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Boucoyannis Deborah. Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments. Cambridge University Press,2021. — 400 p.. 2021

How did representative institutions become the central organs of governance in Western Europe? What enabled this distinctive form of political organization and collective action that has proved so durable and influential? The answer has typically been sought either in the realm of ideas, in the Western tradition of individual rights, or in material change, especially the complex interaction of war, taxes, and economic growth. Common to these strands is the belief that representation resulted from weak ruling powers needing to concede rights to powerful social groups. Boucoyannis argues instead that representative institutions were a product of state strength, specifically the capacity to deliver justice across social groups. Enduring and inclusive representative parliaments formed when rulers could exercise power over the most powerful actors in the land and compel them to serve and, especially, to tax them. The language of rights deemed distinctive to the West emerged in response to more effectively imposed collective obligations, especially on those with most power.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Part I The Origins OfRepresentative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts

Introduction: From Roving to Stationary Judges

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

The Inverse Logic OfRepresentative Origins

England: Representative Emergence and the Myth of State Weakness

Case Selection and Plan of the Book

A Theory OfInstitutional Emergence: Regularity, Functional Layering, and the Origins of Parliament

“Representation,” the historian Wim Blockmans wrote, “appears whenever a government finds itself forced by the concentration of power in the hands of its subjects to share power with them through institutionalized consultation.”[100]

Two Key Concepts

The Theoretical Landscape: Alternative Theories and their Limitations

Solutions to the Problem of Regularity: Functional Layering and Institutional Fusion

Explaining Functional Layering and Institutional Fusion: The Role of Power

Why did functional layering occur in the English Parliament but not the French Parlement?

Social Causes OfInstitutional Variation: Power over the Most Powerful

Part II The Origins of Representative Practice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation Taxation and Representative Practice: Bargaining vs. Compellence

How does an institution expand to provide greater participation in central governance and decision-making to broader sections of the population, whilst still compelling the most powerful actors in the realm?

The Compellence Model OfRepresentation and its Historical Foundations: Obligation before Right

Obligation, Taxation, and Representation: The English Historical Record

Representative Practice Explained, 1227-1307: Taxes and the Commons

Variations in Representative Practice: “Absolutist” France and Castile

“The division of classes was the crime of the old monarchy, and later became its excuse.”[551]

Leon-Castile: From Feudal Centralization and Constitutionalism to Noble Immunity, Urban Dominance, and Absolutism

6 No Taxation of Elites, No Representative Institutions

Princes are more powerful and more dreaded by their enemies, when they undertake anything with the consent of their subjects.

Taxation of the Rich, the Eumenes Paradox, and the Origins of Representative Government

France: Noble Military Service, Taxation, and Estates-General

Comparative Extractive Capacity of England and France

Part III Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation Courts, Institutions, and Cities: Low Countries and Italy

So far, the account has explained fiscal dynamics in terms of ruler power and concerns about justice.

The Differences between City-States and Representative Regimes: Selectorate and Incentives

Similarities: Common Origins in Central Power and Justice

Courts, Institutions, and Territory: Catalonia

Another major case combining commercial expansion and a strong representative tradition was medieval Catalonia.

Frequency of Meetings

Concentration of Land, Conditionality, and the Power of the Count-Prince

Pacification, Judicial Integration, and Ruler Power

Institutional Fusion at the Corts with Limited Territorial Anchoring

Parliament, Noble Fiscal Obligations, and Taxation

Municipal Organization Endogenous to Comital Strength

The Endogeneity of Trade: The EnglishWool Trade and the Castilian Mesta

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.

Capital Mobility, the English Wool Trade, and the Links to Representation

The Castilian Mesta and the Inefficiencies of Political Weakness

Part IV Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights

Power, Land, and Second-Best Constitutionalism: Central and Northern Europe

England may have developed a robust parliament, but it did not display radical democratic practices - rulers, for instance, were never elected. Instead, it was in central-northern Europe, in Hungary, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, Sweden, even Russia that elections of rulers were held.

Hungary and Poland

Sweden and Denmark

The Holy Roman Empire

Conditional Land Law, Property Rights and “Sultanism”: Premodern English and Ottoman Land Regimes

Conditionality of landholding has emerged as central to representative emergence across the cases examined in this book so far, from England to Hungary and Poland.

Ottoman and English Property Rights: Conditionality and Power

Common Responses to Ruler Control of Land: Uses and Vakifs

Land, Tenure, and Assemblies: Russia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Russia expanded greatly from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, especially under Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1547-84). His rule encapsulates Russia’s image as a “despotic,” tyrannical regime, displaying notorious brutality.

Conditional Land Rights and Second-Best Constitutionalism

Indicators of Ruler Weakness

Consequences of Ruler Weakness: Institutional Fragmentation

Part V Why Representation in the West: Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization

Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice: England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire

Representative outcomes in East and West differed and previous chapters considered possible explanations.

The Kernel OfRepresentative Practice: Legal Representatives in the Ottoman Empire and Russia

Bottom-Up Incentives and Collective Action: Petitions for Justice

Collective Responsibility and Corporate Bodies

Conclusion

This book has aimed to show that justice rather than taxes was at the foundation of representative governance.

The NormativeZEmpirical Inversion

Whence State Power?

Passages to Modernity

Books and textbooks on the discipline History of state and law:

- History of state and law - Roman law -

- Advocacy - Agricultural law - History of the state and law - Theory of state and law -

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