Short history of Time (changes)

To hell with all these moaners -- I love the time change.  

This weekend felt like the first dawning of spring in Toronto, with temperatures finally out of the subzero range and suddenly into double digits. And what really made it special was all the people seizing the year's first opportunity to get out a lightweight coat and stroll the newly lively streets far into the evening -- an evening joyously prolonged by that morning's time change.

In Canada the official starts to each season are absurdly ill-matched to our real climate (Winter starts on December 21, and Summer on June 21? Srsly?) Whereas the time changes really do match and enhance the changes we actually sense:  the coming darkness in October and the promise of brightness again in March.  We live on the northern shoulder of the world: I'll take the hour of early darkness the time change creates then (it's dark anyway!) in exchange for expanding those glorious summer nights when it is warm and wonderful to be outdoors in our extra hour.

Next week is March Break. Many thousands of Canadian will fly away east to the Algarve, Sicily, Egypt, or west to Baja, Hawaii, Fiji and Bali, to get a short week of warmth and sunshine.  They will not complain at all at voluntarily submitting their bodies to four or eight or fourteen hours of time change -- in both directions.  

But somehow a one-hour change for Daylight Saving is an unendurable nightmare? Come on.

Once again the media will roll out scare stories about increased automobile accidents and the other disasters the time change supposedly causes -- though never providing credible evidence. This morning Toronto morning radio has its usual traffic reports of endless "stalls" on the highways.  Is it really the time change that causes a sudden neglect of routine auto maintenance?  Time-change deniers are like vaccine 'sceptics' -- they just won't tolerate collective action for the public good.

Let's watch Vancouver stumble out to work and school in the dark next winter, only to realize that because it's winter it's dark again anyway by the time they get home. See how popular the no-time-change fad is then.

Book Notes: the political science of parliamentary oversight.

I’ve been reading a curious book called Overseen or Overlooked? Legislators, Armed Forces, and Democratic Accountability, written collectively by three political scientists: David P. Auerswald, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. Auerswald teaches security studies at the National War College in the United States. Lagassé and Saideman are both professors at the Paterson School of International Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Their book’s project is to compare three types of democratic legislatures by how well or poorly they oversee military and security policy. Do Westminster parliaments, or Congressional legislatures, or what they call “consensual” parliaments (generally, European legislatures that have added proportional representation to Westminster structures) do this important job best? Being political scientists, they develop an elaborate testing model.

Long story short, the whole investigation goes sideways. After a huge effort in travel, interviewing, and the assembly and handling of masses of data, they have to conclude: it doesn’t matter a toss. 

They find some Westminster parliaments perform their oversight functions well, and others badly. The US Congress and similarly structured governments elsewhere have sometimes done oversight well, but sometimes not. After comparing how the European parliaments have done, they throw up their hands. “Oversight levels appear to be unrelated to the democratic regime type” (121), and  “similar types of democracies do not always have similar patterns of legislative behaviour.” (147)

Overseen or Overlooked? is an institutional study that concludes that institutional form is not really that important. Two hundred and fifty pages in, they start to think that “micro institutional rules and conventions matter a great deal in strengthening or weakening legislative oversight.” Political culture matters!

No matter a legislature’s institutional form, “Oversight improves when the governing party members are less beholden to their leaders and act more independently,” they start to think. For instance, “Canadian MPs are tightly disciplined, whereas UK MPs are loosely disciplined and known for the independence." And so: “parliamentary oversight is more vigorous in the latter despite the similarity in legislative form.”  Ditto for the Congressional examples.

They even grasp, in looking closely at the European legislatures that they dub “consensual” (because they rely on proportional representation systems that produce coalitions of many small parties), that consensus is often not reached. Indeed, legislators there, often appointed by parties rather than directly elected, are tightly controlled by party leadership and as limited to point-scoring in partisan wrangles as their counterparts elsewhere. (Have we seen much sign of ‘consensus’ among German or Italian or Polish or Belgian or Hungarian legislators in recent times? The whole presumption is unfounded.)

The theme their study might have pursued is expressed in one sentence. They come to conclude that “Executive control turns, in part, on party discipline” (258) and then jump quickly to the recommendation that , defence committees should try to operate more independently of government whatever the legislative system.

