Conclusion
The chapter focused on city-states, showing how their origins parallel those of territorial representative institutions, such as England’s, on some dimensions. Land rights were controlled by counts or lords and public administration involved jurisdiction, a pattern that in northern Italy was still operative into the eighteenth century under princely governments.
The stronger the executive government, the more representative the regime: Flanders sustained more effective institutions, unlike Italian cities, because “the counts of Flanders always remained in place as the ruling power.”[907] This applied throughout the Low Countries, “where the towns did not succeed in winning complete autonomy. They did not cease to form part of the territorial principalities within which they had sprung up. Their institutions had a mixed character, half princely, half urban.”[908] This also ensured the participation of the countryside.[909] In Holland, as de Vries noted, government was institutionalized at the provincial level, so as to check domination by cities.227Failure to integrate social groups is accepted as a major cause of institutional and regime divergence in the Italian cases. To the question, “why could urban republics not become effective territorial republics,”228 the answer seems to be that “the conflict between landed and commercial interests was seldom resolved successfully.” Republican governments were not able to co-opt rural populations in a structure that permitted the jurisdictional integration needed for a polity-wide regime.[910]
England, by contrast, was distinguished by a broad network of small urban centers. Urbanization in 1300, as we have noted, is estimated at about 4.4 percent, that is about a fifth of that in the Low Countries, when only cities above 5,000 inhabitants are included.[911] But about half of the urban population of England was then living in small towns, numbering between 300 and 2,000 inhabitants, and not captured by such datasets.[912] If these are included, urbanization could potentially be around 13 percent.[913] These were “local outlets and collection points” providing “vital points of contact between the different levels of the commercial economy.”[914] They were integrated into a network of commercial activity because of the English crown’s high capacity to regulate internal affairs and create “free-trade” areas.[915] Cities are often considered engines for growth, yet about 80 percent of wealth in the early period was concentrated in the countryside.235 It was the English crown’s capacity to harness urban and rural entities across this territory, mediated through its parliamentary structures, that enabled its later growth. Sequencing matters.
In other words, if Europe’s urban development “outpaced that in the Islamic world,” it is not because “the development of forms of local participative government in Europe... made cities less dependent on the state.”236 The more independent cities were from any supra-local “state,” as in Italy, the more their long-term political (and economic) trajectory suffered. Accordingly, we also cannot seek representative origins in the urban advantage of Europe over other regions.
Trade increased the resources available to communities, but it could not itself dictate the shape of institutional solutions to the problem of governance: law and the classical tradition provided the initial foundations to these, as Perry Anderson noted long ago, with the Church as intermediary.237 It is not an accident that the regions that generated these political forms had also witnessed the revival of classical forms in Carolingian and Romanesque architecture and art from the ninth century and of textual traditions, including political ones, especially since the twelfth century.238 As Wickham notes, communal forms emerged not just in commercial but non-commercial towns as well.239