Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and its European Rivals From Civil War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories have been appropriated by North American 'Whigs' in a search for that 'constitutional moment' in their mother country’s political and legal history when the realm’s monarchy and aristocracy accepted a Bill of Rights and embraced an unwritten, but in their view economically functional constitutional regime. Departing from the politically malign and economically inefficient ways of the Stuarts, England’s reformed parliamentary government (which continued to be elected by a corrupt and non-democratic process) then apparently entered into sustained commitments: to respect property rights, defend private enterprise, protect freedoms to contract and promoted over time a penumbra of favourable institutional developments which led on (via an unmeasured and unmeasurable reductions in transaction costs) to the emergence of the world’s first successful market economy.[...]