It is said that thoughtful people are not afraid to change their mind. David Stasavage deserves this accolade. In a string of influential articles and an earlier book (States of Credit, 2011), he has taken as a starting point that the bedrock of modern democracy, political consent via representative institutions, formed in medieval Europe. Now, he has published a book that presents a dramatically different take on the origins of democracy. Its point of departure—signaled by the title—is that numerous other historical societies have been characterized by what Stasavage terms “early democracy,” meaning that rulers depended on some kind of consent from those they governed, normally via assemblies. This regime form was particularly likely in small-scale settings, in places where it was difficult to accurately monitor and tax production, and in societies where we find a balance of power between rulers and those they governed, for instance due to good exit options for the latter.

In historical perspective, this regime form is thus a product both of features of the natural environment (for instance, how intensive agriculture was and the extent to which exit was possible) and of initial state organization. However, Stasavage argues that this also meant that the advance of civilization favored autocracy, because it produced easier-to-tax intensive agriculture, as well as writing and measurement technologies that could serve as the sinews of bureaucracy. Early democracy therefore gradually disappeared in many places, or, as in China, was blocked from the very beginning by a strong state, which could monitor production.

According to Stasavage, what made Europe different was its economic and administrative backwardness. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, administrative structures and agriculture remained primitive for more than a thousand years. This combination of economic and administrative backwardness was first reflected in Germanic assembly politics and later in the advent and spread of medieval representative institutions, which—just as any other institution of early democracy—existed in lieu of a state apparatus. Europe’s technological and administrative backwardness thus allowed early democracy to survive even as it was replaced by autocracy in many other places.

This was the backdrop for the development of practices of representation and consent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which allowed Europeans to scale up early democracy to larger political units. Stasavage shows how these practices were first developed within the Catholic Church and then spread to lay politics. But the reason for their use in both contexts was the same, and both corroborate the more general argument: European rulers, whether lay or ecclesiastical, needed money and had no alternative to acquiring it via consent.

For Stasavage, modern representative democracy required a more even balance between state and society. This combination first arose in England, where monarchs were strong enough to use parliament to project public power. This was owing to a long historical tradition dating back to Anglo-Saxon England, where state structures were stronger than those in the rest of the Latin West; it enabled thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English kings to strip representatives of the political mandates that were a common feature of medieval representation and that allowed local interests to veto policies not to their liking.

However, Stasavage argues that it was in the British settler colonies, where society was further empowered by good exit options and where bureaucracy was very weak, that genuine representative democracy first arose. From there, it spread (back) to most of Europe—and parts of Latin America—because of the legacy of state weakness and assemblies in these areas. This development received a further boost as nineteenth- and twentieth-century European states came to depend on universal conscription, making rulers dependent on their citizens.

This brief outline does not do full justice to the book, which also has a lot to say about the ways different political regimes affected economic development. But it summarizes what Stasavage has to say about the decline and rise of democracy. The very use of this term—even with the qualifier early—to describe a large number of historical societies will be sure to provoke many. Yet, if readers come to the book expecting a social scientist unshackled by reality, they will soon discover that Stasavage knows a lot about the historical societies he is dealing with. The book draws on ethnographical and archeological quantitative data in simple but persuasive ways, but most impressive is Stasavage’s handling of narrative historical sources. He demonstrates how our knowledge about societies (for example, in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient China, and ancient India) has evolved over time; he takes stock of the disagreements between different historical interpretations; he tries to identify the most recent knowledge about the societies he analyzes; and he tells us why he agrees with some historical interpretations more than others. Finally, he has a judicious skeptical touch, often making clear that we simply do not know enough about a period or place to say anything definitive.

As already mentioned, the ultimate expression of this thoughtful mindset is the way Stasavage has jettisoned his prior belief that there is anything particular about political consent in medieval Europe. However, there is one point where he seems to me to have changed his mind more than the admittedly scarce source material can bear. In his 2011 book, States of Credit, Stasavage emphasized the importance of the ninth- and tenth-century Carolingian state collapse for the development of European institutions of self-government. In his new book, we hear virtually nothing about this collapse. Au contraire, the book implies that state power was permanently low in Europe. Even the Romans, according to Stasavage, had little in the way of genuine bureaucracy, at least not compared with Chinese emperors. And whatever Roman state apparatus existed then broke down after the Germanic invasions.

Stasavage here rides roughshod over a widespread consensus among medieval historians: that early medieval Germanic/barbarian rulers inherited a relatively vigorous notion and exercise of public power from the Roman Empire. From the fifth century to the late ninth century, according to medieval historians working on Western Europe, there was a clear distinction between the private and public aspects of power, and monarchs generally overawed all other political players in their realms. To be sure, public power was not at the same level as in the Byzantine Empire, Imperial China, or the early Abbasid Caliphate. But it was nonetheless robust for centuries after the fall of Rome. Only after the Carolingian state collapse did this exercise of public power by Western European kings hollow out “from inside in a much more fragmented world, and local lordship became more important” (Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe: From the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation, p. 78, 2016).

In other words, Stasavage’s interpretation of early medieval kingdoms seems to be colored by this later breakdown of royal power, which marked an end to the ex-Roman tradition of public authority, but about which we hear almost nothing. One indication of this is that he places the Byzantine concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and the state bureaucracy late, under the ninth- and tenth-century Macedonian emperors, to show that this was a novel development that broke with the Roman past. On this point, Stasavage’s use of source material is for once very weak, resting on a single reference (p. 105, fn. 17) to an old work by George Ostrogorsky (History of the Byzantine State, 1969).

Stasavage thereby ends up ignoring a significant rupture in medieval Europe. This speaks to a broader point, which is slighted in the book, even though it is in many ways a mirror image of Stasavage’s insight that the advance of civilization has tended to sound the death knell for political consent. Civilization and state power have often proved remarkably brittle, and throughout history, the collapse of old power structures has repeatedly paved the way for a reestablishment of political equality (James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017). To more fully understand the European political inventiveness in the high middle ages—and hence the roots of modern representative democracy—the Carolingian state collapse surely needs to be factored in.

However, this point only reinforces one of the main conclusions of Stasavage’s book: that where a strong state exists, democratization is unlikely, regardless of whether a society modernizes in socioeconomic terms. The book deserves to be read and discussed, because its global history perspective allows Stasavage to formulate this, as well as a number of other thought-provoking ideas that remain hidden to those only studying democracy and democratization in the contemporary era.