1688: The First Modern Revolution (review)

This is a brave and bulky attempt to resuscitate King James II's reputation by suggesting he was more of a strategist than many Whig, revisionist, and traditional accounts argue. Instead of the Establishment Whig myth, which has achieved "hegemonic status" (p. 21), of James as a psychologically unstable, fanatical Catholic whose fall accomplished the restoration of liberty and moderation through a conservative revolution versus the more modern revisionist view of him as generously tolerant of other religions, Pincus portrays him as a "radical modernizer" (p. 475), taking his cue from King Louis XIV in France. While, according to Pincus, James's modernizing schemes were definitely planned, the revolution he provoked in putting them into effect were rooted in changes in English society as far back as the English Civil War. Pincus offers a Tocquevillean critique, suggesting that by James's disturbing deeply embedded social and political attitudes, he gravely weakened the fundaments of English society and ended up losing control over the process of change as it gathered momentum; his program was "at its most fragile . . . during its transformative phase" (p. 213). Ultimately, control of the process passed to those who inherited James's strategy after 1688 and who helped to inaugurate a new kind of modern state through this, the "first modern revolution," as the book states, whose effects were consolidated by 1696. The effects of the 1688-89 Revolution were the result of two "competing modernization programs"(p. 36). James II's aggressive policy against the Dutch, his foreign policy dominated by an imperialist preoccupation with colonial acquisition, his expansion of foreign trade and the army, his imposition of a central bureaucracy over local government, and his highly efficient surveillance system competed with a postrevolutionary regime that had the same modernizing objective but sought to achieve it through different means—that is, through a pro-Dutch foreign policy, the development of manufacturing rather than territorial acquisition, some political devolution, and a commitment to religious toleration. The author assembles an enormous battery of evidence in a book that took twenty-five years to produce and that was begun at the time of the 1988 celebrations in London to mark the Glorious Revolution. In Pincus's eyes, these "sedate and dull" celebrations (p. 28) were monopolized by the English government for its own purposes, so he sets out to investigate two themes that past research has underplayed: first, the long-term causes and consequences of the revolution and, second, the revolution's crucial international economic, religious, and political interactions. He argues, for instance, that James's Catholicism can only be understood through an interpretation of current European debates, although to suggest the king adopted a rigid Gallicanism favored by the Jesuits (pp. 121-23) is not entirely accurate. From an examination of his themes, Pincus is led to define 1688-89 and its aftermath as clearly a revolution because it was "violent, popular, and divisive" (p. 8) rather than "aristocratic, bloodless and consensual" (p. 302), and he cites interesting parallels with similar political upheavals in Scandinavia and Spain (p. 35). The divisions it caused in Catholicism have been analyzed further by Gabriel Glickman in his recent book, The English Catholic Community 1688-1745 (Rochester, NY, 2009). Pincus convincingly places 1688-89 within the context of a revolutionary century, 1620-1720, which transformed England and, as a Whig triumph, ushered in a "bourgeois culture" (p. 484). There are some small errors: Wakefield is in the West Riding, not in Northumberland (p. 67); Stockport was in Cheshire, not Lancashire (p. 111); Placidus Fleming (p. 126) was a Scottish Benedictine, not an Augustinian; and the Benedictine presence in York (p. 164) hardly constituted a "monastery," nor was there an "abbey" at St. James's Palace (p. 257).