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Quiet revolutions in early-modern England

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Peter Grajzl
Peter Grajzl
Peter Grajzl
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Peter Murrell
Peter Murrell
Peter Murrell
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Revolutions are invariably viewed as the violent replacement of an existing political order. However, many social innovations that result in fundamental institutional and cultural shifts do not occur via force nor have clear beginning and ending dates. Focusing on early-modern England, we provide the first-ever quantitative inquiry into such quiet revolutions. Using existing topic model estimates that leverage caselaw and print-culture corpora, we construct annual time series of attention to 100 legal and 110 cultural ideas between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. We estimate the timing of structural breaks in these series. Quiet revolutions begin when there are concurrent upturns in attention to several related topics. Early-modern England featured several quiet, but profound, revolutionary episodes. The financial revolution began by 1660. The Protectorate saw a revolution in land law. A revolution in caselaw relating to families was underway by the early eighteenth century. Elizabethan times saw an increased emphasis on basic skills and showed signs of a Puritan revolution affecting both theology and ideas on institutions. In the decade before the Civil War, a quiet revolution of dissent preceded the turmoil that led to a king’s beheading.
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Received: 11 March 2023 / Accepted: 18 July 2023 / Published online: 27 August 2023
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023
Peter Murrell
pmurrell@umd.edu
Peter Grajzl
grajzlp@wlu.edu
1 Department of Economics, The Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics,
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA
2 CESifo, Munich, Germany
3 Department of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Quiet revolutions in early-modern England
PeterGrajzl1,2· PeterMurrell3
Public Choice (2024) 200:357–381
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01093-6
Abstract
Revolutions are invariably viewed as the violent replacement of an existing political order.
However, many social innovations that result in fundamental institutional and cultural
shifts do not occur via force nor have clear beginning and ending dates. Focusing on early-
modern England, we provide the rst-ever quantitative inquiry into such quiet revolutions.
Using existing topic model estimates that leverage caselaw and print-culture corpora, we
construct annual time series of attention to 100 legal and 110 cultural ideas between the
mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. We estimate the timing of structural breaks
in these series. Quiet revolutions begin when there are concurrent upturns in attention
to several related topics. Early-modern England featured several quiet, but profound,
revolutionary episodes. The nancial revolution began by 1660. The Protectorate saw a
revolution in land law. A revolution in caselaw relating to families was underway by the
early eighteenth century. Elizabethan times saw an increased emphasis on basic skills and
showed signs of a Puritan revolution aecting both theology and ideas on institutions. In
the decade before the Civil War, a quiet revolution of dissent preceded the turmoil that
led to a king’s beheading.
Keywords Quiet revolutions · Text-as-data · Machine-learning · Time series · Caselaw ·
Culture · Early-modern England
JEL Classications C80 · C22 · K00 · Z10 · N43 · P10
1 3
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Thus, our analysis of early English law suggests that major developments in financial markets were already ongoing in the first part of the seventeenth century (Grajzl & Murrell, 2021c, 2022b, earlier than mooted in most previous studies. In addition to the findings on Baconian Theology noted above, in Grajzl and Murrell (2023b) we locate the stirrings of the English scientific revolution in 1558 to 1610, earlier than is conventional (Wootton, 2015). Given the central place of the financial and scientific revolutions in any story of England's rise, these are fundamental findings. ...
... 39.4, something remarkable happened in England during 1550-1750, and one of the enduring puzzles of history is what that was and when it happened. Grajzl and Murrell (2023b) address this puzzle directly. In the age of two major political revolutions, this paper looks for quiet revolutions-periods of fundamental institutional and cultural shifts that do not occur via force nor have clear beginning and ending dates. ...
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