LITMIR.BIZ

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       THE RISE OF THE STRONG BUT LIMITED STATE

      In the last chapter, we saw how new military technologies such as siege cannons developed to overcome traditional fortifications and unify territories. No longer could every town or manor stand up to the king’s men simply because it had strong walls. (I will use “king,” since they were mostly kings, with due apologies to queens like Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I.) The emerging nation-state’s military power was too much for the traditional feudal community and broke its protections down. The centralizing of governance powers had begun. It was limited, though, by the difficulty of governance at a distance in an era when the fastest means of communication was through bonfires or via riders on horseback.

      The nation-state still had to accomplish at least three tasks before it came to even remotely resemble today’s strong state. The first was for the king to obtain a monopoly of military power within his territory so that it was a unified whole with a common market. To do this, he had to suppress the large magnates—the domestic dukes and princes—who had the lands and revenues to rival his military power. We will see that this took different forms, but in England, it was achieved through direct confiscation as well as, interestingly, through competition in markets.

      The second task was to create an identity that would replace religion—since religion did not distinguish one nation-state from another in Europe. That identity had to give people a sense of larger purpose. Increasingly, an identity that suited many requirements, including the king’s need to lead a unified country, was identification with the nation.

      Even after unifying the land under his power, the king faced external threats. Some European country was always trying to establish supremacy—first Spain, then France, and in modern times, Germany and Russia. Any European country risked subjugation if it was not militarily powerful. As his feudal vassals’ obligations to supply arms and men waned with the demise of feudalism, the king needed money to maintain a strong military to defend the country against these external threats. Much of the subsequent development of the state can be seen as a consequence of steps taken to enhance its ability to raise revenues—the third task.

      The nation-state that emerged had somewhat contradictory powers. It was strong in its ability to defend itself against external enemies and defeat internal threats to the state, yet it was compelled to respect the private property rights of its citizens. The constitutionally limited state was an important milestone in the path towards free markets. The security of private property did away with the need for private players to protect themselves through anti-competitive medieval business associations, such as guilds. It allowed them to compete as individuals. Greater competition raised efficiency and output, increasing the economic power of the nation-state that could foster it. The markets pillar and the state pillar now fortified each other.

      Since different nation-states went through these developments in different ways, and my intent is to illustrate, not be exhaustive, I will focus on the path England followed, primarily because it was the first large nation-state with a constitutionally limited government. The process of stabilizing governance in the English nation-state took the Crown over two hundred years, spanned the reigns of two houses—the Tudors and the Stuarts—and involved substantial amounts of chance. Even though England’s path to constitutionally limited government and freer markets was unplanned and idiosyncratic, through war it imposed competitive pressures on other European countries to change if they wanted to survive. Eventually, many reached similar endpoints, albeit in their own ways.

      THE DECLINE OF THE MAGNATES

      As we have seen, the new military technologies required scale. At the outset of nation building, the monarch was not personally much wealthier than the most powerful of the landed aristocracy. He needed to build his own power as well as reduce theirs. In the process of eliminating the threat of the high aristocracy, the English king unleashed market forces that would help create entities that would eventually curtail his own freedom of action. Interestingly, as the king lost the ability to act willfully and outside the law, as his identity was submerged in the broader apparatus of the state, the state’s access to financing from its citizens increased. It could now expand in ways, such as maintaining a large army, which would earlier have raised public apprehension about the monarch’s intentions. The limited state became strong and improved its capabilities even while bolstering the confidence of the citizenry in the security of their property. Let us see how this happened.1

      Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, was the last king of England to win his crown on the battlefield. There were others who had some right to the throne, so Henry’s claim to be monarch other than by “right of conquest” was questionable, at best. From the outset, therefore, the Tudors had to dominate other aristocrats through sheer power. This was not a simple or quick task.

      The monarch’s problem was difficult. The landed aristocracy had built militias out of their armed servants, and could also summon their vassals and tenants to fight for them. Even as Henry VII passed a series of Acts asserting that the prime loyalty of every subject was first to the Crown and only then to his lord, feudal tradition militated otherwise.2 The monarch only had control over a small militia, and was otherwise reliant on conscription. This meant that in any emergency requiring a prompt response, such as an internal rebellion by one of the lords, he needed the help of the other lords to defeat it. Furthermore, the king did not have a large bureaucracy to collect taxes. He depended on the high lords to collect and pass taxes on to the royal treasury. With the king so dependent on the aristocrats, he simply could not take them all on at the same time.

      Time and infertility were on the king’s side. He had no need to create powerful new aristocrats, and indeed no dukes were created by the Tudors.3 Furthermore, because some lords did not have male children, which was not

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