Steve Pincus's new book aims to recenter the revolution of 1688/89 back within the narratives of both British and global history. His argument is simply this: that the Glorious Revolution was the world's first modern revolution and that its scale, including popular support, violence, and long-term transformative affects, places it on a par with other revolutions, such as the French and Russian, whose claims to “modernity” are far less challenged. In sum, the English revolutionaries of 1688 created something decidedly new: the first modern state.

Pincus takes his cue from the eighteenth-century intellectuals who invested 1688 with all kinds of revolutionary significance. But there were always naysayers. While eighteenth-century radicals claimed that the revolution had “spawned a new universal age of liberty,” Edmund Burke was persuasively arguing that 1688 had merely restored England's ancient constitution and had not produced any new rights or liberties (23). Thomas Babington Macaulay's Whig History of England (1849) confirmed Burke's assessment of the revolution as moderate, defensive, and merely restorative. In more recent times, many historians have gone even further in draining the revolution of any revolutionary character, labeling it as “sensible” (John Morrill and William Speck), “particularly unmodern” (Robert Beddard), a mere “dynastic putsch” (Dale Hoak), and “conservative in its ruling assumptions” (Mark Goldie) (26). In particular, Pincus takes issue with the revisionist vison of early modern England as found in the work of Jonathan Scott and J. C. D. Clark. Pincus fails to mention in his opening section on the historiography of the revolution that many other historians, well before him, certainly thought that 1688 was revolutionary. These include Lawrence Stone, Lois Schwoerer, Richard Greaves, Richard Ashcraft, and, more recently, Tim Harris. Be that as it may, not since the eighteenth century has anyone invested the Glorious Revolution with the kind of grand and sweeping claims that we find in Pincus's account.

Pincus believes that England was a rapidly changing society with an expanding economy in the late seventeenth century. Overseas trade and manufacturing flourished; mining production increased; new manufactures such as glassware and sugar refining thrived; and cities expanded with paved streets, street lighting, and libraries. All add to a portrait of what Pincus calls a full-fledged capitalist society by 1685. This was something of which both James II and his circle, as well as a larger group of “revolutionaries,” were well aware. The latter, by the way, are never truly defined but seem to be simply Whigs and some moderate Tories. Each group developed its own modernizing program to meet the social and economic needs of this new reality. In fact, it was James II's attempt to modernize the state in the mirror image of Louis XIV's France that so alienated his subjects. In 1685, however, most English welcomed their new Catholic king and remained loyal when the Duke of Monmouth launched his ill-fated enterprise, which Pincus argues had little to do with political ideology and everything to do with old-fashioned English anti-Catholicism in its last gasps. With Monmouth out of the way and a standing army in the field, James embarked on a revolutionary program of Catholic modernity that scholars have hitherto missed because they have failed to see “James's aspirations in the sophisticated European intellectual terrain in which they developed” (121). King James, Pincus argues, was deeply influenced by the strategies of his French cousin, who successfully elevated his own power and prestige while modernizing the state and eliminating all dissent. James sought to emulate this model. He was extraordinarily successful in modernizing and professionalizing the military, expanding the secret service, curbing the press and limiting political discussion, and purging the church and state of anyone reluctant or unwilling to go along with the program.

In addition, James sought to re-Catholicize England. The kind of Gallican Catholic state that he was trying to establish did not permit religious pluralism, and, thus, contrary to recent historiography that portrays James as committed to religious toleration, Pincus sees his offers of liberty of conscience as merely a change in strategy as the king sought new allies. However, the Whigs and Dissenters, to whom James reached out, were not so easily fooled. As the king's modernizing program increasingly provoked widespread disaffection, Whigs and moderate Tories developed their own plans for the economic, political, and social needs of capitalist England. When the revolution came in 1688, thousands of men and women throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland supported the Dutch army. Violence erupted as they assaulted the symbols of James's regime. This was no bloodless coup.

England after the revolution was a divided society as the rage of party dominated politics in the 1690s. The revolutionaries of 1688 did succeed in reorienting English foreign policy, taking an aggressive stance toward “the aspiring world hegemon Louis XIV” (365) and stirring the economy away from one based on land and monopolies to one based on overseas trade and investment. They were also responsible for that greatest of English institutions, the Bank of England. The church also suffered from divisions from within, but in time the Williamite bishops, who expressed “Whig opinions” and took “Whig actions,” thoroughly dominated (423). In the end, postrevolutionary England was a thoroughly transformed society with a new political economy, a new foreign and imperial policy, and a new church.

This is a big book that offers many new ideas as well as many old ones repackaged. The tone is bold and aggressive. Quotes are fired at the reader from many quarters, often without due context. Sometimes the evidence is anecdotal at best. Major players such as William III himself are missing. The birth-suppositious baby, James Edward, is never mentioned, though the event was a major factor behind the invitation to William of Orange by the Seven Signators. One can easily imagine why the baby is missing, however, since most historians believe that the so-called revolutionaries were willing to wait James out, knowing that his Protestant daughter, Mary, was the next in line. Their patience certainly was not very revolutionary. The evidence that Pincus chooses to weigh, or chooses to dismiss, can be arbitrary at times. James II's own words to William Penn, a court insider, that all persons “ought to have the liberty of their conscience” (135), are deemed insignificant. But all the anti-Catholic, anti-James observations of the Puritan diarist, Roger Morrice, are treated as gems. The section on Monmouth's Rebellion is problematic. Pincus wants us to believe that the rebellion was an unpopular, fairly insignificant “conservative” uprising over religion. He dismisses the political demands of Monmouth's Declaration (which were similar to Prince William's Declaration of Reasons) by stating, on the thinnest evidence, that no one read it. The rebellion certainly was not popular, he argues, because so few nonconformist preachers and gentleman in the West Country (like Sir Walter Young) joined Monmouth's army. But how could they? James II's very effective (shall we say, “modern”?) dragnet of all suspicious persons in the west prior to Monmouth's landing made that impossible. Walter Young was arrested on May 19, as were many of Monmouth's potential supporters, shortly before the rebellion.

There is also much to praise here. Pincus's reevaluation of James II is a welcome attempt to comprehend this strange man, especially when the previous efforts have been so unsatisfying. But the most convincing sections of the book deal with England's thriving economy. The chapter, “Going Dutch: English Society in 1685,” is a tour de force. Pincus's assertion that English history can only be understood within a European context, while not exactly new, is ably achieved here. His book also reads well. It will certainly be interesting to see whether this book initiates new trends in English historiography. Is it the beginning of a neo-Whig resurgence, or will portraits of early modern England as an ancien régime prevail?