States of Credit

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 Representation, Scale, and Control 6 The Evolution and Importance of Public Credit 9 Representative Assemblies in City-States and Territorial States 11 Geographic Scale and Merchant Power 14 Broad Sample Evidence 16 Origins of City-States 18 Case Study Evidence 20 Plan of the Book 24 CHAPTER TWO: The Evolution and Importance of Public Credit 25 Why Credit Was Important 25 When Did States First Borrow Long-Term? 29 The Cost of Borrowing 38 Economic Explanations for the City-State Advantage 43 Summary 46 CHAPTER THREE: Representative Assemblies in Europe, 1250-1750 47 Origins of Representative Assemblies 48 Prerogatives of Representative Assemblies 54 Who Was Represented? 61 The Intensity of Representation 65 Summary 68 CHAPTER FOUR: Assessing the City-State Advantage 70 Representation and Credit as an Equilibrium 72 Representative Institutions and the Creation of a Public Debt 77 Representative Institutions and the Cost of Borrowing 84 Variation within City-States 90 Summary 93 CHAPTER FIVE: Origins of City-States 94 The Rokkan/Tilly Hypothesis 95 The Carolingian Partition Hypothesis 95 Empirical Evidence 100 Reassessing the City-State Advantage 106 Summary 107 CHAPTER SIX: Three City-State Experiences 110 Merchant Oligarchy in Cologne 111 Genoa and the Casa di San Giorgio 117 Siena under the Rule of the Nine 125 Summary 131 CHAPTER SEVEN: Three Territorial State Experiences 132 France and the Rentes sur l'Hotel de Ville 132 Revisiting Absolutism in Castile 142 Accounting for Holland's Financial Revolution 150 Summary 154 CHAPTER EIGHT: Implications for State Formation and Development 156 The Debate on War and State Formation 156 Information, Commitment, and Democracy 158 Understanding Early Modern Growth 161 Bibliography 167 Index 187

David Stasavage is professor of politics at New York University. He is the author of Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State.

"States of Credit evaluates a novel conjecture regarding the relations between political representation and public debt. It is an important contribution to the literature."--Avner Greif, Stanford University