Marketing Sovereign Promises
Monopoly Brokerage and the Growth of the English State

This book offers a new theory of state growth, based on the creation of credible and prudent state budgets.

Gary W. Cox (Author)

9781316506097, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 April 2016

232 pages, 21 b/w illus. 14 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.34 kg

'Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' B. B. Andrew, Choice

How did England, once a minor regional power, become a global hegemon between 1689 and 1815? Why, over the same period, did she become the world's first industrial nation? Gary W. Cox addresses these questions in Marketing Sovereign Promises. The book examines two central issues: the origins of the great taxing power of the modern state and how that power is made compatible with economic growth. Part I considers England's rise after the revolution of 1689, highlighting the establishment of annual budgets with shutdown reversions. This core reform effected a great increase in per capita tax extraction. Part II investigates the regional and global spread of British budgeting ideas. Cox argues that states grew only if they addressed a central credibility problem afflicting the Ancien Régime - that rulers were legally entitled to spend public revenue however they deemed fit.

1. Sovereign credibility and public revenue
Part I. The Glorious Revolution and the English State: 2. The market for taxes and platforms
3. More credible platforms, more taxes
4. Pricing sovereign debts
5. Establishing monopoly brokerage of sovereign debts
6. The consequences of monopoly brokerage of debt
7. Property rights
8. From constitutional commitment to Industrial Revolution
9. Summarizing the Revolution
Part II. The English Constitutional Diaspora: 10. Exporting the Revolution - the early adopters
11. Exporting the Revolution - the late adopters
12. Good political institutions.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]