54. Watts 2009: 421; Wickham 2016: 236–38, 243, 256 (quote).
55. Wickham 2016: 233 (pathways). Variation: J. Hall 1985: 136–37, 142; also J. Hall 1988: 33–34, esp. 33: “Why should an imperial Europe have been any different” from conventional capstone empires? For counterfactuals, see chapter 6 in this volume.
56. For the severity of the collapse, see Wickham 2005: 306–14; Fleming 2010: 22–29. The section title is a quote from Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, ch. 3 (sixth century CE).
57. A. Williams 1999: 1–21, 33–36, 54, 88–89; Fleming 2010: 270–74; Wickham 2016: 83–87. For the timing of cohesion-enhancing reform in the late tenth century, see Molyneaux 2015.
58. Maddicott 2010: 1–56; Roach 2013, esp. 44, 77–160, 212, 235–38 (quote: 238); Wickham 2017: 415–18. There is no need to assume that this format had been imported from Carolingian France: Wickham 2016: 89 and 2017: 416 contra Maddicott 2010: 31–32.
59. For these developments since the tenth century, see Maddicott 2010, esp. 57, 64–65, 102–4, 119, 136–40, 382–86, 393, 407–8, 413–31, 435–37, 440–53 (quote: 452). Genesis of gentry: Coss 2003. Wickham 2016: 88–89, 100 stresses the importance of England’s modest size, comparable to that of a large German duchy, and the aristocratic cohesion this facilitated. Fukuyama 2011: 428–31 offers a valuable comparative perspective.
To be sure, English state-building did not follow a smooth or linear path: opposition to royal power caused taxation to decline after the Hundred Years’ War, and after 1455 conflict among aristocrats and Parliament resulted in civil war. Yet even when the elites fought, they remained committed to the state instead of relinquishing their status as “co-participants in government.” Thus Wickham 2016: 219–20 (quote: 219), who (233) emphasizes the importance of “oligarchic involvement in policy-making and a tradition of justice based on assemblies which went back to the early middle ages without a break, the only example of this among the more powerful polities of the period.” Scandinavian polities, which shared these traits, were comparatively weak.
60. Ertman 1997, esp. 34, 88–89, 163, 168–69, 318–19.
61. Tilly 1992: 72; Voigtländer and Voth 2013a: 174, 180 (wars); Dincecco and Onorato 2018: 19–30, esp. 27–29 (122 conflict events in the sixteenth century, 164 in the seventeenth, and 323 in the eighteenth), and 78, fig. 5.1 for their spatial concentration in northern France, the Low Countries, southwestern Germany, northern Italy, Scotland, and Poland, followed by southern England and the remainder of Germany.
62. Hoffman 2015: 15–18, 29–34 (progressive nature), 49–63 (model). The chronology of these specifications remains somewhat opaque: some additional requirements that I omit here (such as high cost of warfare and low variable costs) may have been more recent developments that did not predate the seventeenth century or so. For the relationship between European war-making and state-making, see esp. Tilly 1992 alongside B. Porter 1994; Spruyt 1994; Ertman 1997; Glete 2002.
63. Vries 2015: 276–81 offers a concise and useful summary. This growth was a more gradual process than the “military revolution” envisioned by Parker 1996, but the overall result was dramatic. Black 2002 covers the early stages. State system and innovation: see, e.g., E. Jones 2003: 118–19, 124–25; Bayly 2004: 81. See I. Morris 2014: 165–234 for the nature of war in and beyond Europe from 1415 to 1914, which he labels “productive war.”
64. For the rise of the fiscal-military state, see esp. Bonney 1995; Glete 2002; Cavaciocchi 2008; Yun-Casalilla and O’Brien 2012. Competition: Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 178–79; B. Porter 1994: 111 (quote).
65. Tax rates from Karaman and Pamuk 2010: 611, fig. 5 and 615, fig. 6. Dutch rates doubled in real terms and tripled in silver terms between 1600 and the 1780s. Budgets: Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 181.
66. Karaman and Pamuk 2010: 611, fig. 5 and 623, fig. 9. In the early eighteenth century, Venice ranked third.
67. Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 173–78, 185, 193, 197–98.
