Commerce, finance and statecraft charts the emergence of new approaches to England's economic history in the historical writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book explores the work of the period's most influential historians ­– among them Francis Bacon, William Camden, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and David Hume – and shows how these writers, and their contemporaries, were engaged in a series of hotly contested, politically–charged debates concerning the management of England's commercial and financial interests.

This book will be essential reading for historians and literary critics working on Restoration and eighteenth-century historical writing, and historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers interested in historiographical theory.