Book contents
- Kings as Judges
- Kings as Judges
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Part I The Origins of Representative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts
- Part II The Origins of Representative Practice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation
- Part III Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation
- Part IV Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights
- 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
- 14 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice: England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire
from Part V - Why Representation in the West: Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
- Kings as Judges
- Kings as Judges
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Part I The Origins of Representative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts
- Part II The Origins of Representative Practice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation
- Part III Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation
- Part IV Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights
- 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
- 14 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Part V integrates the different strands in the previous chapters to explain how they account for why representation consolidated in England but not in the non-Western cases. Existing accounts typically focus on the lack of certain cultural templates, whether corporate bodies and estates or corporations. Two alternatives are first examined, namely that the difference can be explained by the absence of two of the main components of representative emergence in the English case, the principle of representation itself and the demand for justice mediated through petitions. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire exhibited both traits, however. So then the chapter revises the common assumption that western representation depended on greater corporate rights and on the end of collective responsibility. Rather, the critical difference was that the English state was better able to resist the demands of groups for corporate privileges, at least in the period of parliamentary emergence, and to impose collective responsibility on a state-derived (rather than tradition-based) basis. This power is exemplified by its capacity to tax the nobility, which, as we have seen other European leaders were generally unable to do.
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- Kings as JudgesPower, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments, pp. 275 - 301Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021