"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." - Douglas Adams

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"England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 holds a special place in our understanding of the modern world and the revolutions that had a hand in shaping it. For the better part of three centuries scholars and public intellectuals identified England’s Revolution of 1688-89 as a defining moment in England’s exceptional history. Political philosophers have associated it with the origins of liberalism. Sociologists have contrasted it with the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Historians have pointed to the Revolution as confirming the unusual nature of the English state. Scholars of literature and culture highlight the Revolution of 1688-89 as an important moment in defining English common sense and moderation. All of these interpretations derive their power from a deeply held and widely repeated narrative of England’s Revolution of 1688-89. Unfortunately, that narrative is wrong...

Macaulay’s thesis became the classic statement of the Whig interpretation of the Revolution of 1688-89. It had a number of distinctive facets. First, the revolution was unrevolutionary. Unlike other subsequent revolutions, England’s revolution was bloodless, consensual, aristocratic and above all sensible. The English had no desire to transform their polity, their society or their culture. Instead they worried that James II had intended to do just that. Second, the revolution was Protestant. James II had tried to reinstitute Catholicism in England. The revolution insured that England would remain a Protestant polity. Third, the revolution demonstrated the fundamentally exceptional nature of English national character. Continental Europeans vacillated between the wild extremes of republican and popular government on the one hand and tyrannical royal absolutism on the other. The English, by contrast, were committed to limited monarchy, allowing just the right amount of tempered popular liberty. Just as the English church was a sensible middle way between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and radical Protestant sectarianism, so the English polity, by maintaining its ancient constitution, was sensible and moderate. In this context the English remained committed to their hierarchical social structure precisely because it did not impose unbridgeable gaps between the aristocracy and the people. Fourth, there could have been no social grievances under-girding the revolution of 1688-89 because English society had changed little in the period prior to James II’s flight. It was only once English property rights were secured by the revolution, only once absolutism was no longer possible in England, that the English economy could truly flourish.

This book challenges every element of this established account... the English experience is not exceptional, but in fact typical (if precocious) of states experiencing modern revolutions. The Revolution of 1688-89 is important not because it re-affirmed the exceptional English national character, but because it was landmark moment in the emergence of the modern state...

Though we have come to view the Glorious Revolution as bloodless, aristocratic, and consensual, the actual event was none of these things. The Revolution of 1688-89 was, of course, less bloody than the violent revolutions of the 20th century, but the English endured a scale of violence against property and persons similar to that of the French Revolution of the end of the 18th century. Englishmen and women throughout the country threatened one another, destroyed each other’s property, killed and maimed one another throughout the revolutionary period. Englishmen and women, from London to Newcastle, from Plymouth to Norwich, experienced violence, threats of violence, or lived in terrifying fear of violence. This was not a tame event. Nor was it a staid negotiation conducted by elites. Men and women of all social categories took to the streets, marched in arms on England’s byways and highways, and donated huge amounts of money – some in very small quantities – to support the revolutionary cause. When the members of the House of Lords tried calmly to settle the succession issue after James II had fled the country, an angry crowd numbering in the tens of thousands cut short the nobles’ deliberations and forced their hands... The Revolution of 1688-89 was, like all other revolutions, violent,
popular, and divisive.

My central argument in this book, then, is that the English in the later seventeenth-century forged the first modern revolution"

--- 1688: The First Modern Revolution / Steven Pincus