This whole subject cries out for the kind of intense investigation given to their fruitless comparison of legislative structure. But they toss off this conclusion with vague handwaving about legislators putting their desire for ministerial office ahead of their oversight roles. What is really needed is close examination of the various ways that parties select their leaders either encourage or discourage independence of legislators. And somehow that question never seems to interest political scientists.

I was reminded of all this by a recent BlueSky post by one of the contributors, Philippe Lagassé, who offers Canadians a primer on how Parliament really works, particularly in military decision-making. The constitutional theory is elegantly laid out: Lagassé rightly establishes that the legislature is there “to hold the executive to account for the decisions it makes,” not “to expect a say in the matter.”  He seems faintly irritated that Canadians don’t understand this. 

But for all Canadians who would rightly respond: “But it does not hold to account; has not in decades! MPs are driven like sheep,” he offers not a word about all the (“microinstitutional”) ways that party discipline has highjacked parliamentary accountability. He has missed the point.

From the American Senate and House  (now reduced to servility by the Republican loyalty to Trump) to Britain (how did Boris last ten minutes?) and to the European parliaments (how did a loyal parliamentary bloc make Orban an elective authoritarian?), to faraway New Zealand, the global plague of legislative failures  to confront party machines that are increasingly skilled and determined in obliterating parliamentary oversight should be an urgent question for analysis. 

Somehow political scientists find the whole subject unworthy of close study.

Random cultural history notes.

I 

I ought to be a sucker for a general interest magazine entirely focused on Canadian issues, personalities, culture, and politics. But in the past, I never really managed to get interested in The Walrus, even when I subscribed. If I looked at an issue, the impression I got was often a publication most interested in content it could get cheaply  -- often long windy opinion pieces by lazy writers based on minimal amounts of real journalism (i,e., research, interviewing, digging).  

Lately, I'm interested.  Here's a reason why:  Eight Experts on What You Are Not Being Told About the Iran War. Quick, timely, well-informed, Canadian perspectives, assembled very quickly by the Walrus staff and delivered digitally within days of the war's start. As analysis, it's a hell of a lot better than what you would find trudging through the New York Times. And with Canadian perspective.

I do subscribe to The Walrus again, but my attention was drawn to this particular item by Wesley Wark's Substack, another very well informed, very timely, and very Canadian perspective on security matters.  

II

It was cheering to see news stories of many thousands of Nova Scotians rallying in Halifax to protest the deep cuts in cultural funding the provincial government led by Tim Houston is pushing through.

Have we got the dumbest crew of provincial governments in history right now?  B.C. where they are reneging of adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (and ending the biannual time change), to Alberta ('nuff said), to Ontario (ditto) and on to Nova Scotia, where cutting one's way to prosperity seems always to be in fashion.  And let's not even talk about the collapsing health care system, a provincial responsibility where premiers always blame Ottawa. Few of them seem to act as if provincial governments were actually important.  (Okay, is Manitoba something of an exception at the moment?)

The Nova Scotia protests actually concern big cuts in social service cuts, tourism, and other fields as well as to the cultural sector, But I was impressed to see the lead in building public opposition being taken by the cultural community, which is being hammered by the Houston cuts in a way that almost suggests some personal animus against the arts. 

We need something similar in Ottawa, perhaps, where the Carney government seems to believe kneecapping Canadian cultural programs and institutions is somehow going to defend us against the American onslaught against our nationality.    

Book Notes: Scott McIntyre and Erna Paris

I've been reading two recent books about the history of Canadian writing and publishing in the last half-century or so: Scott McIntyre's A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing and Erna Paris's Hunting History: A Writer's Odyssey (and with Richard Stursburg's Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Publishing, previously noted here, in the background.)

Scott McIntyre had a remarkable career as a publisher, from holding a senior executive position at McClelland & Stewart at the age of 25, to building Douglas & McIntyre, one of Canada's best and biggest trade publisher, and having a lot of fun all the way through. Also he published one book by me and one by my father -- a good experience for each of us.

But looming over his story is 2012, when Douglas & McIntyre went into receivership -- a defining moment in the collapse of Canadian publishing in the "free trade era" when all the promises of cultural exemptions proved hollow. And when several writer friends of mine were left with royalties never to be received. Stursburg's book is the big picture; McIntyre's is the lived experience.

