1688 - The First Modern Revolution - Steve Pincus.epub

EPUB. Steve Pincus's study of the Revolution of 1688–9 is a monument to his committed scholarship and relentless argument about the nature of later seventeenth-century English politics and society. It is based on vast research in British, North American, and European archives, examining the factors that influenced the reaction to James II's government, and led to the support for William III's new regime after the Revolution. The book is illustrated with more than 60 prints, paintings, playing cards, medals, and maps depicting various aspects of the Revolution's impact on English culture. The most significant elements of Pincus's analysis are that what occurred in 1688–9 was the consequence of two competing groups of modernising revolutionaries—the supporters of James II with their eyes on the French state, and those who came to oppose his rule, looking to the Dutch—and that the events were indeed ‘revolutionary’ in the modern senses of this term, challenging what he sees as the familiar characterisation of 1688–9 as ‘aristocratic, bloodless, and consensual’. To serve this purpose, he attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of the Revolution and the modernisation of English society which occurred in the years that followed.