Creditor Coalitions and State Development in Early Modern Europe

• In Event: Historical Dynamics in European Parties, Regimes, and States

Abstract

This paper focuses on how creditors helped propel two major institutional developments in early modern Europe. The first change was the strengthening of tax institutions, as states installed salaried state agents as the crux of tax administration and sidelined non-state actors, such as tax farmers. The second institutional development concerned the transition from patrimonial to “proto-modern” and then rational-legal bureaucracies. This progression entailed rulers limiting cronyism and embracing meritocracy as the basis for bureaucratic recruitment. This paper theorizes that the incorporation of creditors into ruling coalitions promoted these changes. Creditors pressed governments to strengthen tax institutions and professionalize bureaucracies because these things assisted their economic goals. Empirically, this research harnesses a novel dataset on 17 European polities to measure these institutional changes more directly than the indirect proxies commonly used in historical research on state building. Overall, this paper moves beyond prevailing theories, such as warfare or structural economic change, to better account for the timing and pace of European state formation.

Author

• Ryan Saylor, University of Tulsa