Erna Paris's memoir is not about a failing publisher. From a very early age, Erna Paris developed a profound involvement with justice, human rights, and how societies deal with the horrors of their past. She did it entirely as a journalist and a writer, always outside academia, but well supported by publishers. Her memoir does take readers into her life experience, but the book is structured by her books, one after another, to reveal her remarkable lifelong continuity of interests and concerns. 

As a Jew (from a relatively privileged beginning in Toronto), she began with painful questions of how to confront the Holocaust. After studying in France and marrying a Frenchman, she wrote Unhealed Wounds, using the trial of Klaus Barbie to interrogate how France denied and dealt with its collaborationist past.  

In The End of Days, she went back to how early modern Spain went from multi-cultural tolerance to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews.  

She studied Israel and Palestine in The Garden and The Gun. Long before Gaza loomed over all, she concluded, "The policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice."  

In Long Shadows, perhaps her best and most original work, she travelled the world to explore the much-contested rise of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as a way for conflicted societies to confront their past.* (I'm proud to say I was part of the jury that awarded Long Shadows the Writers' Trust prize in nonfiction.) In The Sun Climbs Slow, she moved on the International Criminal Court and its possibilities for redress and judgement. 

I knew and admired Erna Paris, but before reading Hunting History, I really had not grasped the magnificent scope of her achievement. Nor had I had known how much of an international audience, and worldwide translations, and even political influence and respect she had earned over the years

So maybe she was sheltered somewhat from the travails of Canadian publishing.  But this memoir -- lovingly completed by her children and published after her death in 2022  -- is published (quite beautifully) by the ominously named At Bay Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house I had never heard of before, when it deserved to come out triumphally to national acclaim from a major Canadian house with the resources to give it the attention it deserves. Those days have ended too. 

Will Erna Paris be remembered in Canada as she deserves? We will need a Canadian literature and a Canadian culture to make it so. 

____

* Long Shadows was published in 2000. Erna Paris was already living with cancer as Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission transformed how we discuss Indigenous and settler-colonial issues in Canada. Her brief closing remarks on that matter in Hunting History are sensitive to the topic, but not what she might have given us had she lived longer.     

History of floorcrossing

For The Walrus online, David Moscrop offers a "tepid" defence of floor crossing by members of parliament.  

We return individuals to be parliamentarians. We should expect and want them to exercise their judgment. Indeed, for all the complaining we do about MPs being trained seals or nobodies or whatever, when one finally decides to think for themselves, we get awfully worked up awfully fast. 

All true, but he still kinda hates the whole thing. Oh, well, at least he does not offer proportional representation as the solution. 

In the final analysis, Parliament's vital task is to review and correct the actions of, and if necessary remove and replace, governments. (I know, it does not. But it should.) And to fulfil that role -- in other words, to play a useful role in holding government accountable -- MPs have to be able to use their own judgment freely throughout the life of a parliament. 

David Moscrop is "tepid" on this, because he shares the viewpoint of voters who  

tend to be torn between wanting their MP to be a representative exercising judgment but also a delegate responding to the preferences of the individual.  

He too wants both. But in practice the delegate theory is always applied so as to make MPs servants of whoever is the party leader. 

History of Free Speech in Alberta

On February 23 The Writers' Guild of Alberta planned to mark Freedom To Read Week with a public forum in Calgary on censorship and book banning. A rental agreement was signed and a deposit paid to Legion Hall 264.

A week before the event, the Legion cancelled the booking. It said:

"aspects of the event conflict with Legion policy, which requires alignment with current government regulations and guidelines"

The Legion did not specify the guidelines it wished to align itself with, but the organizers assume they were referring to the Alberta government's controversial school library book restrictions, which educators, writers, and defenders of freedom of  thought and speech have been criticizing for years.

Edmonton writer Anne Bailey is President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. “This shocking decision from the Legion reinforces just how important it is to celebrate Freedom to Read Week and to hold events such as ours,” Bailey notes. “Freedom of expression is a fundamental democratic right and the purpose of events like these is to remind all of us to be vigilant and to stand up against censorship whenever it happens.” 

Sounds right to me. How's your freedom feel this week? And what does Legion 264 think its founders were fighting for?

