Nearly thirty years after the publication of Douglass North and Barry Weingast’s seminal work on “constitutions and commitment” in early modern England, one might think that little remains to be said about the Glorious Revolution. In fact, the opposite is true. A recent wave of scholarship has effectively challenged North and Weingast’s claims, sparking new interpretive debates and shedding new light on the causes of economic development. Gary Cox is one of the central players in this literature, and his Marketing Sovereign Promises is bound to shape the agenda for many years to come.

At the heart of Cox’s book is an analysis of the constitutional rules that divide state power between executives and parliaments. When an executive is able to undermine parliamentary decisions, Cox argues, the parliament will be reluctant to provide the executive with either the revenue needed to provide public goods or the legal authority needed to overcome barriers to growth. The solution is for the parliament, or non-state “brokers” regulated by it, to have a monopoly over the making, implementation, or adjudication of economic policy, and for such brokers to have institutional incentives to uphold the rule of law.

The institution to which Cox devotes the most attention is the appropriations process. On the one hand, both executives and parliaments are tempted to use state resources for private gain, and neither is able to commit itself not to do so. On the other hand, each has incentives to constrain the other. Cox maintains that a well-designed constitution will take advantage of this fact and divide between the two organs responsibility for proposing the budget, appropriating spending, authorizing taxation, and administering spending. If the right balance is struck, such arrangements will encourage compromise that serves the public good. They are not without risk, however. If the executive and parliament cannot reach agreement on a budget, the government will be forced to shut down. To avoid this, many constitutions include a reversionary rule that, in the event of a budget stalemate, automatically sets spending at the level of the previous year.

Cox argues that reversionary rules can have damaging consequences. To keep the government running on the previous year’s budget, they must grant the executive increased discretionary power over spending. This makes stalemate an attractive outcome for the executive. If the executive adopts an uncompromising bargaining strategy that leads to stalemate, it will be able to use its new discretionary powers to manipulate the political system in its favor. Under these circumstances, a transition to authoritarianism becomes more likely. Even if this does not occur, the parliament will henceforth be wary of granting the executive any resources that can be turned against itself. As a result, public goods will be underfunded and the economy will suffer.

Cox persuasively uses this theoretical framework to reinterpret the significance of the Glorious Revolution. On his reading, the Revolution altered the balance of power between Crown and Parliament, but this by itself did not suffice to induce economic change. Instead, it was a necessary precondition for Parliament to begin to create new institutions, like ministerial responsibility and the Bank of England, that constrained the executive, reduced transactions costs, and increased the credibility of state promises. Cox shows how these reforms came about, demonstrates that they corresponded to changing patterns of taxation and borrowing, and theorizes their effect on long-term economic growth. In the last section of the book, he examines the effect of budgetary rules on spending in other countries, first through an overview of continental Europe in the nineteenth century, then in a wider statistical analysis of regimes around the world.

Cox’s approach is explicitly institutionalist: he argues that institutional design strongly affects credibility, and he criticizes the idea that credibility is simply a function of the interests of the ruling coalition. It is a notable lacuna, therefore, that he does not explicitly discuss the intermediate position: that institutions do affect outcomes but that their creation and maintenance are endogenous to the interests of the ruling coalition. For the most part, he seems to implicitly argue against this view, but he also leaves the occasional opening to it. At one point, Cox recognizes that the viability of institutional reform can hinge on the preferences of elites, and he accepts that institutional reforms that favor parliaments can be undone by powerful executives (p. 150). Moreover, he is unable to rule out the possibility that particular types of regimes, representing particular types of coalitional interests, create institutions that bias outcomes in their favor (pp. 169–170). Cox’s treatment of these issues is all too brief, comes late in the book, and does not inform his interpretation of English history. Rather, he brackets the question of institutional origins (p. 129). Much more, therefore, remains to be said.

Another limitation of the book is the tradeoff it makes between the breadth of its analytic insights and the depth with which it tests them empirically. Given the wide-ranging implications of his theoretical framework, Cox rightly chooses breadth over depth. Every few pages, he presents a new analytic puzzle, considers alternative views, and weighs the evidence. Historians will not be satisfied; however, a thorough treatment of each issue would require several books. Much like the contribution of North and Weingast, therefore, Marketing Sovereign Promises should be seen not as a definitive source of proof for specific interpretive claims, but rather as an ambitious provocation that will shake existing assumptions and inspire further research in many different areas of study.

On that point, it should be noted that the subtitle of the book, Monopoly Brokerage and the Growth of the English State, undersells it. Marketing Sovereign Promises should be of interest not just to those who conduct research on early modern England, or even to Europeanists in general. Rather, it has wide implications for comparative politics, historical sociology, and public choice, and it is a must-read for scholars interested in the political economy of economic development, the rise of modern democracy, and constitutional design.