Summary of JOIE article ( 09 March 2023) by Mario Yamada, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. The full article is available on the JOIE website.
In this article, I provide an explanation of how the conservative Tory elites in England/Britain in the period before the Industrial Revolution were politically marginalized, creating political and economic spaces for the liberal Whigs. Such marginalization of conservative political groups was unusual before the 19th century, when monarchs retained substantial political power. I argue that the ‘foreigner’ monarchs under the personal unions with the Dutch Republic and Hanover allied with the Whigs because the primary concern of those monarchs was the security needs of their home states; this created a significant disadvantage to the incumbent Tories while providing a window of opportunity for the Whigs to form a coalition with the Crown.
I reached this conclusion as a result of answering two questions. First, why was it only in Britain that war resulted in modern economic growth? A number of wars were fought in Europe before the 19th century, but other monarchical states, which also benefited from colonial trade and saw the rise of commercial interests, did not see growth on a par with that of Britain. What explains this English exceptionalism? Second, how can Britain’s relatively warless period be accounted for? Between 1722 and 1738, Britain fought only one war, the Anglo-Spanish War (1727–29), which ended with no large-scale fighting. Historians often refer this period to as ‘Pax Walpoleana’, named after the de facto first prime minister Robert Walpole, who is known for his avoidance of war vis-à-vis the sometimes-jingoistic kings and public. Why was war not required if the process of development did not stagnate in this period?
These questions arose from the debate between Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Joel Mokyr in this journal (Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022). The debate took place in the form of Hodgson’s review of Mokyr’s latest book (A Culture of Growth, 2016) and Mokyr’s reply to that review. Hodgson, while appreciating the importance of cultural entrepreneurs introduced by Mokyr, argues that Mokyr’s account should be supplemented with the stories of ‘disruptive’ exogenous shocks that created opportunities to these entrepreneurs and propelled the institutional progress that would not have happened ‘from within’. He claims that interstate war prompted the development of efficient state administration (Hodgson, 2022). Mokyr remains cautious about the immediate use of war as an explanation for development, noting ‘[w]ithout further elaboration, the argument can be overdone’, and pointing out some counterexamples to the association of war and development, including the stagnation of France in the same period and Britain’s relatively peaceful period prior to the mid-18th century (Mokyr, 2022).
I answer the first question by highlighting the English anomaly of being under ‘non-imperial personal union’. Personal union was not a rare system of rule in Europe at that time. England practiced it in terms of Scotland and Ireland, for instance. However, it normally occurred in the form of regional imperialism. The personal unions that England/Britain had with the Dutch Republic and Hanover were unusual in the sense that rulers of smaller states headed a larger state. Under this irregular arrangement, the foreigner monarchs (William III, George I, and George II) chose their local ally in England/Britain based on the security needs of their home states.
Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William III (r. 1689–1702) initially allied with the Tories to finance, through land tax, his war to defend the Dutch Republic from the offensive of Louis XIV’s France (the Nine Years’ War, 1688–97), but as the war continued, the Tories grew disgruntled with such Dutch financial exploitation. Following this rift, the Whigs offered the Dutch king their cooperation for his war effort by borrowing from English merchants, their major constituencies. William, thus, switched his alliance from the Tories to the Whigs in 1694, and the Bank of England was created to facilitate the borrowing.
The non-imperial personal union also provides an answer to the second question. The ‘usual’ monarch-Tories alliance was restored under the English queen Anne (r. 1702–14), but George I (r. 1714–27), under the Hanover–Britain union, reestablished the Crown’s alliance with the Whigs; he resented the Tories’ clandestine peace negotiations with France during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–15) and some ostracized Tory heavyweights’ having joined the Jacobite Rising of 1715. George I largely left Britain’s self-governance to the Whigs, especially Walpole, and himself focused on Hanover’s foreign policy. George II (r. 1727–60) maintained this principle. The long absence of the Tories from power resulted in the incorporation of their constituencies (largely small and medium landed interests) into the Whig-led regime by Walpole, making the traditional economic interests the regime’s ‘junior partners’, instead of formidable political competitors to the new commercial interests, which was the case before and elsewhere.
This article follows my previous article “Making reform and stability compatible with each other: elite redeployment in Meiji Japan” in this journal (JoIE Blog post for that article). As a historical political economy comparativist, my major research interest has been how vested interests (vetoers-to-change) lost their political power, creating spaces for reformist forces (change agents) in today’s advanced economies, when they were still the developing economies in the past.