Princes are more powerful and more dreaded by their enemies, when they undertake anything with the consent of their subjects.
Philippe de Commines[691]
Rulers are often assumed to be predatory and to resist conceding rights to their subjects, but contemporaries understood well the dividends of consent.[692] The question, rather, was which rulers could secure this consent rather than face a fragmented polity.
The key factor, I have argued, was relative power over the most powerful subjects, in most cases the nobility. It is widely assumed, however, that extraction in England was low in the early period;[693] even some historians assume that the nobility was lowly taxed. Major econometric studies have confirmed England’s extractive advantage compared to France after 1660, but earlier ones begin around 1500 when English revenues were lower - thus supporting the intuition that its fiscal precocity was endogenous to the increasing powers of Parliament after the seventeenth century.Another prominent mechanism invoked to explain the interaction of fiscal politics and representation involves debt. It echoes a story in Plutarch’s Lives, that of Eumenes, a Macedonian general who neutralized his main enemies by borrowing money from them, forcing them to “forbear all violence to him for fear of losing their own money.”[694] This logic illustrates a paradox: borrowing vests the lender in the survival of the debtor. This applies, for instance, to the seventeenth century, when English elites developed critical fiscal ties to the state, as analyzed by sociologist Bruce Carruthers.5 Public debt is also the centerpiece of Stasavage’s account of public institutions and policy change: when representative institutions included state creditors, as in both Italian city-states and early modern England, they were more likely to consolidate and enable economic growth.[695] But these accounts either focus on the period after 1688 or fail to account for the medieval English case. They therefore don’t illuminate the question of parliamentary origins.
In this chapter I show that even before Parliament emerged, English extractive capacity far exceeded that of France, not just in fiscal but in military terms as well. I first show that the Eumenes paradox was operative in this early period, only it did not involve merchants but the nobility. It is not commercial wealth per se that mattered but extraction from the most powerful actors, those integrated in hierarchies of dependence throughout the polity.[696] Accordingly, I show the heavy burdens of the English nobility, by examining noble debt and loans to the crown, as well as other measures of noble fiscal ties to the crown. I then show how in France noble taxation was low; in fact, the ruler’s capacity to extract from nobles co-varied with the frequency of the Estates-General. In the final section, I offer comparative data that, unlike previous estimates, trace England’s military and fiscal extractive capacity to the period of institutional origins and control for its increasing wealth.
6.1