Afterword: Whose Country House?

The long eighteenth century was a period of intense economic, social, and political change in Britain. The shift from a primarily agrarian to an imperial economy had an impact not only on the physical landscape but also on the nation’s demographics as the population moved variously between urban and rural environments. The new economic opportunities disrupted the upper end of the social order as wealth equated with power, no matter how recent its acquisition. This new, untitled, moneyed class enjoyed economic, social, and political clout. Consequently, politics, once the reserve of the landed elite, became a contested field of mutually