A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Stirrup Rider Empires, from 600 to 1200. While being a major advance in horse riding, the stirrup just offers a short term for the intermediary phase of Rider Empires. Expansion of Islamic Caliphate was the towering event. It surpassed the Xiongnu area record. Apart from Tang, Tufan in Tibet, Liao, and Seljuk, all other medieval empires remained of modest size. In population, Song in 1125 briefly reached 38% of the world population – the largest percentage any empire has ever reached. The Caliphate altered the language mix throughout North Africa, introducing the Arabic. The Seljuks did so from Central Asia to Anatolia, introducing Turkic. The Caliphate clashed with Tang in Central Asia in 751. The forces of an empire reaching to the Atlantic Ocean confronted for the first time those of an empire that reached to the Pacific. Neither realized the momentousness of this skirmish. Western Europe developed feudalism, a maddeningly complex multistranded hierarchical order, which does away with single territorial authority.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

The long evolution that had been transforming the Iberian economy since the fifth century found its excipient in the Islamic invasion at the beginning of the eighth century. A consequence was the division of the peninsula into two parts separated by a territorial strip as a border. In the south side, the Muslim al-Andalus settled new population, generally repeating its tribal and traditional structure; applied changes in the tenure and exploitation of agricultural systems; and consolidated the preeminence of urban centres. On this basis it was established a monetary economy connected to the political and social evolution of Mediterranean Islam, applying economic policies that involved public expenditure, taxation and market regulation. Meanwhile, in the northern side, the Christian kingdoms and counties were strengthened thanks to the increase of agrarian land, including the absorption of the border strip. From the eleventh century onwards, feudal structures favoured the kingdoms and counties expansion over the Muslim south. Urban capitals articulated the new territories, at the same time that the Camino de Santiago attracted European immigration which promoted urban activities. Commercial development linked to centres beyond the Pyrenees and, through the Mediterranean, to urban centres of Provence and Italy.

The period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries was a phase of profound political and economic mutation for the Iberian Peninsula, in the context of which the confluence of expansionist processes dictated the emergence and reconfiguration of different political maps. This chapter seeks to trace the general evolution of the different political models that took shape in the Iberian Peninsula throughout this period, as well as to characterize the action of the institutions responsible for defining the foundations of an economic policy. To this end, the chapter is divided into two parts. The first one focuses on the evolution of the space controlled by the Muslims, looking at transversal aspects of economic policy and the implications deriving from the development of the territory. The second part focuses on the study of Christian institutions, on the construction of the Iberian kingdoms, and highlights the role of the monarchies and political institutions in the establishment of the economy and on the transition from a war-based economy to an economy where the market and trade assume a growing importance.

This chapter explores the constitutional ramifications of the French Revolution’s transformation of the old regime of property. It reinterprets the abolition of feudalism as part of the revolutionaries’ larger attempt to draw a conceptual and legal line of demarcation between property and power. Their double aim was to make property truly private by stripping from it all attributes of public authority and to make power truly public by eliminating its former patrimonial characteristics. The attempt to implement this demarcation in practice was still underway decades after the Revolution had formally ended feudalism. Over time, it largely succeeded. From this distinction between property and power flowed some of the key conceptual binaries – the political and social, state and society, public and private, sovereignty and property – through which we still apprehend the world. The abolition of feudalism was thus much more than simply the eradication of an archaic form of property. Rather, it played an essential role in shaping the conceptual building blocks from which modernity was built.

It was during the reign of Henry II (1154–89) that royal justice was available to anyone could bring their case within a certain formula, known as a writ. This is discussed in Chapter 5, ‘The Father of the Common Law (c.1154–1215)’, the title of which refers to the title often bestowed upon Henry II, the first monarch from the House of Plantagenet. The chapter focuses on the development of the writ system during and in the aftermath of Henry’s reign in relation to what we now call land law and whether this marked a move to centralisation that replaced the feudal system. The chapter begins by examining the Becket controversy but will then move on to argue that it is for other developments that Henry Plantagenet’s reign should be remembered. The second part of this chapter explored the developments to the legal system that occurred during this reign and that allowed for a common law to develop and be regularised. The final section will explore in detail the origins of the writ system, following Maitland’s legendary account of The Forms of Action as well as the revisions and criticisms put forward by Milsom.

This chapter explores the effect of the Norman Conquest as well as looking at the developments during the Norman period as a whole during the reigns of William I (1066–87), William II (1087–1100), Henry I (1100–35) and Stephen (1135–54). It falls into three sections. The first provides an overview of the main effects of 1066 in terms of law and order. The second and main section then discusses in detail what is often considered to be the most significant development under the Normans, the feudal system, and how this impacted upon law and order. Feudalism actually undermined the development of a common law by feudal lords presiding over their own feudal courts for their tenants. The king’s law and protection was only afforded to his own personal tenants. The third section then focuses upon two aspects that are often overlooked in accounts of the effect of the Conquest: the effect of the Norman era upon the position of slaves and women. The importance of the later Norman kings will be the focus of the conclusion.

