Nonetheless, there is obviously a grain of truth in the view of Prussia as an authoritarian state in the mid-18th century. Frederick the Great was a notorious micromanager. State monopolies were created for goods such as tobacco, coffee, and salt. Frederick anticipated Hamilton’s and List’s notion of infant industries, subsidizing the silk industry in Prussia and linen production in Silesia.

All of this resulted in much waste, goods of inferior quality, and higher prices for consumers.

I’ve always suspected that it was Frederick who Adam Smith had in mind when he critiqued “the man of system” in the Theory of Moral Sentiments who is “wise in his own conceit” and imagines “that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board”.

Count Mirabeau saw Prussia as a classic example of how wasteful state direction of the economy could be:

“The King of Prussia recently gave six thousand écus for the establishment of a watch factory at Friedrichswalde. Such a small project was not worthy of this gift. It is easy to foresee that if this factory is not continually fed with further benefits, it will not sustain itself. Of all useless accoutrements, there is none more useless than a bad watch” (quoted in Clark, 2006, p. 179).

I’m not aware of cliometric research on this topic but from Clark and other sources it seems that some of Frederick’s investments paid off but most did not. Nor is there any accounting of the opportunity cost of these policies.

Nonetheless, as Noel Johnson and I emphasized in several papers (here, here, and here), despite its waste and inefficiencies mercantilism could pave the way for the expansion of markets because mercantilist policies often swept aside prior feudal laws and regulations which impeded the development of internal markets.

This fits Clark’s assessment of economic development in Prussia. He quotes the German historical school economist Gustav Schmoller as arguing that the mercantilist regime of Frederick the Great “had to fall in order that the seeds it had sown could bloom under the sun of industrial liberalism” (Clark, 2006, p. 179).

We are often told of the disagreements between the German historical school and the Austrian tradition in economics. It is therefore interesting that Schmoller’s position is also F.A. Hayek’s position in his The Constitution of Liberty. This is intriguing given that many classical liberals were initially wary of the concept of state capacity.

Here is what Hayek has to say about state development in Prussia:

“In view of the reputation which Prussia acquired in the nineteenth century, it may surprise the reader to learn that the beginning of the German movement for a government of law is to be found in that country. In some respects, however, the rule of enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century had been surprisingly modern there—indeed, one might say almost liberal, so far as legal and administrative principles were concerned. It was by no means a meaningless assertion when Frederick II described himself as the first servant of the state” (Hayek, 1960, p. 196).

Hayek specifically goes on to consider Frederick II’s legal code of 1751 which sought to both condense and simplify existing laws.

We saw in the previous episode that Frederick—despite his often arbitrary and autocratic behavior—acquired in popular legend a reputation of being constrained by law. Here is what Hayek has to say about developments in late 18th-century Prussia:

“The most distinctive contribution of eighteenth-century Prussia to the realization of the rule of law lay, however, in the field of the control of public administration. While in France the literal application of the ideal of the separation of powers had led to an exemption of administrative action from judicial control, the Prussian development proceeded in the opposite direction. The guiding ideal which profoundly affected the liberal movement of the nineteenth century was that all exercise of administrative power over the person or property of the citizen should be made subject to judicial review” (p. 198).

Overall, and due largely to the desire to build a stronger and more effective state apparatus, the Prussian state moved in the direction of ever more general statements of the rule of law.

Incidentally, a paper I just accepted for publication in Explorations in Economic History finds evidence consistent with this. The authors show that Frederick’s legal reforms increased the representation of women in the second-highest appellate court.

Identity Rules and General Rules

One way to think about the types of legal reforms made by Frederick II and his successors is through the lens of identity rules versus general rules. This is the framework that structures my book with Noel Johnson, Persecution and Toleration.

All societies rely on rules to govern behavior and ensure social order. But rules are expensive. They require enforcement and interpretation. As James C. Scott emphasized, most premodern states lacked the ability to comprehend the societies they sought to rule. Given this lack of legibility, attempts to construct fully general legal systems were always doomed to failure. The alternative most states fell back on was rule via identity rules.

Identity rules are a convenient shorthand for rulers who lack the capacity to treat individuals as individuals. Instead, they prescribe rules based on social status. So a serf is treated differently than a townsperson. A man is treated differently than a woman. These social identities reduce the costs of governance and they may well make sense given the level of technology available to governments before the industrial era. But they are incompatible with liberal notions of the rule of law.

The classic example of rule by identity rules we focus on in Persecution and Toleration is how different religious communities were treated in premodern states, e.g., dhimmi status in Islamic polities or the exclusionary treatment of Jews in medieval Europe. But this concept generalizes and is not specific to religious minorities.

The complex and overlapping legal system that characterized Prussia before the mid-18th century was a system of identity rules. Legal standards varied from one place to the next. Often the legal system was in the hands of local elites who could extract rents from it. The outcome was an often arbitrary system that treated similar cases differently and penalized non-elites.

There is therefore a self-reinforcing relationship between reliance on identity rules and low state capacity as the above figure illustrates.

Nonetheless, developments over time made this equilibrium less stable.

Mercantilist and cameralist reformers came to realize that this system of overlapping jurisdictions and inconsistent legal results was bad for market integration, investment, and economic development. For quite practical and self-interested reasons, therefore, rulers like Frederick the Great in Prussia and Joseph II in the Habsburg empire had an incentive to streamline and rationalize it. This rationalization was itself a precondition for the development of markets and (this is the point that Billy Christmas really brings out) liberalism.

High state capacity makes possible market development because it is consistent with and supportive of governance by general rules as opposed to identity rules. Note that these are end-points and both state capacity and reliance on general rules can erode even in modern states (as they arguably have eroded in the modern West in recent decades).

Unleashing the Market

The third and final part of this essay will consider the consequences of the political and legal reforms made in the early 19th century following the twin shocks of the French Revolution and defeat by Napoleon.

To anticipate, traditional accounts of German industrialization contrast a period of relative stagnation before 1850 with rapid industrialization after 1850. They emphasize the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution. Indeed, this is the version Jared Rubin and I provide in How the World Became Rich. We emphasize catch-up growth based on high levels of human capital and breakthroughs in areas such as chemical fertilizers. We didn’t have space in the book to go into the institutional preconditions of Germany’s rapid industrial and economic ascent. The next post will explore these.

Tyler Cowen famously coined the term state capacity libertarianism. The concept has become influential among those who see a capable state that can enforce general rules and secure basic public goods as a precondition for free markets to flourish. Philosopher Billy Christmas has introduced the term state capacity liberalism to argue that liberals of all stripes should take the concept of state capacity seriously. As he puts it:

“State capacity liberals believe that if we care about liberal society we should care about understanding and sustaining the seemingly paradoxical, and certainly contingent, equilibrium that generates it” (Christmas, 2026).

I think this is an important intellectual development and urge you to read the full paper. In this series of short posts, I want to suggest 19th-century Prussia as a possible example or case study for state capacity liberalism in practice.

Much of what I sketch below relies on Christopher Clark’s excellent Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947.

This first part of the essay will consider whether the development of a powerful state in Prussia led to the formation of a particularly harsh despotism or rather prefigured the rise of a genuinely liberal state. The second part will apply the framework of identity rules versus general rules to the legal reforms undertaken in the 18th and 19th centuries. Finally, the third part of the essay will consider the pro-growth and pro-market effects of state policy in Prussia and the impact on economic growth in Germany.

Prussia as a Despotic Leviathan

For many scholars, Prussia has long been seen as the archetypical illiberal or despotic state. It is the poster-child for what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call a “despotic leviathan”. In the account they provide in The Narrow Corridor, Prussia is the quintessential state forged by war. Beginning their account with the Great Elector, Frederick William, who remade the Prussian state and army in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, they provide a classic account of how war drove state-building.

“This all meant greater state capacity. With big guns, the state could control more. But to get big guns, it needed more tax revenues. More tax revenues would be easier to raise if Frederick William could increase his power over society, and that’s what he did. Previously taxes had to be negotiated with various representative bodies, such as the Estates of Kurmark in Brandenburg. He started out by trying to get permanent grants of taxation, which would free him from the need to endlessly seek the approval of the estates”

Social scientists will recognize this account as classic Tilly: war made the state, and the state made war. Or as Acemoglu and Robinson put it:

“War might have made the state in Prussia, but it made a famously despotic one.”

Liberty, they conclude, was “completely snuffed out.” Here Acemoglu and Robinson are championing a long intellectual tradition, one that goes back at least as far as World War I.

Barrington Moore famously contrasted Prussia’s political development with that of England and France. In Prussia, the power of the landed Junker elite impeded the development of bourgeois and liberal institutions and led Germany onto a perverse and militaristic developmental track. Fritz Fischer’s argument that Germany bore primary responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War helped inspire the famous Sonderweg thesis.

How then could Prussia be an example of any form of “liberalism” let alone state capacity liberalism?

Prussia and the Rule of Law

Acemoglu and Robinson quote the Great Elector and Frederick the Great as seeking to rule despotically:

But were absolutistic or despotic aspirations the same as actually being a despot?

There is a longstanding literature that says that for early modern Europe the answer is a pretty definitive no.1

As Peter Wilson puts it:

“Absolutism was once a certainty. It was seen as a distinct form of monarchy that dominated the European continent and defined an entire age . . . ”

He goes on to note that:

“Where are these certainties now? Generations of historians have been chipping away at an edifice which, even if its precise shape was in dispute, at least had seemed solid enough and its basic dimensions agreed by all. The hammers and chisels have been replaced by power tools, and what seemed so imposing has been revealed as nothing more than a stucco façade. As the plaster falls away, the once omnipotent inhabitants of the palace are exposed as frauds who disguised their lack of real power with a lot of showy display. Robbed of their grand coverings, they appear little different from rulers elsewhere in Europe’s history, bound by customary and practical constraints to consult traditional institutions and important social groups.”

Before we go on, it is worth considering the evidence for the Great Elector’s despotism. Effectively, it comes from his successful struggle with the towns and the estates over taxation.

The many self-governing cities such as Königsberg that had inherited rights and autonomy from the Middle Ages were stripped of their independence and subsumed under royal power. Königsberg resisted his demands for taxation outside the Estates and lost.

Many early modern rulers struggled against the independence of local elites, towns, and religious institutions. These struggles were often violent - think of the expulsion of the Huguenots or the Dissolution of the monasteries. One measure of despotism then would be how violent this process of state building was.

As a point of comparison, in his repression of the city of Novgorod, the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible killed 2000-3000 people or 10-30% of the population on modern estimates. Many were roasted alive or tortured to death. Following the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536/7, Henry VIII executed 216 local elites. Some like Robert Aske were hanged in chains, others hanged, drawn and quartered, or like Margaret Cheney burned alive.

So how many people did the Great Elector end up killing in his struggles with towns and estates?

Disappointingly, according to Clark, the Great Elector had one person executed for political crimes across a 46 year reign. He treated his main urban opponent Hieronymus Roth pretty badly - Roth died in prison rather than accede to the Elector’s demands. But put in a comparative historical perspective, this body count makes him almost saintly.

Frederick the Great’s Absolutism

What about his great-grandson Frederick the Great? Frederick was certainly authoritarian and autocratic.

But there is another quite different story told about Frederick the Great. Admittedly the story is apocryphal but the fact that it was told is nonetheless revealing. This is the Legend of the Miller of Sanssouci.

Sanssouci in Potsdam is where Frederick built his summer palace. According to the legend, Frederick was disturbed by the noise made by the windmill and offered to buy it from the miller. The miller refused. Frederick then threatened him:

“Does he not know that I can take the mill away from him by virtue of my royal power without paying one groschen for it?”

The miller is supposed to have replied:

“Of course, your majesty, your majesty could easily do that, if – begging your pardon – it were not for the Supreme Court in Berlin.”

Now, there is no evidence that any of this happened! And the real story of the mill appears to be quite different. Frederick was quite capable of overturning judicial decisions. But it reveals that contemporaries had quite a different view of how despotic Prussia was.

None of this is to downplay the real institutional differences that emerged between England and continental monarchies like Prussia over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.

But as we will see in the next post, the polity that Frederick the Great built would eventually become a rule of law state capable of unleashing rapid economic growth in the century after his death. We will consider the argument (made previously in work I have done with Noel Johnson) that the early modern state, by breaking down feudal rules and institutions, actually cleared the way for modern liberal institutions. And in so doing, I will call upon the expertise of an unlikely authority.

Everyone discussing his passing seems to share a sense of awe and of loss. The awe stems from the range of his expertise and his mastery of the historiography of many countries over many centuries. A typical statement from the introduction of his last major book, The Donkey and the Boat, notes that he had to end the book in 1180 because

“I wanted to be able to study all available documentation, documentary, literary, and archaeological alike, for the regions I was focusing on; I needed to study it all directly, as the use made of it by too much of the historiography has been distorted by prior assumptions about what the historian ought to be finding” (p. 7).

If another author wrote something like this it would likely sound boastful, but with Wickham it was entirely serious and credible.

The awe is also what generates a sense of loss, even for those of us who never met him. What other books could he have written? What other periods of history could he have extended his critical mind over? He was only 76 years old. It seems the world has lost not only the foremost scholar of this period but also potentially another magnum opus like Framing the Early Middle Ages.

Wickham was in that class of scholars who are, in a very real sense, irreplaceable. James C. Scott, who also passed relatively recently, was another.

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Framing the Early Middle Ages

Framing came out in 2005, and I was too busy doing my MPhil in Economics at the time to read it. I recall it looking out formidably from the bookshelves of Blackwell’s in Oxford, where its price was also a bit of a deterrent for an impoverished student. I did, however, buy and read it a few years later. Although a lot of it was extremely detailed and specific to particular regions and times, it fed into my nascent interest in the concept of state capacity.

Wickham does not use the term, of course. But his account of the “decline” of the Roman economy is a state-centric one. (Wickham doesn’t like loaded terms like this and prefers to talk of “simplification.”) The late Roman state was a huge consumer, and Wickham saw its fiscal and military machinery as a major driver of regional flows of goods and money. It was the state, through its tax system, that obliged rural populations to participate in market exchange. And it was the Roman state that upheld elite demand for luxury manufactured goods. What happened in Western Europe after 400 AD was the gradual disappearance of this state and, eventually, of professional military forces.

This provided a stimulating and challenging explanation for the sharp contrast between the world of late antiquity and that of the early Middle Ages. That contrast had been brought home to me by reading Bryan Ward-Perkins’s book on the economic decline of the Roman world, and it had motivated Henri Pirenne’s famous Mohammed and Charlemagne.

I’ve written some critical things about this state-centric thesis (see here). But I think that Wickham’s framework, with its focus on the importance and consequences of maintaining or not maintaining a paid military, is undoubtedly the right one for analyzing this crucial transition.

Medieval Europe

Framing and its more accessible sequel, The Inheritance of Rome, are critical for understanding the transition from the empire to the rise of established polities in what would become the nation states of medieval Europe. But the other Wickham book that has influenced me is his shorter Medieval Europe. My coauthor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (henceforth JFV) has written a nice piece on X going into some detail on the work (originally written in 2017). He notes that:

“Medieval Europe is no exception. The amount of material condensed into 352 pages is so extraordinary that, merely to absorb even a minimal amount of its detail, I have had to let a few other obligations slide over the last few days. The end result has led me, almost by necessity, to write this post.

Before continuing, however, I should warn our readers. Medieval Europe is an uncompromising academic monograph. The prose is clear and, on many occasions, brilliant in its precision, but this is not a book to take to the beach for a little light entertainment that requires no thought. Wickham is not going to tell you about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s love affairs. He is going to tell you how the fiscal capacity of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Norman conquest of England in 1066 would prove crucial to the evolution of the political economy of northern Europe in the centuries to come. This is not a world of lances and tournaments; it is a world of productive systems and administrative structures.”

JFV goes on to note Wickham’s background as a Marxian historian, and hence his emphasis on the material foundations and structure of each society. He notes the irony that, when it comes to history, neoclassical economists like himself are closer to sophisticated Marxian or Marxian-influenced historians like Wickham than to other historians, because they share a focus on the economy and on how material resources get distributed.

(As an aside, I have a currently unread copy of Wickham’s edited volume Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century sitting on my desk, but I don’t find much of interest or insight in modern Marxism-infused history. It is a testament to Wickham’s work that I find it so fascinating independent of any interest in things like the transition problem. His strength relative to others in this tradition is that he is resolutely empirical.)

