Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

Conflict over political institutions continued, and the power of the monarchy was further constrained by the first elected Parliament in 1265. Unlike the Plebeian Assembly in Rome or the elected legislatures of today, its members had originally been feudal nobles, and subsequently were knights and the wealthiest aristocrats of the nation. Despite consisting of elites, the English Parliament developed two distinguishing characteristics. First, it represented not only elites closely allied to the king but also a broad set of interests, including minor aristocrats involved in different walks of life, such as commerce and industry, and later the “gentry,” a new class of commercial and upwardly mobile farmers. Thus the Parliament empowered a quite broad section of society—especially by the standards of the time. Second, and largely as a result of the first characteristic, many members of Parliament were consistently opposed to the monarchy’s attempts to increase its power and would become the mainstay of those fighting against the monarchy in the English Civil War and then in the Glorious Revolution.

The Magna Carta and the first elected Parliament notwithstanding, political conflict continued over the powers of the monarchy and who was to be king. This intra-elite conflict ended with the War of the Roses, a long duel between the Houses of Lancaster and York, two families with contenders to be king. The winners were the Lancastrians, whose candidate for king, Henry Tudor, became Henry VII in 1485.

Two other interrelated processes took place. The first was increasing political centralization, put into motion by the Tudors. After 1485 Henry VII disarmed the aristocracy, in effect demilitarizing them and thereby massively expanding the power of the central state. His son, Henry VIII, then implemented through his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, a revolution in government. In the 1530s, Cromwell introduced a nascent bureaucratic state. Instead of the government being just the private household of the king, it could become a separate set of enduring institutions. This was complemented by Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church and the “Dissolution of the Monasteries,” in which Henry expropriated all the Church lands. The removal of the power of the Church was part of making the state more centralized. This centralization of state institutions meant that for the first time, inclusive political institutions became possible. This process initiated by Henry VII and Henry VIII not only centralized state institutions but also increased the demand for broader-based political representation. The process of political centralization can actually lead to a form of absolutism, as the king and his associates can crush other powerful groups in society. This is indeed one of the reasons why there will be opposition against state centralization, as we saw in chapter 3. However, in opposition to this force, the centralization of state institutions can also mobilize demand for a nascent form of pluralism, as it did in Tudor England. When the barons and local elites recognize that political power will be increasingly more centralized and that this process is hard to stop, they will make demands to have a say in how this centralized power is used. In England during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this meant greater efforts by these groups to have Parliament as a counterweight against the Crown and to partially control the way the state functioned. Thus the Tudor project not only initiated political centralization, one pillar of inclusive institutions, but also indirectly contributed to pluralism, the other pillar of inclusive institutions.

These developments in political institutions took place in the context of other major changes in the nature of society. Particularly significant was the widening of political conflict which was broadening the set of groups with the ability to make demands on the monarchy and the political elites. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (this page) was pivotal, after which the English elite were rocked by a long sequence of popular insurrections. Political power was being redistributed not simply from the king to the lords, but also from the elite to the people. These changes, together with the increasing constraints on the king’s power, made the emergence of a broad coalition opposed to absolutism possible and thus laid the foundations for pluralistic political institutions.

Though contested, the political and economic institutions the Tudors inherited and sustained were clearly extractive. In 1603 Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter who had acceded to the throne of England in 1553, died without children, and the Tudors were replaced by the Stuart dynasty. The first Stuart king, James I, inherited not only the institutions but the conflicts over them. He desired to be an absolutist ruler. Though the state had become more centralized and social change was redistributing power in society, political institutions were not yet pluralistic. In the economy, extractive institutions manifested themselves not just in the opposition to Lee’s invention, but in the form of monopolies, monopolies, and more monopolies. In 1601 a list of these was read out in Parliament, with one member ironically asking, “Is not bread there?” By 1621 there were seven hundred of them. As the English historian Christopher Hill put it, a man lived

in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows … of monopoly glass; heated by monopoly coal (in Ireland monopoly timber), burning in a grate made of monopoly iron … He washed himself in monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly leather, monopoly gold thread … His clothes were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins. They were dyed with monopoly dyes. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters. His food was seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, monopoly vinegar … He wrote with monopoly pens, on monopoly writing paper; read (through monopoly spectacles, by the light of monopoly candles) monopoly printed books.

These monopolies, and many more, gave individuals or groups the sole right to control the production of many goods. They impeded the type of allocation of talent, which is so crucial to economic prosperity.

Both James I and his son and successor Charles I aspired to strengthen the monarchy, reduce the influence of Parliament, and establish absolutist institutions similar to those being constructed in Spain and France to further their and the elite’s control of the economy, making institutions more extractive. The conflict between James I and Parliament came to a head in the 1620s. Central in this conflict was the control of trade both overseas and within the British Isles. The Crown’s ability to grant monopolies was a key source of revenue for the state, and was used frequently as a way of granting exclusive rights to supporters of the king. Not surprisingly, this extractive institution blocking entry and inhibiting the functioning of the market was also highly damaging to economic activity and to the interests of many members of Parliament. In 1623 Parliament scored a notable victory by managing to pass the Statute of Monopolies, which prohibited James I from creating new domestic monopolies. He would still be able to grant monopolies on international trade, however, since the authority of Parliament did not extend to international affairs. Existing monopolies, international or otherwise, stood untouched.

Parliament did not sit regularly and had to be called into session by the king. The convention that emerged after the Magna Carta was that the king was required to convene Parliament to get assent for new taxes. Charles I came to the throne in 1625, declined to call Parliament after 1629, and intensified James I’s efforts to build a more solidly absolutist regime. He induced forced loans, meaning that people had to “lend” him money, and he unilaterally changed the terms of loans and refused to repay his debts. He created and sold monopolies in the one dimension that the Statute of Monopolies had left to him: overseas trading ventures. He also undermined the independence of the judiciary and attempted to intervene to influence the outcome of legal cases. He levied many fines and charges, the most contentious of which was “ship money”—in 1634 taxing the coastal counties to pay for the support of the Royal Navy and, in 1635, extending the levy to the inland counties. Ship money was levied each year until 1640.