Chapter 6 analyzes firm-level patterns of collective action and finds that law-abiding firms are more likely to experience collective action for interest-based demands. Using the strike map dataset of the China Labour Bulletin, it shows that interest-based protests are less likely to invite state repression, in part because they do not target state authorities. Contrary to the assumption that those protest that ask more than the legal minimum might be more politically threatening than law-based protests, the findings in this chapter demonstrate that interest-based protests rarely breach the physical boundary of individual firms.

The population of Czarist Russia roughly tripled between 1850 and 1914. Keynes conjectured that this “excessive fecundity” contributed to the revolutions of 1917–18. In Russia as in contemporary India, however, population grew largely because the growing railroad network alleviated local famine. The growth and routing of the railways were determined chiefly by military considerations, hence can be regarded as exogenous. The railroads also allowed the opening of new lands and greater regional and national specialization: Russian grain exports quintupled between 1850 and 1914, foreign investment poured in, and millions of peasants moved temporarily into urban industry during months of slack farmstead demand. Hence a population explosion that would ordinarily have reduced wages and living standards was instead accompanied by rapid economic growth, per capita income almost tripling in the sixty years before 1914. The regions not serviced by railways, however, stagnated or declined; and, controlling for other factors, regional railway access correlates negatively with peasant unrest. Not rapidly growing population, but uneven development, appears most associated with rebellion.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

A simple Cobb-Douglas production function illustrates how supply shocks affect relative returns and, thereby, a society’s degree of economic inequality, whether measured as the rental-wage ratio, the share of income going to the top few percentiles of the distribution, or the Gini coefficient. Illustrative examples of positive and negative shocks to the supply of labor, land, physical capital, and human capital are presented and their main causes adduced. Trade also matters. An unanticipated opening or closing of trade routes can effectively change a factor’s supply or the availability of external markets for products that use that factor intensively. Unforeseen innovations in transportation and communication, or the discovery of new trade routes, open new sources and markets; wartime blockades often close them. Both historically have given rise to extreme supply shocks.

The contemporary revival of interest in political economy highlights the coexistence of different and opposed conceptions among scholars and policy makers in addressing the interface between the economy and the polity. One set of approaches focuses on individual actors in the marketplace or in the public sphere, while another set of approaches shifts the emphasis to the state as a self-contained and internally undifferentiated collective actor. This chapter outlines a conception of political economy that moves beyond this dichotomy and develops the view that individuals, markets, and states are embedded in a relational field composed of multi-level social interdependencies and institutions. The aim of the chapter is to explore the ‘constitution’ of political economy as the multi-layered and relatively persistent configuration of domains and sub-domains in which economic structures and political actions mutually reinforce or hinder one another, thereby determining the dynamics of social wealth – what we call ‘commonweal.’ The chapter conceptualises political economy as a relational field resulting from overlapping spheres of social life. It refers to the social relationships enabling the material provision of human needs and brings to the fore the political dimension of need satisfaction, which involves balancing and coordinating differentiated interests in society.

Chapter 4 is an examination of workers’ blame attribution, looking at when workers direct their grievances to the central government vis-`a-vis other actors. It demonstrates that migrant workers’ social grievances about limited upward mobility, income inequality, and unfairness grow as they gain experience as migrants. While atomized protests focus on economic grievances pertaining to a specific job, the empirical analyses of survey data show that social grievances pose a bigger threat to the regime, since they change the direction of blame attribution. Protest participants are less likely to blame the central government than nonparticipants, which could imply that those that blame the central government might not be interested in atomized protests.

The constitution of a given economy involves features of invariance in the constellations of positions associated with the existing division of labour. The positions of individual or collective actors relative to one another turn a mere collection of actors into a structured body of interdependencies that is already political and economic prior to its formal establishment through a visible settlement. Interdependencies between actors are conducive to plural ways in which interests arise and group affiliations are shaped. This chapter emphasises the distinction between conciliation of interests as compromise between partial interests and conciliation as pursuit of partial interests under a ‘systemic interest’ reflecting the viability of a given body of interdependencies. Institutional architectures are relatively stable systems of formal and informal rules that determine which constellations of affiliations and interests are possible and which ones may be expected for any given pattern of relative positions. There is a two-way relationship between interdependencies and institutional architectures. Alternative patterns of interdependence are associated with different identifications of systemic interest and different patterns of conciliation under that constraint. On the other hand, institutional architectures may trigger interests that may or may not be compatible with existing interdependencies and their transformation over time.

Chapter 5 is a study of within-firm mobilization during collective action and explains why those with the resources for mobilization have weaker preferences for collective action. Due to high levels of labor turnover, the majority of the workforce lacks strong social ties in the workplace, and those who do have mobilizational resources perceive collective action to be highly costly. Collective action occurs when the workers with mobilizational resources expect a high chance of success.

This chapter outlines a conception of the body politic as an organised plurality of actors governed by ordering principles that aim to achieve ‘correct proportions’ between various levels of agency and thereby ensure viability of the system over time. Fundamental dispositions in the body politic are directed towards mutual recognition rather than the mere pursuit of ‘influence’ through political power or economic wealth. This implies that actors are relational beings, embedded in relationships enabling them to organise social, political, and economic associations. The chapter discusses contractualism in political economy, considering its separation of economics from the body politic and its reduction of political economy to instrumental rationality and maximising choice. The contractualist approach is contrasted with a relational perspective that emphasises interlocking institutions that channel within the body politic existing social dispositions and interdependencies. The chapter also explores the implications for political economy of the latter view, building on the work of political and economic theorists of the Enlightenment such as Paolo Mattia Doria and Antonio Genovesi. Their approach is consistent with a non-contractualist view of the evolution of civil life which emphasizes the primacy of plural levels of aggregation and intermediate affiliations in the development of the body politic.

We focus on exogenous and unanticipated shocks, negative or positive, to the supply of any of the four main crucial factors of production: land, labor, physical capital, and human capital. Among the causes of such shocks are plagues, wars, migrations, and new technologies. Supply shocks matter politically because they threaten a sudden change in factors’ relative returns: a loss of labor, absent intervention, raises wages but lowers returns to land and capital; an infusion of human capital lowers skill premia but raises wages and the rents of land and physical capital. Owners of adversely affected factors will attempt to adjust, usually in one of three (increasingly costly) ways: through factor substitution, exit to another sector or region, or adoption of a factor-saving technology. (Hence innovation is usually endogenous but sometimes, by overshooting, can itself occasion a supply shock.) Only where none of these options avail will they resort to the (usually) costliest option of coercion: enslaving labor, seizing land, conscripting capital. What determines how a society adapts, or whether it does so at all, are such objective factors as soil, climate, and proximity to markets.