Revolutions are invariably viewed as the violent replacement of an existing political order. However, many social innovations that result in fundamental institutional and cultural shifts do not occur via force nor have clear beginning and ending dates. Focusing on early-modern England, we provide the first-ever quantitative inquiry into such quiet revolutions. Using existing topic model estimates that leverage caselaw and print-culture corpora, we construct annual time series of attention to 100 legal and 110 cultural ideas between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. We estimate the timing of structural breaks in these series. Quiet revolutions begin when there are concurrent upturns in attention to several related topics. Early-modern England featured several quiet, but profound, revolutionary episodes. The financial revolution began by 1660. The Protectorate saw a revolution in land law. A revolution in caselaw relating to families was underway by the early eighteenth century. Elizabethan times saw an increased emphasis on basic skills and showed signs of a Puritan revolution affecting both theology and ideas on institutions. In the decade before the Civil War, a quiet revolution of dissent preceded the turmoil that led to a king’s beheading.

革命总是被视为对现有政治秩序的暴力取代。然而，许多导致根本性制度和文化转变的社会创新并不是通过武力发生的，也没有明确的开始和结束日期。我们着眼于近代早期的英国，首次对这种悄然发生的革命进行了定量调查。使用利用判例法和印刷文化语料库的现有主题模型估计，我们构建了对 16 世纪中叶至 18 世纪中叶之间 100 个法律思想和 110 个文化思想的关注的年度时间序列。我们估计了这些系列中结构性断裂的时间。当对几个相关主题的关注度同时上升时，悄然的革命就开始了。近代早期的英国经历了几次安静但深刻的革命事件。金融革命于 1660 年开始。保护国见证了土地法的革命。十八世纪初，一场与家庭相关的判例法革命正在进行。伊丽莎白时代人们越来越重视基本技能，并显示出清教徒革命影响神学和制度观念的迹象。内战前的十年里，一场静悄悄的异议革命发生在导致国王被斩首的动乱之前。