Julian Hoppit's book aims to provide a “structured overview of economic legislation” (xvi). This overview helps Britain's Political Economies provide a comprehensive account of Britain's legislative fertility from 1660 to 1800. Using simple counting— as opposed to “statistical wizardry” (7)—Hoppit assembles a “finely grained” (xv) account of economic legislation. He does not lead with any overarching argument. Instead, he counts legislation and uses that count to take aim at a series of historiographical totems: the fiscal military state, the security of property rights (as emphasized by New Institutional Economists), and—with most assiduity—mercantilism. For Hoppit, the finely grained statutory action that he surveys, showing that government was a small player in economic action, offers a means to challenge those who have emphasized the growth in state power in this period. This granular picture of legislative action helps Hoppit to disconnect Britain's state institutions from the massive expansion of industrial productivity that occurred in the decades after his account. Skepticism about the heuristic possibilities of the term mercantilism becomes a slightly repetitive bugbear. For Hoppit, this term overstates the coherence of economic policy.
Hoppit organizes his book in two parts. In the first he provides the broad legislative dimensions of Britain's political economies. In the second part he offers more detail about the legislative process and promises insights into the reasoning and controversies through a series of cases. Part one, in which Hoppit often reuses materials he has published in articles dating back to the 1990s, helps us to understand that government did not control economic policy, but Parliament provided a way of integrating state and local issues; that legislation to improve public finances and external trade expanded greatly over the period; and that the whole process of legislating economic matters was complex and manifested “marked geographical patterning” (134). We also learn about the types of information sought by Parliament and some of the ways in which interests put pressure on the legislative process. Using the cases on the Fens, the banning of wool exports, bounties, and taxation, Hoppit offers more detail about the ways in which legislation happened, of the interests involved, how economic legislation worked because it satisfied noneconomic concerns and how, across all cases, powerful interests used Parliament to improve their economic standing. Overall, Hoppit's research helps him to highlight that it “is the scale and heterogeneity of Britain's political economies in this period which must be stressed” (325).
Hoppit offers useful conclusions for students of eighteenth-century British history. His research is undoubtedly forensic and the fruits of simple counting are crisply put before the reader in prose and charts. The conclusions are also effectively tilted against the restoration of Whig history that the New Institutional Economists implied. Hoppit's skepticism about mercantilism is less convincing, in part because he refuses to see the same gap between prescription and practice in economic ideas that he does when calibrating the aims of legislation. Mercantilist dogma was often a form of special public pleading to satisfy particular audiences. The realities of how economies functioned of course conflicted from this posturing much of the time. Hoppit also misses the opportunity to analyze the changing language of legislation and petitions. This could have helped him connect the patterns of legislative activity to prevailing cultural shifts. Although we hear some eighteenth-century voices and their reflections on the patterns Hoppit detects, the rich texture and cultural character of the period that readers will know from the superb earlier works of Paul Langford are lacking here. If simple counting offers methodological modesty, it also obscures a crucial metric of legislative effectiveness. As Hoppit is sensitive to, the tendency for legislators to tread carefully (with “hesitancy,” as he puts it [325]) added to the frequency of legislation: more acts were required to substitute for weaknesses in previous attempts. Surely it would be sensible to also categorize those legislative initiatives that proposed to solve the problems of existing legislation. How would Hoppit's survey look if a category of new and replacement or repeal legislation were introduced? Without this, legislative fertility could be seen as regulatory impotence (whether emerging from the state or not).
Hoppit's insistence on emphasizing the finely grained picture is also at times tiresome. To assemble such a large overview without any belief in the possibility of being able to extrapolate from it beyond constant references to complexity and granularity raises the foundational question: Why bother with an overview? The case study chapters alleviate this frustration, but only to some extent. Hoppit has a clear preference for using transparent quantitative data to deflate the larger claims of historians who tend to instinctively prefer colligatory concepts and bold organization ideas and arguments to make sense of the past. Hoppit's preference is laudable as long as new and alternative ideas emerge from the full consideration of the data. Statements like that in chapter 6, “that localities and regions came to bear the imprint of different types of specific economic legislation and that these were sometimes pretty easily enacted, but sometimes not” (179–80), certainly exhibit a judicious tone. But they at best leave the significance of such a judgement unspecified or—at worst—state the obvious. If simple counting is Hoppit's tribute to the political arithmeticians of old, his book is part homage to the hesitant legislators they sought to influence.
