“Common pleas shall not follow our court but shall be held in some certain place.”[1]

This was the seventeenth out of the sixty-three conditions that the barons imposed on the king of England in Magna Carta in 1215. Until then, barons seeking to settle disputes under royal jurisdiction, even disputes in which the king was not a party, often had to search for him around the realm.

Finding the king could be a wild chase: even after Parliament was fully formed in the 1290s, for instance, Edward I visited more than 1,300 English locations and several Continental ones over a seventeen-year period, spending fewer than four days on average in each (see frontispiece).^[2] The image popularized by the economist Mancur Olson of the ruler as “roving bandit” extorting goods and services from the population^[3] was not wrong: ruler visits were dreaded across Europe for the destruction they often caused.^[4] English kings’ retinues accidentally burned down houses; Edward I traveled with lions that killed working animals in Gascony, outraging the locals. Rulers and their retinues (which often numbered in the dozens or hundreds) forced local communities to subsidize these visits with foodstuffs and services. This practice, known as purveyance, was a heavy burden: over three weeks in the 1280s, the Flemish count required 10,600 herrings.⁵

But these “visits” were not lawless - Edward I paid compensation for the animals killed, for instance - nor was their purpose merely extractive.⁶ Most importantly, these roving kings dispensed justice. In this book, I argue that this eager and often desperate demand for justice was funda­mental for the development of the parliaments, or polity-wide institutions of representation, that emerged in medieval Europe. Moreover, this demand was tied to the king’s status as “lord of all the tenants in the realm”; premodern land was held from rulers, as it technically does in Britain to this day.^[5]

The role of justice in early institutions of governance has long been studied by historians, with three major accounts, Thomas Bisson’s com­parative study of the origins of European government, John Maddicott’s account of the English Parliament, and Michel Hebert’s overview of Western medieval parliaments, recently reviving interest.^[6] Yet the topic has been generally neglected in social scientific accounts of the emergence of representative institutions and of state-building in general.

Like the demands for justice, representation was pervasive in Western Europe since the medieval period at all levels. Misguidedly, a robust parliamentary tradition is today associated historically only with a small number of cases - England and the Netherlands especially - with most European cases developing some form of “absolutism,” where rulers are deemed not to have been constrained by any institutions or even laws. Yet assemblies congregated in villages, towns, counties, or principalities throughout Europe.^[10] They emerged in Italian city-states, the semi- autonomous cities of the Low Countries and the towns of France and Castile, in Russia, throughout the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Sweden, and beyond. So, although classic narratives pit constitutional regimes against absolutist ones, localized representative practices survived even within absolutist regimes like France or Spain, where representation was eventually either suppressed or weakened by the eighteenth century.

Only in some cases, however, did parliaments serve as the central organ of governance at the polity level.^[11] This outcome was rare because it involved integrating extensive territories and diverse populations both inclusively and effectively under a stable center.

To explain such variation in representative practice, most scholarship has drawn on Cicero’s observation that money, especially taxation, is the sinews of war.^[13] In social science, taxation is typically related to represen­tative origins through a balancing logic, especially since the pivotal works of economist Joseph Schumpeter and, more recently, political scientist Margaret Levi:^[14] war-mongering rulers secured taxation from social groups endowed with new wealth and thus with greater bargaining power in exchange for rights. As Chapter 2 will discuss, this logic has been deployed across many works, from geopolitical accounts^[15] to com­parative history and sociology.^{[16] [17]} Historians too have emphasized the bargaining dynamic over taxes, as this dynamic is omnipresent in the 19 sources.

Few have thus challenged the centrality of money in state-building, despite Machiavelli’s early doubts.^[18] The concurrent rise of trade and representation after the 1100s has solidified this connection. However, the role of taxation in the emergence of representative institutions remains underspecified. For one thing, the hypothesis assumes that rep­resentative origins depend on rulers becoming constrained through the collective action of social actors. Attributing collective action simply to expected gains in rights, however, implies a functionalism that weakens the theory’s explanatory power. The need to create institutions that serve group interests does not necessarily translate into an ability to do so.

