How is rule of law established? We address this question by exploring the causal effect of increases in fiscal capacity on the establishment of well enforced, formal, legal standards in a pre-industrial economy. Between 1550 and 1700 there were over 2,000 witch trials in France. Prosecuting a...

The growth of the 17th century French state contributed to the establishment to a more regular, and even liberal legal order. Higher fiscal demands on the state led to a process of legal standardization that extended the rule of law. We use data on witch trials and taxation covering twenty-one...

In early 19th century England there was no professional police force and most prosecutions were private. This paper examines how associations for the prosecution of felons arose to internalise the positive externalities produced by private prosecutions. Drawing upon new historical evidence, it...

This essay reviews Escape from Rome by Walter Scheidel. It examines the argument that Europe's persistent fragmentation following the collapse of the Rome empire is responsible for the origins of the modern world. First, I consider Scheidel's argument that the rise of Rome at the end of the...

Ogilvie's The European Guilds is a major contribution to economic history and institutional economics. This review essay surveys the main contributions of Guilds, locating it in a long-standing debate over whether craft guilds contributed positively or negatively to economic development in...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained...

This paper offers a novel account of the rise of religious freedom. Religious and political power have been bound together since pre-history. As a consequence, there was an absence of religious freedom throughout most of history. Even when religious dissidents were not being persecuted for their...

How did religious freedom emerge? I address this question by building on the framework of Johnson and Koyama’s Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (2019). First, I establish that premodern societies, reliant on identity rules, were incapable of liberalism and religious...

This chapter evaluates the concept of legal capacity and how it is employed in research in historical political economy. I discuss its relationship to the wider literature on state capacity, research on the rule of law, and the literature on legal origins. I go on to outline how the concept of...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...