Passages to Modernity

If, as argued, England was strong and France weak in the Middle Ages, how are we to reconcile this narrative with classic accounts of Continental absolutist strength and English weakness in the early modern period? And how was it that by the seventeenth century, Charles I (1625-49) could simply cease to call Parliament for eleven years when it proved too recalcitrant? Conversely, France had raised troops so large and waged war so effectively by the 1660s that Europe feared the spread of “universal monarchy.”^[1549] By the time of the French Revolution, in Barrington Moore’s memorable phrase, the nobility had become “a decorative appanage of the king.”⁵⁷ If so, isn’t this more recent period more relevant to a causal account of parliamentary emergence?

This book rests on the premise that the foundation for the institutional divergence of European polities can be traced back to the medieval period.

The privatization of power relations in France also helps explain why the nobility was gradually disempowered by the king in the 1600s. As it never developed a polity-wide frame of institutional cooperation, the nobility was unable to sustain a concerted institutional front vis-a-vis the king. Replicating a pattern found repeatedly in this book, early strength of a social group meant low initial incentives for collective action, resulting in weak institutional formation and collective rights in the long run.

Moreover, the drastic increase of power achieved by Louis XIV dis­plays some key features identified in early English institution-building. The common narrative of French growth focuses on the “centralization” pursued through the intendants, officials dispatched from the center to circumvent the local power structures composed of governors and pro­vincial nobilities and to raise taxation.^[1551] Indeed, the explosion of taxation noted by historians in this period owed much to this practice. But this was a similar strategy to that adopted by medieval English kings, as we have seen, based on itinerant officials that aimed to supplant local power structures (in the judicial realm). As in England, conditional relations with the crown shaped the intendants' effectiveness: they were originally revocable and not purchasable. Governors also became temporary, i.e. conditional, and their troops dependent on Louis.^[1552]

The difference with England lay not in the intrusiveness of French central institutions but in their lower effectiveness. French society, and especially the privileged orders, remained harder to control. However, as they had not resolved their collective action problem due to the earlier weakness of the crown, they did not respond to royal expansion in a unified way; resistance remained local. Although a revisionist approach has framed these inter­actions within a model of “social collaboration” with the king,^[1553] they still reflected royal weakness.^[1554] When the crown attempted to assert control after 1695 by imposing taxation on those privileged orders, they indeed acted collectively (as this book would predict) and developed the language of “liberty” and “citizenship” leading up to the French Revolution - a provocative finding by historian Michael Kwass.⁶⁴ However, the state was not strong enough to prevail, as sociologist Theda Skocpol argued in her classic study, so this confrontation produced neither an effective state nor representative institutions, but social revolution.^[1555]

Nonetheless, England had deviated from the conditions described in this book already by the fifteenth century.

From the standpoint of this book, however, it was precisely the shift “from tenure to contract”⁷⁴ from the fourteenth century, i.e. from a form of dependent organization to a more privatized and decentralized one, that eventually undermined social order and parliamentary politics. The Tudor reassertion of authority also failed to establish equivalent ties of enduring institutionalized conditionality within the framework of a chan­ging, commercializing economy, resulting in weakness. For instance, land appropriated from the Dissolution of Monasteries was sold, leading to a one-off increase in the royal Treasury⁷⁵ and a decline in parliamentary exchange: during this time almost three quarters of royal revenue was non-parliamentary.⁷⁶ As O’Brien and Hunt noted, Tudor fiscal prowess was “temporary”; Stuart extractive capacity was quite weak.⁷⁷ Between 1550 and 1640 real per capita taxation was only 65 percent of that collected between 1330 and 1440 (the highpoint of medieval collec­tion).

Conditions settled only after the Glorious Revolution, when condition­ality was reimposed on a new basis: debt and commercial growth now restructured political relations, vesting power-holders with incentives to monitor parliamentary politics.^[1562] Once again, a highly effective state (now an increasingly sovereign parliament) was necessary for this out­come, one that achieved the second highest rate of tax extraction after 1688 (after the Netherlands). If anything, the nobility’s well-documented strength in the next two centuries might help explain why the extension of the franchise was so delayed in England. If the state had been able to compel it as effectively as in the early stages in this book, voting reform may have even happened earlier.

*

In conclusion, I will highlight some implications of this argument for three debates in current policy: the fiscal politics of state-building in developing countries, the political economy of redistribution, and the problem of political order. The revision offered in this book has relevance because the bargaining model has been influencing policy in international organizations such as the IMF and the OECD. Developing countries have turned to domestic resource mobilization especially after recent financial crises, so taxation is being used for institution-building.⁸¹ “State-society bargaining around tax” is assumed to make “a unique contribution to building more effective, accountable states and public institutions.” Even in such public policy scholarship, this mechanism is traced to European history, especially to the narrative of seventeenth­century England and Holland, where war pushed governments to negoti­ate with capital-holders.⁸² The lesson is assumed to carry into the modern world.

