My professor asserts that the Glorious Revolution, by securing the legitimization of private property rights, became the turning point in capitalism taking over as the world's dominant economic system. How accurate is that assessment?

by TyrodWatkins514

He argues that the dysfunctional nature of the British monarchy in the 17th century caused it to overlook people claiming private right to land. Then, when the Glorious Revolution occurred, these new landowners secured their right to do so. This, he argued, spurred settler capitalism into prominence as the new constitutional monarchy looked for new lands from which to profit.

I know very little about Renaissance-era British history and I'm interested to know if this idea holds water. I should also note that this part of the course was part of one lesson, and the course itself was not focused on British history.

Malaquisto
  1. The Glorious Revolution was immensely important in both British and world history. Without the Glorious Revolution, there's probably no British Empire in the 18th and 19th century. It's also a huge deal in terms of political evolution -- it established Britain as the world's first no-kidding formal constitutional monarchy, with clearly defined separation of powers and an elected House of Commons as the most important branch of government -- of political theory, and (eventually) of human rights.

  2. The Glorious Revolution was immensely important in economic terms. It put Britain into a state of near permanent foreign war -- from 1688 to 1714, Britain was at war almost nonstop with a single four-year break. This forced the British to dramatically raise their game in terms of their financial systems. Most critically, it led to the creation of the Bank of England a few years later, which was an absolutely critical moment in the history of state finance.

  3. The Glorious Revolution gave British imperialism a huge shot in the arm. Before that, Britain wasn't really an imperial power in any meaningful sense. The country had only a handful of foreign possessions, almost all in the North Atlantic or Caribbean. There had only been two foreign conquests of any significance in the last 50 years -- Jamaica under Cromwell, and New Amsterdam / New York a few years later under Charles II. At the same time, Stuart Britain had actually pulled back from some possessions (Dunkirk, Tangier) as expensive overstretch. On the whole, Britain before 1688 was just not a particularly imperialist power, with only occasional interest in organized aggression outside of Europe.

By putting Britain at near nonstop war with France, the Glorious Revolution encouraged dramatic expansion of the Royal Navy, a predatory policy towards French and Spanish colonies, and an interest in seizing or creating new colonies for "strategic" reasons. Perhaps more important, it pushed Britain towards an explicitly imperialist set of policies, where overseas possessions were acquired, defended and expanded in order to generate tax revenue, give access to raw materials, and provide strategic outposts. Empire took on a snowballing logic of its own, and 1688 is the moment the snowball really got rolling.

  1. Within Britain, the wealthier middle classes and the landed gentry became politically more important. I am going to simplify a lot and say that these two groups would eventually form the core of the two Parliamentary parties, Whigs and Tories. And while they frequently clashed, one thing they had in common was that they were propertied man -- almost always /owning/ land, and often drawing their incomes from land. So there was, if you like, a shift of emphasis. Both groups found their prophet in John Locke... but this post is getting long already. Suffice it to say that, yes, there was a new focus on property ownership as the basis of political theory and political power.

However.

  1. The Glorious Revolution had nothing to do with the legitimization of private property rights. Those were already pretty well protected under the late Stuart regime (and under the Commonwealth before them). This wasn't because the Stuarts were constitutionalists who respected rights. It was because most property -- especially most /land/ -- was owned by powerful people, nobles or "landed gentry", and confiscating their land or otherwise messing with their property rights could cause very painful political backlash.

More importantly, not much changed after 1688. Some human rights got expanded under William -- habeas corpus was affirmed for good, formal censorship was largely dropped. But there were no significant changes to property rights in Britain. (There were a bunch in Ireland, but Ireland is a separate case.)

There was a gradual ongoing "defeudalization" of property rights. In particular, there was an expansion of the ability to collateralize (mortgage) land. But this had started under the early Stuarts, and continued far into the 18th century. It maybe moved a little faster after 1688; there's a 2006 paper by Dan Bogart and Gary Richardson that found an inflection point in the 1690s. But it was a relatively modest effect.

  1. Settler capitalism... no. English settlers were land-hungry pretty much from day one. By 1688 English settlers had already seized huge chunks of land from the Irish to convert into "plantations", had driven the Native Americans out of most of what's now lower New England and tidewater Virginia and Maryland, and had covered Barbados with sugar cane right down to the high tide line.

It's true that this process accelerated after 1688. But it was already accelerating before 1688. And it didn't go faster because of a change in rights. It went faster in part because of Britain's endless wars and the snowballing acceleration of empire mentioned above, and -- in North America -- because of a combination of natural increase plus immigration.

Note that French North America grew almost as fast as British North America, even though they had nothing like "settler capitalism" going on. Canada / Quebec stayed smaller than the English colonies because it started from a very small base, and then the French never encouraged immigration. But they still managed to expand their population about tenfold in less than a century, almost entirely through natural increase.

Perhaps more to the point, /settler/ property rights didn't undergo any dramatic changes after 1688. The legal regimes in the colonies were complicated and changing, but there's no clear change or set of changes you can point to under William that dramatically encouraged settlement.

-- Finally, I hesitate to say your professor is wrong, because this sounds like a somewhat garbled version of a tighter argument that has been made by serious historians. There's a 1989 article where Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that the Glorious Revolution helped to secure property rights and stimulate capitalism /indirectly/, by making the monarch answerable to Parliament. Perhaps that's what he was talking about. That article triggered a debate that's still going on, so that is a thing. But if you're repeating his argument verbatim, then the answer is "mostly no".