An innovative account of how thousands of acts of parliament sought to improve economic activity during the early industrial revolution.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 transformed the role of parliament in Britain and its empire. Large numbers of statutes resulted, with most concerning economic activity. Julian Hoppit here provides the first comprehensive account of these acts, revealing how government affected economic life in this critical period prior to the Industrial Revolution, and how economic interests across Britain used legislative authority for their own benefit. Through a series of case studies, he shows how ideas, interests, and information influenced statutory action in practice. Existing frameworks such as 'mercantilism' and the 'fiscal-military state' fail to capture the full richness and structural limitations of how political power influenced Britain's precocious economic development in the period. Instead, finely grained statutory action was the norm, guided more by present needs than any grand plan, with regulatory ambitions constrained by administrative limitations, and some parts of Britain benefiting much more than others.

Analyzing the evolution of economic policy in postwar Britain, this book develops a striking new argument about the sources of Britain's economic problems. Through an insightful, comparative examination of policy-making in Britain and France, Hall presents a new approach to state-society relations that emphasizes the crucial role of institutional structures.

"The second part of the book, as well as sketching an economic alternative, investigates how political theory and ethical concepts can help us today to re-establish the search for human freedom and a 'balanced' society."--BOOK JACKET.

In this 1998 book, experts in British industrial history analyse the causes of nationalisation in the 1940s.

How did Britain emerge as a world power and later as the world's first industrial society? What policies, cultural practices, and institutions were responsible for this outcome? How were the inevitable disruptions to social and political life coped with? This innovative volume illustrates the contribution of economic thinking (scientific, official and popular) to the public understanding of British economic experience over the period 1688-1914. Political economy has frequently served as the favourite mode of public discourse when analysing or justifying British economic policies, performance and institutions. These sixteen essays, centering on the peculiarities of the British experience, are grouped under five main themes: foreign assessments of that experience; land tenure; empire and free trade; fiscal and monetary regimes; and the poor law and welfare. This is a collaborative endeavour by historians with established reputations in their field, which will appeal to all those interested in the current development of these branches of historical scholarship.

Describing key political and economic decisions or events, this book discusses Britain's economic decline in the post war period. It offers an alternative approach to improving its performance, known as the strategic alignment of national and corporate competitiveness.