British state development after the Glorious Revolution

Abstract

North and Weingast (1989) argued that the Glorious Revolution broadly enhanced the British state’s credibility. In contrast, I argue that the Revolution made the state’s fiscal-military component credible but left its civil component no more credible than it had been before. This differential credibility explains the stark contrast in efficiency and hierarchy that developed between the fiscal-military and civil administrations after the Revolution. When the Civil List Act 1831 capped a half century of reform and put the civil budget wholly under parliament’s control, the developmental gaps between the state’s two components abruptly began to close. I show this by documenting structural breaks in the growth rate and organization of the civil state.