To greet our reaching 100 episodes, we’re going to pause and recap how far we’ve come.

When we started, England, was just a small country on the edge of Europe, trying to punch above its weight, giving far more powerful nations – notably Spain – a bad time. But then it grew, sorting some of its constitutional problems as it went, often painfully, as in the Civil Wars and the execution of the King. In the course of the eighteenth century, it fought war after war against France, and also kept going with its constitutional progress, reducing the power of the monarch in relation to parliament. Military advances and constitutional change were, however, also accompanied by another and even more powerful development: the emergence of an environment encouraging business, backed by a major, reliable and effective financial system, including a well-run stock market, which produced the conditions for technical and scientific innovation to launch the industrial revolution.

By the early nineteenth century, England, which had merged first with Scotland and then with Ireland to become the leading nation of the United Kingdom, was an economic powerhouse. With victory in the final war against France, it had become the global superpower of its time.

A long way from the upstart snapping at the heels of grownups at the top table we saw back in episode 1…

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License