Where Medieval Europe has influenced me is primarily in how it conceives of feudalism. As JFV notes in his review, feudalism is a contested concept among medievalists, and many refuse to use it. In my ongoing work with Desiree Desierto, however, we view it as the critical ingredient in the later rise of constitutional government in Western Europe. (JFV is also right to emphasize the importance of intellectual developments and legal concepts.) Wickham would likely disagree with our arguments, but he still provides the essential insights into how the agrarian economies of these societies worked, introducing his own distinctive phraseology such as “capillary power” and “coherence” (as applied to either economies or states).

Mediterranean Trade and a Lost Opportunity

As we have seen, Wickham’s scholarship should have led to fruitful interactions with economic historians, in particular his attentiveness to the material conditions and structure of the economy and his mastery of archaeological evidence. It is my understanding that he did have good relations with historians at Oxford who were associated with the economic and social history group there. Nonetheless, I think there was a missed opportunity.

Wickham’s last major book, The Donkey and the Boat tackles a big topic. Ever since the work of Robert Lopez, many have located the origins of the rise of the West in the period after 1000, and specifically in the emergence of prosperous city-states in northern Italy.

In his 2021 piece in Past & Present, Wickham took economic historians to task for this approach:

“Modern-orientated European economic history tends, still today, to see pre-capitalist (or pre-industrial, or just ‘pre-modern’) economies as basically primitive, ‘backward’ as they are sometimes described, unable to take advantage of the technological breakthroughs that presented themselves; or else — or, sometimes, as well as — simply potentially modern societies, running by modern economic rules, but just undermined or blocked by institutional failures, or sometimes furthered by their efficiencies, as in much New Institutional Economic history. Different regions get brownie points for being more like modern societies; the active economies in the list I began with get seen as handing the torch on, one to another, until it finally ended up in its natural home, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England, ready for industrial society to be born.”

Wickham was, of course, versed in all approaches to economic history, and it would be churlish of me in the extreme to chide him for unfamiliarity with developments in modern economics. The following footnote indicates that he was very well acquainted with the vast empirical literature surrounding the Great Divergence debate. As I’ve noted, his range was extremely impressive. Still, my impression is that he formed a rather negative view of the “New Institutional Economics” early on. This meant that opportunities to connect his work with later developments in economic history or political economy were never taken up.

In particular, he clearly wasn’t a fan of Avner Greif’s influential work on trading networks in the Mediterranean. There are a couple of places, often in the footnotes, where he takes a pointed dig at Greif’s work as overly schematic. Unfortunately, beyond the paragraph quoted above, we never got a sustained criticism of, or engagement with, this work or with institutional economics more generally. New institutional economics and economic theory in general have more to offer beyond this one case study and set of models.

One definitely gets the impression that Wickham came to believe that economists wading into medieval history were not well-versed enough in the complex, multilingual historiographies or in the ever-growing archaeological evidence to be taken too seriously. I won’t wade into the controversies surrounding private and public ordering in these medieval trade networks, but I think this led him to miss how powerful and insightful modern economic theory can be. He was able to extract a lot of insight and value from the Marxian economic history literature without necessarily being influenced too much by the baggage that accompanied it. But he didn’t think the more recent advances in economics had much that was relevant for medieval economic history.

So the missed opportunity, for me, is that we never saw a serious dialogue in print about questions like these. How general is his model of peasant production? Could it be embedded in a simple neoclassical model? And how does the model, which is really an ideal type rather than something an economist would recognize as a model, account for transitions between modes of production?

But as with all great scholars, the conversation about his work will continue long after his death.

The backstory is that I was listening to the Rest is History’s great series on 1066. There Tom Holland made the striking claim that England was perhaps the wealthiest country in Western Europe at the time. He was clear that Anglo-Saxon England wasn’t necessarily wealthy in any absolute sense of the word but at the same time, it was noticeably more prosperous than its neighbors and it was this that made it a target for external predators like the Vikings and Normans.

And Holland is not alone in thinking this. Peter Sawyer in his published lectures, The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England, makes the claim that

“on the eve of the Norman Conquest, England had become an exceptionally wealthy, highly urbanized kingdom, with a large, well-controlled coinage of high quality” (Sawyer, 2013, p. 1)

Indeed, these views are pretty much the consensus assessment of medievalists who study this period.

What is curious is that they are almost completely at odds with what economic historians would say about 11th-century England.

For example, many books on the Great Divergence begin by making the point about how backward Western Europe, and specifically the British Isles, was c. 1000 AD.

The Malthusian Perspective

A benchmark economic historians have at their disposal for thinking about this type of question is the Malthusian model. The idea is that the long-run population of an area gives you a good idea of agricultural productivity (because in the long run, excess food is converted into more people).

If this is a good indication of how productive Anglo-Saxon England was then it does not suggest an unusually productive economy. Domesday Book records around 270,000 heads of household, and turning that into a population total requires a multiplier for household size plus an allowance for the people and places Domesday leaves out. Josiah Cox Russell’s multiplier of 3.5 gives a population of about 1.1 million. But this is likely too low. F.W. Maitland’s multiplier of 5 gives about 1.5 million and the most widely used figure among economic historians today is Broadberry et al.’s (2015) estimate of about 1.7 million for 1086. Some historians have argued for higher totals, above 2 million, and there is genuine uncertainty here (Hallam, 1988).

But even on the high estimates, this population was low compared to the medieval peak c. 1300, when Bruce Campbell puts it at between 4 and 6 million (Broadberry et al., 2015 settle on about 4.75 million).

Importantly, estimates for English population numbers c. 1066 are within the estimates given by historians for the population of Roman Britain. Some historians have suggested Roman Britain may have numbered as many as 4 million people, although this is likely an optimistic upper bound.

Of course, populations can collapse for many reasons. England’s late medieval population was low due to the impact of bubonic plague. But if we accept the basic premises of the Malthusian framework, it seems like Anglo-Saxon England’s carrying capacity or the productivity of its agrarian economy was not unusually high. It supported roughly as many or fewer people than it had roughly a thousand years earlier.

What About Urbanization?

There are limits to the insights we get from the Malthusian model, of course. One limitation of it is that it is based on the idea that all workers are employed in agriculture and it doesn’t take into account the productive role of cities (where, over some range, increasing returns may obtain). Renaissance Italian city states were remarkably prosperous and one of the reasons we know this is that they supported very high rates of urbanization. Similarly, high levels of urbanization are one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have for thinking that the Roman and Greek economies at their height were highly productive.

In contrast, however, Anglo-Saxon England had few large towns or cities. On the eve of the Conquest, London and York were the largest towns. Estimates for London range from around 10,000 to 25,000, and York had perhaps 10,000. Norwich and Lincoln had perhaps 6,000. Everywhere else was much smaller. Richard Britnell estimates that around 10 percent of the population lived in towns by 1086, and the share was probably lower c. 1000 (Britnell, 1993; Dyer, 2002). By 1300, it had risen to perhaps 15 percent or more.

These numbers look small by comparison with the great cities of the 11th-century world. Paul Bairoch (1988) famously put the population of Umayyad Córdoba at around 450,000. Later work has revised this down considerably. Bosker, Buringh and van Zanden (2013), following Glick (1979), put Córdoba at about 100,000 in 1000. But Córdoba was still huge compared to any English town. The same dataset puts London at about 25,000 in 1000, which is a generous figure, and York at about 12,000. On these numbers Córdoba was four times the size of London. Constantinople and Baghdad had around 300,000 inhabitants each, and Cairo (Fustat) around 135,000 (Bosker et al., 2013; again, these are conservative estimates, I’ve seen people go up to 400,000 for Constantinople in this period). Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, may have approached a million. Nothing like this scale of urbanization and hence commerce, trade and economic specialization can be observed in the British Isles until the 17th century.

What about GDP per capita?

Broadberry, Guan and Li (2018) put together some comparative estimates of historical GDP per capita. Their main focus is China but they include estimates for 11th-century England as a comparator. Of course many caveats apply here but the numbers are roughly in line with what we might expect and don’t support claims that Anglo-Saxon England was especially or uniquely prosperous.

The figure of 723 (1990) dollars is significantly above subsistence (roughly 400 (1990) dollars). So Broadberry et al. think there is something to claims of Anglo-Saxon prosperity. But it is also significantly below the estimates given for Song China or for Italy in the Renaissance. It was roughly the same as the per capita income they estimate for England in 1300 when the population of England was roughly double what it had been in 1090.

The narrow claim that Anglo-Saxon England was likely richer than its peers (endemic war was more common in post-Carolingian Francia) might well be correct. There are no reliable output estimates for northern France, Flanders or Germany at this date, so it is quite possible and indeed likely that English per capita income was higher than theirs.

That is essentially what historians like Holland and Sawyer are claiming. But to my mind the relevant comparison for “exceptionally wealthy” should be with the richest economies of the period. On that comparison, England looks like it was clearly behind al-Andalus, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic Middle East and Song China. And the evidence on real wages suggests that Iraq and Egypt enjoyed a period of high living standards between the 8th and 11th centuries (Pamuk and Shatzmiller, 2014).

What about the massive amounts of Dangeld?

So where do the claims for the wealth of Anglo-Saxon England come from? The main reason seems to be its coinage and the ability of the Anglo-Saxon state to pay huge amounts of Danegeld to basically buy off Viking invaders. These amounts, such as the 36,000 pounds Ethelred the Unready paid in 1007, dwarf the amounts of tax revenues that later medieval kings could bring in and they suggest an immensely wealthy king (especially as the Vikings kept coming back, these amounts kept going up).

John Gillingham raised skepticism about the numbers recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle back in 1989 and I am in general quite persuaded by his arguments. My understanding, however, is that the consensus view of Anglo-Saxon historians is that the numbers are reliable and that the Anglo-Saxon state was indeed able to raise vast sums of coinage and precious metals as Danegeld.

But if these numbers are roughly accurate, what do they imply about the prosperity of Anglo-Saxon England?

It is worth being clear about how large they are. The Chronicle records 72,000 pounds raised in 1018, plus a further 10,500 from London. As Gillingham points out the geld of 1130 brought in less than 2,500 pounds. No English tax appears to have raised as much as the 1018 levy until the reign of Edward I, after more than two centuries of population and economic growth (Gillingham, 1989).

If we take these numbers seriously, there are two ways to interpret them. The first is the one favored by Anglo-Saxon historians. Late Anglo-Saxon England had a highly capable state and a highly monetized economy, and so the king could tax a broad base of taxpayers in coin.

But there is a second way of thinking about this that I believe has not been discussed in the literature.

This is that, if most of the surplus was held by a small elite, a state only needed to squeeze a relatively small number of great landholders to raise very large sums. On this reading, England’s ability to pay off the Vikings tells us about the distribution of wealth rather than about how rich the country was.

Again, the Malthusian model helps clarify why these are different claims. In the simple Malthusian model taxes, rents and expropriations do not affect per capita income in the long run. They reduce population. Income per head is pinned down by the birth and death rates, so if the elite or the state takes a larger share of output, there are simply fewer peasants living at the same standard of living. A heavily taxed Malthusian economy is not a poor one per head. It is a smaller one.

I would love to be wrong here, but my impression is that inequality has not been built into these models in a very systematic way. But in one of my favorite papers, Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson (RIP) (2011) offer a useful way of thinking about it. In a pre-industrial society, the maximum amount of inequality is limited by how far average income sits above subsistence, because the masses cannot be pushed below subsistence for long. They call the share of this maximum that elites actually take the “extraction ratio”, and they find that many pre-industrial societies came close to the maximum. If English GDP per capita was around 723 dollars and absolute subsistence around 400 dollars, then something like 45 percent of output was, in principle, available to be extracted. That is plenty to pay Vikings with, if it was in the hands of a small number of people and the state could extract it.

The reason I think this is plausible is that we do know that landed wealth in late Anglo-Saxon England was highly concentrated. Domesday Book provides estimates that allow historians to reconstruct landholding in 1066 as well as in 1086. It shows that a small group of earls and great thegns held a very large share of the land. Robin Fleming (1983) shows that on the eve of the Conquest the Godwine family’s estates were worth more than the king’s. There was a small group of great lay magnates who held much of the kingdom’s landed wealth. And then we also know there were a lot of very poor and dispossessed people, as around 10 percent of the population recorded in Domesday Book were slaves. Lawson (1984) shows that under Cnut, landholders who could not pay the geld forfeited their estates to whoever would pay it for them. This is a mechanism for extracting surplus from landholders.

But what about the coinage?

This is the Lenborough Hoard, discovered in 2014 and the height of the “Dangeld-era”. In today’s money it might be worth as much as 1.3 million pounds.

Again the quality and amount of late Anglo-Saxon coins is typically cited as a measure of “wealth”. But in fact coinage doesn’t have to correspond to wealth. We now believe that sustained economic growth began in 17th century England. But the coinage of this period was famously terrible.

Anglo-Saxon England was highly monetized in the sense that there was a lot of coin. But my hunch is that low levels of urbanization suggest that this monetization was not the result of extensive commerce and trade. A kingdom in which perhaps one person in ten lived in towns, and the largest town had perhaps 10,000 to 25,000 people, is not my idea of a highly commercialized economy. It looks like a rural economy with a very effective fiscal state. Much of the demand for coin may have come from the state itself, through taxation, frequent recoinages and the aforementioned Danegeld.

Putting this together, I think the most plausible reading of the evidence is this. Anglo-Saxon England had a remarkably capable state. Its wealth was highly concentrated and highly visible: in the estates of a small elite, in church treasuries, and in a closely managed silver coinage. That made it a very attractive target for Vikings and Normans. But, and this is the important point, none of this is the same as being a wealthy economy. In Malthusian terms, the vast sums paid as Danegeld were a drain of surplus that would have shown up in population, not in living standards. And the population of England in the 11th century was, as we have seen, not especially large.

References

Bairoch, P. (1988). Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bosker, M., Buringh, E. and van Zanden, J.L. (2013). “From Baghdad to London: Unraveling Urban Development in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, 800–1800.” Review of Economics and Statistics 95(4): 1418–1437.

Britnell, R.H. (1993). The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Broadberry, S., Campbell, B.M.S., Klein, A., Overton, M. and van Leeuwen, B. (2015). British Economic Growth, 1270–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Broadberry, S., Guan, H. and Li, D.D. (2018). “China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850.” Journal of Economic History 78(4): 955–1000.

Darby, H.C. (1977). Domesday England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dyer, C. (2002). Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fleming, R. (1983). “Domesday Estates of the King and the Godwines: A Study in Late Saxon Politics.” Speculum 58(4): 987–1007.

Gillingham, J. (1989). “’The Most Precious Jewel in the English Crown’: Levels of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Early Eleventh Century.” English Historical Review 104(411): 373–384.

Glick, T.F. (1979). Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hallam, H.E. (ed.) (1988). The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. II: 1042–1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lawson, M.K. (1984). “The Collection of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Reigns of Aethelred II and Cnut.” English Historical Review 99(393): 721–738.

Milanovic, B., Lindert, P.H. and Williamson, J.G. (2011). “Pre-Industrial Inequality.” Economic Journal 121(551): 255–272.

Pamuk, Ş. and Shatzmiller, M. (2014). “Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700–1500.” Journal of Economic History 74(1): 196–229.

Sawyer, P. (2013). The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This paper is called “Did Textile Industrialization Amplify Electoral Support for the Radical Left? Evidence from the 1918 Ottoman Constitutional Elections” and on the surface it looks like a plausible paper. There is a valid research question and an identification strategy, so I was about to send it out to trusted Ottoman experts to referee . . .

But before I did so something didn’t sit right with me . . . were there elections in the Ottoman empire in 1918? And was there an Ottoman Constitutional Assembly?

The answer to both questions it turns out is . . . no and no.

Below I outline quite how outlandish and incompetent a forgery this turned out to be.

Distance to Petrograd?!

At this point, I had Claude take a look at the paper. Did the authors simply get the date wrong for the Ottoman elections or was it deeper than that? There were elections in 1919 for example. Claude, however, immediately flagged that every regression controlled for “Distance to Petrograd” and “Distance to Moscow” as well as “% Slavic speakers”. Then it twigged. There were elections to the “Constitutional Assembly” in Russia in late 1917 and in fact everything in the paper is actually about Russia and not the Ottoman empire. The entire historical setting is fictitious.

