English meddling in the Spanish Netherlands, at the time
fighting against Spain for independence.
The Spanish monarch Philip II sent a powerful fleet, the
Armada, commanded by the Duke of Medina Sidonia. It
appeared a foregone conclusion to many that the Spanish
would conclusively defeat the English, solidify their
monopoly of the Atlantic, and probably overthrow Elizabeth
I, perhaps ultimately gaining control of the British Isles. Yet
something very different transpired. Bad weather and
strategic mistakes by Sidonia, who had been put in charge
at the last minute after a more experienced commander
died, made the Spanish Armada lose their advantage.
Against all odds, the English destroyed much of the fleet of
their more powerful opponents. The Atlantic seas were now
open to the English on more equal terms. Without this
unlikely victory for the English, the events that would create
the transformative critical juncture and spawn the
distinctively pluralistic political institutions of post-1688
England would never have got moving. Map 9 shows the
trail of Spanish shipwrecks as the Armada was chased
right around the British Isles.
Of course, nobody in 1588 could foresee the
consequences of the fortunate English victory. Few
probably understood at the time that this would create a
critical juncture leading up to a major political revolution a
century later.
There should be no presumption that any critical juncture
will lead to a successful political revolution or to change for
the better. History is full of examples of revolutions and
radical movements replacing one tyranny with another, in a
pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed
the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of
the vicious circle. The end of colonialism in the decades
following the Second World War created critical junctures
for many former colonies. However, in most cases in sub-
Saharan Africa and many in Asia, the postindependence
governments simply took a page out of Robert Michels’s
book and repeated and intensified the abuses of their
predecessors, often severely narrowing the distribution of
political power, dismantling constraints, and undermining
the already meager incentives that economic institutions
provided for investment and economic progress. It was only