Chapter 4 looks specifically at the reorganisation of military power in this period, which is closely related to the declining power of aristocracies. The rise of the modern state and its monopoly of legitimate force made militaries and law enforcement bureaucratic functions of the state, rather than localised privileges of divided nobilities. The pacification of the nobilities, the subduing of their traditions of martial competition to the modern state, opens up the scope for the more civil forms of competition. The ‘wild’ can now be replaced by the ‘domesticated’.

The Introduction argues that the common scholarly terms feudalism, lordship, state-building, bureaucracy, officeholding and government all promote a misleading narrative about Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern period. To better understand how power and authority functioned at the local level, it is essential to focus on the people who provided protection and exercised justice – and to recognize how little their corrupt practices changed between 750 and 1800. At the center of this study is the position of advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt), which emerged in the Carolingian period. Advocates then proliferated, especially in the German-speaking lands, and were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice on ecclesiastical estates, in some towns and even for entire regions. Examining how advocates profited from their positions across a millennium offers the opportunity to reassess the standard narrative of European political progress and to rethink the concepts we rely on to tell that story.

The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

The state that evolved under the second Pahlavi monarch featured rapid economic development and persistent political underdevelopment. Especially from the 1950s onward, when the amount of oil revenues coming into the economy increased significantly compared with before, the economy began showing classic signs of the “resource curse.” As is often the case, resource curse – that is, the negative consequences of overabundance of a single commodity and the riches accrued from it to the economy – had manifold ramifications for Iran. As the economy grew, reliance on its single, biggest source of growth, oil, deepened greatly. This occurred at the expense of other sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. It also hastened rural flight, resulted in unplanned urban growth, and brought about maladjustments between economic needs on the one hand and resources, skills, and opportunities on the other. More detrimentally, it froze or significantly slowed down any transition out of rentier arrangements and strengthened existing institutions and practices where they were. The state may have fostered economic development, but it remained politically underdeveloped itself.

On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and the Lombards, and father of at least eighteen children, was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III at Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne thereby united most of Western Europe under his rule, a vast area home to between 10 and 20 million people.1 Almost all of these people lived in the countryside.

The reason for this was that, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, Western Europe was characterised by conflict, population decline and de-urbanisation (the movement of people from the cities to rural areas). The Romans, of course, were known for their prosperous cities. A visitor to Rome today can still see the impressive ancient architecture of the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon.

Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

The consolidation of French kingship in the 13th century was accomplished by a group of jurists – the legists – trained in the Civil Law and ready to imagine their ruler as princeps after the Roman model. No longer simply a feudal suzerain, Philip the Fair would assert his legal authority against provincial lords, against the head of the Roman Church (Boniface VIII), and against whoever would possess the imperial throne. Although described as legibus solutus by his legal counsel, Philip remained dependent on the material resources possessed by his most powerful vassals, by the church orders and by his bankers, all of whom were learning to invoke their dominium proprietatis against the dominium iurisdictionis of their king.

Chapter 5 delves into the relationship between sovereignty and the sovereign, and between the sovereign and the state. Who decides who is sovereign, which is to say who controls the property rights associated with state sovereignty? The chapter addresses this question, arguing that the rules about who gets to be sovereign are, at least in part, both imposed and enforced by the cartel. Which is to say that the sovereign is a member of the cartel because she is recognized as sovereign by the other members of the cartel. The norms underlying this recognition change over time, and the chapter notes four different major changes in these norms since the Westphalian settlement, from feudal to monarchical to national to territorial to citizenship legitimation. But these norms are sticky, and new ones often do not fully displace earlier ones. Sovereignty disputes are therefore often messy; not only are the norms that govern what sovereign property is mutually contradictory, but the norms governing whose property it is are mutually contradictory as well.

City-republics have traditionally served as exemplars of participatory government. Their bottom-up organization would seem to suggest an alternative path to representative emergence. The three chapters of Part II address this challenge of equifinality; this chapter does so in two ways. First, it points out that republics are different forms of governance than representative polities, as they eschew a central executive and don't involve the integration of varied social groups. Second, despite such differences, republics and municipal governance can also be shown to reflect the basic logic of this book, as they were preceded by a period of centralized rule under conditional relations. These enabled the institutional learning that was necessary for participatory institutions to consolidate. The absence of an executive, however, also meant that they did not survive over the long term. These points are demonstrated by an examination of Italian city-states and of the Low Countries. Both Flanders and Holland had a thriving urban sector, but they retained their participatory institutions longer because the exective authority of the count was comparatively greater. The Swiss Cantons are briefly considered. The role of trade emerges as endogenous to political organization.

This chapter outlines a "feudal transformation" in medieval Europe, in which originality and creativity became activities to be protected and encouraged through grants of legal privileges. A Venetian statute that many have seen as Europe's first patent law is here placed in the context of legal and religious reforms overseen by Carolingian bishops and rulers. The trajectory of these reforms is traced through the development of medieval universities and legal education, which are linked, in turn, to an idealizing social vision of law as a morally binding force, drawing people together into communities through legal promises and oaths. With the birth of the European legal profession, Roman and Biblical legal traditions are synthesized into the legal foundation for medieval city-states, guilds, and universities, together with the prebend system that provides material support for clerics of various kinds. In the medieval city-state of Venice, these legal traditions become the basis for a transformation in legal privileges, emphasizing the value of novelty and creativity for legal communities and providing early precursors for later patent and copyright law.