THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
VOLUME 72 SEPTEMBER 2012 NUMBER 3
Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?
GARY W. COX
Douglass North and Barry Weingast’s seminal account of the Glorious Revolution argued that specific constitutional reforms enhanced the credibility of the English Crown, leading to much stronger public finances. Critics have argued that the most important reforms occurred incrementally before the Revolution; and that neither interest rates on sovereign debt nor enforcement of property rights improved sharply after the Revolution. In this article, I identify a different set of constitutional reforms, explain why precedents for these reforms did not lessen their revolutionary impact, and show that the evidence, properly evaluated, supports a view of the Revolution as a watershed.
ince North and Weingast’s seminal treatment, England’s Glorious SRevolution has become the canonical example of how constitutional engineering can fundamentally alter a country’s politics.1 Yet, scholarly views on the Revolution divide more sharply today—both empirically and theoretically—than when North and Weingast first advanced their thesis. On the empirical front, the “no structural breaks” school— including Nathan Sussman and Yishay Yafeh, Gregory Clark, and Peter Murrell—show that interest rates, property rights protection, and many other phenomena exhibit no sharp change at the Revolution.2 In contrast, scholars such as North and Weingast, Dan Bogart, and Gary Cox show that credit access, property rights adjustment, and