The introduction reviews the current debate concerning the origins of the industrial revolution in England, especially the institutionalist argument, its emphasis on property rights, and critical responses to it. In brief, the classic institutionalist argument is that the Glorious Revolution marked a significant improvement in the security of property rights, leading in turn to the Industrial Revolution a century later. The most common counter-argument is that property rights had been secure in England since the medieval period. Herein lies part of the significance of wardship for larger debates concerning the origins of the industrial revolution. If, as the book contends, wardship meant that property rights were much less secure than is now commonly supposed, this would go a long way to resuscitating classic institutionalist accounts of English/British institutional change in the seventeenth century and consequent economic development.

This chapter examines the policy influence of churches under autocratic and democratic regimes. The main analysis focuses on Zambia and Ghana, both of which have undergone numerous periods of democratization and autocratization. The chapter shows how liberal democratic institutions improve the ability of churches to accomplish their educational policy goals in these two countries and, suggestively, across sub-Saharan Africa more generally by giving churches greater influence over policymaking and protecting their agreements with the state.

The first half of this chapter surveys some of the tangible economic consequences of wardship – it increased the incidence of waste (that is asset-stripping of wards’ estate), increased the barriers to agricultural improvement and obstructed land transactions. The difficulty lies in presenting systematic evidence concerning this – ideally it would be possible to identify and attribute differences in agricultural productivity according to freehold tenure – some of which did entail wardship for underage heirs, namely ‘knight service’ and some of which did not, namely ‘socage’. But beyond a massive data collection exercise it is unclear how this could be achieved. Instead, as a proxy for productivity, the second half of this chapter presents evidence concerning land values. As one would expect, land held by socage sold at a 10% premium compared with land held by knight service.

Institutions of organization are designed to lower transaction costs. Transaction costs tend to be prohibitively high when large numbers of people would be required to engage in a transaction, so those transactions will not occur. Classic cases of externalities, such as when large numbers of people in an area suffer from air pollution from nearby industries, are good examples. Large numbers prevent those suffering from pollution from negotiating with those who are causing it. One way that market institutions deal with the problem of large numbers is to reduce those large number cases down to bilateral exchanges. With two parties engaged in transactions, transaction costs are lower, which facilitates mutually advantageous exchange. That works well for institutions of organization, but is difficult to apply to institutions of governance because one set of rules is designed for the entire population. Transaction costs are necessarily high, which means that only an elite few will be able to negotiate in the design of those institutions of authority and governance.

The conclusion returns to the book’s central argument – that wardship, the arbitrary burdens it imposed on those unfortunates ensnared, the wider economic costs ensuing, all while producing so little benefit to the Crown, was representative of the wider Stuart state. It is easy to envisage how a nascent industrial revolution might have been smothered by the Stuart fiscal state, perhaps via monopolies being awarded to undeserving favourites, or contracts and property rights being re-drawn to suit the perceived interests of the Crown. Ultimately, the conclusion will make the case that the industrial revolution could not have started in England during the eighteenth century, were it not for the constitutional changes of the seventeenth century.

Exchange within the political marketplace, just like the marketplace for goods and services, takes place within an institutional structure that lowers transaction costs to facilitate political exchange. One difference is that whereas institutional constraints in markets for goods and services typically are enforced by a third party – government – institutional constraints in the political marketplace are enforced by those who are constrained by them. This chapter discusses a variety of political institutions, and explains why those institutions, in general, are designed to enable the political elite to maintain their power against potential challengers. Recognizing the way that political institutions are designed to protect the power of the incumbent elite, the chapter concludes that the most important dimension of political competition is the competition between elites and challengers, not competition among parties.

