Was the English Revolution Really a Bourgeois Revolution? | A Brief History of Things

In explaining the long-term social causes of state breakdown in the English Revolution, Goldstone argues, population change belongs at the center—not the consequences of capitalist development.

For a long time people have explained the English Revolution of the 1640s as a conflict between the groups that profited from a growing capitalism and a conservative king and the old aristocracy. In other words, the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution.

Who exactly belonged to that bourgeoisie? On the traditional account it comprised the agrarian capitalists among the landowners and the commercial capitalists from the overseas trading companies. They bitterly resented the limits that the feudal monarchy and aristocratic politics of the day placed on how they produced and did business, and the clash between a rising bourgeoisie and the conservative feudal classes was precisely what caused the revolution.

The American scholar Jack Goldstone argues instead that the English Revolution was largely an early modern crisis—the sum of a series of crises set off chiefly by population growth—much the same in kind as the upheavals that upended Ming and Qing China.

At first glance the claim sounds far-fetched, but Goldstone's argument holds together as he works it out. He starts by showing that the English king and many nobles were themselves capitalists of a sort. Studies of how crown lands were managed show that the king had no objection to enclosure; by 1630 he was probably the largest enclosing landlord in England. Mounting fiscal pressure pushed the Stuart court to lead the way in enclosing, turning waste into arable land, and often doing it together with local nobles. In northern England after 1600, the king led in raising rents and entry fines, pushing them up to the highest market rents in the region. If enclosure was meant to raise rents, and if profit marks commercial development, then the king's own conduct makes it hard to cast the seventeenth-century English crisis as a fight between a swelling class of commercial nobles and a conservative king who opposed commerce.

Moreover, by 1640 most elites, however old or new their titles, were involved in business of one kind or another. A century and a half of inflation meant that a fortune left badly invested shrank fast, and landlords who had not put their rents on a market footing saw their wealth dwindle almost to nothing.

Research on where merchants' loyalties lay during the English Revolution found that many of these "new capitalists" were not the king's enemies but his close allies. England's overseas trade sat in the hands of monopoly companies licensed by the crown, and those who profited from the monopolies generally backed the king; it was the domestic traders who backed Parliament. The king's supporters also included the "new families," who owed their offices to his favor, bought land from him as a commercial investment, and joined him in local ventures such as draining marshes and improving forests.

The king and London's citizens and gentry later became enemies, but from the middle of the sixteenth century to the 1620s the royal government and the commercialized capital propped each other up, and both gained from the other's growth. In the early Stuart years the king built a close partnership with the city's commercial oligarchy: he leaned on London's mayor and aldermen to raise loans and place royal bonds, and in return those oligarchs got tax concessions, royal monopolies, and trading contracts.

What shook this system of mutual support was the fiscal trouble the English crown ran into in the 1620s and 1630s. Charles I needed money, and the pretexts he came up with were so full of holes that almost anyone could see it. Many monopolies were revoked or declared expired, and getting them back meant offering a loan or paying cash. That enraged the very commercial capitalists who until then had been glad to extend him credit and arrange his financing.

Another piece of evidence: many of the variables closely tied to the English Revolution—prices, social mobility and social competition, the potential for social mobilization—moved in clearly the opposite direction after it. Before the revolution prices kept climbing, people and land changed hands constantly, cities grew fast, and real wages kept falling. After 1660 prices drifted down, far fewer people entered the ranks of the nobility and the gentry, urban growth slowed, and real wages climbed. After the revolution England's overseas trade, above all with Asia and the Americas, expanded sharply, enclosure sped up, and farming grew steadily more commercial. These trends are usually read as proof that the English Revolution was a victory for capitalism. Yet even as the economy accelerated, population grew very slowly, prices stayed relatively stable, urbanization slowed, and social mobility in fact stalled.

So Goldstone argues that in explaining the long-term social causes of state breakdown in the English Revolution, population change belongs at the center—not the consequences of capitalist development. In other words, what was closely tied to the social and economic trends of early modern England that carried the greatest political weight was not the growth of capitalism but the change in population.

