This book explores the role that parliamentary legislation played in shaping the British economy from the Restoration to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Although legislation on economic affairs began to increase from the middle of the seventeenth century, not until the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9 and the subsequent establishment of political stability and parliamentary sovereignty did the floodgates open. Between 1689 and 1800, Parliament passed 7,545 economic acts, which was more than half of its total legislative output; it also considered a further 3,365 bills that failed. Whereas prior to 1714, fewer than 30 percent of all acts were economic, after 1760, the figure was 64 percent. Few, if any, other European states were so prolific.
Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, famously styled this form of economic regulation the “mercantile system.” Later economic historians called it “mercantilism.” Yet as Hoppit shows, there was no system here....