No one could accuse Steve Pincus of being coy. His title sums up an eye-catching central thesis that is remorselessly repeated throughout this vast book. Quaintly taking aim at Thomas Babington Macaulay (d. 1859) as the misguided epitome of “Whig” history, Pincus argues that 1688 did not represent a conservative event designed to protect the preexisting English Protestant state, but rather “the first modern revolution,” one that ensured that “the character of English state and society relations was fundamentally transformed” (8). Both James II's supporters and his opponents consciously intended a future for England that would mark a sharp break with the past. The king wished to be a Gallican Catholic absolutist and took Louis XIV's government in France as a blueprint. Those who stood against him in 1688 wanted a fiscal-military state that would be capable of defending England's burgeoning mercantile interests abroad and be sustained by a national bank at home. Two rival “modernizing” programs clashed and the king lost, but this was far from inevitable. Indeed, Pincus argues that the extent of English discontent testifies most of all to how effective James's efforts were: “He went a long way toward transforming the English state into a centralized, efficient, and bureaucratic machine” (178). Although this process is described as “Catholic modernity,” Pincus is also keen to emphasize that confessional “identity” politics were not the primary motor of public affairs by the 1680s. Instead, Englishmen were most concerned by secular issues to do with legally defensible liberties at home, and the defense of a national interest abroad—the latter as part of multiconfessional alliances. Finally, this “revolution” is placed in broad chronological and thematic parameters. Chapters are devoted to describing the extent to which England's society and economy had changed over the course of the whole early modern period leading up to the 1680s, and scholars are chastised for not adequately interrelating politics, society, diplomacy, the economy, and intellectual trends: “Early modern men and women experienced their lives whole. It is time that historians return to writing history tout court” (486).

This all sounds like heady stuff. But Pincus's 1688 is fundamentally flawed in three ways: the argument is most implausible where it is most novel; the evidence used to make the argument is mishandled; and much of the book involves reinventing the wheel due to a bizarrely patchy engagement with existing scholarly literature.

No one has ever doubted that James VII & II took a number of steps during his reign down an absolutist path that most of his subjects felt to be profoundly dangerous. But Pincus needs to emphasize the scale and rapidity of what happened in order to underpin his view that 1688 represented a “revolution” because a process of state “modernization” forced contemporaries to take sides, and forced the king's opponents to challenge it with an alternative path for English state building. On this basis we learn of James's “total reshaping of English government at every level” (162). The king's bureaucrats “fanned out across the country” (145), and his spy network was sufficiently extensive that James “had effectively implemented a very modern surveillance state” (153). Precisely because the king's government became so intrusive and effective, a generation of Englishmen used to minimal interference from Whitehall were driven to express their fear and anger in terms specifically directed against centralized absolutism. Thus the growth of the state was the prime target of rioters in 1688, not “popery,” and Pincus repeatedly insists on an exceptionally discerning crowd: when mobs assaulted Catholic chapels they were actually assaulting “the most visible symbols and the most vocal proponents of James II's absolutist state” (256). This view is predicated on the belief that later seventeenth-century England was a different country from that of earlier times: “The experience of the previous century and a half had apparently diminished the religious prejudices of the English people while at the same [time] enhancing their commitment to their laws in church and state. By the accession of James II identity politics played only a limited role in shaping English political culture” (99). On this basis, Pincus can argue that the acquittal of the seven bishops in June 1688 was not “an Anglican triumph,” but a deliberate response to “one of many steps taken by James in his Catholic modernization program” (213). Similarly, English foreign policy was conducted according to assessments of the country's national interest, even after 1688 and the commencement of hostilities with Louis XIV: “The English … understood the war against France as a war to protect national integrities against an aspiring universal monarch, not as a war of religion” (339). Hence English willingness to fight alongside Catholic Europeans against the French.

What was the motor of change in early modern England? Here Pincus is an unabashed economic determinist: “Rapid economic development necessarily changed the political environment” (87). It is for this reason that he argues that Macaulay and other “Whig” historians were wrong to see a conservative revolution in 1688 that unintentionally triggered economic change in subsequent decades. Instead, by 1685 England “was not an agrarian capitalist society; it was a capitalist society” (59). Pincus's economic interpretation forces him into some of his most unconvincing instances of special pleading. Having extensively argued that the post-1688 regime fundamentally rejected James's efforts to promote commercial prosperity through monopolistic companies, Pincus notes in passing that “the East India Company survived temporarily as an exception to a developing antimonopolistic rule” (388). This seems quite an important exception. Similarly, much is made of the scale and rapidity of James's efforts to create a “fledgling Indian empire” (378) that would provide the resources for English economic growth. But, in another aside, we learn that James's “coherent and modern imperial policy” strangely came to naught in India because “the Moguls soundly defeated the English” (381). Perhaps losing imperial territories does indeed count as “modern.”

