What was Great Britian like in the late 1700s?

Answer 1

This is a wide question. It had a predominately agrarian economy although the first moves were being made in the Industrial Revolution. For example, the steam engine had been in use since the first half of the century in mines etc., and had been gradually improved. However, possibly the greatest moves in general betterment of life had been in agriculture with improvements in the breeding of food animals so as to give better yields, through people such as 'Turnip' Townsend. The King, George III, was also greatly interested in agrarian improvement, although by late in the century he was suffering from illness which at the time time was thought to be madness, but which has now been identified as Porphyry. Society was still highly stratified with only the landed gentry and aristocracy having any real say in how the country was governed and elections and such like were fairly corrupt. However, the country did have a parliamentary democracy of a sort - the monarchs having been brought under control by this time. The country was at war with France - as it had been for much of the century. By the late 1700s Napoleon was the bogeyman, however, rather than the absolutist monarchs of the early 1700s. The American colonies had been lost in 1776 which meant that Britain had turned its attention to the East and was beginning to open up the exploitation of the Indian sub-continent and the Antipodes following the discovery of Australia by Captain Cook in 1770 which led to the landing of the 'first fleet' in 1788.

Answer 2

At war

Answer 3

it was in the trend towards switching from farming to industrialization...also competing against france of economic domination.