outcome of this conflict not only put a stop to the attempts to
create a renewed and stronger absolutism in England, but
also empowered those wishing to fundamentally change
the institutions of society. The opponents of absolutism did
not simply attempt to build a different type of absolutism.
This was not simply the House of Lancaster defeating the
House of York in the War of the Roses. Instead, the
Glorious Revolution involved the emergence of a new
regime based on constitutional rule and pluralism.
This outcome was a consequence of the drift in English
institutions and the way they interacted with critical
junctures. We saw in the previous chapter how feudal
institutions were created in Western Europe after the
collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Feudalism spread
throughout most of Europe, West and East. But as chapter
4 showed, Western and Eastern Europe began to diverge
radically after the Black Death. Small differences in political
and economic institutions meant that in the West the
balance of power led to institutional improvement; in the
East, to institutional deterioration. But this was not a path
that would necessarily and inexorably lead to inclusive
institutions. Many more crucial turns would have to be taken
on the way. Though the Magna Carta had attempted to
establish some basic institutional foundations for
constitutional rule, many other parts of Europe, even
Eastern Europe, saw similar struggles with similar
documents. Yet, after the Black Death, Western Europe
significantly drifted away from the East. Documents such as
the Magna Carta started to have more bite in the West. In
the East, they came to mean little. In England, even before
the conflicts of the seventeenth century, the norm was
established that the king could not raise new taxes without
the consent of Parliament. No less important was the slow,
incremental drift of power away from elites to citizens more
generally, as exemplified by the political mobilization of
rural communities, seen in England with such moments as
the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
This drift of institutions now interacted with another
critical juncture caused by the massive expansion of trade
into the Atlantic. As we saw in chapter 4, one crucial way in
which this influenced future institutional dynamics
depended on whether or not the Crown was able to