 

More dual-national history

Patrick Lacroix, the historian of franco-america, responds to a recent post here in order to draw our attention to Canada's own new amendments to citizenship law. Briefly (and as far as I can tell from this), the recent Bill C-3 meandCanadian citizenship can now be acquired by children of people who were not born in Canada but who had/have some substantial connection to Canada, particularly by having lived in Canada at some point. (The Supreme Court of Canada had ruled the previous rule -- only first-generation children of Canadians eligible -- was unfair.) 

The new law, now passed, opens avenues where having, for instance, a Canadian grandparent and a parent who lived for a time in Canada may provide a route to citizenship.  As Patrick notes below, this is causing much interest among Franco-Americans who have retained ties to their francophone roots in Canada -- and created work for archivists too. Patrick:

I enjoyed reading your post about the new British passport requirements—something I hadn't heard about, but, then again, outside of Midsomer Murders, I'm far from having my finger on the pulse of British society.

In Canada, I'm not sure that Bill C-3, passed in December, has received attention commensurate to its significance. The bill vastly expands citizenship eligibility for descendants of Canadians. New England is abuzz with the new measure. Franco-Americans in particular have expressed interest in reclaiming citizenship in a country that their ancestors left, in some cases, five or six generations ago. At the Acadian Archives, I have been on the front lines of this effort to secure genealogical proof of an ancestral Canadian connection. There are Reddit and Facebook pages for those seeking to avail themselves of the law. Staff at Quebec's provincial archives are overwhelmed with requests. The limited guidance regarding C-3 on the federal immigration website suggests that public servants at the federal level may have been caught unprepared by the wealth of interest. It's also a golden age for immigration and citizenship law firms.

I continue to wonder whether this was a cunning assertion of Canadian soft power in Donald Trump's America (or a way of tapping into a skilled workforce) or something that the government stumbled into. Granted, the Supreme Court had essentially laid the grounds for this piece of legislation, but I don't think anyone was prepared for its open-endedness or the torrent of applications that has begun to pour in. I also wonder if the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) who will now claim Canadian citizenship will eventually be expected to show a Canadian passport when traveling north.

Myself, I'm looking closely at the British process for renouncing British citizenship and its claims upon me.  It seems to involved a certain amount of paperwork and the transfer of large amounts of money. Fortunately I do not have any travel plans involving Britain right now.

History When the Levees Break

Yesterday I noted some highlights in the new Canada's History issue.  Since then I have spent more time with the issue, and I need to say a little more about one article in particular, "Watershed Moments," by Toronto journalist and activist John Lorinc.  (Digital version accessible here.)

Lorinc has a solid historical story here:  vivid accounts of the immense Winnipeg flood of 1950, and of the 1948 Fraser River flood that devastated much of British Columbia's lower mainland, and of Hurricane Hazel's lethal impact on Toronto in 1954. He also describes Halifax's flooding in 1942, which effectively isolated the central city on its peninsula from outlying areas -- and the rest of Nova Scotia. 

It's a good story, well studded with quotes from environmental historian Jennifer Bonnell and other historians. Gerald Friesen is quoted about flooding around Winnipeg in 1997. But it gets added heft from Lorinc's care in linking these disasters to the ways local authorities reacted in the short and long term.

After 1950 Winnipeg (eventually) got started on building its Big Ditch bypass for Red River overflows. Ontario began developing its system of Conservation Authorities, and they led the way in forbidding urban development in low-lying ravine floors in Toronto and other cities.  Halifax invested in bypasses and overpasses. 

Lorinc contrasts these with British Columbia's limited responses on the Fraser River, which so far has not faced a full repeat of 1948, despite flooding in 2007 and 2021. "There's no political consensus as to which level of government should take responsibility for flood protection," Lorinc writes. 

He notes also that Ontario is busy dismantling the watershed-level planning undertaken by the conservation authorities since Hurricane Hazel. It's this political sting in his history that really elevates Lorinc's article. At the conclusion, he quotes Professor Bonnell: "It's important to do the work of stitching that back in time to remind people that this is not a totally anomalous event."  Well said.

I have loved ones who live below sea level behind the dikes in Richmond, B.C. And the place from where I write overlooks one of Toronto's ravines (now almost entirely parkland). I look out sometimes wondering how big a flood it will take to surmount the steep bank that's just below my window.

