political institutions represented the triumph of Parliament
over the king, and thus the end of absolutism in England
and subsequently Great Britain—as England and Scotland
were united by the Act of Union in 1707. From then on
Parliament was firmly in control of state policy. This made a
huge difference, because the interests of Parliament were
very different from those of the Stuart kings. Since many of
those in Parliament had important investments in trade and
industry, they had a strong stake in enforcing property
rights. The Stuarts had frequently infringed on property
rights; now they would be upheld. Moreover, when the
Stuarts controlled how the government spent money,
Parliament opposed greater taxes and balked at
strengthening the power of the state. Now that Parliament
itself controlled spending, it was happy to raise taxes and
spend the money on activities that it deemed valuable.
Chief among them was the strengthening of the navy, which
would protect the overseas mercantile interests of many of
the members of Parliament.
Even more important than the interest of
parliamentarians was the emerging pluralistic nature of
political institutions. The English people now had access to
Parliament, and the policy and economic institutions made
in Parliament, in a way they never had when policy was
driven by the king. This was partially, of course, because
members of Parliament were elected. But since England
was far from being a democracy in this period, this access
provided only a modest amount of responsiveness. Among
its many inequities was that less than 2 percent of the
population could vote in the eighteenth century, and these
had to be men. The cities where the Industrial Revolution
took place, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield,
had no independent representation in Parliament. Instead,
rural areas were overrepresented. Just as bad, the right to
vote in the rural areas, the “counties,” was based on
ownership of land, and many urban areas, the “boroughs,”
were controlled by a small elite who did not allow the new
industrialists to vote or run for office. In the borough of
Buckingham, for instance, thirteen burgesses had the
exclusive right to vote. On top of this there were the “rotten
boroughs,” which had historically had the right to vote but
had “rotted away,” either because their population had