"The irony of England is that it was monarchical power that helped drive the shift away from early democracy, and so modern democracy incorporates an element of autocracy. It is for this reason that once Parliament became supreme after 1688, William Blackstone, the famous jurist, would write that it had “absolute despotic power.” While England initiated the development of modern democracy, it was slow to advance the process further. Even after what is commonly known as the “Great Reform Act” of 1832, only a tiny fraction of the total population could vote. Here we face a puzzle: while seventeenth-century English radicals like the Levellers first conceived of universal male suffrage as a way to govern a society, their ideas would first be implemented in North America and not in England. Though we often think of 1776 or 1787 as the beginning of American democracy, from the seventeenth century a very broad suffrage—for free white males— became the norm in England’s North American colonies."