In summary, what I learned from Claude was that everything about the paper was fake. No elections in 1918. The parties it describes such as the Socialist-Federalist coalition and the Social-Democratic Party did not exist. The election system of proportional representation was never used in any Ottoman election. It refers to parts of the Ottoman empire participating in the election of 1918 that had been lost to Greece years earlier. The final give away is apparently according to the author “the emancipation of serfs . . . began the main growth phase of industrialization”.

So it wasn’t just an AI-written paper, though the writing itself shows all the signs of AI. It was a bizarre attempt to transpose analysis of the Russian Revolution to the Ottoman empire.

The Ripped-Off Paper

Again Claude was very helpful in assisting me in finding the paper that the author stole from. This was Castañeda Dower and Markevich, “Did Industrialization increase support for the radical left? Evidence from the 1917 Russian revolution” published in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2025.

This is an excellent paper that I fully recommend you read. The paper that was submitted to Explorations turns out to be a mangled version of a recent and rigorous analysis of the Russian Revolution. The text is different and so the fake paper might well survive a naive plagiarism test but it is clearly derivative as this side-by-side comparison illustrates:

But what is still more striking is that all of the empirical analysis in this paper is copied word for word from the JCE paper on the Russian Revolution. This is why they have variables such as Distance to Petrograd in their descriptive statistics. The author of the fake paper didn’t even bother to generate new numbers.

The really weird one is that the author of the fake paper generated a bizarre map with geo-coordinates.

Of course, latitude 62.5 degrees is really far north, far further north than modern-day Turkey. So what do the map’s geo-coordinates correspond to?

The References!

Finally we get to the references. It is well known that AI can hallucinate references. And my first assumption was that this is what this author had done. That Garvey (2024) was going to be plausible-sounding but non-existent paper on the Ottoman empire.

But that would be too logical! There are two relevant citations in the paper: Lipset (1959) on the famous modernization hypothesis and Davidson and MacKinnon (2010) on wild bootstraps for standard errors. But almost all of the papers cited are real recent papers on random topics.

Why do this? I asked Claude and it suggested that the author might be selling citations. That is, the fake author could be earning money by citing real papers in his fake paper thereby inflating citations counts. However, when I asked it to investigate further it found no evidence of this. No evidence that these papers belonged to a fixed bundle of references being cited in random papers. Nor are these papers cited off-topic elsewhere. So it seems more likely that they come from an automated “find me a citation” tool with no relevance check, or from a reference list lifted from some other document.

What This Means for Academic Publishing

So what, a fake paper got submitted. Why did I waste so much time analyzing it? The real issue is what this means for journals and academic publishers. Elsevier provide tools for identifying multiple submissions and old-school plagiarism. But there is no strategy for dealing with fake AI papers, the vast majority of which will be much more sophisticated than this one.

The impact on academic journals is potentially devastating. I almost sent this paper out for referee. Had I done so I would have wasted the valuable time of scholars who review papers for free on the basis of trust. We are already facing a crisis of refereeing outside the top journals. Explorations continues to do relatively well because of the good will and high social capital of the members of the economic history community. But I wonder how long this can survive.

Human Progress

Should We Accept Degrowth as a Serious Academic Concept?

In recent years, an intellectual movement known as “degrowth” has grown in popularity through the efforts of a small but growing group of academics and activists. Key texts that champion this ideology, such as Jason Hickel’s 2020 book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World…

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2 months ago · 11 likes · Mark Koyama

My piece makes it clear that we shouldn’t be taking degrowth very seriously, at least as scholarship, though we might have to start taking it seriously as advocacy.

Here it might be worth going into a little bit more detail on the economic history behind the article. To do this we need to tackle a piece published in World Development by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel entitled “Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century”. This article is influential; as of now it has 181 citations despite being published just three years ago and it is the main basis for many of the claims Hickel makes in his more popular books. This is an effective polemic but not a serious piece of scholarship.

Let us see why.

Sullivan and Hickel set out to overturn what they call “the standard public narrative”: the claim, associated with Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling - and indeed one Jared Rubin and I use in How the World Became Rich - that around 90 percent of humanity lived in extreme poverty before 1800 and that capitalism was then responsible for lifting the majority of the world’s population out of destitution.

Instead, they draw on data on real wages, adult male height, and mortality. Their big claim is that the rise of capitalism from 1500 onwards caused a “dramatic deterioration” in human welfare. And improvement, where it came, arrived only in the 1880s in northwest Europe and the mid-twentieth century elsewhere, driven by organized labour and the public provision of goods like healthcare and welfare rather than by growth.

The claim that the onset of capitalism coincided with a decline in living standards rests on the following evidence.

This data rests on the work of Robert Allen and is extremely well-known among economic historians and other social scientists. They were first published in 2001 and that paper (published in Explorations in Economic History, no less) has 1982 citations on Google Scholar. The finding that real wages declined during the early modern period is not quite the gotcha that Sullivan and Hickel seem to think. Economic historians have known this at least since the work of Wilhelm Abel whose Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe came out in German in 1935. Henry Kamen’s The Iron Century was premised on the idea that the period 1550-1660 was one of falling living standards across continental Europe.

The issue then is not with the facts but with their interpretation. I will point out that Sullivan and Hickel cite Allen’s 2015 paper entitled "The high wage economy and the industrial revolution: a restatement". The whole point of this paper is for Allen to defend his high estimates for British wages and to argue that these high wages as partly a product of Britain’s market economy and colonial expansion. So it is curious to see this as evidence that the alleged onset of capitalism lowered real wages. But this is a side point.

The real point is that the pattern of falling real wages in Figure 4 of Hickel and Sullivan is entirely an artifact of the Black Death. Note that there are only two cities for which there is data before 1425 (London and Florence).1 London’s estimate for the 1st half of the 14th century is the lowest value London records in the entire five and a half centuries of the series. The fall in living standards Hickel and Sullivan record is simply the demographic recovery from the Black Death in a largely Malthusian world.

We can use Allen’s own data to extend the data for London back to the 13th century and it becomes very clear that the post-Black Death spike in real wages is the outlier and that living standards were not high in the bucolic preindustrial age. The usual caveats apply as English population estimates for the pre-Black Death era are disputed.

Their argument rests on the claim that the onset of capitalism was in 1500 which also happens to be the point when Europe’s demographic recovery really began to gain momentum and its population began again to exert pressure on land and resources. What if is said to have capitalism begun in 1750 or 1800? The argument collapses. Similarly, if capitalism is dated to 1300 then should we say it caused a big rise in real wages (followed by a fall)? Any argument from timing is both unserious and fragile.

What about arguments from location? The fall in real wages was real and prolonged in Southern Europe. This is the standard story of a Little Divergence within Europe. But this interpretation seems to be the opposite of Sullivan and Hickel’s story. Where capitalism is getting going - London and Amsterdam - real wages go up, but where older feudal institutions remained, or in areas left out of the Atlantic trade boom there is stagnation.

None of this is definite and there are a lot more things one could go into but this alone undercuts the entire narrative thrust Hickel then refers to and builds upon in his popular books such as Less is More.2

There is a lot wrong with academic publishing, and as an author I’ve experienced many of these problems (waiting 18 months on a first decision at a journal when my coauthor and I were untenured assistant professors, for example). But there is also a tremendous amount of unpaid volunteer work that goes on behind the scenes, and as editor I am most appreciative of the work of the excellent referees. Explorations is very lucky to draw on a hard-working, responsive, and very knowledgeable referee pool. Obviously there have been frustrations, but overall I was actually surprised by how many referees get their reports in on time (and by the very high quality of the vast majority of them).

There are also well-known issues with for-profit publishers. My own (previous) employer, George Mason University, stopped subscribing to Explorations last year.

Before proceeding, it is worth reviewing the statistics. Even a small field journal like Explorations gets hundreds of submissions a year. I’ve dealt with about 200 papers since July 2025. This is partly because we don’t have a submission fee, unlike many journals, but it also reflects the sheer increase in the number of papers that are being written.

There is no way that, as a journal, we could publish more than a fraction of these, and our submission stats reflect this. One thing the previous editorial team (Karen Clay and Ralf Meisenzahl) taught me was the importance of respecting and conserving the pool of referees. You can perhaps ask someone to referee a couple of times a year for a journal, but you certainly can’t tax them to write a referee report every other month! So I have tried to be efficient with desk rejections.

Obviously it is never nice to have a paper rejected. I’ve published around 40 peer-reviewed papers, and the vast majority of those were rejected multiple times (I’ve stopped counting, but I am sure some papers were rejected around 8–10 times prior to finding a home). The best thing one can do is reject papers quickly and efficiently if they are not a good fit. Sometimes this means one-line rejections; in other cases I take the time to try to provide useful feedback. Some of this information is worth sharing.

So what do successful papers at Explorations have in common? The first thing that stands out is that they know the journal they are submitting to. Most papers that are submitted have cover letters announcing that the paper is a great fit for the journal. Unfortunately, often this is untrue. Sometimes this is obvious: we get papers on export growth in the 2010s, or on AI and the future of the global economy. In other cases, we get papers based on detailed archival work or qualitative sources. These papers may or may not be valuable contributions, but they are obviously not what we publish. I think part of the problem here is that paywalls make it difficult for some scholars to actually see what current papers in economic history look like. In contrast, successful papers know that Explorations publishes quantitative papers that address active questions in economic history. They speak to ongoing research questions and engage with the scholarship of other established scholars. These papers are successful because of their scholarly contribution, but they are also relatively easy for me to edit because it is clear who I should ask to referee them.

Below I break down papers that I handled between July 2025 and today based on theme. There isn’t too much one should draw from this but I do want to draw attention to one thing. 100% of papers on History of Economic Thought were rejected. History of thought is its own sub-discipline and has its own field journals.

Modern applied papers in economics also share a common language and a common set of standards when it comes to applied work. So the majority (though by no means all) of published papers draw on this toolkit. A common language for statistical and econometric work is very valuable, and means that we can efficiently diagnose problems in research design (e.g. weak instruments or exclusion-restriction issues in an IV design, or pre-trends in a difference-in-differences design). Papers that don’t speak this language can still be published (and are), but they are harder for referees and editors to assess.

Journals are a form of scientific communication. They are part of a modern version of what Joel Mokyr terms the Republic of Letters. So it is vital to learn how to speak this language if one wants to get one’s ideas across. Naturally, however, this means it is difficult for outsiders. It is clear from the submissions I get that authors from outside academia, or from outside Western Europe and North America, find it harder to get published. This, however, is not a problem that I think the editor of a journal can do too much to address (apart from providing useful feedback). What is great is that knowledge of modern econometrics methods is more widely and easily available than at any time in the past.

As a checklist for prospective authors I can only make the following suggestions:

1. Read, or at least skim, the abstracts of a couple of issues of the journal you are sending your paper to. If your paper isn’t like any of the other recent papers there, it is unlikely to be a good fit.

2. Think hard about who a good referee for your paper is (and why they are good referees). Make it clear that they are your natural interlocutors, and the editor will likely select at least one of them as a possible referee.

3. Write a clear and compelling introduction. This is the part of the paper the editor will read most carefully before deciding whether to send it out for review. A few pointers here. Abstracts should be short and to the point. Some journals insist on 150 or 200 words, which is going too far, but I have had some submissions to Explorations with abstracts that run onto the next page, and that defeats the purpose of an abstract. The introduction itself should make it crystal clear what historical puzzle or question the paper addresses, and what methods and data it uses to answer that question.

Finally, field journals play a very different role in the profession than general-interest journals. It is tricky publishing economic history in the top general-interest journals, as one has to make the case that either using historical data or revisiting some old historical questions has important repercussions that regular economists should pay attention to. I welcome the renewed (post-2010) interest in economic history shown by the top journals, but it has also created certain incentives. For a field journal like Explorations, by contrast, many successful papers address themselves to quite narrow questions. Answering a small question well, or with new data or methods, is likely sufficient. Conversely, more ambitious papers about long-run persistence or big issues in development sometimes get rejected by our referees because they get crucial details about the data or the history wrong.

Brian and I are committed to making Explorations the premier field journal in which to publish research in economic history, especially of a more quantitative variety (though we also wish our friends and colleagues editing the Journal of Economic History well!).

With his breakthrough 1990 book, The Lever of Riches, Mokyr began the research on innovation that would culminate in his Nobel Prize. The Lever of Riches is a highly accessible history of technology from antiquity through the Second Industrial Revolution (1850-1914.) In it Mokyr linked the history of technology to the fundamental issue in economic history: the origins of sustained economic growth.

As well as providing a detailed narrative history of invention, this book also introduced important concepts and ideas to the history of innovation. Mokyr distinguished between macro-inventions and micro-inventions. By the former, he meant what we often call general purpose technologies such as the printing press or the internet. Macro-inventions can be truly transformative but it typically takes many decades for their full impact to be felt. Moreover, macro-inventions are potentially sterile unless complemented by a stream of micro-inventions: small improvements and cost savings that improve the initial technology and allow it to be disseminated on a broad basis. The macro-invention of the internal combustion engine and the automobile required many complementary improvements (for example, rubber tires) to ultimately bring about the transformation in transportation that took place by the early 20th century.

Mokyr’s insight was that a lone genius inventor, such as a Leonardo da Vinci, could not on his own have much impact on the history of technology and growth. Many of da Vinci’s designs were feasible but, lacking either complementary micro-inventions or craftsmen and mechanics capable of implementing his ideas, they were neglected by his contemporaries. This emphasis on innovation as a collective rather than individual achievement would become an important theme in Mokyr’s later work.

Read more on the Library of Economics and Liberty.

Time is precious so I thought it made sense to ask you (the readers) what you’d be interested in seeing me write about:

• As social scientists develop a better understanding of causal inference and new standards for replicability emerge, I anticipate empirical economic history coming under increasing fire. Morgan Kelly’s Tawney Lecture is just one example of one important avenue of criticism. While not focusing on the persistence debate, this post will offer a cautious (partial) defense of empirical economic history as currently practiced.

• A tweet on business cycles (anticipating my review of Goodspeed’s book attracted a lot of attention and criticism. If readers want a deeper dive into Austrian business cycle theory (and why I think it became an analytical deadend) I’d be happy to provide one.

• The Glorious Revolution is a well known among economic historians and economists largely because of North and Weingast’s seminal 1989 article and Acemoglu and Robinson’s restatement of their thesis in Why Nations Fail. What do these accounts get right and wrong about the event? And what crucial factor is entirely missing?

• Finally, if none of these topics seem important but you have another issue that you think I should be address please leaving a comment!

Here is a preview:

Goodspeed is not just interested in confronting the kinds of explanations for mania, crashes, and panics seen either in history books or in journalist accounts. He wants to see if the data supports theoretical accounts of recessions that locate the cause of the downturn in the preceding expansion. His antagonists are two celebrated Austrians: first Friedrich Hayek, introduced early in the book as a prospective restaurant dishwasher as a young man in New York and whose prominent account of business cycles rivaled Keynes’s in the 1930s; and second, Joseph Schumpeter, who saw in recessions the opportunity to sort out the mistakes and misallocations of the boom. Goodspeed’s main goal in the 200 or so pages of the book is to ask whether the data supports these theories, or their modern variants, or whether it is consistent with a much simpler story.

The short answer is no, and this is Goodspeed’s second main message. The spine of the book is data on quarterly output for the UK and US. The UK data comes from the work of Steve Broadberry and coauthors. The US data stems from the National Bureau of Economic Research but Goodspeed has extended it back to 1700 and applied a consistent methodology to provide a continuous business cycle series for both countries.

Goodspeed shows that British and American expansions do not resemble Dorian Gray, looking beautiful but hiding an inevitable accumulation of malinvestments (objectively bad investments that are destined to fail) and distorted decisions (mistaken economic decisions taken on the basis of bad regulation or flawed prices) that make a correction inevitable. If they did so, he argues, one would expect that as expansions get longer they get more and more likely to end. In his data, however, the relationship between the age of an expansion and the probability of death is essentially zero. Nor do measures of increased investment during the boom correlate with the severity of a downturn. Nor do longer expansions have longer recessions after them.

This is why recessions remain essentially unpredictable. Any perceived regularity is likely to be a statistical illusion. Goodspeed shows that attempts to forecast recessions such as inversions of the yield curve (where long-dated government bonds have lower interest rates than short-dated ones) or the Sahm rule (which says a recession is likely underway if the unemployment rate spikes high above its recent lows for three months) are overfitted to US data and don’t work for the UK. The same proved to be true of the Phillips Curve, a strong correlation between unemployment and inflation that existed in British data between 1860 and 1960, which broke down after governments attempted to target it and fine tune the economy in the 1960s.

