Sustained economic growth in England can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. That earlier growth, albeit modest, both generated and was sustained by a demographic regime that entailed relatively high wages, and by an increasing endowment of human capital in the form of a relatively...

This paper shows that franchise extension is not enough for commitment to redistribution and that in the absence of de facto empowerment, the threat of revolution is intact. In particular, the paper studies the relationship between a democratic reform that extends the political rights of a...