No government can do everything. Even in states with a very large public sector, private enterprise retains a significant role, and the state must at some point depend upon private concerns either to provide essential services or to deliver the raw materials that state concerns require. This is as true of the British state in the eighteenth century as any other, perhaps especially so since the boundaries of the state were very tightly drawn and it depended heavily upon private contractors to deliver many services both military and civilian.

We advance the idea of the ‘Contractor State’ to describe these many and complex interactions between government and contractors, and the diverse ways in which private interests were harnessed and directed to serve public ends. This is intended not to dispute but rather to complement, the concept of the ‘fiscal-military state.’ It does, however, serve to highlight the imbalance between the large amount of excellent work that has been conducted on how eighteenth-century governments raised money, and the comparatively little that has been done on how that money was translated into effective military and naval forces. In turn, this imbalance partly reflects the fact that for much of the eighteenth century the state's ability to raise money efficiently and effectively contrasted with the often piecemeal means of supporting the army, and to a lesser extent the navy, whose need for a permanent infrastructure of dockyards and bases at strategic locations gave its administration a permanence and stability that the army largely lacked. Even so, the early history of the Victualling Board demonstrates the sometimes disorganised nature of naval administration in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and its subsequent improvement during the course of that century was mirrored elsewhere in the naval administration, and indeed all across government.

Among the most important aspects of this improvement was the development of increasingly formalised, transparent and effective processes for engaging, dealing with and then paying private contractors. Contract administration, though a modern phrase, was a vital part of the activities of many government departments. It had to be, for without effective administration of contracts corruption, peculation, poor-quality and inadequate supplies and general inefficiency invariably followed.