Why Nations Fail

partly on procedural grounds, since there were irregularities
with the way the evidence had been collected.
Not all Blacks or those who sympathized with them were
as lucky as Huntridge. Though some others were also
acquitted or had their convictions commuted, many were
hanged or transported to the penal colony of choice at the
time, North America; the law in fact stayed on the statute
books until it was repealed in 1824. Yet Huntridge’s victory
is remarkable. The jury was made up not of Huntridge’s
peers, but of major landowners and gentry, who ought to
have sympathized with Walpole. But this was no longer the
seventeenth century, where the Court of Star Chamber
would simply follow the wishes of Stuart monarchs and act
as an open tool of repression against their opponents, and
where kings could remove judges whose decisions they did
not like. Now the Whigs also had to abide by the rule of law,
the principle that laws should not be applied selectively or
arbitrarily and that nobody is above the law.
T
HE EVENTS SURROUNDING
the Black Act would show that the
Glorious Revolution had created the rule of law, and that
this notion was stronger in England and Britain, and the
elites were far more constrained by it than they themselves
imagined. Notably, the rule of law is not the same as rule by
law. Even if the Whigs could pass a harsh, repressive law

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to quash obstacles from common people, they had to
contend with additional constraints because of the rule of
law. Their law violated the rights that the Glorious
Revolution and the changes in political institutions that
followed from it had already established for everybody by
tearing down the “divine” rights of kings and the privileges
of elites. The rule of law then implied that both elites and
nonelites alike would resist its implementation.
The rule of law is a very strange concept when you think
about it in historical perspective. Why should laws be
applied equally to all? If the king and the aristocracy have
political power and the rest don’t, it’s only natural that
whatever is fair game for the king and the aristocracy
should be banned and punishable for the rest. Indeed, the
rule of law is not imaginable under absolutist political
institutions. It is a creation of pluralist political institutions
and of the broad coalitions that support such pluralism. It’s
only when many individuals and groups have a say in
decisions, and the political power to have a seat at the
table, that the idea that they should all be treated fairly
starts making sense. By the early eighteenth century,
Britain was becoming sufficiently pluralistic, and the Whig
elites would discover that, as enshrined in the notion of the
rule of law, laws and institutions would constrain them, too.
But why did the Whigs and parliamentarians abide by
such restraints? Why didn’t they use their control over
Parliament and the state to force an uncompromising
implementation of the Black Act and overturn the courts
when the decisions didn’t go their way? The answer reveals
much about the nature of the Glorious Revolution—why it
didn’t just replace an old absolutism with a new version—
the link between pluralism and the rule of law, and the
dynamics of virtuous circles. As we saw in 
chapter 7
, the
Glorious Revolution was not the overthrow of one elite by
another, but a revolution against absolutism by a broad
coalition made up of the gentry, merchants, and
manufacturers as well as groupings of Whigs and Tories.
The emergence of pluralist political institutions was a
consequence of this revolution. The rule of law also
emerged as a by-product of this process. With many