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Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of the Laws, 1750) was one of the first attempts to provide an interpretive structure to the history of human legislation. A provincial magistrate and Bordeaux aristocrat, Montesquieu also participated in his local provincial scientific academy, had interests in scientific agriculture, and authored the influential epistolary novel Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters, 1722). Montesquieu’s professional interest in the law was coupled by his personal interest in the explanatory power of the scientific method.

The union of the Parliaments between Scotland and England marked the end of Scottish and, what is often not recognized, English national independence and the formal beginning of the state known as Great Britain. More significant was the subsequent evolution of new political and cultural relationships between the two states. On the European stage, the union represented one of the first instances of incorporation of two states into one by means other than conquest, by the consent of both states’ representative and legislative bodies.

James Watt was the son of a Scottish architect and shipbuilder. He began his career in 1757 as a maker of scientific instruments on the staff of the University of Glasgow. While there he attended the lectures of Joseph Black, who was developing his theory of latent heat, and he also became well acquainted with John Robison, a brilliant young chemist. Robison directed his attention to the problems of existing steam engines, and when Watt was asked, during the winter of 1763-1764, to repair a model of the Newcomen engine, he was led to a critical study of its workings.

Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; commonly known as The Wealth of Nations) exerted greater influence in the systematization and development of economic theory than any other single work. In this volume, as in his lectures, Smith extracted economic theory from the broad field of moral philosophy and offered a comprehensive theory of economic value and of the operation of the market system. Although Smith was clearly dependent on others for many of the insights in The Wealth of Nations, the importance of his work has led many to call him the father of political economy.

When Louis XVI became king of France in 1774, he inherited a wealthy kingdom but an empty treasury and a government deeply in debt. Following a traditionally anti-British policy, France entered the American War of Independence on the side of the colonies. In order to continue this war the government had to borrow even more, thereby plunging the country into deeper financial trouble.