Special pleading and selection of material may be an inevitable aspect of scholarly life, but Pincus mishandles evidence too frequently for the interpretations built on it to be taken seriously. He is astonishingly literal-minded when deploying evidence that “fits” with his arguments. As it is important to emphasize the relative decline of confessional sentiments in political life by 1685, Pincus claims that Whig candidates in the general election for parliament did not use “inflammatory religious language” (100) and emphasized their loyalty to the crown. Readers may be able to imagine reasons politicians might say something other than that it accurately reflects their inner opinions. As it is important to emphasize that James's model for “Catholic modernity” was Louis XIV's France, establishing the centrality of Gallicanism becomes vital. Thus the Catholics who dominated the central committee to regulate the “Three Questions” campaign have to be presented as “Gallican” (157). Yet no evidence is deployed to prove that the influential lawyer Robert Brent held such “Gallican” views, and describing the marquis of Powis as a “Gallican” directly contradicts an earlier description of the peer as being part of a group of Catholics “closer to the pope and the Habsburgs” who opposed provocative acts that seemed to be in the French interest (141–42). As it is important to argue that James's policies were “not insane, stupid, or perverse” (162), Pincus takes seriously Sir William Petty's ludicrous estimate that within one year the number of Catholics in England might increase from about 14,000 to 1.4 million: “Petty may have been optimistic, but he was not outlandish in his estimates” (165–66). Optimistic indeed! As it is important to emphasize the extent of ideological change over the course of England's radical “revolution” of 1688, Pincus claims that in the wake of the 1696 assassination plot “more than 80 percent of those who commented on political allegiance rejected passive obedience, notions of de facto kingship, and defended political resistance” (454). How is this figure reached? (The endnote reference does not help, nor should the reader generally expect much assistance from the derisory index.)

These problems can be identified by a close internal reading of the text, a dose of common sense, and some wider knowledge of the field. More substantial problems are revealed if the reader independently consults the primary sources that Pincus cites in dazzling profusion and then compares those sources with how they are described in 1688. Pincus's phenomenal industry is evident in the 128 pages of endnotes, buttressed by eleven further pages listing the manuscripts consulted in 62 archives. One of Pincus's core claims is that English foreign policy became based on perceptions of national interest against the universalist threat posed by Louis XIV and that these transcended confessional divides. He argues that this line of thought can even be found in fast sermons before parliament and quotes examples by Thomas Tenison and William Wake to prove his point. But whilst he cites Tenison talking in general platitudes about unity of purpose and healing breaches (343), he does not cite what immediately follows: “How can this be effected, but by bringing again the Spirit of our illustrious Ancestors which appeared gloriously in former days, and particularly in the Reign of that excellent Princess who settled our Reformation, and was a Terror to some Nations. … We are engaged in the Evangelical Cause, against Popish Supersition” (A Sermon Against Self-Love… [1689], 22–23). Similarly Pincus claims Wake's sermonizing was designed to make clear that war with Louis XIV was not “a religious crusade” (343). To make this point he quotes two lines from Wake which are separated by Pincus's gloss. But he does not make clear that he has omitted a section from the original that connects his two quoted passages: “The Fortunes, I do not say, of every single Person among you, though that were somewhat; nor of your own Country and Religion only, which ought to be much more valued; but what is yet more considerable, the Fortunes of all the Reformed Churches, and distressed Countries of Europe, depending on the success of our present Enterprizes” (A Sermon Preach'd Before the Honourable House of Commons… [1689], 31). Although keen to criticize Tony Claydon's emphasis on the religious dimension of international relations between 1660 and 1760, Pincus's cherry-picking from original sources does not inspire confidence. Indeed sometimes Pincus's paraphrase of a text's core argument is diametrically opposite to its real focus. Although I generally find his argument that James and his regime were not sincerely interested in religious toleration convincing, this is not helped by citing a speech by Charles Trinder, the Catholic recorder of Gloucester, delivered to local gentlemen in January 1688. Pincus claims that Trinder “left his auditors and readers in little doubt that the religious troubles began with the Reformation. Surely such a dangerous religion [i.e., Protestantism] could not be tolerated” (136). Yet anyone looking up Trinder's speech will find that it is actually an extended paean of praise to the benefits of toleration in general, and James II's indulgence policy in particular, intended to encourage the voters of Gloucester to support candidates who as MPs would overturn the Test Acts and Penal Laws (The Speech of Charles Trinder… [1688], esp. 15). Instead of careful source criticism, Pincus's historical technique involves deluging the reader with a cascade of examples, for instance, 63 primary-source references to do with the assault on the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (173–76 nn. 68–78) when three or four secondary works would have sufficed. These references are often difficult to disentangle as citations are lumped together in unhelpfully massive endnotes. In essence, this is history by index cards.

