Politics shaped England’s socioeconomic development over 1530-1780, as the island nation alone in Europe progressed from monarchy-and-aristocracy toward the proto-bourgeois, from agricultural toward commercial and early industrial.
In the Tudor era, the Commons gained influence; in the Reformation, absolutism was undermined by conscience and education of the gentry. London’s economic power acted to unify England (if not the soon-to-be United Kingdom). Domestic policy aimed at controlling the peasantry via justices of the peace. Foreign policy, which began in medieval thrall to Rome and Spain, grew to be independent (though the country remained a 2d-line power).
1640’s destruction of the Stuart bureaucracy was the most decisive event in British history. The dynasty’s unsustainable economics – spending more than it received – led to the Civil War (see also 18th-century France). But predictable causes do not guarantee predictable outcomes: nonconforming religion (e.g., Lollards) as well as the new urban culture evinced popular opposition. When the conflict came, richer peasants aligned not with the lumpen but the gentry, which had learned to lead in the schools.
During the Interregnum and Restoration, the abolition of northern and Welsh councils unified the legal system and the economic dominance of London gathered pace, acting to radiate Puritanism. But the Restoration’s key feature was anti-democratic. Aristocrats and bishops returned; nonconformists were excluded by the Clarendon Code; enclosure accelerated, promoting agricultural productivity. In this respect, Jacobitism was an outcome not a cause: unimproving, gentry and freeholders were liquidated; the ‘new men’ were ascendant before 1745. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 marked the transition to national monopoly (i.e., to colonial mercantilism from chartered companies) and the Dutch wars. Then joint stock companies deployed capital where previously it had been in limited supply. (Ireland, after African slaves, was the principal victim of this trend.) The Restoration did not halt labor migration but favored employers. Excise and land taxes acted to shift resources from peasants to landowners and the City. Following the Toleration Act, Quakers and others saw to it that favorable legislation was enforced across England, again promoting more uniform administration and tempering the influence of JPs. Intellectually, the Newtonian revolution as well as dispersion of ‘natural hierarchy’ undermined views of social organization: men no longer were united to each other.
After the Glorious Revolution and over the 18th century the colonies supplanted Europe as England’s biggest market; 1763’s Peace of Paris converted these markets from suppliers to buyers, until the American revolution and Irish revolt shook the system. Thus there were five periods of export trade: old draperies to 1600; new draperies to 1650; colonial monopoly – entrepot – re-export to 1700; manufactures to the colonies to 1780; and afterward the industrial revolution, enabled by modernized banks and credit, facilitated worldwide export. Bacon’s aspirations for society advanced by scientific approaches advanced dissent. Freeborn men thought to enter the factor was to surrender their birthright; laborers now sought protection for Elizabethan regulations (e.g., prices, standards, apprenticeships, etc.). By 1780, rural distress was evident, though grand landowners had regained ground.
Heavily focused on structural analysis, there is no discussion of even the Whig Ascendancy or George III’s new system. Event are Whiggishly inevitable. The neo-Marxist approach also surrenders credibility in such observations as Soviet collectivization costs ‘thousands’ of lives.