The full review is available here.

I decided to post my short review of it below as it is otherwise hard to access and behind a paywall. I’d love to write a longer piece if I had time. By way of introduction, I should note that I have been listening to Dominic Sandbrook’s masterful books on the 1970s (in reverse chronological order).

What I appreciate about Sandbook’s account of Britain is that he understands the particular economic situation facing British policymakers in the 1970s. From 1945 through to the early 1970s growth had appeared robust and indeed historically unprecedented. But at the same time, it was precisely in these decades that the British economy became uncompetitive and was overtaken by its European peers. Nick Craft’s research is the best place to start if one wants to understand why.

Forging ahead, falling behind and fighting back

Forging ahead, falling behind and fighting back

Why was Britain the first industrial nation? Why was it eventually caught up? Why once it had fallen behind the United States, did it fall further behind its European rivals in the Post-War period? And how did it recover its relative position in the 1980s and 1990s? Forging ahead, falling behind and fighting back provides a macroeconomic perspective on the these questions. The word macro is advisory. Crafts surveys the British economy from 1000 feet, through the lens of growth theory. The upside is that he delivers a lot of insight in 150 pages.

The first chapter provides an overview of the Crafts-Harley view of the British Industrial Revolution. This emphasizes its limited scope. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the British economy already had a comparatively modern structure, with many individuals working outside agriculture. Growth between 1770 and 1850 was reliant on a few key sectors and TFP growth was modest (0.4% a year). Most workers remained employed in traditional sectors of the economy. Not until the second-half of the 19th century did the benefits of steam, the general purpose technology of the age, fully diffuse through the economy. Nonetheless, from a long-run perspective, the achievements of this period, modest but sustained increases in per capita GDP despite rapid population growth, were indeed revolutionary.

One theme of the book is institutional path dependency. Characteristics of Britain’s early position as an industrial leader continued to shape its political economy until the end of the 20th century. For instance, Britain’s precocious reliance on food imports from the early 19th century onwards left a legacy that was favorable to free trade. Elsewhere, democratization in the late 19th century often led to protectionism, but in Britain it solidified support for free trade because, after the expansion of the franchise, the median voter was an urban worker dependent on imported bread.

The second part of book considers the late Victorian, Edwardian, and inter-war periods. In the late 19th century the United States overtook Britain. A venerable scholarship has identified this period as one of economic failure. Crafts, however, largely follows McCloskey in exonerating Edwardian Britain from the charge of economic failure. Competition limited managerial inefficiencies in most areas of the economy; though there were notable failures in sectors where competition was limited such as the railways. The main policies failures were this ones of omission rather than commission: more could have been done to invest in R&D and support basic science.

The seeds of failure, for Crafts, were sown in the interwar period. Place in a comparative light, TFP growth in the interwar period was significantly slower than in the US. The new industries of this period did not establish a strong export position. The 1930s saw the establishment of a managed economy, in which policymakers acceded to a marked decline in market competition. Protectionism and cartelization kept profits high but at a cost of long-run productivity growth that would only be fully revealed after 1945.

Most economic historians view the postwar period through the lens of Les Trente Glorieuses. But in Britain this was an era of missed opportunities. Growth accounting suggests that Britain underperformed relative to its European peers. Thus though the British economy grew faster in these years than in any other period, it is in this period that Britain’s relative failure should be located.

Crafts examines this failure using insights from the varieties of capitalism literature, which contrasts coordinated market economies like West Germany with liberal market economies like the United States or Britain. In the favorable conditions of postwar recovery and growth, coordinated market economies saw high investment and wage restraint. Britain, however, lacked the corporatist trade unions of West Germany. As a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, it inherited a diverse set of overlapping craft unions which could not internalize the benefits of wage restraint and often opposed new technologies or managerial techniques. Britain functioned as a dysfunctional liberal market economy, one that became increasingly sclerotic as the 1960s passed into the 1970s.

Industrial policy was meant to “pick winners’”. But “it was losers like Rolls Royce, British Leyland and Alfred Herbert who picked Minsters” (p. 91). Market power grew. Approximately 1/3 of the British economy in the 1950s was cartelized and 3/4 saw some level of price fixing. Britain’s exclusion from the EEC until the 1970s meant that protective barriers were high, enabling inefficient firms and managerial practices to survive. High marginal rates of taxation and weak corporate governance encouraged managers to take their salaries in the form of in-kind benefits, and deterred innovation. Labour relations became increasingly hostile as the external economic environment worsened following the end of Bretton Woods.

Britain recovered its relative economic position after 1979 through radical economic reforms and a dramatic shift in policy objectives. Though of course, the Thatcher period saw numerous missteps and policy blunders, what Crafts argues was most important was that there was an increase in product market competition, a reduction in market distortions, and trade union power, factors that enabled Britain to benefit from the ICT revolution in the 1990s.

Rarely does one wish a book to be longer. But this is the case with Forging Ahead, Falling Behind, and Fighting Back. While a short and sharp overview of the Industrial Revolution is entirely appropriate, given the number of pages written on this topic, the last part of the book does need extra pages; the argument there is too brief and requires more evidence and substantive argumentation. One wishes, for instance, that the theme of institutional path dependency was developed in more detail. Despite this, Forging Ahead, Falling Behind, and Fighting Back is a notable achievement. It provides a masterly survey of British economy history tied together by insights from economic theory.

On Branko Milanovic’s recommendation, I read Aldo Schiavone’s The End of the Past. Scholarly and elegantly written, it provides one of the best imaginative reconstructions of the ancient Roman economy.

Previous posts have touched on the economies of late antiquity, the modernist primitivist debate, and diagnosed problems in many recent assessments of the ancient economy (here, and here). I want to use Schiavone’s book to revisit a question raised by Peter Temin in The Roman Market Economy. How advanced was the Roman economy? Specifically, how did it compare to the economy of Europe in late medieval or early modern times? Was the Roman economy only as developed as that of Europe circa 1300 or was it as advanced as that of western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution in say 1700.

This question is not mere idle speculation. It matters for our understanding of the causes of long-run economic growth whether an industrial revolution could have happened in Song China or ancient Rome. This type of counterfactual history is crucial for pinning down the causal mechanisms responsible for sustained growth, especially as historians like Bas van Bavel are now proposing explicitly cyclical accounts of growth in societies as varied as early medieval Iraq and the Dutch Republic (see The Invisible Hand? (OUP, 2016))

Temin’s GDP estimates suggest that Roman Italy had comparable per capita income to the Dutch Republic in 1600. The Empire as a whole, he suggests, may have been comparable to Europe in 1700 (Temin 2013, 261). My gut reaction is that this is plausible as an upper-bound. Schiavone (writing several years before Temin), however, raises important points that I had not fully considered previously.

Schiavone opens with an account of a speech given by Aelius Aristides celebrating the wealth of the Roman empire in the mid-2nd century AD.

“Whatever each culture grows and manufactures cannot fail to be here at all times and in great profusion. Here merchant vessels arrive carrying these many commodities from every region in every season and even at every equinox, so that the city takes on the appearance of a sort of common market for the world. One can see cargoes from India and even from southern Arabia in such numbers that one must conclude that the trees in those lands have been stripped bare, and if the inhabitants of those lands need anything, they must come here to beg for a share of what they have produced….

Your farmlands are Egypt, Sicily, and all of cultivated Africa. Seaborne arrivals and departures are ceaseless, to the point that the wonder is, not so much that the harbor has insufficient space for all these merchant vessels, but that the sea has enough space (if it really does). Just as there is a common channel where all waters of the Ocean have a single source and destination, so that there is a common channel to Rome and all meet here: trade, shipping, agriculture, metallurgy— all the arts and crafts that are or ever were and all things that are produced or spring from the earth. What one does not see here does not exist” (Aristides, The Roman Oration).

This is a panegyric addressed to flatter the emperor but its emphasis on long-distance trade, commerce, manufacturing is highly suggestive. Such a speech is all but impossible to imagine in a predominantly rural and autarkic society. Aristides is painting a picture of a highly developed commercialized economy that linked together the entire Mediterranean and beyond. Even if he grossly exaggerates, the image he depicts must have been plausible to his audience. In evaluating the Roman economy in the age of Aristides, Schiavone notes that:

“Until at least mid-seventeenth century Amsterdam, so expertly described by Simon Schama — the city of Rembrandt, Spinoza, and the great sea-trade companies, the product of the Dutch miracle and the first real “globalization of the economy — or at least, until the Spanish empire of Philip II, the total wealth accumulated and produced in the various regions of Europe reached levels that were not too far from those of the ancient world” (Schiavone, 2000, 94).

This is the point Temin makes. Whether measured in terms of the size of its largest cities — Rome in 100 AD was larger than any European city in 1700 — or in the volume of grain, wine, and olive oil imported into Italy, the scale of the Roman economy was vast by any premodern standard. Quantitatively, then, the Roman economy looks as large and prosperous as that of the early modern European economy.

Qualitatively, however, there are important differences that Schiavone draws out and which have been obscured in recent quantitative debates about GDP estimates.

Observe that Roman history leaves no traces of great mercantile companies like the Bardi, the Peruzzi or the Medici. There are no records of commercial manuals of the sort that are abundant from Renaissance Italy; no evidence of “class-struggle” as we have from late medieval Europe; and no political economy or “economics”, that is, no attempts to systematize one’s thoughts and insights concerning the commercial world. The ancient world, in this view, only superficially resembled that of early modern Europe. Seen from this perspective, the latter contained the potential for sustained growth; the former did not. Why is this?

The most obvious institutional difference between the ancient world and the modern was slavery. Recently historians have tried to elevate slavery and labor coercion as crucial causal mechanisms in explaining the industrial revolution. These attempts are unconvincing (see this post) but slavery certainly did dominate the ancient economy.

In its attempt to draw together the various strands through which slavery permeated the ancient economy, Schiavone’s chapter “Slaves, Nature, Machines” is a tour de force. At once he captures the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient economy, its unremitting brutality—for instance, private firms that specialized in branding, retrieving, and punishing runaway slaves — and, at the same time, touches the central economic questions raised by ancient slavery: to what extent was slavery crucial to the economic expansion of the period between 200 BCE and 150 AD? And did the prevalence of slavery impede innovation?

It is impossible to do justice to the argument in a single post. Suffice to say that after much discussion, and many fascinating interludes, Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery.

One can think of this equilibrium as resting on two legs. The first is the observation that the apparent modernity of the ancient economy — its manufacturing, trade, and commerce — rested largely on slave labor. The expansion of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean after 200 BC both rested on, and drove, the expansion of slavery. Here Schiavone notes that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes.

The existence of slavery, however, was not the only reason for the neglect of productive innovation. There was also a specific cultural attitude that formed the second leg of the equilibrium:

“None of the great engineers and architects, none of the incomparable builders of bridges, roads, and aqueducts, none of the experts in the employment of the apparatus of war, and none of their customers, either in the public administration or in the large landowning families, understood that the most advantageous arena for the use and improvement of machines — devices that were either already in use or easily created by association, or that could be designed to meet existing needs — would have been farms and workshops”

The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning:

“technology, cooperative production, the various kinds of manual labor that were different from the solitary exertion of the peasants on his land — could not but end up socially and intellectually abandoned to the lowliest members of the community, in direct contact with the exploitation of the slaves, for whom the necessity and demand increased out of all proportion . . . the labor of slaves was in symmetry with and concealed behind (so to speak) the freedom of the aristocratic thought, while this in turn was in symmetry with the flight from a mechanical and quantitative vision of nature”

Thus this attitude also manifested itself in the disdain the ancients had for practical mechanics.

Similar condescension was shown to small businessmen and to most trade (only truly large-scale trade was free from this taint). The ancient world does not seem to have produced self-reproducing mercantile elites. Plausibly this was in part because of the cultural dominance of the landowning aristocracy.

The phenomenon coined by Fernand Braudel, the “Betrayal of the Bourgeois,” was particularly powerful in ancient Rome. Great merchants flourished, but “in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation: ‘Nay, it even seems to deserve the highest respect, if those who are engaged in it [trade], satiated, or rather, I should say, satisfied with the fortunes they have made, make their way from port to a country estate, as they have often made it from the sea into port. But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman’” (Schiavone, 2000, 103).

Such a cultural argument fits perfectly with Deirdre McCloskey’s claim in her recent trilogy that it was the adoption of bourgeois cultural norms and specifically bourgeois rhetoric that distinguished and caused the rise of north-western Europe after 1650.

Having taken note of the existence of such a powerful equilibrium — one resting on both material and cultural foundations — we can now return to Schiavone’s argument for why a modern capitalist economy did not develop in antiquity. He argues that given the prominence of slavery and the prestige of the landowning elite, economic expansion and growth of the kind that took place between c. 200 BCE to 150 CE was not self-reinforcing. It generated a growth efflorescence that lasted several centuries, but it ultimately undermined itself because it was based on an intensification of the slave economy that, in turn, reinforced the cultural supremacy of the landowning aristocracy and this cultural supremacy in turn eroded the incentives responsible for driving growth.

Compare and contrast with early modern Europe. The most advanced economies of early modern Europe, say England in 1700, were on the surface not too dissimilar to that of ancient Rome. But beneath the surface they contained the “coiled spring”, or at least the possibility, of sustained economic growth — growth driven by the emergence of innovation (a culture of improvement) and a commercial or even capitalist culture. According to Schiavone’s assessment, the Roman economy at least by 100 CE contained no such coiled spring.

We are not yet at the point when we can decisively assess this argument. But the importance of culture and the manner in which cultural and material factors interacted is clearly crucial. The argument that the slave economy and the easy assumptions of aristocratic superiority reinforced one another is a powerful one. For whatever historical reasons these cultural elements in the Roman economy were relatively undisturbed by the rise of merchants, traders and money-grubbing equites. Likewise slavery did not undermine itself and give rise to wage labor.

Why this was the case can be left to future analysis. The full answer to the question why this was the case and a more careful consideration of the counterfactual “could it have been otherwise” are topics deserving their own blog post.

Medieval rulers were therefore quite content to allow their barons to possess powerful and strongly garrisoned castles if those barons were part of their governing coalition. These castles, moreover, were costly for the king to besiege so they made the threat of a rebellion against the king tangible.

Now the question this post addresses is why did this feudal castle equilibrium eventually disappear?

There are essentially two competing explanations:

1. Rising state capacity and the desire of early modern rulers to monopolize power.

2. Changing military technology that rendered most baronial castles obsolete.

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive (and were in fact deeply interwoven). But, as I’ll argue below, the evidence is much more consistent with (2) rather than (1).

The Early Modern State-Building Thesis

As discussed in classic works by Otto Hintze, Charles Tilly, and Thomas Ertman more powerful and centralizing states after 1500 after protracted struggleda, disarmed their nobility, imposed a measure of civil peace, and eventually centralized military capacity.

Simplifying things, the Tilly-thesis would suggest that causation ran from the emergence of stronger states after 1500 to the subduing and disarming of the feudal aristocracy and the destruction of their castles.

In his biography of Cardinal Richelieu, the American Congressman and historian James Breck Perkins provides an elegant summary of this perspective. Circa 1600, he writes:

“Over all the land, numerous chateaux were scattered. ‘In France there are too many chateaux,’ said an ancient proverb, showing the deep-seated dislike to a powerful nobility that was still fresh at the era of the French Revolution.

Richelieu, however, tore down many of these castles (although probably far fewer than historians used to think). Perkins continues:

“They were the relics of a past age rather than important features of the present age. Richelieu might have allowed them to stand until they fell from decay or were torn down to suit new demands of fashion, without fearing any effective resistance to the royal authority. Still, the destruction of fortresses scattered through the interior of the country marked the close of an era of internal disorder and private warfare. It was an outward sign that the robber-baron and the noble highwayman had ceased to exist”

The image of Richelieu urging the destruction of internal fortifications is captured in an early scene in one of the most disturbing historical films I’ve seen: Ken Russell’s The Devils. The Catholic priest Urbain Grandier made an enemy of Cardinal Richelieu by opposing an edict to take down the city walls.

