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THIS new millennium year has led historians to address moments in the past which represent epochs in human affairs. The Enlightenment comprised such a turning-point, since it secularised the world-view and trained eyes and attention towards the future. British thinkers played an influential part in this intellectual revolution – though, as I have maintained in a recent book,Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World(2000), that is a contribution widely ignored or played down, by contrast to that of France. In that book I tried to explain that neglect, and I shall not bore you by repeating myself now. Rather my aim this evening is to set before you some key innovations in theories and thinking which emerged from eighteenth-century Britain, in particular ones specially pertinent to Sir Thomas Gresham and his College, and to the Royal Historical Society. I shall be focusing, in other words, on enlightened ideas about wealth and economics, science and history.