Let us start by reformulating John Maynard Keynes’s famous claim: Economists who advise policymakers about good governance and development strategies and who believe themselves to be quite exempt from the influence of inferior humanistic disciplines are usually the slaves of some defunct historical interpretation. With Kings as Judges, Deborah Boucoyannis offers those who have not been paying attention to what has happened in historical research a much-needed update on the origins and development of representative institutions in medieval and early modern Europe, and their enduring political relevance.

The key claims can be summarized as follows. First, the origins of representative institutions are judicial, not financial. Long before kings taxed, they judged, and early parliaments were their courts. Second, representative institutions consolidated as realms-wide permanent political institutions—characterized by “regularity, collective action, and territorial anchoring” (p. 58)—where rulers were strong, not weak. It was the ability of the monarchs to compel especially the high nobility to attend and, in a later stage, be taxed that made parliaments integrated parts of the body politic: “no elite compellence, no enduring representative institutions” (p. 21).

Parliaments therefore only became central organs of governance where property rights were weak in the sense that all land tenures theoretically (and to some extent in practice) belonged to the monarch. And the story of parliament revolves around the monarch’s relationship with the nobility, not the commercial groups that much recent research has emphasized. In parts of Western and Central Europe where monarchs were unable to compel the most powerful nobles, they did one of two things: either they incorporated lower social groups such as townsmen into the representative institutions, creating weak representative institutions based on urban pockets—as in cases such as France and Castile—or they allied with the lower nobility and created what Boucoyannis terms “second-best” constitutionalism, exemplified by polities such as Sweden, Poland, and Hungary.

These bold and provocative claims are substantiated using different sources of evidence. Boucoyannis starts by bringing to the table several crucial insights that historians have long recognized but which social scientists have largely ignored: representation was an obligation long before it became a right; early representative institutions were tools of monarchs, not of elite groups; and so-called early modern absolutism did not mean that rulers were powerful or unconstrained, but rather the opposite: absolutism is a weapon of the weak. One of the great virtues of the book is this tenacious attempt to take what historians have written seriously. The preface sets the tone by enumerating the huge number of professional historians Boucoyannis has consulted along the way.

Boucoyannis has also collected quantitative data on representative institutions, the groups attending them, the use of petitions, and features of the economy and the fiscal system. She uses these and other data to make the case for the main argument when comparing England and France, and when analyzing the development of the Iberian parliaments of Castile and Catalonia. The sweep of the comparative analysis is truly remarkable: Scandinavian kingdoms, the Low Countries, Italian city-states, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire are also covered.

As with any academic work, there are of course also some weaknesses. Boucoyannis succeeds in making the case that the strength of English rulers was on a different plane than what we find in France. But she also repeatedly emphasizes how the strengthening of enduring realm-wide representative institutions in other European polities happened when rulers were relatively strong. However, she has no clear cross-case or within-case empirical specification of when ruler power was high and when it was low—the “master variable” (p. 62)—in, for example, the Northern European kingdoms that she analyzes in chapter 10, the Low Countries analyzed in chapter 7, and the Catalonian case analyzed in chapter 8.

Based on my own prior work I would, for instance, disagree that the count-kings of the Crown of Aragon—the case that comes closest to replicating the English outcome—were relatively strong during the formative period (before 1200), as Boucoyannis claims (pp. 180–83). The ninth- and tenth-century state collapse had been very intensive in this area, and early Catalan corts and Aragonese cortes were often called to deal with the problem that the monarchs were unable to enforce a land peace and had to rely on oaths in parliament (as Boucoyannis seems to acknowledge on p. 185). And they tended to consolidate as permanent political institutions during “do or die” moments, such as the critical 1280s and 1290s, when the House of Barcelona’s very existence was threatened by French and Angevin forces.

A resort to more quantitative data would perhaps have provided a stronger comparative test. There is one very powerful short-term indicator of ruler strength within realms in the case universe that is being analyzed, which the book does not employ. As historians regularly argue, royal and princely power dropped dramatically when monarchs were underage, during so-called minorities. It would then normally reassert itself when the monarchs came of age, during so-called majorities. If representative institutions normally strengthened when royal power was relatively high, we would expect that this occurred during majorities, not minorities. But recent research finds the opposite: throughout Western and Central Europe in the period 1000–1800, parliamentary activity was much higher during minorities where rulers were weak (see Andrej Kokkonen, Jørgen Møller, and Anders Sundell, The Politics of Succession: Forging Stable Monarchies in Europe, AD 1000–1800, 2022, chap. 7). Boucoyannis might object that the frequency of parliamentary convocations is not a convincing measure of the institutional outcome she is interested in: “enduring polity-wide parliamentary activity” (p. 214). But even if this is granted, frequent convocations are still one among several indicators of such activity. This, at least, is how the tallies of parliamentary meetings are being used in many of the empirical chapters of the book.

Other variables could have been used to gauge ruler strength in a longer-term perspective. Boucoyannis repeatedly argues that a crucial indicator of royal weakness is an elective crown. She uses this observation to emphasize differences between the elective monarchies of Northern and East-Central Europe (second-best constitutionalism) and the primogeniture monarchy of England (the real thing). But if primogeniture is a corollary (or even a cause) of state strength, as Boucoyannis argues in the conclusion, then it is surprising that we find no general relationship between the spread of primogeniture and parliamentary activity in the case universe she analyzes—though there is evidence that successions became less associated with parliamentary activity under primogeniture, which probably reflects that they were less troubled (see Andrej Kokkonen, Jørgen Møller, and Anders Sundell, The Politics of Succession: Forging Stable Monarchies in Europe, AD 1000–1800, 2022, chap. 7).

The case might simply be that such quantitative indicators analyzed in long time frames are not well attuned to capturing the origin story that Boucoyannis tells; which, if correct, would vindicate her chosen qualitative approach. That said, the evidence for the English main case (and the difference vis-à-vis France) remains for this reviewer the most convincing part of the empirical analysis. But as Boucoyannis points out, it is the English case that has in fact generated most of the conventional wisdom that the book challenges: it is the “crucial test” (p. 25) for established theories, emphasizing war-and-taxation as well as property rights. The book does a great service by pointing out that social scientists working in the traditions established by Charles Tilly and Douglass North have tended to read history backward in the English case.

As Boucoyannis emphasizes, if the story about England told in Kings as Judges is correct, much of the development advice lavished on countries in the Global South rests on shaky historical foundations. Hopefully, scholars of contemporary processes of political and economic development will be paying close attention to this impressive book, instead of automatically resorting—implicitly or explicitly—to defunct historical interpretations of European state formation. Boucoyannis deserves great credit for bringing recent historical evidence to bear on the received wisdom, and fundamentally challenging it.