As Steve Pincus tells us in the introduction and at key moments in the
narrative, his account of the events of 1688/89 in Britain was a decade in
the making. Having heard several of the book’s chapters before as seminars,
lectures, or conference papers, this reviewer had looked forward to its
publication in the hopes that it would answer some of her own questions about
political economy, foreign policy and ecclesiastical politics in the late
1680s. Unfortunately, despite its grand aims, this lengthy and lively work
instead somehow amounts to far less than the sum of its parts.
Whatever else can be said for this polemical reinterpretation of the
Revolution of 1688/89, no one can accuse its author of lacking ambition. Very
rarely does a modern historical monograph begin and end with the view that
almost everyone else got everything entirely and precisely wrong. Yet that is
the constant refrain in over five hundred forcefully written pages. In them,
the author depicts the Glorious Revolution as the first “modern”
revolution. Why? Because, according to Pincus, English society was rapidly
modernizing; contemporaries knew this, and not just the elites. What they
were contesting in this account were competing visions of the new order.
James II was the frustrated architect of a new “Catholic modernity,”
whereas his opponents, no less committed to refashioning the British state
and society, had equally splendid plans.
This is a book about which it is almost impossible to remain neutral. Despite
repeated reassurances that the author has drawn on new evidence or forgotten
sources, this is a work of historiography, or meta-history, not of historical
explanation. To say that the analysis is reductionist would be generous; the
narrative inhabits a world of binary opposites, Hegelian (rather than
Marxist) dialectics, where conflict between mutually exclusive ideologies
drives historical change. If the hermeneutic stance is familiar, the
argumentative strategy is befuddling. The Revolution of 1688/89 was
“modern” and a “revolution” because respected historians have
characterized it as essentially conservative, non-violent, driven by elites,
and perhaps best described as a “foreign coup.” They were wrong; thus the
opposite must be true. Q.E.D.
In this rhetorical extravaganza, the author displays a genius for
rationalization. There were “long-term causes and long-term intended
consequences,” (p. 474) we are told, in a seductive narrative that leaves
almost no room for uncertainty. All the actors, from the king, to his
ministers, to his opponents and even the man (and woman) on the street, had
all the information they needed to judge between these competing, overarching
visions, which included everything from church-state relations to foreign
policy and political economy. As if in a nod to the Chicago School, this is
the history of /homo economicus/. No one, it seems, was misinformed, or the
least bit in doubt. Although the victors disagreed among themselves,
everything mapped eventually (if not entirely tidily) to Whig and Tory
factional politics, out of which the Whigs emerged triumphant. Yet while
their politics triumphed, their intellectual descendants got the history
wrong, or rather, whitewashed their narratives to make the winners look
reasonable, sensible, and sane. If the author has a good word for anyone
else’s contributions, he reserves it for the eighteenth-century writers who
celebrated the Revolution of 1688/89 as a radical rupture with the past, in
contradistinction to Macaulay’s nineteenth-century account.
To take such a work on its own terms is a challenge. The categories the
author deploys would have been barely recognizable to contemporaries.
“Catholic modernity,” for instance, is, at times, a dressed up
Gallicanism, alternatively caesaro-papism, but at any rate a detailed vision
held by James II for a coherent and all-encompassing imperial monarchy, which
might have been universal but for the need to share the globe with Louis
XIV. Far from incompetent, rigid or inflexible, this James II knew what he
wanted: the French model. He pursued it with more vigor than subtlety, and,
in the end, lost. His opponents, on the other hand, are said to have
preferred the Dutch model -- a vibrant, commercial society based on
toleration and strong representative government -- though they disagreed
about what that meant in practice.
Do political actors actually think this way? If they did, what would it imply
about the political culture? To see in reifications of foreign nations
plausible programs for modernization and reform implies a deep-seated
political malaise, despair at the value of indigenous institutions, and even
cultural shame. Divided Germany after World War II comes to mind, but few
others do. The author provides no evidence of this in late
seventeenth-century Britain. At least in Jonathan Scott’s equally
iconoclastic /England’s Troubles/, the cultural trauma of the Civil Wars
and Interregnum is offered as an important but neglected motivation. In this
account, we are expected to accept, axiomatically, that because England was
“modernizing” (or at least experiencing economic growth) the political
elite must have wanted to “modernize” the state.
Since others have dealt extensively with the presentations of ecclesiastical
politics and foreign policy, I will limit myself to the claims made about
competing visions of “political economy” (another term which would have
been meaningless to contemporaries). In this chapter, Pincus uses a medley of
tracts (most available on /Early English Books Online/ and the rest in the
Goldsmith-Kress collection) to outline two coherent views: an “agrarian
political economy” and a “labor- and manufacturing-based political
economy,” which he claims eventually mapped to Tory and Whig politics. Most
of the writers, the author acknowledges, were “projectors,” which is to
say private parties who proposed bold (and occasionally profitable) schemes,
always for the “common good,” to courtiers in bids for patronage. Reading
sources against the grain to discern what they reveal about contemporary
attitudes is a valid methodological tool, but not one that can stand on its
own. Most of these cherry-picked sources were printed on hand presses for
their immediate audiences. Even if they reflected contemporary views, they
did not, and could not have, framed contemporary debates. Some of these
authors do appear to anticipate eighteenth-century and even
nineteenth-century economic writers, but as Julian Hoppit and others have
shown, these were not systematic programs of reform.
In the midst of regime change, some of these projectors proved successful in
winning approval of their schemes, but the success of their projects (even
the Bank of England or the new East India Company) and the glory of their
subsequent careers should not be taken as evidence that their views were
shared by anyone other than themselves, much less that these competing claims
were at the heart of a coherent debate about state modernization. Where the
author talks about actual state practice, he discusses the Hearth Tax (always
marginal to the revenue) and debates about the Land Tax, rather than
focusing, as John Brewer did in /Sinews of Power/, on excise taxation, which,
among other things, served as collateral for new species of government debt
and was associated with the “spy network” that Pincus attributes to James
II. To read this account, one would think that the Treasury officials took
advice from adventurers and were even drawn from their ranks. To financial
historians, the “Financial Revolution” was incremental -- a series of
contingent events and unintended consequences. Assuming otherwise for the
sake of argument does not make it so.
The Revolution of 1688/89 in a British perspective, as Tim Harris has
concluded in/ Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy/, may have
been far from the tame event depicted by Macaulay. But that does not make it
the “first modern revolution.” The greatest shortcoming of this book is
the author’s overweaning aim to replace one set of stylized facts with
another. North and Weingast’s account of “credible commitment” may
unwittingly (or not) have furnished ideological window-dressing to the
Washington Consensus. We can very much hope this version will not offer
something similar to those who harbor ambitions for twenty-first century
nation states.
D'Maris D. Coffman is the Mary Bateson Research Fellow and Director, Winton
Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Copyright (c) 2011 by EH.Net. |
