Parliament of England and Great Britain

Parliament of England and Great Britain became the decisive center of political authority after the Glorious Revolution, displacing the monarch’s practical supremacy and reshaping the institutions governing law, taxation, property, trade, and public finance. Its post-1688 power helped constrain arbitrary rule and establish conditions favorable to economic expansion, even as voting rights remained restricted and the new order’s inclusiveness was limited.

From royal authority to parliamentary supremacy

After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament negotiated a new constitutional settlement with William of Orange. The Declaration of Rights, presented to William in February 1689 when he was offered the crown, determined the succession in a way that departed from accepted hereditary principles. It also asserted that the monarch could not suspend or dispense with laws, reaffirmed that taxation required parliamentary consent, and prohibited a standing army in England without Parliament’s agreement. Its language on free elections and frequent sessions remained vague, but the change in practical authority mattered more than detailed rules: Parliament’s power had shifted, and William abandoned practices exercised by earlier kings, including interference in legal decisions and claims to customs revenues for life.

This transformation marked the defeat of absolutism in England. Parliament controlled state policy, and its interests differed from those of the Stuart monarchs. Many parliamentarians had investments in trade and industry and therefore had reason to defend property rights that the Stuarts had infringed. Their control over public spending also altered their attitude toward taxation and state capacity: where they had resisted higher taxes and a stronger state under royal control, they were willing to raise revenue for purposes they valued, especially a navy protecting overseas commercial interests. After England and Scotland united under the 1707 Act of Union, parliamentary supremacy extended into Great Britain.

Access, petitions, and unequal representation

The transfer of authority did not make England a democracy. In the eighteenth century, fewer than two percent of the population could vote, and only men were eligible. Industrial cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield had no independent representation. County voting depended on landownership, while boroughs could be controlled by small elites: in Buckingham, thirteen burgesses held the exclusive right to vote. Some constituencies had become rotten boroughs as populations moved or land disappeared to coastal erosion. Old Sarum had seven voters and Dunwich thirty-two, yet each elected two members of Parliament.

Petitioning offered a broader route to influence. People outside the narrow electorate could petition Parliament, and Parliament listened. This activity mattered more to the emergence of pluralism than the limited reach of electoral democracy: organized petitioners could affect how the state worked even without seats or votes. The campaign against the Royal African Company’s monopoly demonstrates how that access operated. The company’s charter, granted by Charles II in 1660, protected its lucrative monopoly in the African slave trade; its governor and major shareholder was his brother James, later James II. After the Revolution, Chief Justice Holt ruled that the company’s seizure of an independent trader’s cargo was unlawful: a monopoly privilege could be created only by statute, not by royal prerogative. The question consequently came before Parliament.

The resulting petition campaign strongly favored free access to Atlantic trade. Interlopers secured 135 petitions, compared with the company’s response; only five of the interlopers’ petitions bore their own signatures, while 73 came from outside London. From the colonies they gathered 27 petitions, against 11 for the company, and their petitions carried 8,000 signatures in total, compared with 2,500. Framing opposition as a matter of national interest helped widen support beyond the petitioners’ immediate commercial concerns. In 1698 Parliament abolished the Royal African Company’s monopoly, a concrete demonstration that organized interests could press for institutional change through the new political center.

Economic reform and the expanding state

Parliament’s changed authority brought reforms that strengthened property rights and promoted manufacturing. In 1689 it abolished the hearth tax, an annual charge on each fireplace or stove that fell especially heavily on manufacturers, and shifted taxation toward land. It also passed legislation intended to expand the market for woolen textiles and reorganized land rights, permitting the consolidation and removal of archaic property and user arrangements. These policies suited parliamentarians with investments in manufacturing, while helping alter the rules under which production and commerce operated.

Financial reform was another consequence of parliamentary government. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as a source of funds for industry, helping initiate a wider expansion of banking and financial markets. By the early eighteenth century, borrowers able to provide collateral could obtain loans beyond the aristocracy. Records from C. Hoare’s & Co. in London for 1702–1724 show that two-thirds of its largest borrowers were merchants and businessmen rather than privileged social elites; among them was John Smith, who received a £2,600 loan during 1715–1719. The change was not simply the creation of a bank: access to credit widened as finance developed under the new institutional settlement.

Parliament also continued the centralization of political authority begun under the Tudors, while changing who controlled the state. Before 1688, it opposed a more effective, better-resourced government because it could not direct that government. Once Parliament held power, it supported greater state capacity. Expenditure soon reached around 10 percent of national income, financed by an expanded tax base, notably excise duties on domestically produced goods. The resulting state was larger and more capable, and its growth accompanied, rather than displaced, parliamentary constraints on the executive.

Law, constraint, and institutional persistence

Parliament’s power formed part of a broader political settlement in which law increasingly constrained elites as well as common people. The Black Act was harsh and repressive, but its implementation encountered the rule of law established after the Revolution. In the case of John Huntridge, accused in 1724 of helping deer stealers, a jury acquitted him after a trial lasting eight or nine hours, partly because of procedural irregularities in how evidence had been obtained. The jury consisted of major landowners and gentry, yet the prosecution could not simply dictate the result. The contrast with the earlier Stuart period, when royal authority could direct courts and remove judges, illustrated that political power was now subject to legal limits.

The distinction was between rule by law and the rule of law: Parliament could enact a severe measure, but applying it arbitrarily threatened the equal legal principles and pluralistic balance on which the post-Revolution order rested. Once laws were understood to bind the powerful as well as ordinary citizens, even people accused of encroaching on private property retained a right to a fair trial. That constraint helped preserve the institutional settlement against attempts to suspend it for narrow interests. Parliament’s importance thus lay not only in its capacity to make policy, but also in the political conditions that enabled broader groups to contest policy and made power less easily monopolized.

Limits and wider significance

The new order was pluralistic by comparison with royal absolutism, not inclusive by modern democratic standards. The overwhelming majority could not vote, cities central to industrial development lacked independent representation, and established elites continued to dominate many constituencies. Yet petitioning gave people beyond those represented in Parliament a meaningful, if unequal, means of pressing claims. The company-monopoly campaign shows how this channel could turn dispersed opposition into a national political case and produce a durable policy change.

Parliament’s rise therefore joined political constraint to economic transformation. By controlling state policy, protecting property rights, abolishing selected barriers and taxes, widening access to finance, and increasing the state’s fiscal capacity, it created conditions favorable to manufacturing and the Industrial Revolution. Those outcomes were not simply products of better economic advice: they reflected a shift in who held authority, whose interests shaped institutions, and how far powerful actors could act without constraint.