-modern states were sometimes able to achieve surprising things with relatively little official involvement and next-to-no public spending. Hilton equates liberalism broadly with the desire to reduce, or enlighten people as to the necessary limits of, government's role, activities and impact.

The field of political economy assumed its initial shape over the course of the eighteenth century in Britain, especially in the work of Adam Smith. The eighteenth-century British political economy, which was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and nascent Romanticism emphasized the natural processes that bring humans and their environments into reciprocal relations. The political economy came to have a dreadfully bad odour among the most prominent literary figures of the early nineteenth century. This chapter sketches the development of hostilities, from the outraged reaction through disagreements about the national economy during the Napoleonic War years, and into disputes about the nature of labour, value and happiness. As political economy coalesced in the post-war period around Ricardo's analyses, it increasingly became a kind of life science. Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation opens with the question of how a society's wealth is distributed among the three parties involved in its production: labour, capital, and rent.