For two hundred years historians have viewed England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution—bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view.

By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England’s revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688–1689.

James II developed a modernization program that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state. The postrevolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution—not the French Revolution—the first truly modern revolution. This wide-ranging book reenvisions the nature of the Glorious Revolution and of revolutions in general, the causes and consequences of commercialization, the nature of liberalism, and ultimately the origins and contours of modernity itself.

Steven Pincus received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990. At Yale he teaches 17th and 18th century British and European history, the history of the early British Empire, and Directed Studies. In addition to research seminars in History, he regularly co-teaches cross disciplinary seminars with faculty in other departments. Recent topics have included the Divergence of Britain, Comparative Revolutions, and Early Modern Empires in Theory and Practice.

He is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 and England's Glorious Revolution 1688-89 and most recently 1688:The First Modern Revolution. He has also edited two collections of essays. He has published numerous essays on the economic, cultural, political and intellectual history of early modern Britain and comparative revolutions. In March 2010 he will deliver the Sir John Neale lecture at University College, London.

His research interests include: 17th and 18th century British Political History, the Emergence of Capitalism, the History of Economic Thought, the Origins of the British Empire, the Early Modern Atlantic World, Early Modern Nationalism, comparative revolutions and Political Thought.

At Yale Steve Pincus is a co-organizer of two regular colloquia: Transitions to Modernity and British Historical Studies. He is also chair of Yale’s Council on European Studies. He is a former program chair of the North American Conference on British Studies.

Steve Pincus has supervised doctoral dissertations on a wide range of topics in British and Atlantic commercial, political, intellectual, cultural, and imperial history.