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The first systematic account of how structures of justice led to the emergence of representative institutions and state-formation in Western Europe.
List of contents
Preface and acknowledgments; Part I. The origins of Representative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts: 1. Introduction; 2. A theory of institutional emergence: regularity, functional fusion, and the origins of parliament; 3. Explaining institutional layering and functional fusion: the role of power; Part II. Origins of Representative Rractice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation: 4. Taxation and representative practice: bargaining vs compellence; 5. Variations in representative practice: 'absolutist' France and Castile; 6. No taxation of elites, no representative institutions; Part III. Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation: 7. Courts, institutions, and cities: Low Countries and Italy; 8. Courts, institutions, and territory: Catalonia; 9. The endogeneity of trade: the English wool trade and the Castilian mesta; Part IV. Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights: 10. Power, land, and second-best constitutionalism: Central and Northern Europe; 11. Conditional land law, property rights, and 'Sultanism': premodern English and Ottoman land regimes; 12. Land, tenure, and assemblies: Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Part V. Why Representation in the West: Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization: 13. Petitions, collective responsibility, and representative practice: England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Deborah Boucoyannis teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington University. This book is based on a dissertation that received the American Political Science Association's Ernst Haas Best Dissertation Award in European Politics and the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Politics and Society, and other journals.
Summary
The first systematic account of how structures of justice led to the emergence of representative institutions and state-formation in Western Europe. It will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, political economy and economic history, history, historical sociology, political sociology, law and legal history.
Additional text
'It is commonplace to describe scholarly work as 'groundbreaking', but Professor Boucoyannis' book, and especially her chapter on Ottoman land law, really do merit this description. She is the first to notice the similarities between English land-law after the Norman Conquest and Ottoman land-law between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Both legal systems made tenure on the land conditional, although it was the Ottoman system that gave control only, not ownership, of the land to the ruler. They had similar restraints on alienation and similar laws governing peasant land tenure. This chapter also demonstrates that the English crown wielded greater power than did the Ottoman sultans, thus undermining the old view that it was the 'arbitrary' rule of the sultans that prevented the emergence of representative institutions in the Ottoman Empire. The chapter is valuable in its own right, especially for historians studying the fundamental principles of the Ottoman laws of property and land tenure.' Colin Imber, University of Manchester