Two centuries after independence, is colonialism still a valid explanation for Spanish America’s inequities and lagging economic performance? This chapter makes the case that the legacies of colonialism run at a deeper and much more local level than commonly acknowledged and publicly discussed. In particular, factoring-in the administrative practices of the Spanish Empire reveals how eighteenth-century office-selling undermined local governance in numerous ways: Shaping the spatial distribution of authoritarian and ethnic enclaves; the recurrence of violent conflict in certain areas; and ultimately, the under-provision of public goods leading to subnational differences in living standards we observe today. The chapter also outlines the limits of current explanations – focused on factor endowments, national institutions, or postcolonial state-building – to explain local-level differences. The chapter concludes with a roadmap describing the rest of the book.

This chapter focuses on the role of institutions in shaping economic efficiency and development throughout European history. It argues that institutional innovations have been central to Europe’s long-term economic progress, even though inefficient institutions have sometimes persisted due to vested interests. We first discuss what is considered a development-friendly institutional setup, and then analyse relevant historical institutions such as serfdom, open fields, guilds, cooperatives, the modern business firm and socialist central planning to understand their specific (in)efficiency contributions and distributional consequences.

Around the world, countries have set up climate institutions that putatively “depoliticize” climate policymaking, removing decisions from the realm of partisan politics or delegating decisions to technocratic bodies. Here, we offer an empirical reassessment of such apolitical institutions in the UK, Norway, Denmark, and Australia. We find that what seems in many cases like depoliticization – upon closer examination – proves anything but. Instead, we offer a reinterpretation of climate advisory institutions as the path-dependent product of distributive and partisan conflicts. New climate institutions did not emerge merely as a result of norms about public goods provision and efforts to reshape intertemporal policymaking incentives, to provide stability, or to solve the gap between current and future welfare needs. Instead, these institutions addressed core distributive conflicts over climate policy, the short- or medium-term political needs of incumbent governments, or both. In turn, we argue that this political context surrounding their creation has limited the degree to which they can stabilize policy over time or depoliticize climate policy debates.

Chapter 3 develops a theory of the domestic politics of intra-industry trade. It argues that changes in the nature of trade away from endowments-based trade to two-way trade within industries change the structure of preferences over trade policy and the way that actors mobilize politically in order to influence trade policy. This, in turn, affects trade policy outcomes and the ease with which trade agreements are concluded. First, I argue that the distributional effects of intra-industry trade drive a wedge through industry preferences over trade policy. As intra-industry trade increases, globalized firms support openness, and smaller, domestic-oriented firms within the same industry support protection. Second, these heterogeneous firm preferences change the ability of industries to overcome collective action problems and organize politically to influence trade policy. I argue that industry associations are hamstrung in their ability to lobby while individual firms have a greater incentive to lobby alone for their preferred policies. Third, exporters will overwhelm domestic-oriented firms in their ability to lobby, and as a result, tariffs will be lower in industries with higher intra-industry trade, though this may not be the case with non-tariff barriers to trade.

This chapter assesses the effects of intra-industry trade on lobbying in the EU. It includes the results of analysis of an original dataset of EU-based lobbying over several trade agreements. First, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of trade policy in the EU, and then surveys the literature on the politics of trade in Europe, with a focus on the state of our knowledge about the character of political coalitions and the involvement of industry associations and individual firms in the trade policymaking process. Second, the chapter discusses the role of intra-industry trade in the EU and presents an argument about the way that IIT has eroded the ability of European industry associations to lobby jointly over trade policy. Third, the chapter introduces the dataset used to assess the argument and discusses the quantitative analysis and results. The results support the theory developed in this book and demonstrate that IIT affects societal coalitions across diverse institutional contexts.

The book opens with some compelling examples of puzzling episodes in recent trade policy negotiations. I question why Americans were largely unaware of TTIP, while the TPP became a lightning rod for controversy and went down in flames on day one of the Trump presidency. I also discuss the dramatic rise in firm-level lobbying over these and other trade agreements, despite the IPE literature’s longstanding assumption that firms primarily engage in trade politics collectively via industry associations or class-based coalitions. Then I briefly introduce my theoretical story, which makes sense of these and other puzzles. I discuss the state of our understanding of trade politics in developed democracies before presenting the plan of the book to follow.