Book Notes: Dalrymple's Golden Road

I've been greatly enjoying The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple.  Most of the buzz that led me to read it emphasized the enormous trade between Rome and India that developed once Rome secured control of Egypt, with almost all the trade carried by South Asian merchant fleets that had begun plying the Indian ocean long before their contact with the Roman market that opened after Rome's conquest of Egypt.  I was also aware that Dalrymple wants to stress that India's sea trades were much larger and more globally consequential than the overland "Silk Road" that briefly thrived during the Mongol control and management of the land-based route from China to the Mediterranean.  

But trade is only one interest of Dalrymple as he tracks India's far flung influence in the first millennium of the modern era.  Buddhism evolved and took shape in India, but was successfully exported to the Himalayan regions and to China, first by merchants, later by Chinese scholars who studied at Buddhist centres in India and returned home to make Buddhism one of the most widely followed Chinese religions. He then tracks in great detail how Buddhism made the same voyage into South East Asia, leading to such monuments as Angkor Wat in Thailand Cambodia! and Borobudur in Java. Hinduism was not far behind Buddhism in penetrating South East Asia but more successful in becoming the faith of ruling monarchs there, leading to a unique blending of Hindu and Buddhist cultural influences in much of South East Asia.  All these religions evolved not only in India but in the other territories.

Dalrymple then moves on to set out how the elaborate mixing of culture, art, philosophy, and science, including mathematics, progressed mightily in the "Indosphere" before being transmitted back into India and west into the Islamic world, picking up the earlier innovations of the classical Greeks and moving on from there to Muslim Spain, and from there into Christian Europe. He lays out in great detail how the 9-digit counting system, the zero, and many of the fundamentals of western science were shared out from Indian roots.  He concludes that much of Europe's extensive borrowings from Arab and Islamic culture, by way of Spain, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms, included within them strong Indian components.

Dalrymple sees the end of the Indosphere coming with the consolidation of Muslim religion and government across India and deeply into South-East Asia.  And eventually the Christian West used its learnings from the east in science, technology, and commercial methods to build its own global influence and reduce India and South Asia to colonial poverty and subservience, only recently ended. 

But India had a very good millennium, he proposes, and one much too often neglected and misunderstood. One of the very great civilizations, and you cannot understand world history without it.  Very impressive, the best of Dalrymple's books I have seen.

This Month at Canada's History

Canada's History for Spring 2026 is now going out to subscribers.  The cover is a terrific image by Alberta artist Fred Curatolo illustrating the cover story, "Canada's Comedy Greats" by John Semley -- pretty good too.

Among the stories this month: Ann Hall on the Edmonton Grads, Lisa van der Geyn on psychiatric-care pioneer Clarence Hincks, Gabriel Milhet on Nova Scotia black rights campaigners, John Lorinc with a big article on a series of mid-century floods that transformed Canadian disaster response, and several more.

Also a big review section and much else. It's looking good. You really ought to subscribe. (And I'm deep into the Hudson's Bay Charter for an upcoming story, so waste no time.) 

Threatened with capture by a foreign country!

Have I ever mentioned I'm an immigrant? I was not yet four years old when I arrived in Canada, and have no clear memory of the country I was born in. I came essentially undocumented, "on" my mother's passport. I held no passport of my own until I formally claimed and received Canadian citizenship and (later) a Canadian passport. Canadian, Canadian only, proud to be Canadian, intent on being Canadian exclusively.

Because of where I was born and where my grandfather was born, I think I could apply (or at least could have applied) for British or Irish or European Union citizenship or (for a while) all three. Indeed I have often been told I should have done so -- that it is wonderful to have many citizenships, to be able to choose whatever lineup is shortest at the arrivals terminal, or perhaps even assist one's children in living elsewhere at some point.  

But I have always avoided doing so. I'm a Canadian through and through and have never held any other documentation. I like to say, if you claim a second nationality, eventually that other country will want to tax you or conscript you, and I'm only prepared to accept that possibility from the country of which I am proud and prepared to be a citizen. My (Canadian) papers are in order. My kids will fend for themselves in foreign parts.

I'm just discovering that His Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom sees it differently.  

