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The British Enlightenment

In the 17th century Britain went through troubling times, enduring not only political and religious division in the English Civil War, King Charles I's execution, and the Cromwellian dictatorship, but also the Great Plague of London and Great Fire of London. The restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, who had Roman Catholic sympathies, led to turmoil and strife, and his Catholic-leaning successor King James II was swiftly ousted. Invited in his place were Protestant William of Orange and Mary, who assented to the Bill of Rights 1689, ensuring that the Parliament was dominant in what became known as the Glorious Revolution.

The upheaval was accompanied by a number of major scientific advances, including Robert Boyle 's discovery of the gas pressure constant (1660) and Sir Isaac Newton 's publication of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which described Newton's laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation.

All these factors spurred the advancement of economic thought. For instance, Richard Cantillon (1680–1734) consciously imitated Newton's forces of inertia and gravity in the natural world with human reason and market competition in the economic world. In his Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General, he argued rational self-interest in a system of freely-adjusting markets would lead to order and mutually-compatible prices. Unlike the mercantilist thinkers however, wealth was found not in trade but in human labor. The first person to tie these ideas into a political framework was John Locke.