ABSTRACT
It has recently become again fashionable to argue that freedom from despotic government was the main institutional prerequisite for premodern economic growth. The unique combination of natural liberties, parliamentary constitution, and common law entrenched by the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the freedoms enjoyed by republican citystates and by the Dutch United Provinces were the root causes of their economic success. Experience in countries with parliamentary and republican regimes is contrasted with that of autocratic Continental regimes like Spain and France, in which excessive taxation, redistributive economic policies, and the ruler’s arbitrary whim produced political bondage and economic stagnation. In a fresh twist to the old Whig interpretation of English history, the Anglo-American legal and constitutional settlement is erected by implication into a model of the economically optimal political arrangement.1