As we will see, views on which social group was critical varied, with most theories emphasizing urban ones. But all groups were composed of individuals typically divided by conflicts of interest or by tendencies to free-ride. War is often assumed to override such divisions, by mobilizing citizens around a “public good.”^[19] As economic historians Gennaioli and Voth noted, however, in the medieval period wars were actually a “sport of kings”^[20] - usually they pursued the personal inheritance or interests of rulers.^[21] Ironically, states involved in more defensive wars early on, such as France, developed weaker institutions. Further, scholars of the devel­oping world, such as Miguel Centeno in his sociological analysis of Latin American state-building, have long noted that the posited connection between war and state-building has rarely been replicated outside the West.^[22] This war-based logic also cannot explain why groups would request collective rights rather than individual ones or rents, as observed both historically and in the modern world.^[23]

Some influential theories assume more specifically that rulers bar­gained with holders of mobile capital, who had the capacity to “exit” the state and remove their capital and could thus obtain concessions instead.^[24] If so, however, how did regimes incorporate broader segments of the population, especially the countryside? This is a necessary trait for a regime to become inclusive - what I call territorial anchoring. As we will see, French and Castilian institutions did not include the countryside, only the towns. But in both cases, polity-wide representation faltered. This pattern, observed in further cases, has not been addressed.

Another key institutional feature remains unexplained in current the­ories: regularity.^[25] It is not enough to discern the demand for consent; the question is why would subjects demand an institution to regularize their consent.

Further concerns about the bargaining logic are raised when one looks beyond Western Europe. The regimes of premodern Russia, China, and the Ottoman Empire are commonly described as absolutist or even sul- tanic, so one might conclude that war-induced bargaining was not involved in state-society relations. Yet war was endemic: as economic historian Philip Hoffman noted, early modern China was at war as often as England and France, over 50 percent of the time.^[27] Military technology was as developed in the Ottoman Empire and China before the 1600s as it was in the West, perhaps more so.^[28] Nor was Western economic growth exceptional: some Chinese regions matched European ones before 1700.^[29] As we will see, bargaining on taxes was equally common across regions. And councils even elected Mongol leaders from the thirteenth century.^[30] Representative assemblies conveying local preferences to the political center are identified with the West, however.^[31] Why that is so remains an important puzzle.

Understanding the preconditions of representative governance is not a remote historical concern.

Representative origins finally illuminate an enduring theoretical con­cern in social science: how to constrain power.^[36] Political scientist Barry Weingast articulated the “fundamental political dilemma” as a conundrum: “A government strong enough to protect property rights and enforce contracts is also strong enough to confiscate the wealth of its citizens.”^[37] This dilemma afflicts both economics and politics and is resolved when actors solve their collective action problem to restrain the ruler. Variation in this capacity even explains why premodern growth rates diverged, according to economists Acemoglu and Robinson.^[38] The paradigmatic case, especially since North and Weingast’s work, has been England and the contractual equilibrium produced by the seventeenth-century Glorious Revolution,^[39] though the logic has broad empirical relevance.⁴⁴

But how social actors collectively constrained rulers remains unclear. For Olson, collective action was only possible when selective incentives or force were present, by rulers (“bandits”) who became stationary and realized that encouraging growth would maximize their revenue, thus limiting “bandit” behavior.⁴⁵ However, this approach does not resolve Weingast’s “political dilemma”: if the bandit is powerful enough to encourage growth and extract from the population, he is still powerful enough to confiscate their wealth - this is the insight of the predatory theory of rule.⁴⁶ As political scientists Haber, Maurer, and Razo have argued, “the despot’s commitment to protect property rights is purely volitional” and thus has no external constraint.⁴⁷

To answer these concerns, this book makes some observations that depart from much of the conventional wisdom. First, it shows that justice was the critical factor shaping representative emergence. Taxation does not suffice to explain outcomes and neither does its proximate cause, war, as both were relatively irregular initially. Only when the irregular pressures of taxation were made to overlap institutionally with regular judicial incentives did representative institutions emerge as central organs of governance. Second, this regularity and overlap occurred not where rulers were weak or where they were balanced by powerful social groups, but where they were more powerful, in particular where they controlled most of the land in their territory and could grant it to subjects conditionally on the perform­ance of obligations. Third, the most critical step for polity-wide institutions was not the inclusion of urban, mercantile classes, as most accounts have it, but the compellence⁴8 of the nobility. It was when rulers could exercise power over the most powerful that they could effectively sustain polity­wide institutions. Fourth, the book argues that what distinguished the West and England in particular was not stronger individual, especially property, rights but, initially, the opposite: English rulers imposed the same collective obligations across communities and social orders throughout the polity and harnessed them to institutional structures at the center so effectively that demands for rights were the response. The empirical reality was one of conditionality and dependence on royal authority, which was endogen­ously transformed over time. This means, finally, that the historical record requires reconceptualizing representation as originally an obligation before it became a right.

Representative origins, in other words, invert the various logics widely assumed to explain representation. The following section examines some ways in which this occurs and which show that ruler strength was instead crucial. This revision clashes with the assumption that the prototypical constitutional state, England, was weak; I question this in the second section. A preview of the theory follows, and the chapter concludes by explaining the case selection and methodological approach.

1.1