This phrase titles a 2023 book by Dan Evans that analyzes the “irresistible rise” of the petit-bourgeois in the post-Thatcher era. For 10 points each:
[10m] Give this phrase that a 1776 book uses for a country that would “found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers.” Napoleon supposedly used this three-word phrase to deride England.
ANSWER: a nation of shopkeepers
[10e] The first use of the phrase appears in this aforementioned 1776 book, which Margaret Thatcher supposedly always kept in her handbag. This anti-mercantilist magnum opus founded classical free market economic theory.
ANSWER: The Wealth of Nations (by Adam Smith)
[10h] The petit-bourgeois experience of the British Empire is also chronicled in a Bernard Porter book titled for “imperialists” in this mental state. In The Expansion of England, John Robert Seeley remarked on the “fit” of this mental state that created Britain’s empire.
ANSWER: absent-mindedness [or absence of mind; accept The Absent-Minded Imperialists]
<JB, European History>