Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

partly explains how the Corn Law was repealed without more serious
conflict. By 1846 landowners could no longer control legislation in
Parliament. This was an outcome of the First Reform Act. However, if
in 1832 the expansion of the electorate, the reform of the rotten
boroughs, and the repeal of the Corn Laws had all been on the table,
landowners would have put up much more resistance. The fact that
there were first limited political reforms and that repeal of the Corn
Laws came on the agenda only later defused conflict.
Gradual change also prevented ventures into uncharted territories.
A violent overthrow of the system means that something entirely new
has to be built in place of what has been removed. This was the case
with the French Revolution, when the first experiment with
democracy led to the Terror and then back to a monarchy twice
before finally leading to the French Third Republic in 1870. It was the
case in the Russian Revolution, where the desires of many for a more
equal system than that of the Russian Empire led to a one-party
dictatorship that was much more violent, bloody, and vicious than
what it had replaced. Gradual reform was difficult in these societies
precisely because they lacked pluralism and were highly extractive. It
was the pluralism emerging from the Glorious Revolution, and the
rule of law that it introduced, that made gradual change feasible, and
desirable, in Britain.
The conservative English commentator Edmund Burke, who

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steadfastly opposed the French Revolution, wrote in 1790, “It is with
infinite caution that any man should venture upon pulling down an
edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the
common purposes of society, or on building it up again without
having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.”
Burke was wrong on the big picture. The French Revolution had
replaced a rotten edifice and opened the way for inclusive institutions
not only in France, but throughout much of Western Europe. But
Burke’s caution was not entirely off the mark. The gradual process of
British political reform, which had started in 1688 and would pick up
pace three decades after Burke’s death, would be more effective
because its gradual nature made it more powerful, harder to resist,
and ultimately more durable.