the Stuart monarchy would have been much more likely to be a replay of the House of Lancaster versus the House of York, pitting one group against another narrow set of interests, and ultimately replacing and re-creating the same or a different form of extractive institutions. A broad coalition meant that there would be greater demands for the creation of pluralist political institutions. Without some sort of pluralism, there would be a danger that one of the diverse interests would usurp power at the expense of the rest. The fact that Parliament after 1688 represented such a broad coalition was a crucial factor in making members of Parliament listen to petitions, even when they came from people outside of Parliament and even from those without a vote. This was a crucial factor in preventing attempts by one group to create a monopoly at the expense of the rest, as wool interests tried to do before the Manchester Act.
The Glorious Revolution was a momentous event precisely because it was led by an emboldened broad coalition and further empowered this coalition, which managed to forge a constitutional regime with constraints on the power of both the executive and, equally crucially, any one of its members. It was, for example, these constraints that prevented the wool manufacturers from being able to crush the potential competition from the cotton and fustian manufacturers. Thus this broad coalition was essential in the lead-up to a strong Parliament after 1688, but it also meant that there were checks within Parliament against any single group becoming too powerful and abusing its power. It was the critical factor in the emergence of pluralistic political institutions. The empowerment of such a broad coalition also played an important role in the persistence and strengthening of these inclusive economic and political institutions, as we will see in chapter 11.
Still none of this made a truly pluralistic regime inevitable, and its emergence was in part a consequence of the contingent path of history. A coalition that was not too different was able to emerge victorious from the English Civil War against the Stuarts, but this only led to Oliver Cromwell’ s dictatorship. The strength of this coalition was also no guarantee that absolutism would be defeated. James II could have defeated William of Orange. The path