… the right training and contracts. The rise of merchants is also associated with the widening of the middling section of society. Somewhere between the gentry and aristocracy and the laboring sorts were the ‘middling sorts’, those who worked … draper who acted like part of the landed gentry. 3 . Peter Earle, The Making of the English middle class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 15. I was not averse … of this social group. 5 Merchants were active participants in what historians have called ‘polite and commercial society’. 6 In The Present State of Great Britain (1716), it was declared that: ‘next to the purity of religion we are …