those emergencies meant there was little likelihood it would invoke the specter of national emergency to expropriate money from the wealthy through extortionate taxes or forced loans. For wealthy landowners and businessmen, healthy government finances meant greater predictability about continued moderate taxation. This gave them the confidence to make larger fixed investments in canals, roads, and eventually railroads that paved England’s path to wealth, and indeed the Industrial Revolution.
Sounder government finances also meant the government no longer had to do special deals with a few favored individuals or companies to raise money. It could stay at arm’s length, become more bureaucratic in the sense of working according to a set of transparent rules, and thus create a level playing field for all its citizens. This also meant the possibility of a less-constrained, freer, and more arm’s-length market. And the drumbeat for that, as we will see in the next chapter, started increasing.
What Did the Glorious Revolution Do?
As economic historians Douglass North and Barry Weingast argue, the Glorious Revolution tethered the monarchy more effectively through Parliamentary and judicial oversight so that its freedom to go in inappropriate directions was more limited.36 What was not spelled out in any detail is what would happen if the tether was cut—for example, if some monarch turned his standing army against Parliament in violation of the unwritten constitution. This is where the previous history was relevant. Parliament had demonstrated through the Civil War, and by deposing James II in the Glorious Revolution, its ability to come together to defend its rights. Its power to have its way when provoked is what gave teeth to the Declaration of Rights and subsequent reforms.37
This point sometimes gets lost in the debate about the role of institutions in development. There is a strong correlation between the existence of “good” institutions in a country and its economic growth and prosperity, so much so that one of the more influential recent papers on the subject is titled triumphantly, “Institutions Rule.”38 While institutions matter, they rest on a bedrock of an underlying distribution of power among the constituencies in a country, which may have its sources largely elsewhere. For instance, the independent power of the gentry came from their commercial aptitude, their wealth, and their closeness to their tenants, who looked to them for sound management and good livelihoods. Unlike the landed magnates, no member of the gentry was extremely powerful on their own, hence they needed transparent rules and law to protect them, as well as a body like the House of Commons to help them coordinate their actions. At the same time, their numbers meant they could not be expropriated with the stroke of a pen or collectively accused of treason. The mistake when institutions function well is to believe that they would function similarly well elsewhere, ignoring the possibly different underlying distribution of power. The United States Constitution, when adopted by Liberia, turned out to be just a piece of paper, with none of the effective checks and balances that fill the Federalist Papers and characterize how the United States works.39
While we know a fair amount about the kinds of institutions that exist in advanced states, there has been far less study of how to create the right distribution of power. Simply distributing property does not help, because what is given can be taken back. As we will see again and again in this book, the existence of vibrant competitive markets that allow productive and independent owners to emerge is a large part of the answer—markets help constrain the state and protect property as part of the balance. As our discussion of England’s emergence as a constitutionally limited state suggests, getting the right distribution of power also involves much luck. Perhaps this is why nation-building exercises in Libya and Afghanistan have largely proved failures so far.
OTHER COUNTRIES
The transformation from feudal vassal to commercial tenant, and the resulting shift in power from the landed magnate to the more numerous and dispersed gentry, did not take place everywhere, and rarely in the same way. Nevertheless, while every modern liberal democracy had its own idiosyncratic path toward constitutionally limited government, there were generalizable elements from England’s experience. The key development, as argued in this chapter, was the transfer of large unproductive land holdings from the monasteries and aristocrats into the hands of the more commercially minded gentry. In the process of dispersing economic and political power away from the church and the aristocracy, a new independent constituency arose that benefited from a more open rule-based system.
In the United States in the early nineteenth century, settlers poured into the newly surveyed and auctioned lands in the West. Land was widely owned, and those who could not make a go of it sold quickly to those who could, so it was also productively held. The exception was the South, where both corruption and climate conspired to create large, concentrated plantations run on the backs of slave labor.40 Studies show wider distribution of land, especially when also efficient, helped improve local governance. Rodney Ramcharan of the University of Southern California finds that US counties where there were large farms and concentrated land holdings (because of the kind of crops favored by rainfall patterns) tended to have less spending on education, a key measure of the democratic responsiveness of the government to public need.41 In a joint study, Rodney and I found that such counties had far fewer banks per capita in the early twentieth century, a measure of broad-based economic opportunity.42 We traced such differences to the nature of governance in those areas. Therefore, even within a developed large country not so long ago, land distribution affected local governance, and thence economic opportunities.
As economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff have argued, there is a more general pattern here. For example, countries in Latin America that started out with more plantation-based agriculture, and thus large concentrated land holdings, tend to have less broad-based political and social institutions today.43 The lesson is not simply that land holdings concentrated among the few are bad for democracy—a point made forcibly by political sociologist Barrington Moore—but that substantial wealth held by a few with close ties to government reduces the possibility of the state working for the many. Such lessons apply even today. It is one reason we should be concerned about the rise of megacorporations dependent on intellectual property, as I will argue later in the book.
Market forces also do not always work to weaken the politically powerful. The precise circumstances matter. As Barrington Moore argues, the boom in prices as well as the expanding market for grain exports in the sixteenth century in northeast Germany had the effect of strengthening, not weakening, the power of the landed nobility.44 With labor scarce, the landed nobility could have moved to paying peasants market wages, and commuting feudal obligations. Instead, by common arrangement, they increased the labor obligations of the peasants, eliminated their ability to sell or bequeath property, and reduced their ability to marry, or even move, off the manorial estate.
What was different in northeast Germany (and Eastern Europe more generally) from England was that the peasant did not have much market choice himself. Central authority was weak and there were no royal courts that might have protected his rights against the nobility. Moreover, even though it was a common feudal practice that a serf who escaped the manor and lived in a town for a year and one day became free, towns had declined in size and prosperity in northeast Germany, and there were not enough of them to hide him or give him a livelihood, unlike in more urbanized England. In Poland, the land market was suppressed because of laws that prevented ownership from passing outside nobility.45 As a result, rich businessmen, lawyers, and merchants could not buy land, put it to more efficient use, and put pressure on feudal arrangements. With few checks on the power of the landed nobility, market pressures increased peasant oppression and feudal obligations rather than diminishing them. Even today, perhaps because it stayed feudal much longer, much of northeast Germany is less prosperous than southern Germany.
CONCLUSION
The absolute monarchy symbolized by the Tudors and attempted by the Stuarts gave way to a state that obtained more capabilities after giving up its power to be arbitrary. Such a state enjoyed broader legitimacy among the propertied because of the widespread belief that it would continue to adhere to a social contract with its wealthier citizens and investors.