68. Damage: De Long 2000: 150–57. Finance: Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 140–48.
69. O’Brien 2012b: 545–47.
70. See, e.g., Ringmar 2007: 170; Goldstone 2009: 97–119, who cites England as the only exception (see below); Dincecco 2011.
71. For the concept of the “North Sea region”—centered on the Netherlands and Britain—see van Zanden 2009a: 233–66.
72. I am grateful to Şevket Pamuk for sharing these data with me. Pamuk 2007: 297, fig. 2, also shows the preceding plague-induced improvements; see Scheidel 2017: 293–313 for a recent overview. The “continental Europe” sample is based on data from Paris, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Milan, Valencia, Vienna, and Kraków, which provide the longest relevant time series. Trends were very similar for skilled urban workers: Pamuk 2007: 297, fig. 3. “Welfare ratios” are determined by relating nominal wages to stylized consumption baskets.
73. The “Continental Europe” metric is based on data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden. For similar comparisons over an even longer term, see Broadberry et al. 2015: 423 fig.11.05.
74. In figure 10.4, the “English share” metric covers the half centuries before the stated dates.
75. For England/Great Britain, see also Broadberry et al. 2015: 410–11.
76. Cf. similarly Allen 2003: 415, table 2.
77. For the Little Divergence, see chapter 7 in this volume. The best accounts of the pioneers are De Vries and van der Woude 1997 (Netherlands) and Broadberry et al. 2015 (Britain). With respect to other proxies of improved access to financial and human capital and of commercial integration, such as falling interest rates, skill premiums, and price variability, Europe more generally had scored well compared to other parts of the world from the Late Middle Ages onward: see esp. van Zanden 2009a: 17–31 and van Zanden 2009b.
78. Van Zanden 2009a: 262 (legacy), 296 (quote), and 203–66 for the underlying dynamics in general. Specifically for the benefits of the Reformation, see chapter 12 in this volume. Advantages: Downing 1992, esp. 239–42 for comparative analysis.
79. De Long and Shleifer 1993, esp. 689–90, 697; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005: 562–63, 569–72; Findlay and O’Rourke 2007: 351; van Zanden 2009a: 263, 291–93.
80. Van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker 2012: 840–44, esp. 843, fig. 4 (trends), 849–52 (conflicts), 852–58 (economic effects). Stasavage (in press) tracks the evolution of democratic institutions over the very long run: see esp. ch.5, on medieval Europe.
81. For Dutch innovations, see North and Thomas 1973: 132–45, esp. 134–35, 139–42. De Vries and van der Woude 1997 is the classic account of the early modern Dutch economy. Traditions: van Zanden 2009a: 207–10. National citizenship: Mielants 2007: 156.
82. Growth: van Zanden 2009a: 215–26. (Contrast Philip II’s multiple defaults: Drelichman and Voth 2014.) Association: Voigtländer and Voth 2013a: 177–79, esp. 179, fig. 4: this correlation for Europe overall (from 1300 to 1700 for urbanization and from 1500 to 1700 for GDP) is driven above all by the Dutch data, and the trend more or less disappears when the Netherlands and England are excluded: see 179, fig. 4B. Cf. Voigtländer and Voth 2013b: 806, fig. 10 for a somewhat different but fundamentally similar depiction of trends.
83. See, e.g., Magnusson 2009: 19–25. Dutch cities: t’Hart 1994: 211–12. For Dutch influence on British development more generally, see Jardine 2008.
84. See, e.g., Macfarlane 1988: 192, 201–2. The caption quotes A. Smith 1776: 221.
85. Goldstone 2009: 110–11.
86. See, e.g., Neal 1990: 10–12; Landes 1998: 223. For the role of Huguenots in later British development, see most recently Beaudreau 2018.
87. Kelly, Mokyr, and Ó Gráda 2014: 369–84 emphasize these factors, which in their view generated high real wages rather than being their result (contra Allen 2009b: see chapter 12 in this volume).
88. Van Zanden 2009a: 228–29; Johnson and Koyama 2017: 3–6.
89. Angelucci, Meraglia, and Voigtländer 2017.
90. E. Jones
2010: 244; O’Brien 2011: 426; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 209–11.
91. See, e.g., Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005: 563–66; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 208.
