The widely posited links between the urban belt of Europe, trade, and representative institutions are not supported by either the Italian citystates, the cities of the Low Countries, or Catalonia, previous chapters have argued.
Historical legacies were crucial in those cases, as the institutions formed either did not include broad sections of the population or failed to integrate localities in the legislative process (which also affected their survival).
Nonetheless, the hypothesis is an intuitive one, especially given the commercial character of the main case that fulfilled all those conditions, England, so it merits further scrutiny. Trade was central to the English economy and to Parliament since the 1300s: even today, the Lord Chancellor sits on a “Woolsack” dating from the time of Edward III (1327-77), symbolizing the fount of English wealth.[989] Exports to Europe generated remarkable revenue.[990] The wool trade was also crucial for Douglass North’s neo-institutionalist account of the contrasting impact of trade, exemplified positively through England and negatively through Castile.[991]Parsing out the logic that connects trade and representation requires scrutinizing the mechanisms that might transform commercial activity into political outcomes. The main current hypotheses revolve around the dynamics of mobile capital and bargaining, which draw on a thriving literature in modern political economy. As discussed in the opening chapters, mobile capital is more commonly identified with tradegenerated wealth, which is not tied to land and is therefore amenable to “exit.”[992] As mobile wealth is harder to monitor, it is assumed to endow actors with greater bargaining power to demand representation and more constitutional governance.
This dynamic further entails some specific hypotheses that require more thorough examination. One of these has already been rejected by historians. It used to be thought that as trade-generated wealth elicits indirect taxation, which was assumed to require a small bureaucracy, it obviated the rise of a coercive state that could suppress rights.
Conversely, agricultural systems necessitated direct taxation; this required greater use of coercion, which was more congruent with absolutism - a hypothesis that seemed to be corroborated by French use of direct taxation.[993] John Brewer’s classic study of eighteenth-century England refuted the link between indirect taxation and a small bureaucracy.[994] This, however, does not settle the question of how both mobile capital and indirect taxation impact the origins of representation.I address this question in the first section that examines two additional assumptions about the English case: that actors with bargaining powers will request constitutional gains in return, which implies that mercantile interests align with those of the public, and that such actors will be able to act collectively to secure their goals. The second section considers the case of Castile, which has often been invoked to exemplify a “strong” crown that suppresses political rights and economic growth. Following the conclusions of Chapter 5, I show how existing conditions were contrary to those assumed and how the suboptimal effects of trade flowed from state weakness. Echoing Acemoglu and Robinson, I show how “the differences in the organization of trade... reflected the different political institutions of these countries.”[995] The analysis further undercuts hypotheses that reduce representative emergence to commercial dynamics.
9.1