Author:

Spike Gibbs

Introduction:

The year 2022 again saw a significant number of publications in late medieval economic and social history, including a bumper six articles in this journal which at least partly covered this period. Political structures and their economic impacts were a particularly popular topic. Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer examine the development of self-governing merchant towns in England using a dataset of 555 boroughs which existed before the Black Death. They demonstrate that a combination of involvement in trade and being in royal hands caused specific towns to seek ‘Farm Grants’ (conferring rights to self-governance including in tax collection and law enforcement) from the crown. They argue this process was triggered by the Commercial Revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which towns sought more flexible institutional arrangements to handle commerce. They further show that towns with Farm Grants were more likely to be represented directly in parliament, creating a virtuous re-enforcing relationship by which urban autonomy led to a stronger nationally representative body. This leads to their wider argument that this relationship helped create stronger constraints on rulers in early modern England than elsewhere in Europe. Lantschner examines city states across the Mediterranean world, comparing Christian and Islamic regions. He challenges previous assessments that have seen Italian city-republics as a stage in the development of western-European democracy and as imperfect versions of modern states. Instead, he argues that city states thrived in areas of political fragmentation and are best seen as ‘brittle regimes’ in which actors including political organisations and city-based lords, often in alliance with external agents outside the city, vied for control.

Published on The Economic History Review,Volume77, Issue1

Open access and free to download

https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13315