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Marketing Sovereign Promises: The English Model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2015

GARY W. COX
GARY W. COX*
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, 616 Serra Street, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

The difficulty sovereign actors face in making their promises credible is widely appreciated (e.g., North and Weingast 1989; Myerson 2008). In this article, I argue that the English repeatedly used institutions of monopoly brokerage to mediate trades between the sovereign (offering various promises) and subjects (offering revenues). Once set up—at different times in different markets—institutions of monopoly brokerage sparked substantial and abrupt growth in state revenues. Moreover, these revenue increases cannot be explained by changes in promise-holders’ ability to punish nonperformance, changes in the preferences of pivotal state decision makers, or changes in high constitutional structure alone.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 190 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

I thank Lucy Barnes, Michael Braddick, Torun Dewan, Tiberiu Dragu, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, participants at seminars at LSE and Harvard, and anonymous reviewers for their comments; and Eliana Vasquez for help in preparing the manuscript.

References

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