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...

Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood. Tracing the...

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...

Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argued that "fractured land" was responsible for China's tendency toward political unification and Europe's protracted political fragmentation. We build a...