The Tilly explanation suggests that the timing of these developments should have occurred sometime after 1500 (consistent with the Richelieu example). He wrote:

“In 1500, no full-fledged national state with unquestioned priority over the other governments within its territory existed anywhere in the West. England was probably the closest approximation . . . [But] . . . . It still harbored a number of great lords who controlled their own bands of armed retainers”

But as Perkins recognized, the destruction of castles and city walls in the interior of France was not just driven by the centralizing tendencies of the early modern French state. It was also a reflection of changing military realities such as the rise of gunpowder weapons.

Military Obsolescence

In fact, the timing suggests that most castles had ceased to be military relevant before early modern states became powerful enough to fully suppress their independent nobility. That is, the disappearance of feudal castles wasn’t caused by the rise of the state. Rather, the rise of the state was made possible by the decline in feudal castles.

Certainly, this seems to be the case in late medieval England.

The civil wars of the 12th and 13th centuries had been castle wars. During the civil war between Stephen and Matilda known as the Anarchy, pitched battles were a rarity. So common were sieges, that a phenomenon known as the “siege castle” emerged: castles that were built just to besiege other castles.

We haven’t yet run the numbers (or found good enough data) to compare the ratio of sieges to pitched battles during the Anarchy. But it is clear that former predominated. We have done this analysis for the 1st Barons’ War, however and the numbers are stark: 90% of engagements were either categorized as sieges or castle events.

In contrast, following the development of gunpowder weapons and specifically iron cannonballs, the high walls of medieval castles became extremely vulnerable. The rapid French reconquest of Normandy and Gascony in the 1440s were made possible by the development of a formidable royal artillery train. Similarly, even the previously impregnable Theodosian Walls of Constantinople quite rapidly became vulnerable.1

Warfare rapidly evolved. Sieges were still common but the ratio of sieges to pitched battles fell dramatically. This was because towns and castles that previously had a good chance of resisting a siege now surrendered. In our paper, we document this with data we collected on all the battles and sieges in the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). While a majority of encounters were still sieges, the proportion of pitched battles dramatically increased.

When Henry Tudor invaded in 1485 he was able to bypass the major castles of the kingdom and force Richard III to fight a risky, and as it turned out, decisive battle at Bosworth Field.

By the late 15th century, castles were no longer the “bones of the kingdom”. As predicted by our theory, this made England militarily and politically unstable.2 The norms that had previously governed feudal rebellion had disappeared. Whole bloodlines of the English aristocracy wiped themselves out. As Henry VII, Henry Tudor worked hard to reduce the remaining military power of the feudal aristocracy. Sir William Stanley - the man whose change of sides during the battle had been decisive for Henry’s victory - was nonetheless, executed for plotting against the king in 1495.

There are nuances, of course. Into Elizabeth’s reign, the royal government kept track of which castles were in good repair and in royal hands and during the English Civil War, many medieval castles proved useful as bases of operations or even as fortifications. Nonetheless, we argue it was changing military technologies that led to the end of the feudal equilibrium and the rise of the more powerful states largely post-dates this.

As we discuss in the paper, already by the early 16th century new types of fortifications were emerging to deal with the threat posed by cannon. These trace italienne fortifications were immensely expensive, however, and required far larger garrisons. As a result, they were built by the new fiscal states such as France after 1600, and they tended to be built on the borders of the consolidating territorial states rather than in the interior.

I opened the previous essay by mentioning the magnificent castles of Northern Wales. But it would be more accurate to anchor our expectations with reference to Mountfitchet castle near Stansted airport.

When we describe England as being covered with many hundreds of castles in the early 12th century, the majority of them were more like Mountfitchet than the massive royal fortifications like Caernarfon Castle.

The question, however, remains: Why did strong Anglo-Norman Kings such as William I and Henry I permit their barons to cover the land with their own private fortifications?

Defense against the native Anglo-Saxons is an obvious answer. No doubt the rapid establishment of motte and bailey castles across England right after 1066 can be explained this way. And the large number of castles along the Welsh marches can be explained by ongoing conflict with the native population. But in general by the 1070s or 1080s there was no serious ongoing internal threat. In any case, with Jacob Hall and Desiree, we tried to see if possible internal and external threats (see the map below) could explain castle location and there is simply no relationship.

So why did the Norman kings allow their barons to build so many castles? The answer has to do with the coalitional nature of feudal government. Unlike early modern rulers or Tilly-inspired political scientists, they did not view private castles as a measure of state weakness.

Rather, as we document in our paper, baronial castles helped to hold a feudal realm together because they helped make the deals and arrangements between the king and his barons credible.

The Credibility of Feudal Promises

The key idea that we have been working on across several papers is to model the feudal world as a coalitional bargaining game. Simply put, no king rules alone. He needs lords to contribute their military and economic resources to his coalition.

You can think of this coalition as held together by a series of implicit and explicit promises and agreements. Those lords who support him with more resources will expect a greater share of the spoils and rents. But these agreements are non-binding — the king can always renege and take a larger share for himself. Or he can redistribute the lands and castles one lord expected to another lord.

This was one reason why the problem of royal favorites was so acute in the medieval period. Successful medieval kings were able to manage their coalitions of aggressive, aggrandizing, and ambitious barons. Unsuccessful ones like Edward II (r. 1307-1327) failed in this. Edward II’s lavishing of lands and titles on Piers Gaveston at other barons’ expense illustrates exactly the kind of royal reneging that destabilized feudal coalitions.

What helps to keep the king honest? The lord’s castle.

Lords, as we have noted, had their own independent military power. But, it was almost impossible for an individual baron to successfully defeat the king. This only happened when kings alienated their entire baronage (as Edward II eventually did).

It is the existence of private castles that makes it costly for a king to break too many promises to individual barons.

If a baron rebels, he retreats to his castle and takes with him whatever resources he can defend. The baronial castle can eventually be retaken, but it is very costly to do so. Moreover, the castle can allow the baron to raid out and control the nearby countryside.

This is the key mechanism that we formally model: baronial castles raise the cost of reneging for the king, making his promises to the barons more credible. And once this is understood, it becomes clear why rulers like William I and Henry I did not oppose castle-building by their own barons. Baronial castles allow more barons to provide resources to the king, making the realm larger in equilibrium. They make the king more likely to honor his commitments and make his promises more credible, reducing the number of rebellions.

In other words, private castles were not a sign of state weakness. They were the institutional glue that held feudal polities together.

Powerful kings did not monopolize castles

Powerful feudal rulers did not eliminate private castles because to have done so would have been incongruent with other features of feudal rule such as the decentralization of military capacity and the low level of fiscal capacity. Castles were costly to maintain and garrison. No king could aspire to possess all or even a majority of the castles in his realm.

This is evident from the reign of Philip Augustus (r. 1180-1223). Philip was a formidable ruler who greatly expanded both the royal domain and the borders of his kingdom.

Philip Augustus certainly dispossessed barons who opposed him. But, as his biographer John Baldwin notes, he did this through fundamental feudal methods. He redistributed castles to his followers but he did not dramatically increase the share of castles in royal hands.

Importantly, the doctrine of renderability (discussed in Part 1) meant that he didn’t have to directly control all of the castles in his realm. Moreover, like any feudal ruler he lacked the resources to directly maintain and garrison all the castles in the realm himself.

John Baldwin in his landmark biography of Philip Augustus writes that

“not only did Philip acquire and build fortresses to consolidate the royal domain and his new acquisitions, he also gave them away when it best served his interests” (Baldwin, 1986, 301).

This is clearly not the behavior of an early modern ruler seeking to monopolize all military power in his realm. Philip Augustus was no Louis XIV. When it came to castles, there are numerous instances of him giving away castles such as Montboissier which he gave to the Count of Auvergne in 1189; furthermore:

“In this inaccessible region Bertrand de la Tour received three castles, the bishop of Clermont four, and the bishop of Le Puy five.”

Similarly, when Philip conquered Normandy he granted many castles to his vassals. Powerful English kings like Henry II behaved similarly in this period.

Checking despotic power

Finally, what evidence is there that castles allowed feudal lords to check despotic power?

Here we draw on our paper on Magna Carta, written with Jacob Hall, where we demonstrate that baronial castles played a critical role in the formation of the rebel coalition that was capable of checking King John in 1215 (see my earlier post). You can read about that paper here.

Consistent with this argument, when the Barons’ War did break out following John reneging on Magna Carta, control of key castles played a critical role in the conflict. Baronial control of Rochester Castle delayed John’s army for more than 7 weeks before capitulating.

In future work it would be interesting to see how important castles were in other attempts to impose checks on royal behavior (particularly outside England).

The Bones of the Kingdom

William of Newburgh called castles “the bones of the kingdom” (*regni ossibus*). Our paper explains why. In a world without formal constitutional constraints, without independent courts, without any mechanism to bind the king’s future actions, baronial castles solved the fundamental commitment problem of medieval governance. They made the king’s promises credible by making reneging costly.

In Part 3, I’ll turn to the question of why baronial castles eventually disappeared — and what that tells us about the transition from the feudal world to the early modern state.

But we often forget one crucial feature of medieval castles: many of them did not belong to the king but rather were the “private” possessions of feudal barons.

We are tempted to take the persistence of private military fortifications throughout the Middle Ages for granted. But this is in fact a puzzle.

One that Desiree Desierto and I explore in a recent paper published in European Economic Review.1

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The Barbarian Invasions and the Emergence of Defense-in-Depth

Two preconditions were important in the proliferation of private castles across medieval Europe: (i) external invasions and raids; and (ii) the collapse of public authority over much of Western Europe.

The logic of defense-in-depth is laid out in Edward Luttwak’s classic The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. At the height of the principate, the Roman empire invested in a system of linear defenses. Static defense was expensive but if it held, it could provide peace and stability for the interior. But with more mobile invaders, a static perimeter defense had to be abandoned in favor of defense-in-depth. This is what happened in the later Roman empire, as linear defenses were abandoned for self-contained strongholds.

Luttwak’s concerns were the barbarian invasions of the 3rd and 4th century. But the logic also applies to the invasions that beset Western Europe between the 8th and 10th centuries.

Raids from Scandinavia intensified after around 800 CE. These were made possible by innovations in longship design which meant that raiders from Scandinavia posed a threat to the rulers of sedentary populations across Europe. Their ability to choose where and when to attack, to navigate river-ways and penetrate deep inland rendered static defenses ineffective.

In addition to Viking raids, there were intensified attacks from the Eurasian Steppe. Nomads like the Magyars possessed comparable mobility across land and conducted lightning raids hundreds of miles from their base in the Hungarian plain.

Defense-in-depth required self-contained fortifications that could hold up invaders, prevent them from raiding the nearby countryside, and provide time for a reinforced defense force to be assembled. While the threat of external invasion explains the need for fortifications and defense in-depth, it does not account for why so many of the fortifications of the Middle Ages were private fortifications. After all, the fortifications of the late Roman empire were built and controlled by a centralized state.

This brings us to the second precondition: the collapse of centralized political authority.

The fall of the Western Roman empire in the 5th century had been accompanied by the decentralization of political and military authority. During the 8th century, the Franks under the Carolingian dynasty restored a measure of public authority. But their empire lacked strong fiscal or administrative foundations and in response to the raids of invaders and internal conflict, real power devolved from the royal court to a new provincial aristocracy.

As military and judicial power localized, the power of the king was hollowed out. This process reached its culmination in 11th century Francia, or France, where the early kings of the Capetian dynasty became equivalent in power to many of the territorial lords. This period of weakening central authority is associated with the rise of feudalism.

Was the proliferation of the baronial castles in the 11th and 12th centuries evidence of state weakness or was it part of a distinctive feudal political order?

Baronial Castles as a Measure of State Weakness

From the perspective of modern social science it is natural to view the proliferation of private castles as a measure of state weakness. In a fantastic paper that I hope is published soon, Cappelen and Hariri introduce a dataset of medieval castles. They put this important data to work by using castles

“ . . . to trace the gradual monopolization of the means of violence in medieval and early modern Europe. Because castles are physical structures with coercive potential, castle ownership measures the extent to which the means of violence have been monopolized by the Crown.”

For Cappelen and Hariri as political scientists, the share of castles that were controlled by the ruler versus the proportion controlled by the barons is a natural measure of state development. As they write, this ratio “can be used to trace historically the rise of the attribute that is distinctive of the modern state: that it holds a monopoly on the means and use of violence within a territory:

In general, private castles were a threat to the ruler’s effort to centralize power, and state-making rulers therefore prohibited private castle construction, conquered private castles or demolished them. By contrast, royal castles were the administrative and military strongholds of the state. It is these historical dynamics that we use to gauge the the process of state formation in medieval and early modern Europe

The fortifications built in England by Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) to defend against Viking raids were built and controlled by the king. These fortifications, known as burhs, provided a point of refuge for the population from raiders. They were state-driven efforts, described by one historian as “a public works programme of unparalleled magnitude.” So the idea of centrally controlled fortifications was not unknown. Why, then, did private castles rise in prominence, proliferating across Western Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries? After all, this was over a century after the worst nomadic or Viking threats had receded.

One reason is that decentralized defense meant a more dispersed and flexible military organization. Authority and military command had to be delegated to the local lord on the spot. As Marc Bloch observed, “the most successful resistance came rather from the regional powers which, stronger than the kingdoms because they were nearer to the human material and less preoccupied with inordinate ambitions, slowly emerged from among the clutter of petty lordships.”

From the perspective of the modern state, this proliferation of private castles looks like a straightforward failure — the inability of rulers to achieve a monopoly of force. Charles Tilly’s influential account of state formation treats baronial castles as barriers to progress: objects that needed to be removed for the state to become what it was ultimately destined to become. When Louis XIII of France demolished private castles and built new fortifications on the frontiers, the American historian James Breck Perkins described it as marking “the close of an era of internal disorder and private warfare.” This view — castles as symptoms of disorder — has dominated how historians and political scientists have understood medieval Europe.

But there are reasons to doubt this story.

Problems with the State-Centric Perspective

While I am a great fan of Tilly’s work, one cannot deny that narrative he proposes is deeply teleological. It takes the modern centralized state as the natural endpoint of political evolution and judges everything that came before against that benchmark. From this vantage point, baronial castles can only appear as aberrations.

Our paper was initially written for a conference celebrating the work of James C. Scott. And, Scott argued, when we view the world exclusively through the lens of the modern state, many prior forms of political organization appear deviant or inexplicable — when in fact they may have had their own logic.

There is also a problem of sources. Our medieval chronicles were typically written by clerics who favored royal authority. Early modern jurists — often men with positions in government — went further, developing arguments for state sovereignty that cast feudal arrangements in an unflattering light. The seventeenth-century jurist Denis de Salvaing epitomized this tradition, describing baronial castles as “grains of sand and gall-stones in the bowels of the State.”

While social scientists and historians have inherited a long-standing narrative that sees baronial castles as measures of feudal disorder, some of this rests on misunderstandings about how feudalism functioned.

For example, when we think of “private” or “baronial” castles we imagine they were simply the private property of the baron. And it follows that the baron could then exclude anyone including the king from his own property. But that is not how feudal property rights worked.

As Charles Coulson documents, baronial castles were not truly “private” in the modern sense. They were subject to the principle of renderability: the obligation to hand the fortress over to the feudal overlord on demand. During an invasion, a baron’s castle would be available to the king if needed. Baronial castles were not outside the political order — they were embedded within it. Coulson notes that “a rigid distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ traditions of defence does not represent the reality of the early Middle Ages.”

This raises a deeper question. If private castles were not simply symptoms of disorder, what role did they actually play? Why did medieval kings — even powerful ones — tolerate and sometimes encourage their barons to build and maintain their own fortifications?

The medieval chronicler William of Newburgh called castles “the bones of the kingdom.” He did not distinguish between royal and baronial castles. Both, in his view, were critical to the defense and governance of the realm.

In Part 2, I will explore Desiree’s and my answer to this puzzle — and argue that baronial castles were not a sign of state failure but a functional institution within a distinctive feudal political order.

Recent Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr together with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini have recently published a landmark book, Two Paths to Prosperity. This was reviewed by the equally eminent Jan Luiten van Zanden for EH.net. Van Zanden’s essay is recommended reading for anyone interested in these topics.

Van Zanden opens his essay noting that

“Kenneth Pomeranz’s book The Great Divergence (2000) opened the twenty-first-century debate about the timing and causes of the divergent economic development of China on the one side and Western Europe on the other. In Western Europe after 1780, the Industrial Revolution (IR) got under way, ultimately leading to sustained economic growth, whereas in China — whose economy had been dynamic up to that point — the trend reversed and GDP per capita began to shrink. Before the IR, the dynamic center of the world economy was in China (and in the Middle East).

