The "Nabob of the North": Sir Lawrence Dundas as government contractor

This article examines the career of the military contractor and businessman Sir Lawrence Dundas (1710–81). In a controversial career, Dundas achieved notoriety for the fortune that he acquired from government contracts. In historiographical terms, the identification of contracts with patronage and jobbery, by contemporary and modern observers, has obscured the importance of contractors to the British army. In detailing Dundas's activities, largely from official source material, this article argues that the organizational capacity, logistical expertise and management skills of Dundas, and many other contractors, were a vital co-ordinating element within, and component of, the power of the ‘fiscal-military state’.