In his classic study of the growth of political stability in early-eighteenth-century England, the English historian J. H. Plumb wrote: ‘There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, farther from the truth ( . . . ) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.’1 Something of the sort occurred in
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