Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America

Abstract

Abstract During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries an increasingly literate and politically conscious public in England expressed growing distrust of national political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions. The increasing size and complexity of those institutions, the lack of personal knowledge of the officials who ran or controlled them, and their periodic abuses of power fed a rising chorus of distrust, for which the philosopher John Locke provided theoretical support in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Distrust of government resulted in two revolutions in seventeenth-century England and the revolution of thirteen North American colonies against British rule in the 1770s.The corruption of justice and conflicts between the judiciary and juries in the seventeenth century contributed to lack of confidence in law courts and the judiciary, while the unfairness of treason trials led to the reform of treason law in Britain and the United States. Distrust of the Bank of England, the stock market, and large trading corporations resulted from the largest financial scandal in British history in 1720, while the system of taxation involved a loss of trust in government in England and America. Anticlericalism lay at the core of widespread Puritan distrust of the Church of England in the 1630s and 1640s, and the persecution of dissenters after the Restoration raised ecclesiastical distrust to unprecedented levels. After subsiding significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distrust of public institutions in Britain and the United States began to mount again in the 1970s, reaching a peak in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.