Pincus's work is also undermined by his extremely selective interaction with existing scholarship. This is not to deny Pincus's intellectual courage: J. G. A. Pocock, J. P. Kenyon, and Patrick Collinson are severely criticized (367, 463, 464–69). Nevertheless, Pincus is so eager to emphasize the novelty of his own views that he simply ignores existing work that says much the same thing, thus reinventing the wheel. Determined to assert that he offers a novel view of the scale of resistance to James within England, and therefore to downplay the overwhelming significance of William's actions as a Dutch invasion, Pincus effectively turns a blind eye to Tim Harris's recent Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (Allen Lane, 2006). Claiming to discover sympathy for Protestant dissenters among some Church of England clerics involves deriding Richard Ashcraft for describing Low Churchmen as the “shock troops” of religious coercion (425 and n. 58). Yet Pincus necessarily sidesteps a generation of more sure-footed scholarship that has stressed the range of ideological opinion within the clergy of the established church and that has made attitudes toward dissent a core part of early political partisanship. Instead, his presentation of existing scholarship on the Church of England seems essentially to reflect the views of Robert Beddard and G. V. Bennett. (It is particularly odd when discussing toleration not to see reference to John Spurr's seminal article on the Toleration Act.) In a different field, John Childs's work on James's armed forces is cited to show the rapid growth in numbers of troops at the king's disposal: a more than fourfold increase from 1685–88, leading to a total of about 40,000 troops on the eve of William's invasion (144–45, 225, 235). Yet Pincus does not explain that Childs's figures are clearly presented as the most optimistic “paper” account of the armed forces, and that the fighting strength of the army is subsequently heavily revised downwards once issues of experience, training, and equipment (never mind loyalty) are factored into the equation. Lastly, Pincus's geographical biases are striking. Insistently denying the importance of the “British” context for what happened in 1688 would be more defensible if Pincus did not then inflate the novelty of his own emphasis on the European context. Little acknowledgement is made, for instance, of the extremely important collection of essays edited by Jonathan Israel under the self-explanatory title, The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Overall, it is telling that despite the self-conscious iconoclasm of Pincus's work his explanation of James's failure is extremely banal: the king tried to effect change too quickly, and European circumstances gave William of Orange a small window of opportunity to intervene in England (481). Who could argue with that?

For all the detail and insistent arguments deployed in 1688 three fundamental puzzles remain. The first is how exactly decisions were made within James's regime. The king is courageously presented as “an extremely sophisticated politician” (318), but the reader gains little sense of who all of the faceless bureaucrats manning the mighty machine of Jacobite government actually were. Instead reference is made to “James's inner circle of Catholic advisers, and one must suppose that these were largely the French Catholic party” (328). Must one? Without greater clarity on the decision-making process it seems premature to claim such certainty about the king's intended program of Gallican Catholic modernization. The second puzzle is why the most significant role that William of Orange is allowed to play in this book is to appear on the front cover. The actions of this skillful and highly motivated European dynastic prince barely impinge on Pincus's discussion, sometimes to a near comic degree: William's “last-ditch lobbying campaign had some effect” in gaining him the kingship (285). Some effect? Threatening to go home and leave the squabbling English to their fate, thus stampeding the political nation into accepting him as de facto ruler would be another way of describing this process. Thirdly, and perhaps most fundamentally, why does Pincus think that he is writing a replacement for “Whig” history? The core of his approach is about establishing a “modernization” paradigm that explains England's rise to greatness in the century and a half after 1688. Does any of this sound familiar?

All of this is a great shame since Pincus undoubtedly does land heavy blows on the dubious developing scholarly notion that James was sincerely committed to religious toleration as a virtuous goal in its own right. He also offers unparalleled detail on what James owed to Louis XIV in ideological terms, even if his presentation of Louis Quatorzian France seems too ready to believe the Sun King's propaganda about the practical extent of his day-to-day power. Ultimately, overstatement is this book's cardinal sin, and in that at least Pincus does resemble the much maligned Macaulay. As Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked, “I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.” Quite.