Wetlands have deep geological histories, stories of bedrock, sediment, and sea rise. But the direction and speed of flow has been shaped just as surely by human interests and intervention. This chapter asks how wetland commons were used, managed, and disputed in the centuries and decades prior to improvement projects. Moving from the action of ice sheets and mosses to national legislation and daily work, it examines how environmental and political scales intersected. By the late sixteenth century, communities in the northern fens faced amplified flood risks and conflict over shared commons. But these challenges did not necessarily strengthen intervention by state-sanctioned institutions capable of coordinating at a larger scale. A less linear and more fragmented picture emerges in the northern fens, where environmental politics pivoted on rights and responsibilities defined by local custom. Fen custom was reproduced by communal decision-making and participatory acts of walking, remembering, and working. It formed a flexible fabric, adapted in response to dynamic waterways and porous boundaries and negotiated through confrontations on riverbanks as well as courtrooms.

The introduction presents the aims, scope and structure of the book and discusses major historiographical issues: the role of empires in global history; that of slavery in the Atlantic world and that of serfdom in Eurasia; the great divergence debate; the historical meanings and practices of emancipation in a global perspective. The introduction then discusses the question of scales; the role of gender and law; the definitions of institutions, empires and capitalism as well as the qualification of coercion, resistance and agency.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle of this study: why, in contrast to other states in Southern Africa, have Zimbabwean democratic institutions stagnated or even declined since independence in 1980? To begin to answer this question, an overview of the resource sector in Zimbabwe, particularly the large diamond found in 2006, and the development of institutions since Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, is given. Furthermore, an institutional analysis, a brief overview of past studies, and a research design are outlined. In terms of case selection, Zimbabwe is placed in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource curse dynamics, and the concept of the “opaque” state is defined. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is defined in terms of democratization and state capacity, concepts that will be used throughout the study.

The final chapter generalizes the theoretical development from other chapters of this book to states in different regions. Venezuela, similar to Zimbabwe, has also experienced many similar dynamics: hyperinflation, decline of the formal sector, and while at one time having a similar if not better level of development to other countries in its region, has now fallen distinctly behind. However, similar to ZANU-PF and the large diamond production after 2006, the PSUV in Venezuela also had a source of funding to perpetuate its rule after 2012: alluvial gold. Eritrea also has some similarities to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, as they have produced and continued to discover a large amount of resource wealth in a single-party dominant political system. Nonetheless, Eritrea may have avoided some of the extreme pitfalls of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The rapid increase in Zimbabwean diamond wealth and the resulting “opaque” institutions provide lessons for states with a large amount of resource wealth. This study illustrates that different types of resources offer some commonalities but also distinctly different challenges for the institutional trajectory of states and overall capacity.

This chapter explores the varied facets through which conceptions of materialism manifest across the larger ecologies of literary production bundled under the rubric “African literature.” It deliberately treats both of these terms – materialism and literature – in their broadest senses. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the various manifestations of materialism which have emerged in studies of African literature, reading materialism variously as critique (in its Marxist/socialist guise), aesthetic (what Zimblar and Etherington call the “materials” of world literature), and context (material worlds and worldings). The chapter then expands on these ideas through a set of literary-focused readings which draw on anglophone, francophone, and other African literatures, largely emphasizing the global circulations of the novel form from 1960 to the present day. This chapter finally concludes by looking at materialism through the twinned concepts of circulation and mediation, exploring the ways in which the material structures which allow a literature to “emerge,” in market terms, simultaneously impact the constitution of the African literary text and its publics.

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.

The Desolate Boedelskamer was an innovative institution. It introduced a new approach to insolvency. Rather than punishing the insolvent debtor, the Desolate Boedelskamer sought to raise him up. Even though it remained firmly embedded in the early modern mental world and its communal culture of governance, the Amsterdam Desolate Boedelskamer is a clear example of how professionalization and good governance were able to provide systemic trust in a world of growing complexity. This new institution was part of the moral economy of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and relied upon it to function, but it also helped to shape that moral economy. Through a careful balancing act of trust and power, this institution was able to support the proliferation of credit, granting numerous insolvents in seventeenth-century Amsterdam a true stay of execution. In this analytical conclusion, the impact and wider implications of the book's argument will be discussed in a broader context.