by these groups to have Parliament as a counterweight
against the Crown and to partially control the way the state
functioned. Thus the Tudor project not only initiated political
centralization, one pillar of inclusive institutions, but also
indirectly contributed to pluralism, the other pillar of
inclusive institutions.
These developments in political institutions took place in
the context of other major changes in the nature of society.
Particularly significant was the widening of political conflict
which was broadening the set of groups with the ability to
make demands on the monarchy and the political elites.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (this page) was pivotal, after
which the English elite were rocked by a long sequence of
popular insurrections. Political power was being
redistributed not simply from the king to the lords, but also
from the elite to the people. These changes, together with
the increasing constraints on the king’s power, made the
emergence of a broad coalition opposed to absolutism
possible and thus laid the foundations for pluralistic political
institutions.
Though contested, the political and economic institutions
the Tudors inherited and sustained were clearly extractive.
In 1603 Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter who had acceded
to the throne of England in 1553, died without children, and
the Tudors were replaced by the Stuart dynasty. The first
Stuart king, James I, inherited not only the institutions but
the conflicts over them. He desired to be an absolutist ruler.
Though the state had become more centralized and social
change was redistributing power in society, political
institutions were not yet pluralistic. In the economy,
extractive institutions manifested themselves not just in the
opposition to Lee’s invention, but in the form of
monopolies, monopolies, and more monopolies. In 1601 a
list of these was read out in Parliament, with one member
ironically asking, “Is not bread there?” By 1621 there were
seven hundred of them. As the English historian
Christopher Hill put it, a man lived
in a house built with monopoly bricks, with
windows … of monopoly glass; heated by
monopoly coal (in Ireland monopoly timber),
burning in a grate made of monopoly