Explaining this reversal was the central question in the Great Divergence debate . . . Much of the literature, going back even to Max Weber, had claimed that Europe’s institutional divergence dated back to the Middle Ages and that industrialization after 1750 had roots deep in European history. Pomeranz and other representatives of the California School that coalesced around this topic around 2000 pointed to two contingencies that, after 1750, supposedly triggered the IR: (i) the presence of cheap coal in Great Britain and (ii) the colonial powers’ access to cheap raw materials such as cotton. Whether these claims were valid lay at the heart of the Great Divergence debate.

As Two Paths to Prosperity convincingly shows, the central theses of the California School have not withstood critical scrutiny.”

Jack’s post below is a direct response to this claim and a fascinating discussion of the claims made by Greif, Mokyr, and Tabellini about the origins of the Great Divergence itself.

*******

J.L. van Zanden is one of our leading economic historians in his own right, and his review of Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 is sweeping and bold, stating that this book can “be read as a conclusion to the debate on economic development that has dominated economic history since 2000.”

I would like to assert that this debate is not yet concluded! Van Zanden errs in one major respect: he states that the California school argued not only for a “late” divergence between European and Chinese economic development, c. 1750, but also that this Great Divergence was down to “two contingencies that, after 1750, supposedly triggered the IR: (i) the presence of cheap coal in Great Britain and (ii) the colonial powers’ access to cheap raw materials such as cotton. Whether these claims were valid lay at the heart of the Great Divergence debate.” That is just not true. These claims were never advanced by the California School as a whole, but were argued primarily by Kenneth Pomeranz. Other scholars in the School, including R. Bin Wong, John M. Hobson, James Z. Lee and Wang Feng never accepted that “coal and colonies” drove the Great Divergence, though they agreed with the later, 18^th century, dating of the divergence itself. Moreover, the California School, for the most part, NEVER argued that the causes of the great divergence were not traceable further back in time. Rather what the School as a whole argued was (1) that the rapid economic divergence between Europe and China in income per capita and economic technology that started after 1750 was NOT based on an earlier divergence in income per capita and economic technology many centuries earlier; rather as late as the early 18^th century output per person and most elements of technology were still comparable between Europe and China, with the latter still more advanced in agricultural output per acre, and the production of cotton and silk textiles and ceramics; and that (2) since the Great Divergence was not based simply on earlier economic progress, the explanation must lie in some combination of events and processes in other domains: exploration, culture, political and social organization, that enabled the West to produce and then sustain a burst of history-changing innovations in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that produced unprecedented economic growth.

Far from “the central theses of the California School have not withstood critical scrutiny,” in fact the main theses have stood up quite well.

That is, “coal and colonies” were NEVER the “central theses” of the California School. Rather, to put it more briefly, the central theses were (1) that the quantitative divergence of GDP/cap occurred no earlier than 1700, and that (2) the divergence was primarily due to prior developments that were not simply economic. The first thesis has been repeatedly accepted and documented by the work of Stephen Broadberry and his many partners in reconstructing long-term GDP/cap series for European nations and for the leading regions of China. To quote Broadberry, Guan, and Li:
“GDP per capita in the leading region of China remained around the same level as in the leading region of Europe until the 18th century before declining substantially during the Qing dynasty. The Great Divergence thus began around 1700 [emphasis added], earlier than originally suggested by the California School, but later than implied by earlier writers.” ¹ In addition, studies of particular areas of production, including iron and steel, cotton textiles, and ceramics, have shown that c. 1700 Europeans were still trying to catch up and find substitutes for imports from the Middle East, India and China that were technologically superior to what Europeans could produce.² Now one might say that Pomeranz and other California School authors in the 1990s and early 2000s argued for a divergence date somewhat later, after 1750. But in my view, if 20 years of distinguished cliometric research by Broadberry and all of his associates simply moved the date of the divergence up by 50 years, then that is strong confirmation of the California School thesis denying that a divergence in GDP/cap had put Europe economically ahead of any major region in China many centuries earlier.

The acceptance of the second thesis is shown by the numerous economic historians who have now located the reasons for the great divergence not in prior economic progress, but in cultural divergence, including most notably Deirdre McCloskey’s focus on the development of “bourgeois virtues,” and Mokyr’s own Nobel-winning works emphasizing the crucial emergence of a “culture of innovation” as the fount of later economic breakthroughs.³ That the California School was on this same track much earlier should be evident from my own 1987 paper “Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World.” ⁴

Now, the reasons for that cultural divergence are still much debated, even if van Zanden thinks that Greif, Mokyr and Tabellini have now found “the answer” in the role of the Catholic Church in western political development. In fact, even this answer is much more limited and complex than van Zanden allows.

Let me acknowledge that of course the Catholic Church played a critical role in the preservation and promulgation of Roman Law, in Western state formation, and in developing the balance between secular political and divine authorities that helped promote political pluralism and independent city-states in the West, albeit that was also down to the manner of collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the reconstitution of political authority by Germanic leaders. These processes have been well described by Anna Grzymala-Busse and Walter Scheidel.⁵

But while the political fragmentation of Europe into diverse states was clearly necessary for the sustained innovations leading to the rise of the West, it was also clearly not sufficient, as shown by the experience of the Warring States era in China, or the history of southeast Asia, in which centuries of competing warring states in a dynamic cultural system gave birth to sophisticated state structures but not to economic breakthroughs.

More importantly, we need to understand the paradoxical role of the Catholic Church in what van Zanden rightfully recognizes as the crucial element in the Great Divergence, namely “long-term changes in the knowledge economy.” Mokyr helpfully broke these down into a two-fold change in theoretical knowledge (the scientific breakthroughs of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment), and practical knowledge (embodied in highly skilled craftsmen). While craft skills were essential, what really separated the West from the rest was the West’s ability to break through what E.A. Wrigley identified as the energy barrier, by shifting from solely organic sources of energy (including wind and water) to inorganic energy, which only became available for motive force when Europeans learned to build and harness reliable steam engines. While skillfully made machines, such as the spinning jenny and water-driven spinning and weaving machines, helped Europeans to catch up to Indian and Chinese producers in cost, it was only with the application of steam power to such machinery that Europeans surpassed the rest of the world in volume production while drastically undercutting them in prices, and at the same time became capable of producing much cheaper iron and steel in volume, leading to railways and steamships and other miracles of the 19^th century.

Breaking the energy barrier required the insights of modern science, including the existence of air pressure and the ability to quantify and measure work and heat. This work, which included both Protestant and Catholic scientists (Boyle, Black, Watt, Torricelli, Pascal, Lavoisier, Thompson), set scientists and craftsmen on the road to building machines to convert heat into work, from Savery to Newcomen to Watt. Yet the Catholic Church, even though it had long supported academic inquiry and even trained the Jesuits to be their scholarly warriors, set itself firmly against the modern science of Isaac Newton, which seemed to posit a “clockwork universe” with no need for an active, intervening God, and defended Aristotelian and Biblical ideals such as the absence of a vacuum in nature and the centrality of Earth in the universe (even the Jesuits, in adapting to modern astronomy, adopted Tycho Brahe’s alternative to the Copernican system, retaining Earth as the center of solar, lunar, and planetary motions.)

Thus, for all the value of the Catholic Church in promoting an organizational structure that was conducive to growth, it was only the failure of the Catholic Church to retain its hold on orthodoxy of thought and monopoly of power, as manifested in the rise of Reformation states and Protestant thinkers who fought the Counter-Reformation to a standstill and eventually triumphed, that enabled a radical modern science to triumph. By contrast, in the Middle East, India, and China, from 1400 a series of repressively orthodox dynasties (the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the late Ming and Qing) progressively contained and stifled innovation, such that the rate of innovation in the East slowed down, while the way for innovation was cleared in the West, enabling the latter to surpass the East and all prior civilizations after 1700.⁶

To be sure, there is still much more to debate about the cultural foundations for European science and Eastern stagnation, and broader questions about the Rise of the West. How important was the Ming decision to curtail their program of maritime exploration and trade, while the Europeans happened, in contingent fashion, to discover a heavily peopled new continent that challenged all their prevailing ideas about geography, botany, and humanity? How important was European military technology to its ability to exploit its new productive powers? How crucial was European imperialism to provide new ideas, raw materials, and subjugated manpower to underwrite European growth?⁷

Even on the matter of family structure, which van Zanden cites as another way the Catholic Church shaped the West for dominance, there is ample disagreement. James Lee and Wang Feng demonstrated that Chinese families were no larger than European families, and the idea that the European Marriage Pattern was a decisive difference for economic growth has been largely debunked.⁸ And while Greif, Mokyr and Tabellini praise western corporations while denigrating China’s vast regional merchant associations, which operated national and international networks and promoted economic development, calling them mere “clans,” it should be noted that the British and Dutch East Indian Companies – the “model” corporations – both failed when trying to run their colonial domains and had to be rescued by state takeovers, and that in Britain from 1720 to 1824, precisely when modern economic technology and growth emerged, joint-stock corporations were mostly banned due to the spectacular failure of the South Sea Bubble. During this period, it was partnerships that fueled the rise of modern banks and manufacturing companies, including the firm of Boulton and Watt that revolutionized mechanical power.

Finally, it is important to remain aware of the full context of the Great Divergence. The Enlightenment was more than an Encyclopedia of technical innovations and knowledge. It was also a full-fledged assault on Biblical infallibility, hereditary royal and aristocratic superiority and privilege, and many of the certainties of antiquity. It is striking that the Industrial Revolution was just one of THREE divergences that characterized the 18^th century: there was also the advent of the first large-scale constitutional democratic republics in America and France to replace absolute monarchies, and the displacement of classical/theological theories of nature by modern experimental science. Economic, political, and scientific revolutions went together to create the modern world, and each needs to be framed in the context of the others if we are to fully understand any of them.

In sum, the reasons for the Great Divergence are likely to remain debated, and are almost certainly more complex than a straight line running from the medieval Catholic Church to the Industrial Revolution. I am a great admirer of the works of Greif, Mokyr, Tabellini and van Zanden, but at this point to understand the rise of the West will require less simplification or reduction, and a more willing embrace of non-linear, multi-causal complexity.

Notes

1. Broadberry, S., H. Guan and D.D. Li, “China, Europe and the Great Divergence: A Restatement,” Journal of Economic History 81:3 (2021), p. 958.

2. Riello, G. and R. Tirthankar, Global Economic History 1500-2000, 2^nd ed., London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

3. McCloskey, D. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, University of Chicago Press, 2006; Mokyr, J. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton University Press, 2018.

4. Goldstone, J. A. “Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World,” Sociological Theory 5 (1987), pp. 119-135.

5. Grzymala-Busse, A., Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, Princeton University Press, 2023; Scheidel, W., Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Princeton University Press, 2019.

6. Goldstone, J.A. “Political Trajectories Compared, “ Chapter 18 in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 C.E. (Part 1), eds. J. Bentley, S. Subrahmanyam, and M.D. Weisner-Hanks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 447-489; Goldstone, J.A., “Divergence in Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern,” in Comparative Early Modernities 1100-1800, ed. D. Porter, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012, pp. 165-192.

7. Goldstone, J.A., “Either/or – why ideas, science, imperialism and institutions all matter in the ‘rise of the West,’” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 9 (2016), pp. 14-24.

8. Lee, J. and F. Wang, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Myths and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth?” Journal of Economic History 74:3 (2014), pp. 651-693.

Our paper asks: under what circumstances do protests bring down an autocratic regime? We don’t know the medium or long-run consequences of the December-January protests in Iran, which began as protests against soaring inflation, a collapsing rial, and economic mismanagement but coalesced into demands for full regime change. But we do know that the initial momentum of the protests appears over and that for now what appears to have been an incredibly brutal repression has pacified the country.

This illustrates a common phenomenon. Western observers and journalists routinely overestimate the ability of protests to bring down autocratic regimes. Brought up with images of the Fall of the Berlin Wall or the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe, we seem to imagine that such protests have the force of history behind them and are destined to succeed. Social scientific research, in contrast, documents that successful regime changes are usually internal coups and typically rely on powerful regime insiders defecting.

Why do we overestimate the power of protests? Part of this is translating the logic of protests from democratic regimes to autocracies. Even in democracies, I suspect protests are overrated. The Iraq War Protests in Britain didn’t stop the war or prevent the subsequent reelection of Tony Blair in 2005. Peaceful protest is an important democratic right. So we tend to romanticize it and overestimate its power.

The Death of Stalin is much better social science than V for Vendetta.

Nonetheless, there is a logic of political protest and a cost that protests can impose even in autocracies. Furthermore, we uncover the role that cross-cutting ties between ordinary people and political elites play in amplifying these costs. In so doing, we can shed light upon the role that civil society can play in driving political transitions.

Here is how we think about it. Consider the influential selectorate theory developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his collaborators. All rulers, whether democratic or autocratic, need the support of some coalition to stay in power. Call the “selectorate” the pool of people who have some say in choosing leaders. Then there is a ruling coalition, which is the smaller group whose active support is essential for survival.

Leaders maintain power by distributing a mix of public goods (which benefit everyone) and private transfers or patronage (which benefit only coalition members). In democracies, winning coalitions are large, so leaders must rely more on public goods provision; in autocracies, coalitions are small, so leaders can buy loyalty through targeted patronage. This framework offers a unified way to think about political survival and governance.

What our approach adds to selectorate theory is a focus on civil society and the role of ordinary citizens who fall outside the winning coalition. Traditional selectorate models focus on how leaders maintain elite loyalty, but largely ignore the ordinary citizens who cannot directly remove the ruler. We show that these ordinary citizens still matter indirectly because they can protest. In our telling, protests don’t directly topple a dictatorship — after all, who has the guns? But protests raise governance costs and therefore they can be decisive if they induce political actors to defect.

Civil society organizations, be they parties, NGOs, trade unions, or social clubs, can matter here if they are groupings that span both political actors and ordinary citizens.

Our model then distinguishes between those elites who can remove a ruler from power directly (we call them political actors) and ordinary citizens who cannot directly depose a ruler. Ordinary citizens can protest. But protests don’t automatically lead to regime change. Rather, they simply make it harder for a ruler to maintain loyalty among political actors, but protests alone are rarely sufficient.

This allows us to articulate a novel role for civil society organizations even in autocratic regimes. Our main result is that civil society organizations that include both political actors and ordinary citizens are far more effective at achieving political change than organizations composed of only one type.

An organization of only ordinary citizens can protest, but a well-resourced ruler can weather the storm. An organization of only political actors can threaten defection, but without popular support, they’re easier to buy off with patronage.

But a cross-cutting organization that spans both types creates a powerful feedback loop: popular discontent among ordinary members puts pressure on political actor members, who can then credibly threaten to withdraw support from the regime.

In the paper, our key example is historical: the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But we also discuss some other case studies and it is those I’ll focus on here.

The People Power Revolution

In 1986, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was deposed peacefully as a result of popular protests. Why did popular pressure work in this instance but not in others?

While there are many reasons for this, our model provides an analytical template for understanding why Marcos was unable to hold on to power in the face of the People Power movement. As we discuss in the paper:

“Marcos had been in power since 1965 and had declared martial law in 1972, which allowed him to rule as a dictator. By the early 1980s, many segments of Philippine society, elites as well as the masses, had reasons to oppose his continued rule. His regime was characterized by widespread corruption — a ‘politics of plunder’ — and human rights abuses.”

At the same time, Marcos’s regime was far from totalitarian. There was widespread support for more democracy, and civil society organizations were allowed to flourish. The economy was also heavily reliant on American investment.

External economic pressures and the cutting of international lending created the situation that made Marcos vulnerable. Various organizations, including labor unions, student groups, and professional associations, mobilized the public against the Marcos government.

The most important civil society organization, however, was the Catholic Church. Initially, Church leadership in the Philippines was willing to support Marcos because he was anti-Communist. But after the murder of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino, their position changed and Church leaders like Cardinal Sin called for a democratic transition.

What followed in early 1986 was a classic example of popular protest inducing regime change. Protests involving priests as well as pro-democracy activists jammed up the main roads bringing Manila to a standstill. This dramatically raised the costs of repression to the Marcos regime (killing Communists in secret was one thing, shooting priests and nuns in public would be quite another).

