The impact of war: new business networks and small-scale contractors in Britain, 1739–1770

This paper argues that the resources and skills of military contractors were a crucial component of the war-making capacity of the British state in the mid-eighteenth-century. Contractors used product knowledge, access to capital and credit, market intelligence, and personal and professional connections to effectively perform contracts, and by doing so contributed towards operational capability and combat readiness. Contracting not only reveals the diversity of the domestic economy but also the degree of connectivity between different sectors. Problems of scale, cost, and risk were overcome by harnessing and channelling broad expertise across different sectors. If modern states were highly innovative in fiscal-military terms, contractors were no less so in managing extensive supply operations