England: Representative Emergence and the Myth of State Weakness
How can this argument about royal strength be reconciled with the widespread assumptions of representation emerging in weak states? England especially is habitually assumed to be weak before 1660 or even 1500, as were all European territorial states.[78] Moreover, if English rulers were instead powerful, why would they acquiesce to an institution that would eventually constrain them? Could they not foresee future limits to their power?
The assumption of English weakness has prevailed due to the importÂance of seventeenth-century developments for constitutional history.
For the German historian Otto Hintze, for instance, England was able to preserve its constitutionalism because it was unburdened by heavy geoÂpolitical pressures and had a commercial economy and a weak state.[79] The English seventeenth century was indeed a period of great turmoil and internal weakness. After all, it saw the decapitation of its king and a protracted civil war which gutted royal power. However, this proves rather uncharacteristic if a longer timeframe is adopted. The historian John Brewer showed in his pathbreaking work that England was far from a weak state after 1688.[80] The taxing advantage that historians have shown since 1700 is a powerful indicator of this strength and one that contemporaries understood well. Even Adam Smith noted approvingly that England taxed more than twice per capita than France did in the eighteenth century.[81]This advantage is easily attributed to a newly sovereign Parliament. But as Brewer observed, it dated to the Anglo-Saxon period.[82] Medieval English fiscal prowess has long been noted by historians.102 The connecÂtion of fiscal extraction to war was compellingly showed by Mann across the medieval period.103 Yet English extraction in both taxation and troops raised for war exceeded that of France even before the period of Parliament’s emergence and throughout its early formation, as I show in this book.104 Only after 1500 did France indeed extract more than England for about 150 years, but this lead should not be projected to the period of origins.
This is not to say that English rulers were omnipotent; they routinely strained to raise resources,[83] whilst rulers who were fiscally autonomous dispensed with assemblies.
Some princes, in Thuringia and Meissen for instance, avoided representation until the fourteenth century because of income from silver mines, as did the Teutonic Order due to its grain revenues (though such instances were rare).[84] English kings lacked such abundance. However, the balance of power with social groups was in their favor: English rulers’ lack of autonomy was relative. This explains why they would acquiesce to parliaments - in fact, as we will see, premodern rulers generally preferred them. When already strong, rulers did not see their powers diminished. What is commonly assumed to be a parliamentary limitation to ruler power eventually often emerges, as this account will argue, as the regularization of their jurisdiction and increase of their revenue.In fact, even after Parliament formed, in the early 1300s, it was still “widely accepted that the king had no superior in the kingdom and could not be sued.” Though we assume that the ruler being above the law was distinctive to absolutist or sultanic regimes, it was the empirical reality against which English earls and barons were still strenuously fighting. Nobles could lawfully distrain the king if he infringed rights affirmed by Magna Carta, but such right looked too “antique in conception and unworkable in practice,” not least because the king could now use the charge of treason against any challenger. This right to resort to force against the king ultimately developed on constitutional lines (unlike for instance in the Ottoman case) only because Parliament had already created a community on behalf of which these noble defenders could claim to speak.107 How this came to be will preoccupy the first two parts of this book.
The key, however, was that Parliament itself was predicated on this strong royal power, allaying endogeneity concerns. These conclusions about the role of power will be further supported by assessing power balances across the cases examined in this account.
1.3
More on the topic England: Representative Emergence and the Myth of State Weakness:
- England: Representative Emergence and the Myth of State Weakness
- Boucoyannis Deborah. Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments. Cambridge University Press,2021. — 400 p., 2021