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August 20 - November 13, 2022
emerging pluralistic nature of political institutions.
But since England was far from being a democracy in this period, this access provided only a modest amount of responsiveness.
Anybody could petition Parliament, and petition they did. Significantly, when people petitioned, Parliament listened.
The Long Parliament abolished all the domestic monopolies that so impinged on people’s lives.
Royal African Company,
Chief Justice Holt
So Holt pushed all future monopolies, not just of the Royal Africa Company, into the hands of Parliament.
One hundred and thirty-five came from interlopers demanding free access to trade in the Atlantic.
1698, when the Royal African Company monopoly was abolished.
Property rights eroded under the Stuarts were strengthened. Parliament began a process of reform in economic institutions to promote manufacturing, rather than taxing and impeding it.
Instead of taxing hearths, Parliament moved to start taxing land.
whole series of acts and legislations that would expand the market and the profitability of woolen textiles was passed.
Parliament also passed legislation that allowed for a complete reorganization of property rights in land, permitting the consolidation and elimination of many archaic forms of property and user rights.
reforming finance.
the creation of the Bank of England in 1694,
the early eighteenth century, loans would be available to everyone who could put up the necessary collateral.
Parliament continued the process of political centralization
the capability and capacity of the state increased
linkages between political centralization and pluralism:
The state started expanding,
qualitative way the state functioned and the way those who controlled it and those who worked in it behaved.
improve the ability to raise revenue through taxation,
the excise tax system had very elaborate record keeping.
This remarkable level of state supervision of society
the state began to rely more on talent and less on political appointees,
most significant area of innovation was the mechanization of textile production and the development of factories
fundamental reorganization of economic
institutions in favor of innovators and entrepreneurs, based on the emergence of more secure and efficient property rights.
“transportation revolution,”
Property rights were much more secure
the reorganization of land that took place in the eighteenth century were parliamentary acts that changed the nature of property ownership.
Many pieces of land were encumbered by numerous archaic forms of property rights and many cross-cutting claims.
This reorganization of economic institutions also manifested itself in the emergence of an agenda to protect domestic textile production against foreign imports.
East India Company,
At this point the most important domestic manufacturers produced woolen textiles, but the producers of cotton cloths were becoming both more important economically and more powerful politically.
“Sumptuary Laws,”
It was now illegal to wear Asian silks and calicoes in England.
After a long struggle, these loopholes, as the domestic woolen textile manufacturers viewed them, were closed by the Calicoe Act of 1721:
the wool industry now turned to clamp down on linen.
The Manchester Act of 1736 agreed that “great quantities of stuffs made from linen yarn and cotton wool have for several years past been manufactured, and have been printed and painted within this kingdom of Great Britain.”
The Manchester Act was a significant victory for the nascent cotton manufacturers. But its historical and economic significance was in fact much greater.
First, it demonstrated the limits of entry barriers that the pluralistic political institutions of parliamentary England would permit. Second, over the next half century, technological innovations in the manufacture of cotton cloth would play a central role in the Industrial Revolution and fundamentally transform society by introducing the factory system.
Navigation Acts, the first of which was passed in 1651,
By 1760 the combination of all these factors—improved and new property rights, improved infrastructure, a changed fiscal regime, greater access to finance, and aggressive protection of traders and manufacturers—was beginning to have an effect.
steam engine that were a result of James Watt’s ideas in the 1760s.
“sun and planets” gear system.
Dionysius Papin,
“steam digester”
In metallurgy, key contributions were made in the 1780s by Henry Cort,
dealing with impurities in iron, allowing for a much better quality wrought iron to be produced.
