The 1780s was a critical decade for British economic policy. It was a time of forced reform driven by fiscal urgency and fear in the wake of losing the mainland American colonies. An event, after all, partly aided by the excruciating weight of the increasingly unsustainable national debt that had accumulated greatly since the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). William Pitt the younger desperately needed more revenues and had no choice but to raise existing taxes. This meant much greater pressure on the excise to extract levies from increasingly aggrieved manufacturers. This, in turn, led to greater protests and attempts by taxed industry to challenge excise gauging methods. In particular, endeavours by manufactures to evade tax via the use of illicit ingredients and, indeed, challenge the Excise's process of measurement led to ever more intricate ways of detecting the composition of taxed items. By the 1810s this included the sophisticated use of illicit materials in underground complexes, and the hiring of men of science to contest excise techniques. This fuelled ever greater technical attempts to analyse food and drink culminating in the establishment of the Laboratory of the Government Chemist in 1842 to police excised manufactures. In this way raising revenue by taxing the manufacture and movement of goods, was a powerful driver of developments in instrumentation and production of certain goods in nineteenth century industrial Britain.