Between 1500 and 1650 England's population more than doubled, from just over 2 million to more than 5 million. That growth strained resources, food among them, and brought sustained inflation, which in turn set off a chain of social crises, the crown's fiscal crisis included.

In the institutional order of early modern England, social stability rested on a few key institutions: the tax system that funded the king's rule, the hierarchies that governed local authority and family life, and the land and labor markets that supplied work and income. If these failed at once, society was in deep trouble and risked coming apart. That is exactly what happened before the English Revolution. Because the population grew faster than the economy, the land and labor markets could not hold a stable balance, and prices rose—a pattern already plain in the early sixteenth century. Under the heavy social and ecological strain that had built up since the 1620s, many of England's institutions had seized up.

Then came fiscal distress for the state, elite mobility and rivalry, and public discontent. Wages had sunk to new lows, leaving workers and the lower and middle ranks alike badly unsettled. The scramble for posts not only left an educated generation with almost no prospect of entering royal government or the church, it also set the new gentry of county after county fighting over precedence. The king looked for new revenue, and wanted it beyond Parliament's reach, which sharpened the conflict between them.

Nobody wanted a revolution, and nobody wanted to keep the conditions of the early seventeenth century either. To sustain itself the crown had to go around Parliament and try every means of raising money; and as the elite kept growing in number, all of them jostling for a place in a wildly unstable structure of rank and interest, tension mounted among the many small factions at court and in the counties. Poverty, unemployment, vagrancy, and crime grew worse by the day.

Fixing any of this required the king and the elite to work closely together to change the government's finances, the way elites were recruited, and how the economy was organized. But with the resources then available, no solution existed that left every side better off. With prices climbing, crown lands all but sold off, and the elite refusing to cooperate, how was Charles I to raise revenue? With the elite so numerous and so divided that a royal favor to one family offended two others, how was Charles I to win their cooperation? And in a moment that hard, if the elite would not close ranks behind his authority in good faith, how was Charles I to hold down unrest?

Social crises come not because anyone wants a crisis, but because long-term social changes have made the existing political order unworkable. Only then do conflict and politics arise, around who is to blame for the deterioration and how to clear up the mess.

At this point an old historical dispute seems to close neatly on itself. But Goldstone is not finished, and he opens another question. If the Eurasian monarchies of the early modern world—England and France, the Ottomans, imperial China—all went through similar state breakdowns driven by demographic crisis rather than bourgeois revolution, why did East and West still diverge? Why did the East not take the capitalist road the West took?

To this classic question, Goldstone, having just explained the English Revolution by demographic determinism, now produces cultural determinism. Cultural structures, he argues, decide how people respond to a crisis of the state and shape how the state is rebuilt. The different ideological legacies laid down while states were rebuilt after the seventeenth-century crisis had a deep effect on how Eastern and Western states developed afterwards.

Revolutions that never fully defeated traditional habits but did pass through a period of rejecting tradition and inventing new ideas—the English Revolution and the French Revolution—left the society that emerged from state breakdown a rich and living inheritance. The Puritans and the Jacobins faded after their revolutions, yet their views kept a place among traditional symbols, traditional institutions, and traditional ideas. Rebuilding in these countries was therefore not a restoration of the old thing as it was: the earlier demands to limit absolute power went on challenging the restored regimes, and the compromise between the two entrenched parliamentary rule, which opened institutional room for capitalism to develop later. Capitalist industry and trade then worked as a stabilizer when England and France again met the pressure of population growth.

By contrast, in countries where traditional forces grew stronger through the collapse of the state—Ottoman Turkey and imperial China, for instance—the ideological response was to purify and reassert traditional institutions. There the crisis was blamed on straying from orthodoxy, and the new regimes worked hard to erase the variety in the existing culture and to weed out whatever they judged heretical. Rebuilding the state and its social institutions revived traditional thought, but the price people paid was to cut off the sources of future vitality and the ground on which fundamental change could stand. And so, when these countries later met another crisis driven by population pressure, the same play ran again and again.

History is always being "renovated" by new readings. That need not lead to historical nihilism; it lets people see more clearly that history and the present alike keep slipping out of any single, settled interpretation, and so keep renewing and enriching what we know.

Recommended reading: Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World

Cover image: Wikipedia

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