The unfinished revolution

Abstract

The success of the policy of expansion was greatly aided by the organisation of a centralised and efficient public power controlling the whole of the land area of the British Isles. But it was also made possible by the English revolution in the seventeenth century, which cut short the development of royal absolutism in England and converted the centralised bureaucratic military and legal apparatus, which the English kings had created, into an instrument for the security and progress of the civil society which developed alongside it. The interrelation between successful overseas expansion, the creation of a strong centralised multinational state in the British Isles, and the subordination of the state power to the interests and needs of a dynamic and assertive civil society, are the necessary historical ground for exploring the next major problem that arises from a study of Britain’s hundred years’ decline: why has Britain alone amongst major states experienced such an exceptional degree of institutional continuity, such a gradual evolution in its political arrangements?