For economic historians, the British Glorious Revolution constitutes an important turning point. In a widely noted and debated paper, North and Weingast argued in 1989 that the Glorious Revolution constituted a fundamental watershed in British history in which the British once and for all solved the Commitment Problem.Footnote ¹ Government would be allowed to tax citizens, but such constraints were imposed on the executive that after-tax income and property (including the securities issued by the crown) would be secure. This meant not only that British property rights could be as secure as any place on earth from arbitrary government, but also that the state could borrow at much lower rates because its financial affairs were managed by Parliament and thus reflected something of a national consensus. The historical irony is that precisely because the citizens of Britain represented in Parliament (a narrow group, to be sure) agreed to be taxed, Britain could afford to impose higher taxes than any other nation. The testable implication of this hypothesis (that government paid lower interest after 1688) has been contested, but the importance of the 1688 overthrow of the Stuarts and the Bill of Rights of 1689 looms large in the history of economic institutions.Footnote ²

Steve Pincus has written a massive book about the Glorious Revolution, which claims to present a completely novel reinterpretation of the events of that year and the following years. In his view, England in the second half of the seventeenth century was a rapidly modernizing economy and was faced between two competing views what a suitable regime ought to be. One of them was following the French model. James II was, in Pincus's view, a thoroughly modernizing and effective king who tried to recreate the British polity in the image of Louis XIV, that is, reorganize the regime along the lines of Gallicanist absolutism. This triggered a sharp negative reaction along virtually the entire political spectrum; the net result was a modern revolution of another sort, one that resulted in a state with a weakened monarchy and stronger representative institutions along the Dutch model. All “modern” revolutions, in Pincus's opinion, followed earlier modernizing attempts by the Old Regime, which unleashed an even more extreme (or at least quite different) modern regime. He sees the same in the French and Russian Revolutions, and even in the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the British Glorious Revolution in this view was much like these modern revolutions.

There is a lot to like in this deeply learned yet accessible and well-written book. Pincus has dug deeply in many libraries and archives, and his account is rich in detail and a vast number of apt quotes. His approach to history is analytical and sensible: he wants to know why things happened, yet he insists that whatever happened did not have to happen. The Glorious Revolution was the outcome of a titanic struggle between two major modernizing camps, and the outcome was far from predetermined. James's policies, he insists, were “not insane, stupid, or perverse” (p. 162); instead he followed a program of state modernization patterned after the centralizing policies pursued by Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV. These policies were perfectly rational, thinks Pincus, except for the fact that they utterly failed. James's economic policies represented an extreme version of Tory mercantilism. Not only were they committed to a zero-sum vision of economic activity, they seemed to be rooted in a belief that only land (and not labor) created wealth. He favored royal monopolies such as the East India and the Royal African Companies. He believed strongly that it was his royal prerogative to create exclusive trading monopolies, of course in exchange for handsome payments of these companies for those rights, funds that he used to modernize Britain's army and navy, to be deployed in support of his pro-French policies.

Pincus emphasizes that the Glorious Revolution was intended as and turned out to be a “revolution in political economy” and in that regard he is clearly in the North-Weingast camp. James II represented a zero-sum ideology; the Whigs, who became dominant in the 1690s, believed more explicitly in the potential for growth and “believed that England's future lay in being a manufacturing rather that an agrarian society” and that wealth was “possibly infinite.” A logical extension of his view is that the Glorious Revolution was an essential step in the direction of Britain's economic ascendancy. If 1688 represented the triumph of those who wanted an industrial and urban culture based on the possibilities of unlimited economic growth (p. 485), one might legitimately ask, why did the Industrial Revolution not occur in 1700?

Pincus's approach to his material is refreshing in two respects. The first is that he does not subscribe to the fashionable “continuity approach,” which denies the importance of watershed events and looks for precedents and continuity everywhere. The other is his firm belief in contingency: there was nothing inexorable about the Glorious Revolution or its outcome. Pincus implies that if James had played his hand a bit differently, or if his disloyal son-in-law had been a different kind of leader, eighteenth-century Britain might well have become a very different kind of polity, more like France and less like the United Provinces.

Pincus leaves no doubt where he stands on most issues; he attacks all previous interpretations of the Glorious Revolution. It was not entirely bloodless (especially taken into account subsequent events in Scotland and Ireland), and in that regard it, too, resembled the French Revolution that was to occur a century later. He takes great pains to persuade the reader that these events were two of a kind. The Whig interpretation of a peaceful nonviolent event in which the British elite elegantly rid itself of an incompetent monarch is dismissed with little less contempt than the “revisionist” interpretation, which saw James as a tolerant and moderate ruler, overthrown mostly by the Church of England reactionary Tories who feared for their powerful position in society. Historians writing on the topic before Pincus are at times praised for their keen insights, but in the end everyone before him failed to see the events of 1688 as a true “modern revolution,” and just must stand corrected. Few doubts seem to enter Pincus's mind and fewer qualifications of the “I might be wrong” kind find their way into his text.

