Redistributing the tax burden was not the only promanufacturing policy that Parliament supported. A whole series of acts and legislations that would expand the market and the profitability of woolen textiles was passed. This all made political sense, since many of the parliamentarians who opposed James were heavily invested in these nascent manufacturing enterprises. Parliament also passed legislation that allowed for a complete reorganization of property rights in land, permitting the consolidation and elimination of many archaic forms of property and user rights.
Another priority of Parliament was reforming finance. Though there had been an expansion of banking and finance in the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution, this process was further cemented by the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, as a source of funds for industry. It was another direct consequence of the Glorious Revolution. The foundation of the Bank of England paved the way for a much more extensive“ financial revolution,” which led to a great expansion of financial markets and banking. By the early eighteenth century, loans would be available to everyone who could put up the necessary collateral. The records of a relatively small bank, C. Hoare’ s & Co. in London, which have survived intact from the period 1702 – 1724, illustrate this point. Though the bank did lend money to aristocrats and lords, fully two-thirds of the biggest borrowers from Hoare’ s over this period were not from the privileged social classes. Instead they were merchants and businessmen, including one John Smith, a man with the name of the eponymous average Englishman, who was loaned £ 2,600 by the bank during the period 1715 – 1719.
So far we have emphasized how the Glorious Revolution transformed English political institutions, making them more pluralistic, and also started laying the foundations for inclusive economic institutions. There is one more significant change in institutions that emerged from the Glorious Revolution: Parliament continued the process of political centralization that was initiated by the Tudors. It was not just that constraints increased, or that the state regulated the economy in a different way, or that the English state spent money on different things; but also the