Britain's Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660-1800

Description

The Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 transformed the role of parliament in Britain and its empire. Large numbers of statutes resulted, with most concerning economic activity. Julian Hoppit here provides the first comprehensive account of these acts, revealing how government affected economic life in this critical period prior to the Industrial Revolution, and how economic interests across Britain used legislative authority for their own benefit. Through a series of case studies, he shows how ideas, interests, and information influenced statutory action in practice. Existing frameworks such as 'mercantilism' and the 'fiscal-military state' fail to capture the full richness and structural limitations of how political power influenced Britain's precocious economic development in the period. Instead, finely grained statutory action was the norm, guided more by present needs than any grand plan, with regulatory ambitions constrained by administrative limitations, and some parts of Britain benefiting much more than others.

Julian Hoppit is Astor Professor of British History at University College London, where he has taught for over thirty years. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, and he has held visiting fellowships at the Huntingdon Library California and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. Previous publications include Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 2002) and A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (2002). He edited the Historical Journal from 2008 to 2012 and he is the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2016-19) to research 'Public Finances and the Union, 1707-1978'.

'Britain's Political Economies will fundamentally alter the way we think about the nature of Britain's state-regulated economy before the Industrial Revolution.' Tim Harris, Journal of Interdisciplinary History '... the great virtue of this book is that it demonstrates the sheer complexity of the way in which 'ideas' translate into 'action', and that is a valuable lesson indeed.' Keith Tribe, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought