English Parliament

English Parliament appears in the book as both a lawmaking institution and a site of political power whose constraints helped shape economic opportunity and the development of more inclusive institutions. Its significance lies not simply in its ability to oppose the Crown, but in the breadth of the coalition behind it and in the legal and political limits that made power harder to exercise arbitrarily.

Lawmaking, Patents, and Economic Opportunity

The account traces an important connection between English law and innovation to the Statute of Monopolies, legislated by English Parliament in 1623. The statute systematized the patent system, which protects property rights in ideas, partly in response to kings’ arbitrary grants of letters patent giving favored recipients exclusive rights to conduct particular activities or businesses. In this account, rules over patents mattered because they could make it possible for inventors beyond the wealthy elite to claim the benefits of their ideas.

The book contrasts this legal framework with the breadth of participation in nineteenth-century American invention. Between 1820 and 1845, only 19 percent of American patentees had professional parents or came from recognizable major landowning families, while 40 percent had no more than primary schooling. Many used patents to start firms. The comparison presents the early English legal settlement as part of a wider institutional story: when rights and access are not confined to a narrow elite, more people can turn an invention into an economic opportunity.

Political Constraints and Banking

The account also contrasts the development of banking in the United States and Mexico. In the late eighteenth century, shortly after the United States Constitution came into operation, American politicians attempted to establish state banking monopolies and direct loans from the banks they regulated toward themselves. The arrangement resembled the later Mexican pattern of political favoritism, but it could not be sustained in the same way: American politicians faced election and reelection, and citizens could remove those who used office to enrich themselves or their associates.

As a result, the attempted banking monopolies crumbled. The book attributes the difference not to a different profit motive among American bankers, but to political institutions that subjected politicians and financial interests to stronger constraints. Broadly distributed political rights helped secure more equal access to finance, which in turn allowed people with ideas and inventions to benefit from them. English Parliament’s earlier lawmaking role is part of this account of how institutions can shape the rules within which economic actors operate.

Rule of Law and the Black Act

The limits on political power are illustrated through the Black Act and the 1724 prosecution of John Huntridge. The Regency Council of Lords Justices, dominated by Robert Walpole and William Cadogan, initiated the case after Huntridge was accused of aiding deer stealers and associating with people designated as Blacks. Walpole personally sought evidence of Huntridge’s guilt, yet after a trial lasting eight or nine hours, the jury acquitted him, partly because the evidence had been collected irregularly.

The book stresses that the jury’s decision was striking even though its members were major landowners and gentry, people who might have been expected to sympathize with Walpole. The case stood in contrast to an earlier period when Stuart monarchs could use the Court of Star Chamber against opponents and remove judges whose decisions displeased them. By the early eighteenth century, the Whig elite also had to abide by the rule of law: laws could not simply be applied selectively or arbitrarily, and a person accused of encroaching on private property retained a right to a fair trial.

The Black Act remained on the statute books until 1824, and many people accused under it were hanged or transported, so the limits on enforcement did not erase its harsh effects. But the law’s uneven application and Huntridge’s acquittal reveal a distinction central to the book’s argument: passing a repressive law is not the same as possessing unchecked power to enforce it. The Glorious Revolution and the institutions that followed had made the rule of law a constraint on elites as well as ordinary people.

Pluralism and Institutional Persistence

The account distinguishes the rule of law from rule by law. A powerful group might use legislation to target common people, but once law was treated as universal, the same principle could constrain those who had made the law. The author argues that this idea depended on pluralist political institutions and on a broad distribution of political power: groups with a voice in decision-making could demand that laws apply fairly to everyone.

The resulting feedback helped preserve political pluralism. If the protections won by merchants, businessmen, and the gentry could be suspended at will when peasants challenged elite encroachment on communal land, those protections might later be taken away from the elites themselves. The system therefore faced pressure to maintain constraints rather than risk a return to concentrated rule. Once established, the rule of law could also generate demands for still broader participation.

Parliament and the Glorious Revolution

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is presented as a struggle for power that differed from a simple replacement of one ruling elite by another. English Parliament was already powerful and comprised a broad coalition of economic interests and political viewpoints. Merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and aristocrats outside the Crown’s circle helped mobilize against James II; their coalition made it less likely that the outcome would reproduce the absolutism it opposed.

The settlement did not make England a full democracy: the book emphasizes that political participation remained limited for more than two centuries. Its significance was instead that the revolution removed James II through a coalition broad enough to support constraints on power and to enable the subsequent empowerment of wider segments of society. English Parliament thus figures as part of a continuing institutional process: lawmaking and political opposition could serve inclusive development when power was dispersed and constrained, rather than captured by a narrow group.