Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"By 1714 Britain boasted a sophisticated system of public credit and an efficient tax-gathering system. Although the origins of what has rightly been called a ‘financial revolution’ stretched back deep into the seventeenth century, it was the arrival of William III in 1688 that initiated the decisive phase. He brought with him Dutch ideas and a Dutch war. The cost of the first two phases of this ‘Second Hundred Years War’ – the Nine Years War of 1688–97 and the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701–13 – was on a scale never before experienced in English history. . . . The danger of the Spanish and French thrones being united under one sovereign had been averted; the Protestant succession in Britain had been given international recognition; the Pretender had been banished from France; the former ‘Spanish Netherlands’ had been turned into an Austrian-ruled buffer against French expansion and further protected by Dutch-garrisoned fortresses; the conquest of Minorca and Gibraltar had secured naval domination of the western Mediterranean; recognition of British control of the Hudson Bay territory and the return of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland encouraged the belief that all North America could soon be wrested from the French; in the Caribbean the acquisition of the island of St Kitts pointed the way to further expansion; the transfer from France of the right to export African slaves to Spanish colonies (the Asiento de negros) symbolized the defeat of the threat that Spain would become a French satellite. Following naval victories at Vigo Bay in northern Spain in October 1702 and off Malaga in August 1704, Britannia ruled the waves." [Blanning: George I, Kindle, p. 69, 72-3]