In the language of our model, these protests raised the costs facing the government and dramatically increased the costs and risks of repression (as international attention was now focused on the ongoing revolution). From the perspective of our model, this, in conjunction with the drying up of external loans and US support, made it very difficult to buy off members of the ruling coalition. Key military and government officials, including Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces Vice Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos, then defected from the Marcos government and declared their support for the opposition leader Corazon Aquino. By February 26, Marcos realized that he could not govern and resigned and went into exile.

As we argue in the paper, the example of the People Power Revolution illustrates the usefulness of our model in understanding regime change. The Catholic Church’s role in organizing opposition to Marcos was critical because it was a wide-reaching group spanning both political actors and ordinary citizens.

There are of course clear parallels to the role Solidarity played in Poland at the same time. At the same time, this example illustrates why popular protests elsewhere have failed to bring down autocratic regimes.

The Arab Spring

An important counterpoint is the Arab Spring. As is well known, the initial spark was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 16, 2010, in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Protests against President Ben Ali then spread across Tunisia, and then to Egypt where protesters opposed the regime of Hosni Mubarak, and from Egypt across the Middle East.

The Arab Spring was a dramatic series of events that grabbed world attention. But it did not deliver on its promise to spread democracy across the region.

Many scholars have offered assessments for this failure. From a Marxist perspective, the Arab Spring failed because it was a revolution without revolutionaries. But many scholars argue that what limited the effectiveness of the Arab Spring were the divisions among the various dissident groups. At the time, my colleague Jack Goldstone warned that “history is replete with student movements, workers’ strikes, and peasant uprisings that were readily put down because they remained a revolt of one group, rather than of broad coalitions”.

We draw on this assessment to argue that the long-standing weakness of civil society organizations in the Middle East meant that there was an absence of genuine cross-cutting groups.

As such, in contrast to the Philippine case, the Arab Spring did not involve organizations which spanned all of society. In addition, many rulers in the Middle East have greater resources to quell opposition. On the eve of the Arab Spring, countries like UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia had access to substantial oil revenues, which, according to our model, would make their regimes more resistant to popular pressure. Interestingly, it was only in Tunisia where there had been a strong labor movement (the Tunisian General Labour Union, the UGTT) that the regime fell and was not reimposed.

Economic history is distinct as perhaps the only subfield in economics where publishing a book is still somewhat normal or perhaps even expected for a senior scholar. This was certainly true of the generation of scholars whose work has shaped our current understanding of economic history: the Joel Mokyr’s, Robert Allen’s, Greg Clark’s, Gavin Wright’s of the world. Sadly, there is a sense that this expectation is fading away, as in some departments at least economic history simply becomes another genre of applied economics. Walker Hanlon’s book The Laissez-Faire Experiment is a marvelous exception to this trend and certainly deserves more attention than it has so far received.

Economic historians have a growth preoccupation. The Industrial Revolution and its causes play the leading role in most prominent books in the field. And there are many other works that seek to explain the absence of an industrial revolution elsewhere in the world.

It is refreshing therefore to read a book that is not about the causes of industrialization but its consequences. If we reach back to the past, say 200 or more years ago, two dramatic transformations are visible: one is the abundance of material goods and transformative technologies due to industrialization; the second transformation is the rise of large, modern, welfare states.

Walker Hanlon’s book The Laissez-Faire Experiment addresses this second transformation. He asks two fundamental questions: ‘First, how well did limited government in mid-19th century Britain work? Second, why was limited government abandoned in favor of the more interventionist government found in the U.K., and essentially all other developed countries, today?’

Hanlon’s argument is elegant and simple and it is grounded in standard economic theory.

The main problem facing the British economy in the early 19th century was dismantling the inefficient policies of the pre-Napoleonic war era, i.e., the fiscal-military state of the 18th century which protected large land-owners and relied on local and ad hoc institutions. Hanlon suggests that laissez-faire was an appropriate economic philosophy in this context: ‘across the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s laissez-faire system was successful. Economic growth was booming, and the benefits were accruing not only for the rich but also for average workers. Technological progress continued at a rapid pace. As a global power, Britain was unmatched.’

But, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, the costs associated with this policy of non-interference mounted. For example, rapid urbanization brought new problems of overcrowding, sanitation, disease control, and pollution. There was a large health penalty to urban living in the 19th century.

Hanlon provides a compelling empirical assessment of the economic problems that led British policymakers to adopt a more interventionist series of policies. Increasingly severe market failures in the form of externalities from pollution, asymmetric information in a range of markets made government intervention potentially welfare enhancing.

The book is admirably clearly written. First, Hanlon presents the relevant economic analysis, which will be familiar to those who have taken Intermediate Micro or Public Economics, outlining the main explanations for market failure: information problems, monopolies, credit constraints, public goods, and coordination problems. Each chapter then considers different applications of the general principles, and provides a survey of relevant literatures in economic history, for example the literature on child labor regulations or urban public health.

The chapter on unemployment insurance, for example, condenses a tremendous amount of information and evidence into just a few pages. One charge that classical liberals have made against the modern state is that unemployment benefits and insurance crowded out the many forms of charity and private insurance that were commonplace prior to the welfare state.

Indeed, Hanlon discusses the wide array of traditional and occupational based non-government forms of insurance available prior to 1850. He then, however, explains how the rise of large, geographically concentrated industrial agglomerations based on a single industrial (or related industrials) such as cotton textiles in Lancashire changed the problem of insuring workers. Neither family, locality-based, nor occupation-based forms of unemployment insurance, could deal with a general downturn in cotton textiles.

The most tragic example of a highly concentrated exogenous shock in the mid-19th century was the Irish potato famine, for which existing forms of relief were entirely inadequate. But there are other less well-known examples.

For example, the cotton crisis brought about by the American Civil War caused concentrated distress in the Northwest. In towns like Blackburn and Preston between 30-50 percent of the population were on poor relief by late 1862. Poor relief was locally organized at the parish level. Therefore, the hardest hit areas struggled to provide the needed aid. There was, widespread recourse to charity and voluntary aid but this, though generously provided, was often unreliable and difficult to coordinate. In response, policymakers therefore allowed local parishes to draw on resources from their county therefore allowing for pooling for resources in a more centralized manner, though there was strong resistance to organizing relief at a national-level.

In developing this argument, Hanlon combines systematically data with references to Parliamentary debates, and to the positions of individual policymakers. He draws on the secondary literature and on original research he has done with Vellore Arthi and Brian Beach that explores how this cotton shock affected mortality, migration, and population growth. These long-lasting impacts suggest that a more active government response would have improved welfare, though moves towards such policies only really took place in the early 20th century.

Overall, the book offers an exemplar of how to write a modern work of economic history. I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this book to anyone interested. Beyond, an economic history audience, it is an important book for anyone interested in understanding the rise of the modern state in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nonetheless, as I discuss below, I want to push the implications of the book’s arguments a little of further and explore some aspects of the debate which Hanlon perhaps neglects.

Having lavishly praised The Laissez-Faire Experiment as a work of economic history, my more critical comments will focus on the implicit political economy of the book and its treatment of economic ideas.

First, and I think intentionally, Hanlon’s treatment of what he calls ‘a laissez-faire philosophy’ is remarkably flat. I say intentionally as Hanlon clearly wants to focus on the economic history. From this perspective, too much engagement with the literature on the history of ideas would be distracting. So, he uses laissez-faire as a short-hand to refer to what is often called classical liberalism, essentially the idea of limited government and a general presumption of liberty.

This is entirely understandable and indeed defensible. Nonetheless, there is a price to taking this approach which I will attempt to cash out below.

First, there is the use of the term laissez-faire as a shorthand. Classical liberalism has never been identical to laissez-faire because classical liberal thinkers have always recognized areas where government intervention is required.

Hanlon doesn’t really defend his use to laissez-faire as shorthand. But this approach overstates the degree of elite consensus and underestimates the extent to which there were competing intellectual traditions in 19th century Britain.

It is true that many of these positions came together in favoring a limited state in the mid-19th century, but it is precisely by recognizing that they were not a coherent ‘philosophy’ that we can appreciate why some of the leading figures also came to push for more technocratic interventions in society. A case in point would be Edwin Chadwick. Chadwick was both a utilitarian follower of John Stuart Mill and a founder of modern public health and policing and he was more than willing to abrogate private property rights to achieve an improved societal outcome.1

There is an fact a long history of debate about whether 19th century Britain was laissez-faire. Certainly, the idea of 19th century Britain as a laissez-faire paradise or hellhole was a cliché of both left-wing and right-wing polemic and of much popular history. But some early papers in of the Journal of Economic History asked whether there was any truth to this? (”the laissez-faire question”). Some suggested that “British laissez faire was a political and economic myth” advanced by nostalgic late 19th-century historians such as A.V. Dicey rather than a realistic description of actual policies or political principles

John Stuart Mill saw the doctrine of laissez-faire as valuable for clearing away the detritus of the old order but did not endorse its ends and was clearly favorable to a more interventionist social philosophy. Indeed, later classical liberals viewed Mill ambiguously for this reason, seeing in his writings the anticipation of many later more egalitarian policies.2 As Brebner observed:

“Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who have been commonly represented as typical, almost fundamental, formulators of laissez faire, were in fact the exact opposite, that is, the formulator collectivist ends and his devout apostle” (Brebner, 1948, p 59-60).

Hanlon’s narrative is of liberal, laissez-faire inclined policymakers and thinkers confronting the reality of widespread market failure and externalities and gradually adapting their policies and intellectual principles. He writes that ‘government intervention during the nineteenth century was not the work of a group of ideological collectivists. Rather, many interventions were the work of laissez-faire adherents who nevertheless believed that intolerable or inefficient conditions exist and were open to the possibility of experimenting with various forms of government intervention’. My feeling is that a deeper investigation of the ideas and writings of the classical economists and associates like Chadwick will reveal a more forthright commitment to policies of amelioration and improvement rather than what is conventionally meant by the term laissez-faire.

Moreover, as Colin Holmes documented more than 50 years ago, something recognizable as a doctrine of laissez-faire did exist in the mid-19th century but it was never the animating principle of the British elite or government. Opposition to great government involvement in society could be animated by traditional small c conservative principles.3 We don’t get a sense of this opposition (no John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, for example) in The Laissez-Faire Experiment.

Acknowledging this does not weaken Hanlon’s argument, but it would strengthen our understanding of the issues at hand in 19th century Britain.

My second comment concerns the treatment of political economy in the rise and fall of laissez-faire.

In general, Hanlon’s treatment is broadminded. He doesn’t assume that the existence of widespread market failures automatically translated into policies that could by assumption correct for those failures. Aware of the role played by both ideology and interests, he rather argues that the market failures that were exacerbated by industrialization ‘created opportunities for efficiency-enhancing government intervention’. Many factors would be critical in determining the extent to which these opportunities were realized.

Hanlon provides a similarly nuanced discussion of the shift towards more government activism at the end of the 19th century. He draws on recent historical scholarship to discuss the extent to which the example of the German welfare reforms and the pressures of war and imperial competition pushed policymakers away from laissez-faire.

Nonetheless, this part of the argument was less compelling that the first part of the book where Hanlon provides a systematic account how the new industrial economy generated all kinds of new externalities.

There is a reason for this. The type of evidence that Hanlon does a great job of assembling is very convincing in demonstrating the existence of market failures. He combines rigorous evidence with economic theory. But he doesn’t have an equivalently powerful framework for discussing how and why certain policy decisions were made.

In his conclusion, Hanlon tackles some of the big questions raised by his account: ‘is there evidence that the expansion of British government intervention . . . was misguided?’. Hanlon provides evidence that this was not so. He contends that policymakers followed experience and were not led by public opinion.

There is a risk here that the political economy of the 19th century does not get the full attention it deserves. Political economy is about heterogenous preferences and Hanlon’s framing in terms of an unmet nascent demand for education or for regulations abstracts from these conflicting preferences. Hanlon appreciates that government policies do not always achieve their aims. But political economy considerations are only occasionally mentioned, for example in explaining the failure to tackle coal pollution.

In contrast, conflicting political interest groups were prominent in earlier accounts of the rise of the state in late 19th century England. Holmes noted that what was traditionally seen as the high-point of laissez-faire ideology, the mid-19th century, was in fact a period of centralization and increased regulation, a point that Hanlon’s narrative and data in fact substantiate. But the role of conflict between different interest groups is not a major theme in The Laissez-Faire Experiment. And this also limits the ability of Hanlon to speak to developments in the 20th century when much larger and more interventionist states emerged.

None of these comments take away from the fact that The Laissez-Faire Experiment is a great work of economic history and a major achievement. All subsequent scholarship will have to engage with it and will no doubt build upon its findings.

This was first published at Fusion and I am very grateful to Sam Goldman for comments

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded for explaining innovation-driven economic growth. Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt were pioneers in endogenous growth theory and many would assume that they missed their moment when Paul Romer won in 2018. Now their seminal contributions in growth theory have been paired with Joel Mokyr’s insights into the historical process of economic growth and innovation. It is Mokyr’s work that I want to focus on here.

Mokyr’s earliest work (including a formal model published in Explorations in Economic History in 1976) was focused on issues of economic growth. But until he wrote The Lever of Riches in 1990, Mokyr was best-known for his work on the Irish famine of the mid-19th century. The Lever of Riches, however, was a blockbuster. It is a testament to the book’s impact and longevity that it is still on many undergraduate reading lists today (including my own).

From The Lever of Riches onwards, Mokyr’s work has not just been focused on growth but specifically on the question of innovation. Innovation has two components: the first is pure discovery, and is traditionally the subject matter of the history of science. The second is the process of bringing a discovery to market and turning it into a profitable part of a business. Mokyr’s work seeks to explain both why Europe became an intellectual hub of discovery after around 1500 and why and how this eventually translated into modern economic growth in the 19^th century.

In that book, Mokyr distinguished between macro-inventions and micro-inventions. By the former, he meant what we often call general purpose technologies such as the printing press or the internet. Macro-inventions have the potential to be transformative but it often take many decades for their full impact to be felt. Moreover, macro-inventions are potentially sterile unless complemented by a stream of micro-inventions, small improvements and cost-savings that improve the initial technology and allow it to be disseminated on a broad basis. For example, the macro-inventions of the internal combustion engine and the automobile required a host of complementary improvements (such as rubber tires) to ultimately bring about the transformation in transportation that took place by the early 20th century.

Mokyr’s insight was that a lone genius inventor such as a Leonardo da Vinci could not on his own have much impact on the history of technology and growth. I recall a British TV documentary from the 2000s where scientists established that many of Leonardo’s inventions such as his parachute and helicopter were feasible in design. But lacking either supporting micro-inventions or craftsmen and mechanics capable of implementing his ideas, these insights were neglected by Leonardo’s contemporaries.

The series of books Mokyr has published since iterated on this topic, providing novel insights into the process of innovation. An important difference between Mokyr’s work on these topics and those of most historians is that he continuously relates discoveries in science and technological breakthroughs to the overall problem of economic growth. He was interested in explaining why economic growth was largely stagnant for so many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

These books have fundamentally reshaped how economic historians think about the origins of sustained economic growth. When I reviewed his 2016 book A Culture of Growth, I observed that while in previous work,

“Mokyr advanced what one could consider as cultural arguments for the rise of, not only inventors and innovators, but also a workforce made up of tinkerers and ‘improvers’ in eighteenth century England. But in those books, he shied away from investigating in full the forces that help to give rise to such culture of practical innovation and improvement.”

In A Culture of Growth, Mokyr focused explicitly on culture. At the time, I noted that this was a recognition that culture had arrived as an important and legitimate concept in discussions of economic growth. Jared Rubin and I focus extensively on these arguments in our book, How the World Became Rich.

But here I want to focus on one important part of Mokyr’s argument, an aspect that has been picked up by researchers in the field but perhaps has not yet penetrated beyond that: the complementarity of institutional and cultural explanations for economic growth.

Many books pose a dichotomy between different explanations of what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment or the origins of sustained economic growth: it is either geography and sheer “luck,” or exploitation; or it is all institutions; or all cultural values. As Rubin and I discuss, however, it is an obvious mistake to assert that these factors operated in isolation of one another. Any plausible explanation of the origins of sustained economic growth has to take into account their interaction.

This is something that Mokyr has been stressing in his work for at least two decades. In particular, he draws attention to what he calls a “meta-institution”: the Republic of Letters.