92. North and Weingast 1989, esp. 805, 821–27.
93. Cox 2012, esp. 568, 594, 596. Cf. also Vries 2013: 325–27 for criticism of the widespread academic focus on 1688 in relation to property rights. Quote: North and Thomas 1973: 155–56.
94. Van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker 2012: 844, fig. 5; Pincus and Robinson 2014, esp. 201–22; Hoppit 2017: 308–9.
95. Bogart and Richardson 2011; Hoppit 2017: 318–19, 322–33; and chapter 12 in this volume.
96. Hoppit 2017: 310, 312, 320.
97. Ibid., 312 (quote); Mokyr and Nye 2007: 60–61.
98. Bogart and Richardson 2011: 270.
99. North and Thomas 1973: 146–56, esp. 155–56; and earlier North and Thomas 1970, as well as North 1981: 164–67. Appleby 2010: 13 (quote), where she also notes that only England succeeded in “sustaining innovation through successive stages of development.” Epstein 2000: 37, 173–74. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic intercity competition—driven by growing urban density and falling distance to consumers in other cities—became so strong that guilds no longer resisted innovation: Desmet, Greif, and Parente 2017.
100. See, e.g., O’Brien 2011: 428–30; Vries 2015: 69–179, esp. 121, 164, 175–78, with a comparison to low-tax China (more on this later in this chapter).
101. Vries 2015: 181–217, esp. 184, 187, 207, 210–11.
102. He 2013: 63–77; Vries 2015: 219–22, 228–29. Brewer 1988 is a classic account of the relationship between warfare, taxation, public debt, and financial innovation. Much the same was true of the Netherlands, which had pioneered large-scale public debt by building on (much more modest) medieval Italian precedent: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, debt rose while interest rates fell, and more than a tenth of Dutch households invested in the war against Spain: Vries 2015: 224 (65,000 individuals out of a population of 2 million).
103. Bayly 2004: 62–63; Goldstone 2009: 114. For the role of credible commitments, see esp. Coffman, Leonard, and Neal 2013. This had deep roots: in the late Middle Ages, English kings had come to depend on credit from domestic capital, which could only be accessed if political support was granted: Grummit and Lassalmonie 2015: 135–37.
104. Vries 2015: 282–89, 321.
105. Brewer 1988: 34–35; Vries 2013: 236–39.
106. For the more general issue of the relationship between state capacity and modern economic growth, see the survey by Johnson and Koyama 2017: 8–12.
107. Findlay and O’Rourke 2007: 352; Vries 2015: 314–35.
108. Hoffman 2015: 210; and see chapter 12 in this volume on Allen’s model.
109. “Mercantilist states were warfare states rather than welfare states”: Vries 2015: 332. For the system, Vries 2015: 325–47.
110. Thus Magnusson 2009: 26–50, esp. 45–49. See in general Ormrod 2003 for mercantilism in the Netherlands and Britain. See also Reinert 2011 for the creation of political economy as a science in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, as Hoppit 2017 reminds us, the cohesiveness even of English policymaking should not be overrated.
111. O’Brien 2011: 439; Mokyr and Nye 2007, esp. 55–60 (quote: 58–59).
112. Jha 2015.
113. Vries 2015: 344–46, 433.
114. Ibid., 339–44.
115. Parthasarathi 2011: 125–35. The Indian textile export industry was duly ruined in the nineteenth century (223–62). For medieval protections, see chapter 12 in this volume. Textile machinery could not legally be exported until 1843, even if enforcement proved unfeasible.
116. Parthasarathi 2011: 164–68; O’Brien 2017: 50–54. Real prices: Allen 2009b: 87, fig. 4.3, also 95, fig. 4.4.
117. Parthasarathi 2011: 168–70.
118. Magnusson 2009, esp. 8, 85–86; Vries 2012: 654–61 (656 and 660 for the simile of the crutch, borrowing from Herbert Norman).
119. An important point made by Vries 2013: 418–19. For the Industrious Revolution, see chapter 11 in this volume.
120. Heavy hand: thus Vries 2013: 336, also 433–34; and in great depth Vries 2015. Mobilization: Vries 2015: 317–18.
121. O’Brien 2017: 19–58, and 79: “My rhetorical and debateable [sic] perception is that in significant respects the First Industrial Revolution can be plausibly represented as the paradigm example of successful mercantilism and that the unintended consequences of the Revolution in France contributed positively and perhaps ‘substantially’ to its ultimate consolidation and progression.” Patenting: Billington 2018.