Economic historians will find his chapter 3, describing “British Society,” of particular interest. Pincus has no doubt in describing this economy as “modern” for the time. But many specialists will find the description overdrawn and often stumbling over its own enthusiasm. It is true, of course, that the Britain of 1680 cannot really be describe as a “traditional” economy. It was commercialized, monetized, and in an oddly lopsided way, urbanized (with London a huge metropolis, but the other towns far smaller), and Pincus is quite right to point out that this was a growing and dynamic economy with a living standard that was much higher than two centuries earlier at the rise of the Tudors. But he often confuses trend with level. Consider a statement such as “England had become a nation of manufactures between the 1580s and 1680s” (p. 59) or his declaration that Britain was an “urban society” with “as many as 40 percent [living] in urban areas” (p. 60) will raise eyebrows among those who worry about these matters full time.Footnote ³ Manchester's “meteoric rise” (p. 62) in the seventeenth century turns out to be from a population of under 5,000 to one between eight and nine thousand in 1700 (in 1800 it was 75,000 and in 1851, 300,000). Even more worrisome is Pincus's celebration of Britain's transport system at the time: “improved roads … created a boom in ground transport … the general quality of English roads in the later seventeenth century was remarkably high” (p. 69). To hear Pincus tell it, neither the Industrial Revolution nor the revolutions in roadbuilding and turnpiking of the second half of the eighteenth century were more than marginal additions to the peaks achieved by 1688.Footnote ⁴ Of course, one can always collect selected scattered quotes supporting one position or another, but overstating the “modernity” of the British economy at this time threatens to weaken the overall authoritativeness of this volume. What is the professional economic historian to make of Pincus celebration of British economic growth in the later seventeenth century as “phenomenal” (an adjective downgraded two lines later as “respectable”)? There are no good annual indicators of growth for this specific period; it seems plausible that some growth took place, but one cannot be sure that growth between 1670 and 1700 was much above the estimate produced by Crafts of about 0.3 percent per annum for 1700–1760, and these largely depended on slow population growth.Footnote ⁵

Economic explanations for these events also are less than wholly persuasive. Pincus has no doubt that “Atlantic trade provides the only plausible explanation for England's divergence from the European pattern” (p. 87), but this seems at least to merit further elaboration: France, Spain, and the United Provinces must somehow have been denied this exceptionalism. The high levels of productivity in British agriculture and its domestically marketed manufacturers and coal, all essential components of its prosperity, surely were at best indirectly affected by the Atlantic trade. This is not to deny that the Atlantic trade could have had favorable effects, only to wonder why they worked so disproportionately in Britain and not elsewhere and whether they really had an impact as large as Pincus asserts.Footnote ⁶

All the same, the basic argument made by Pincus about the revolution establishing an economic and political regime that one would call “modern” does make sense: it resulted in a weakened monarchy, a much stronger Parliament, and created institutions that one might call, with some license, “modern.” Even here, however, Pincus's enthusiasm must be tempered: the British system that emerged from 1688/89 was not less rent-seeking and mercantilist than the one it had overthrown, it was just that a different group of people were feeding at the trough. The founding of the Bank of England in 1694, distinctly a “Whig”institution which “distributed economic resources to productive sectors of the economy” (p. 472) was a manifestation of this belief. In actuality, the bank did little of that; it mostly helped William and his successors to finance the wars against France and like any other rent-seeking organization it manipulated politicians to keep competitors down.Footnote ⁷ The statement that if the Bank of England had been replaced by a competing Land Bank, England would have followed a “very different economic path” (p. 399) seems thus rather odd.

More than anything, perhaps, Pincus should be challenged on his view of James II as a modernizing monarch, adhering to a modern ideology. The brand of monarchy advocated by Louis XIV and James II was an intolerant and self-aggrandizing form of absolutism, practicing an extreme form of mercantilism, and wasting the nation's resources in a destructive quest to expropriate and suppress the prosperity of others. An English regime along Gallicanist lines would have been intolerant and hostile to the empirical and inductive Baconian Program that had started in Britain in the second half of the seventeenth century and would eventually flourish into what I have called an Industrial Enlightenment. If building a large and expensive military and engaging in fruitless wars that ended up bankrupting his nation while expelling hundreds of thousands productive citizens counts for modernism, many bigoted tyrants besides Louis XIV may apply. It is not surprising therefore, as Pincus describes in rich detail, that with these policies James managed to alienate practically his entire nation: Whigs, Tories, dissenters, even Catholics. In an otherwise divided, polarized, and quarrelsome nation, his main act of “modern unification” was to unite practically his entire nation against him. His overthrow may not have been inevitable, but this was a good beginning. Perhaps James was not quite the blundering idiot that some historians have made him out to be, but even Pincus's account makes him look more heavy-handed, arrogant, and insensitive than modern. Whether modernizing or not, James foolishly imposed his centralizing reforms on the wrong country.

In the long run, we can all agree that the Glorious Revolution helped create a more modern England. It did so primarily by establishing a ruling coalition of the urban and rural rich and by moving power from the monarchy to Parliament. It may well be that William's expedition could have failed, despite the universal opposition to James.Footnote ⁸ But the extreme brand of Gallican absolutism that James wanted to impose on his subjects would have blown up in his face sooner or later. Modernization may be all in the eyes of the beholder. Yet “modernization” of the type that led to the economic success and leadership that Britain eventually came to enjoy required far more than a bundle of Dutch institutional imports and Whig beliefs: it needed to reexamine the entire complex of mercantilist ideology and to challenge rent-seeking and redistribution as a national policy.

One small gripe at the publisher (full disclosure: this reviewer's latest book was published by Yale University Press): this is a beautifully produced tome, with lavish illustrations. It seems odd, therefore, that the publisher has not seen fit to provide a full bibliography, especially in view of the dreadful “short-title second citation” system applied in the notes. These copious and detailed notes are rather user-hostile themselves, as each bundles a whole set of references referring to an entire paragraph's content. The mapping from a statement in the text to the exact source in the note is left as an exercise to the reader. Finally, the book is exceedingly repetitive, and a good copy editor should have been able to cut some of the most obvious occurrences.

All in all, this is a provocative, deeply researched scholarly volume. It promises to become the beginning—not the end—of a renewed debate about the significance of the Glorious Revolution in British history, and thus of particular interest to economic historians who have come to realize that the roots to the Industrial Revolution and modern economic growth have to be sought in the ideologies and institutions that emerged in Western Europe in the long eighteenth century.