Beginning in the 16th century but really getting going after 1600, Mokyr discusses the emergence of a transnational and later trans-religious community of scholars, which referred to itself as the Respublica Literaria. This circle of scholars drew its membership from scientists, physicians, philosophers, and mathematicians, as well as theologians, astrologers, and mystical and occultist writers.

Mokyr’s emphasis on the shared beliefs and values of this educated and polyglot community is an argument for the importance of cultural values. These thinkers promoted innovation. In contrast to their medieval predecessors, they did not revere the ideas of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen or engage in what Carl Becker called “ancestor worship”. Rather, their behavior was competitive (sometimes unscrupulously so) as they sought to uncover the secrets of nature.

But it is also an argument for the importance of institutions. This group of scholars itself functioned as an informal international network and as well as distributing new ideas and findings, it generated insights that incentivize further innovation.

By the late 17th century something resembling “refereed” scientific periodicals began to emerge, such as the Transactions of the Royal Society. Improvements in transportation made it possible for books to be distributed more widely. The physical infrastructure supporting this virtual community included universities (especially Padua, Paris, and Leyden) but these were less important than the more informal academies and scientific societies.

Institutional infrastructure was critical. Mokyr draws attention to the importance of the postal system. The origins of a European postal system lie in the 15th century as the de Tasso family began organizing a postal network in Italy. This expanded into the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century. By the 17th century, all of Europe was linked together by a network that enabled continuous and reliable correspondence between scholars living in different countries, a necessary precondition for the emergence of the Republic of Letters.

Institutions also matter at a higher level. All of this took place against a backdrop of a competitive and fragmented state system. As Mokyr contends, and as Noel Johnson and I also argued in Persecution and Toleration, this made it very difficult for any one state or ruler to suppress new knowledge or new ideas. Members of the Republic of Letters, Mokyr documents, used foreign publishers to circumvent censorship. In extreme cases, footloose members moved from one nation to another and played one power against another. The combination of political fragmentation and competition between dynasties, polities, and different religions made coordination by reactionary powers almost impossible. By the 18th century, troublesome books were still being burned in Western Europe, but thinkers were not being physically coerced.

This set of arguments nicely illustrates the interplay between institutional and political factors and cultural factors and shows how difficult it can be to disentangle them cleanly.

These arguments also slot in nicely to other explanations of the origins of growth which emphasize other factors such as political institutions or skills and human capital, which Mokyr also stresses in other research (for example, his work on millwrights, and skilled workers in general). Indeed, in his work from A Lever of Riches onward, Mokyr gradually constructed a rich framework which weaves together many such factors into a coherent account of how sustained growth emerged.

Throughout his research, Mokyr has focused on addressing questions about the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution that economic historians have long puzzled over. Specifically, why did it take place in Britain and not in another part of Europe or the world? And why did it take place in the 18^thcentury and not earlier or later?

Drawing on this larger body of work, one can reconstruct a narrative that begins by explaining the origins and success of the Scientific Revolution in the 16^th and 17th centuries, a pan-European phenomenon which provided the vitally important propositional knowledge that future technological developments would eventually come to build upon but which itself did not translate directly into faster economic growth.

Mokyr then traces the application of selected scientific principles into industry itself in the 18^th century. This was a development that Mokyr terms the Industrial Enlightenment. Unlike the Scientific Revolution, it was predominantly a British phenomenon. It was based around tea and coffee shops, where scientists, entrepreneurs and skilled artisans interacted and shared ideas. And of course, institutional factors were crucial: political stability, integrated markets, and religious toleration were preconditions for this Industrial Enlightenment. These all provided background conditions for the Industrial Revolution itself.

But Mokyr’s narrative does not stop there. His work has also considered the application of modern science after 1850 and it contains insights that have direct relevance for today. At a time when there seems to be a growing backlash against technological progress in many parts of the world and on both sides of the political spectrum, this is a Nobel Prize that acknowledges the importance of innovation and technology. Mokyr’s particular contribution has been to lay out in great detail how innovation took root in Western Europe in the early modern period. While many are seeking to restrain innovation in the name of various political causes, Mokyr reminds us of how much we have to gain through free exchange and a competitive marketplace for ideas. By giving the prize to Mokyr alongside Aghion and Howitt, the Nobel committee have rewarded research that points to the deep historical origins of modern prosperity.

This post will mostly be about why, and why Thomas Cromwell matters for thinking about some of the big questions in economic history.

But first a detour about the limits of TV as a medium for understanding history.

In recent years, commentators have, I think, come to the belated realization that the "age of prestige TV" was less of a golden age than we imagined. While there have been some exceptions (like the first season of Wolf Hall), most TV series produced since 2011 (when Game of Thrones premiered) will be soon forgotten. This is especially so of many of the historical TV series. The Medici, anyone? Or Versailles?1

Why is this? One failing is that geopolitics, economics, religion and strategy are not investigated in detail. When they are depicted, they are flattened into personal antagonisms. Personal conflict and romance are easier to depict.

Despite the quality of the production, I worried that The Mirror and the Light risked falling into this trap. Too much screen time was devoted to humanizing Cromwell.

The antihero who commits terrible crimes but also loves and wishes to be worthy of love is a mainstay of modern fiction – think Tony Soprano. And Mantel's portrait of a protean, aspiring, ambitious, but also human and humane, Cromwell was a revelation. Here, we see him try his best to look after a series of vulnerable young women: Princess Mary, Queen Jane Seymour, the illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Wolsey, and his own daughter. The quality of Mark Rylance and the other actors make many of these scenes compelling. But each scene is a variation on the same theme. Dramatically, these scenes may be needed; but narratively they are constraining and restrict the scope of the historic drama being depicted.

By episode 6, I was almost won around. Cromwell's rapid fall from power is brilliantly depicted. The fragility and arbitrary nature of political power at the top of the pyramid is exposed. Cromwell's mistakes don't have to be particularly momentous for Henry to tire of him and for his enemies, principally the Duke of Norfolk, to sweep in. Nonetheless, everything happens so fast. I would have appreciated more than one episode where we got to see more about why the likes of Richard Rich and Thomas Wriothesley choose to betray their master (see below).

I wish more TV shows as ambitious as Wolf Hall were being made. In this essay, though, I want to delve into some more problems with how Cromwell is depicted both in the show and in the novels.

[Note there are spoilers below for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light]

The Problem of Thomas Cromwell

The Mirror and the Light both as a TV show and the novel face the same dilemma: How to explain the fall from power of a man who up until this point has been shown to be an incredibly capable administrator and courtier, the man who always knows what to say and how to say it.

Mantel, in the novel, explores Cromwell's unraveling through his rivalry with Thomas More. She invents a backstory between them: Cromwell had been a servant at More's school and had looked up to More; but More has no memory of it and never recognizes Cromwell's worth. Peter Straughton and Peter Kosminsky, the writer and director of the TV series, cannot do this because their depiction of More – played by Anton Lesser – was less nuanced than in the book itself, emphasizing his priggishness and hypocrisy, without granting him any of his historical grandeur. And Mantel's portrayal of More was already controversial.2

The show replaces More's role in Cromwell's interior dialogues with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the father figure and mentor who plucked him from obscurity. Instead of being haunted by his role in More's death, he is obsessed with the idea that in his rise to power he may have betrayed his patron. Ultimately, however, this can't bear the dramatic weight it's supposed to; it cannot adequately explain Cromwell's own personal dissolution. Given Cromwell's abilities, it is unclear why he felt he owed so much to the Cardinal. Moreover, if Cromwell's Protestantism is as sincere as recent historians and Mantel believe, then why does Cromwell have such fealty to the corrupt embodiment of the old church?

But to explain why Wolf Hall but especially The Mirror and the Light felt like a missed opportunity, one needs to delve into the political economy of Tudor England.

Missed Opportunity 1: Cromwell's Boys

Wolf Hall captures the sense that Tudor England was a highly fluid and meritocratic society. Indeed, those depicted in the show as "old aristocracy" were in fact relative parvenus. The Duke of Norfolk makes much of Cromwell's lowborn status. But in reality, Thomas Howard's family had only been recently ennobled as a result of the extinction of the Mowbray line. The Howard family had been prosperous gentry until the late 15th century. The Tudors themselves of course were Welsh outsiders.

Amid this flux, Cromwell stands out as someone who can pick out talent and ambition. He collects ambitious young men; men who then rise alongside him.

Having lost his daughters, among the young men he raises is Ralph Sadler who remains loyal to Cromwell even to the end (and would rise to become a privy counselor under Elizabeth). Cromwell treats Sadler as a son. One of his endearing characteristics is his sense of family duty. His ambition is partly in the service of establishing his family and those who have served him well.

So, who else does he support and reward? And what does his selection reveal about his character and goals?

Apart from Sadler, two others stand out among Cromwell's coterie: Richard Rich and Thomas Wriothesley. And in the final episode they are prominent in his fall. Wriothesley, in particular, incriminates his former master. But his betrayal seems reluctant. It is intended to indict the overall political environment rather than the man. The court of Henry VIII is, as we know, a dangerous and ruthless place.

But Straughton and Kosminsky missed a trick. Rich and Wriothesley are among the most repellent and scheming individuals in Tudor history. They are most notorious for personally racking Anne Askew in the Tower of London until her limbs were pulled from their sockets. Rich was a political survivor. A man who rose to prominence by testifying against More in his trial and became "rich" acquiring large amounts of monastic lands during the Dissolution, but who during Mary's reign was a leading persecutor of Protestants in Essex. He remained in favor during Elizabeth's reign, changing his religion and politics to suit the times: a man who has been described as the “arch-villain of Tudor history.”3

Mantel knew about how unscrupulous and shady Rich and Wriothesley are. But it seems like the screenwriters and the actors in the Mirror and the Light apparently don't, so their portrayal was underwhelming. It is not simply that they are men corrupted by the system; rather they are further evidence for F.A. Hayek’s thesis about authoritarian or totalitarian government — that the “worst get on top’’ i.e. that there is a process of negative selection.4

Missed Opportunity 2: What Happens to the Poles?

The Poles and the Courtenays represent the remnant of the old medieval nobility of England, many of whom had been wiped out by the Wars of the Roses or reduced in prominence by the fiscal policies of Henry VII.

There were three Pole brothers, rough contemporaries of Henry VIII: Henry, Geoffrey and Reginald. They were rich, powerful and politically prominent; they possessed Plantagenet blood via their mother Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and owned lands across England. They had not been in favor of Henry's divorce, and all had traditional religious sympathies.

A decisive break occurred when the youngest Pole, Reginald, who had been in semi-exile, denounced Henry’s break with Rome and urged his deposition. As Henry's government reacted to the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Cromwell used this as an opportunity to eliminate the Pole family and their allies. These included Henry Courtenay, a cousin of Henry VIII and a descendant of the House of York, and Edward Neville, a member of the great northern family that had played so prominent a role in the Wars of the Roses.

The Mirror and the Light shows us some of this in Episode 3 but then entirely drops this plot point. We see Cromwell intimidating Geoffrey Pole, but we aren't told that the rest of his family (bar Reginald) are wiped out. Margaret Pole’s horribly botched execution admittedly happened after Cromwell’s death. But leaving the fate of the Poles unspecified is itself a problem. The TV show's relentless focus on Cromwell's fate obscures that of his victims. This is a missed opportunity. Cromwell's ruthless destruction of the Pole family and men like Henry Courtenay, who had been bosom companions of the King, presages the vicious way Henry and the other courtiers will turn on Cromwell in 1540 and reveals the dark side of his state-building project.

Missed Opportunity 3: The Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace

Having just written a paper (with Desiree Desierto and Marcus Shera on the dissolution of the monasteries), I naturally think that The Mirror and the Light doesn’t spend nearly as much time as on this it should!

England’s monasteries were incredibly rich and owned vast swathes of land. The dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540 was a huge event which had consequences that would reverberate for decades if not centuries. In his recent account, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, James Clark writes that:

“As a shockwave shared countrywide, it recalled only moments in the remote past, the Black Death, nearly 200 years distant, or the conquest of the Normans another three centuries beyond that”.5

In contrast, the Dissolution is just part of the background in The Mirror and the Light. The scale of the disruption is not shown and Cromwell’s part in this revolutionary episode is consequently under-explored.

When Cromwell visits Shaftesbury Abbey in Episode 2, he reassures the Abbess that the Dissolution will not effect her. It is, he says, only about closing the smaller monasteries, eliminating waste and corruption, and reallocating resources. Is he lying? Or is he telling the truth?

We are not told. But this is a weighty question. Did Cromwell plan on eliminating all of England’s monasteries as early as 1536? Or was the policy much more ad hoc, driven by opportunism and other actors? Clark notes that recent research has “questioned Cromwell’s capacity to orchestrate policy as well as he could conceive its central theme,” and suggests that “it was the servants of this vast undertaking, and not its master, who first perceived its problems and proposed its solutions.”6 To what extent was he driving Henry’s policies and to what extent was he riding a tiger?

Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell does not resolve this tension.

Similarly, the audience was underserved by not being shown the political reaction to the Dissolution. The rebellions in the north of England against Henry and Cromwell’s policies occur offscreen. Cromwell stayed in London while the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion was taking place and The Mirror and the Light almost exclusively follows Cromwell (though we occasionally have scenes without him).

We never see the popular unrest and we don't see Henry's duplicitous offer to negotiate with the rebel leader Robert Aske or his hosting of Aske at court during Christmas 1536, all events that Cromwell would have been involved with. And we don't see the subsequent repression.

And the repression was brutal. The Duke of Norfolk declared martial law so that he could executed rebels en masse without recourse to jury trials (as he expected many of them to be acquitted by their neighbors). Cromwell was responsible for interrogating Aske personally and for constructing the (legally dubious) case against him.7 Aske and hundreds (!) of other rebels were executed by being hanged in chains.

This apparently involved being hanged alive in chains until one died, a form of death that could take days.8

This brings me to some concluding thoughts. How should we think about the process of state-building and the often brutal and ruthless ways in which modern states were constructed.

Cromwell and the Modern State

In both her Cromwell books and in her excellent novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel's sympathies are with those individuals who, by disrupting the old moribund and irrational order of things, are responsible for bringing the modern world into being.

Cromwell in her novels is such an avatar of modernity. He embodies all the apparently "new" things that historians identify with the post-1500 order. His rise is based on merit and ability; he has no noble ancestors; he is comfortable with commerce and nascent capitalism, as well as with the law; he despises superstition and traditional Catholic religiosity, and though a sincere bible-reading follower of Tyndale, in practice, he is a vehicle of secularization and the privatization of religious faith. Above all else, he is associated with the rise of a stronger and more assertive state. He was building state capacity.

This Cromwell owes much to Geoffrey Elton's classic The Tudor Revolution in Government. Elton was perhaps the first historian to depart from the traditional depiction of Cromwell as a schemer who sought to make Henry an absolute monarch. Rather he emphasized that "the Henrician Reformation rested on conscious co-operation with Parliament and that the propagandists of the time never produced a theory of absolute monarchy". Elton argued that Cromwell was not only a master of bureaucracy but also that his "political creed centred on the legal supremacy of the king in Parliament and included no ambitions for a purely royal despotism".9 Subsequent scholarship has modified many of Elton’s claims but his portrait of Cromwell has largely survived.10

In his excellent Thomas Cromwell: Machiavellian Statecraft and the English Reformation, J. Patrick Coby lists Cromwell’s praiseworthy traits: he could be charming and warm, his intellectual interests ranged widely, he enjoyed entertaining at dinner etc. in a manner that is entirely consistent with the rich and nuanced portrait of Cromwell we get from The Mirror and the Light. But he follows this with:

“. . . But he could be terrifying . . ."11

Like the French Revolution then, where one stands on Cromwell sheds interesting light on one’s broader ideological commitments. It is revealing that Simon Schama was a notable critic of Wolf Hall’s depiction of Cromwell, saying:

“ . . . the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster, who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture.”12

Schama is not a Tudor specialist (and in blaming Cromwell he may be inadvertently letting Henry VIII off the hook) but he is the author of a landmark history of the French Revolution, Citizens which is notable for its emphasis on its human cost. In other words, Schama is more attuned to the human costs of state-building than are either Elton or Mantel.

My feeling after reading and watching Mantel’s Cromwell are that, excellent though both the television show and the books are, they provide only a partial window into Cromwell’s role in the turbulent mid-16th century period of Reformation and state-building. I’m still holding out for a television show or a film capable of showing us this.