Once we reassess the historical record, three different implications for scholarship on the developing world emerge. First, social groups do not need to be strong or commercial before taxation is demanded; they are more likely to engage in collective action and demand rights when tax­ation is already successfully imposed. What matters is whether the tax is a burden that unites groups, not how much or what kind of wealth they have.^[1563] Second, states should not fear such collective action, as it typically is accompanied by enhanced extraction. This requires a background condition, however. Some state capacity must pre-exist any bargaining dynamic if the latter is to contribute to representation. Critical institu­tions have to precede the imposition of taxation if the latter is to provide incentives for the demand of greater accountability and good governance: as even ISIS understood, the provision of justice offers powerful incen­tives. Though compelling, “no taxation without representation” is a slogan, not a causal mechanism.

The second major implication of the argument concerns the political economy of redistribution. Inequality is one of the most important path­ologies of the current political and economic orders.^{[1564] [1565]} In the developing world, inequality of land remains central. Despite long-standing efforts at reform in Latin America, for instance, only about half of all arable land has been either redistributed or expropriated between 1930 and 2008.85 Crucially, this change has not had appreciable impact on levels of inequality;^[1566] results in Africa are similar.^[1567] The English case suggests that it may be helpful to rethink the necessity of land redistribution for political and economic development; at least, the implications of England’s historical land regime have not been fully thought through.

After all, land inequality in Latin America was lower than that observed in Britain, either historically or even today: even half a century ago, 90 percent of the land in Latin America was controlled by 10 percent of the population, but in 1873 all land and homes in Britain were in the hands of

3.6 percent of the population.^[1568] Yet England led both the Agricultural and the Industrial Revolutions and was the most evolved constitutional regime, and the latter already before agriculture ceased to be the most important economic resource. The aristocracy remained dominant into the modern period not simply because of land distribution but because the crown weakened as conditionality receded and the privatization of state-society relations suggested above grew, as argued above. What this account has shown instead is that a certain type of inequality is necessary for more efficient outcomes: only when power is skewed in favor of the state can actors be incentivized to support the creation of a representative institutional structure (with the economic effects that flow from this). Adam Smith famously noted that inequality in the acquisition of property made government necessary, a theme recently revived.^[1569] The claim here is that government power shapes the effects of this inequality.

Rather than the distribution of land, this account has highlighted the type of property rights as crucial, whether conditional or not. Neo-institutional theory has reoriented social science towards property rights but has focused on security as the trait that optimized outcomes instead. As noted earlier, historians have questioned any radical change in security after the posited watershed of 1688, but security remains an intuitively important concept.^[1570] This is enhanced by a widespread understanding of property rights as rights that “individuals appropriate over their own labor and the goods and services they possess.”^[1571] The main threat, according to this view, both historically and empirically, has been state predation.^[1572]

This conception of “absolute” rights over things, however, goes against the standard legal definition of rights as relations between people, not people and things: “a thing cannot bring or defend a lawsuit.”^[1573] The relational understanding suggests that rights over property imply distribu­tional dynamics,^[1574] namely “bundles of rights” between individuals that have to be defined through some socially negotiated process.⁹⁵ The rights of one actor or group have to be protected from encroachment from other actors - the enforcing actor is thus crucial. When the English crown could limit its most powerful subjects from predating on their tenants in the early period, England’s biggest constitutional gains transpired. The crown could do so because it could enforce its conditional relations with those power­holders. It was the conditional insecurity of property rights that had institu­tional consequences. When royal power to sustain this regime declined in the following centuries, Parliament’s capacity to shape political outcomes backslided. The next stage of conditionality, after 1660, was predicated on commerce and debt as noted, as well as strong extractive powers. Today, conditionality, as applied by international organizations, is a controversial concept, but most critiques focus on the substance of the conditions rather than the principle of dependence per se.⁹6 This account supports its importance for conditions of emergence.

Finally, the argument may also illuminate the broader problem of political order. In a classic of political science, Samuel Huntington attrib­uted political instability in modernizing societies to mass political partici­pation under conditions of low institutionalization.^{[1575] [1576]} The implied but troubling solution was to restrict political participation and justify authoritarian governance to strengthen institutions.⁹⁸ The implication of this account is decidedly different: the problem is not disruptive polit­ical participation or low institutionalization per se. These are symptoms of inadequate control over the greatest power-holders - it is the latter that should be the prime target. The less power-holders can be compelled to serve the public good, the less efficient the institutionalization, and the more reason for political participation to be aimed against the regime, thus causing political instability - that is what the democratic contract entails. Liberal political order depends on compelling the powerful to comply with political obligation, especially relating to justice. Obligation - not rights nor cost-benefit calculations nor bargaining over taxation - first propelled the formation of representative institutions in the West, which then allowed rights to become institutionalized. And many of these rights were responses to institutionalized unfairness (as we have seen with regards to primogeniture, for instance).

The English philosopher Francis Bacon pointed out in 1617 that part of what made England’s judicial system distinct was that the institution of Justices of the Peace “knits noblemen and gentlemen together, and in no place else but here in England are noblemen and gentlemen incorporated: for abroad in other countries noblemen meddle not with any parcel of justice but in martial affairs: matter of justice, that belongs to the gown­men; and this is it that makes those noblemen the more ignorant and the more oppressors: but here amongst us they are incorporated with those that execute justice, and so being warriors are likewise made instruments of peace; and that makes them truly noble.”⁹⁹ Though realities were hardly as noble, the point here is that nobles had been compelled to such service in common with “lower” orders. This outcome was not a spon­taneous one; it was the result of power “properly deployed,” as was the liberal constitutional order it generated.¹⁰⁰