This is by far the best (and in many ways the first) comprehensive overview of what, with a little stretch, could be called “economic policy” in early modern Britain between the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic Wars as studied through the lens of the parliamentary process. By meticulously documenting the history and pattern of parliamentary legislation in England (and, after 1707, Scotland), Julian Hoppit sketches a convincing and comprehensive story of how political interference with the economic process influenced economic life in early modern times in manifold ways.
As a self-confessed agnostic with regard to some of the historian's cherished holy cows, including mercantilism (which Hoppit acknowledges as a force, but none to be reckoned with), “the economy” (which obviously did not exist in its modern shape or concept), or the Great Divergence debate (which Hoppit acknowledges but considers too vast a field to throw into the game), Hoppit presents analysis as careful as it is comprehensive. Instead, a focus on British economic lives between the Restoration and the Napoleonic Wars is chosen, with regard to how such economic lives influenced, and in turn were influenced by, what may be broadly called “politics.” Hoppit states that “political power was applied to economic life in varied, confused, contradictory, and sometimes ineffective ways” (which, broadly speaking, matches the description of contemporary politics in the Age of Brexit and Trump), and that there never was a zeal or master plan behind it (Ha-Joon Chang or Erik Reinert would probably disagree) (p. 7). Nevertheless, the British process of political economy deserves to be called, in many ways, dynamic, peculiar, and having causes and effects that, even though they may not have been subject to a master plan, nevertheless were by no means coincidental or unintended. Political economy reflected a very powerful historical actor in the game itself. Government and the state were small, state powers were limited (which put a limit on the degree of regulatory efficiency), but there were some notable dynamics.
Chapter 1 argues that legislation can be counted, and by tracing the number of parliamentary acts, successful ones as well as failures, we have at least a quantitative metric of regulatory activity in what would become the workshop of the world. Since the Glorious Revolution, the British political and state framework was considerably peculiar to say the least and quite incomparable to the political process anywhere else, either in Europe or beyond. This may—if Hoppit's findings are stressed beyond the author's own humble claims—well explain how Britain became the first industrial nation. All matters of economic legislation had to be negotiated, either on the parliamentary level or the local and regional, reflecting competing claims on what was economically desirable and what was not and, in turn, different, diverse, and quite varied world views, power structures, and levels of agency. On balance, the sum of “economic acts” increased between 1660 and 1815, although it is extremely difficult for the historian to disentangle a posteriori “the economic” from “anything else” when counting acts. As contemporaries did not know “the economy,” nor did “the economy” exist, they would not have seen it as something separate from, say, society, culture, politics, etc., the way we tend to nowadays.
After the mid-1750s the frequency and speed of parliamentary legislation increased; this was also an age of increased frequency of political economy writings and translations of economic texts from and to English. A significant share of this increase, attempted as well as successful acts, was due to the enclosure movement. Turnpikes and waterways were likewise important, as were mines, farming, finances (fiscal-military state, taxation), money, and banking, as a detailed breakdown of the overall trend demonstrates (chapter 2). With admirable clarity, Hoppit demonstrates that “across the whole period specific economic acts outnumbered general acts by two to one, but before 1714 those proportions were reversed”; political interest in the economy became, over time, ever more specific and differentiated (and tied to regional, local, or specific projects, be that a canal, a turnpike road, or a village field that was to be enclosed) (p. 70, chap. 3). External trade legislation was less successful than other branches of economic legislation, for reasons of lobbyism and party politics, but also the state's limited powers in enforcing such legislation; Adam Smith's depiction of mercantilism may have simply attacked a paper tiger. Food became ever more important in the patterns of legislation after 1750, which ties in well with the quantitative record of economic historians on prices and wages, as well as new research on the history of economic doctrine (see Pernille Røge and Sophus A. Reinert, eds., The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World [2013]).
Chapter 4 breaks the story down to a regional level, and the contrast especially between Scotland and England is stark. In the 1670s and 1680s the Scottish Parliament had been very active in economic regulation, but after the Union (1707), Scotland's political economy was hardly ever handled through the Parliament at Westminster, which treated—as many historians of modern Scotland have observed—the kingdom in the north with salient neglect. In Scotland, economic policy often took place at the local or communal level, through learned societies or semistate corporations at burgh level, with the Convention of the Royal Burghs often taking a leadership position here. This is a field that still requires in-depth examination. The limited grip of the British state in post-1707 Scotland extended mostly to the Board of Trustees for the Fisheries and Manufactures, established 1727, which spent its (humble) funds mostly on fish and linen bounties. The effects of such policies remain, of course, unquantifiable; small sums may or may not have gone longer ways here and there. One should also add that a lot of economic “policy” in Scotland was often ad hoc and took place behind closed doors managed by the “Scottish Vice-Roy” and right arm of Walpole, the Duke of Argyll (demonstrating the intellectual limitations of a recent argument that inclusive institutions represent best-practice models empowering capitalist development: in Scotland, economic growth post-1740 was quite remarkable but relatively lightly touched by either parliamentary processes of negotiation or “inclusive” institutions).
Chapter 5 reconstructs the dynamics of information flows, with information (accurate or not) representing one of the chief resources for economic development and policy alike. Hoppit pays due heed to the boom in political economy writings and the rise of economic liberalism in political economy, a growing skepticism toward centralized government or too much interference by the state in economic matters, as well as the unoriginality of Adam Smith's ideas when put in perspective (p. 164). These are followed by a series of case studies, with chapter 6 discussing the political economy of the fens and fen drainage, chapter 7 studying wool production and legislative protection—and one could add here that many of the acts prohibiting raw wool exports, as well as the discourses surrounding the process, date back far into the deep history of English economic regulation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Bounties, as chapter 8 argues, were another tool of contemporary legislation, and their economic effect remains, for obvious reasons, as unquantifiable as the impact of parliamentary legislation in general—or “economic policy” in most general terms. Chapter 9 studies the contours of the emerging British fiscal-military state, especially its geography. There were regions such as Scotland that on a per capita basis contributed much less to British tax revenue than their expected value (in terms of population share) would have suggested they should. As Daniel Szechi's work has shown, until the end of the last Jacobite Rebellion (1745–1746) up to one half of the Scottish population would have refused either to identify as “British,” or part of the United Kingdom, or to accept the Hanoverian succession; clearly this had an effect on the configuration of the British fiscal-military state.
Hoppit's book is likely to set the standard for the coming decades.
