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STEVE PINCUS. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale, 2009. Pp. xiv + 647. $40.
All serious students of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 will have to read this impressive monograph. Stimulating, challenging, and provocative, its virtues are manifest; its weaknesses less obviously so. Hence, this review sets out at greater length my doubts about Mr. Pincus' s achievement than my appreciation of its virtues, but this imbalance should not detract from the substantial merits of his work - a book that will long be admired, and also encourage intense debate and profound controversy.
Much in Mr. Pincus' s important thesis is persuasive. The Glorious Revolution is too often seen as little more than an aristocratic coup that removed a disastrous and reactionary monarch, James II, in order to restore England's ancient constitution and the peopie's traditional rights and liberties. Instead, Mr. Pincus regards James II as being initially very successful in building up a Catholic and absolutist state machine, influenced by and modeled on the achievements in France of Louis XIV, but reveals him steadily losing support as he tried to strengthen his position at the expense of the rights, liberty, and property of large and important groups of English people. By 1688, James II's opponents were so numerous and widespread that they could overthrow him in a violent and popular revolution, which soon created a new state and set England on a very different political trajectory. Mr. Pincus' s wide lens looks not only beyond England to the rest of the British Isles, but to developments across Europe. He skillfully demonstrates his own deep knowledge of political, economic, social, religious, and cultural history. His arguments rest on an astonishing array of primary sources, and he writes with clarity and panache.
All of Mr. Pincus' s chapters repay careful attention. He provides a fund of information on England's social and economic transformation in the seventeenth century, especially after 1660. He argues forcibly that James II sought to create a modern English state, though one built on a particular Catholic form of...