Britain is the country I was born in, lo these many years ago, and Britain now declares that all who are British citizens with some other nationality can only enter Britain by showing their British passport (or under some circumstances using a one-time special dispensation -- that costs almost 600 British pounds).   They have a website that enables you to find if you count as a British citizen -- and yep, being born there is the first, pretty much unavoidable, proof. (Here's the webpage.)  In effect, if I arrive at a British airport, the British government can refuse to recognize my Canadian citizenship and passport, and throw me out of the country forthwith for arriving without a British one.

Fortunately a lot of people who are a lot more British-ish than I am -- former passport holders and so on -- are beginning to notice this emerging situation. And are finding it "scandalous and unacceptable."  Resistance is afoot.

I'm beginning to think my inherited (and I must admit, not much acknowledged) guilt for having benefitted from the British Empire is now being visited on me. When I was brought to Canada, there was practically no paperwork for white British people to immigrate to Canada: we just came. The Canadian government hardly considered us as foreigners. "A Canadian citizen is a British subject," it used to say.  And now I'm being punished for it -- or would be if I dropped in at Heathrow.

On the other, I am simultaneously beginning to think that Mark Carney's massive military build-up has to allow for another target needing to see the full force of our Canadian wrath: the country that wants to kidnap a whole lot of us Canadians into becoming somehow British, despite us having all made the conscious choice to be free and independent Canadians instead.

Anyway, if you are in a similar situation to mine, you might consider your plight before you decide to go walking in the Cotswolds, or playing a round at St Andrews, or taking in some West End theatah-- or whatever else one does in that foreign land. Eat a crumpet?

Meanwhile, if you happen to be an immigration and citizenship lawyer reading this blog, feel free to advise how I can avoid being shanghai'd.  

(Actually, Canada also requires dual nationals entering Canada to present their Canadian passport. But I'm not sure Canada imposes dual nationality on people who just happened to be born here, as the British seem to find themselves promising to do.)

George Brown on talking to Americans

Previously posted on this site in 2018, but some things never get old. This is newspaperman and statesman of confederation George Brown on talking to Americans... in 1852: 

...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him.

H/T Russ Chamberlayne, who first drew this to my attention.

Book/Blog Notes: Loomis and Pincus on Charles II

The American historian Erik Loomis, a key contributor to the long-lived blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, has an equally long-running series there called "Erik Visits an American Grave" in which he visits and photographs the graves of more or less famous Americans and gives a quick and often opinionated appreciation of their lives and careers.  He likes union members, and pop musicians, never mentions a Southern Confederate without applying the phrase "treason in defence of slavery," and tends to be hard on captains of industry with elaborate monuments.  He has published over two thousand of these "Visits" at LGM.  I find them admirable as blogging and often intriguing and informative as history, since he is widely informed about American history and frequently up on the latest scholarship.

Loomis visited Britain some time ago and has begun adding visits to non-American graves. 

His latest non-American grave is that of King Charles II (died 1685), and this time he has completely misunderstand the man and the history. Loomis takes him to be a nice, practical guy, smart and curious but beset by Britain's endless Protestant-Catholic hatreds, and that's about it. 

Americans! You can take them out of the country but...  

Some years ago I was massively impressed by the study of Charles's period and subsequent events written by the historian of early modern Britain Steve Pincus, called 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Pincus makes a powerful case that Charles II was a skilled and ambitious king, with big plans to modernize England's economy and governance -- but that his model for modernizing was Louis XIV of France, whose powerfully autocratic personal rule Charles intended to recreate in England. Had Charles lived longer and succeeded in his program, Britain might well have entered the 18th century as autocratic as France under the Bourbon monarchs who brought on the French revolution. 

Pincus argues that the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which deposed Charles's brother and heir James II,  was a profound struggle about two modernizing programs, one intensely monarchical, the other committed to binding kings to parliamentary (and eventually democratic) control.  For Pincus, it was the English Whigs' unwillingness to tolerate the autocratic model Charles was instituting that brought on the upheavals of 1688 and the replacement of James II by William of Orange (and Mary), whose Dutch model of capitalist development they preferred. Their victory permanently confirmed parliamentary rather then monarchical supremacy in Britain. So: a huge reshaping of European and world history -- with Charles central to it, though on the losing side in the end.

I still like "Erik Visits an American Grave" but it's too bad Loomis has extended his coverage without extending his reading. Particularly since Steve Pincus, professor of history at the University of Chicago, is a fellow American. I think he would like 1688.