122. Satia 2018: 147–61 is the latest summary.
123. Vries 2015: 409–13 (quote: 413); E. Jones 2003: 234 (question).
124. E. Jones 2003: 235 (quote).
125. War: Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 185. For the costs and benefits of colonial empire, see chapter 11 in this volume. By-product: Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 225–30 (for war-induced policies yielding “unanticipated positive conditions for economic change” [230]), who stress the contrast to China, where, as we will see later in this chapter, benign policies were pursued that did not similarly stimulate development. Vries 2013: 382 follows their assessment.
126. Vries 2015: 435.
127. Ibid., 434–36.
128. Cf. also de Long 2000: 158–65 for another summary.
129. From this perspective, it makes little sense to ask whether the onset of industrialization was a British or a European phenomenon (e.g., Pomeranz 2000: 6): it was both.
130. Bayly 2004: 82 (quote). Cf. also E. Jones 2003: 127–49.
131. Vries 2013: 358–79 is fundamental. Intervention and its roots: Vries 2013: 381 and most clearly 382: “Competition and the way it was institutionalized in all its varieties in the end, in my view, were fundamental to the rise of the West.”
132. Quote: Vries 2013: 434–35. Van Zanden 2009a: 15–91, esp. 31 and also 294, stresses the medieval foundations of later North Sea region development.
133. Institutions and modernity: Ringmar 2007: 34, 38 (quote); Vries 2013: 319. Experiments: Ringmar 2007: 289: “If one European society temporarily stagnated, there would be elsewhere in Europe another society that continued to change.” Ringmar 2007: 38 (quote).
134. Ringmar 2007: 283–89, esp. 287; Vries 2013: 336. For a complementary perspective, see also North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009: 240–50.
135. Quotes: Bryant 2006: 407–8 (italicized in original); Wong 1997: 151; see also Baechler 1975: 114.
136. Vries 2013: 318–22 considers institutions the ultimate cause of transformation; see also 429–35. Cf. chapter 8 in this volume. Hoffman’s 2015: 213 conclusion that “political history is then one of the ultimate causes behind both the European conquest of the world and the ‘great divergence’ ” applies (only) in this very broad sense.
137. The quote in the section heading is from line 29 of the Mount Yi inscription honoring Qin unification, supposedly dating from 219 BCE (Kern 2000: 12–13).
138. Lists: see, e.g., Landes 2006. E. Jones 2003: 153–222 is perhaps the most massive recent indictment of Asian empires and their economies (quote: 231); for even more blatant Orientalizing, see 110: “Excessive consumption and debauchery and terror were much more prevalent in the empires of Asia and the Ancient World than in the states of Europe.”
139. Criticism: Parthasarathi 2011: 53–55; Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 167–68 (quote: 168); Vries 2013: 59; Brandt, Ma, and Rawski 2014: 59–61.
140. Pines 2012: 107 deems it “highly significant that during the formative stage of Chinese political thought and political culture, no powerful independent elite existed on Chinese soil.”
141. See Zhao 2015a: 11–16 for a summary of the argument, and esp. 274–93 for the rise of the Confucian-Legalist state. Arrighi 2007: 318 also notes that political, economic, and cultural power was much more concentrated in East Asia than in Europe. See, furthermore, Pines 2012: 76–103 on the lite
rati class, esp. 89, and 101 on the absence of divisions between spiritual and political authority.
142. Zhao 2015a: 18 (quote): spatial and temporal variations in Chinese history “do not fundamentally challenge the historical patterns based on comparisons between different historical periods of China and between Chinese and other major civilizations.”
143. Revival and characteristics: Bol 1992; Pines 2012: 102, 113–14; Zhao 2015a: 331–46. Bol 2008 is fundamental for our understanding of neo-Confucianism since the Song.
144. Arrighi 2007: 333 (quote). See Zhao 2015a: 348 on merchants’ inability to “counterbalance the state negativity” due to the “higher-order structural condition” of the political-ideological system. See also Chen 2012: 58 for merchants as a politically disadvantaged group; and likewise Vries 2015: 358.
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