I'm very happy to be with you today and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you.
I first discovered the Mises Institute, like many others I'm sure, about four years ago
on the internet.
I was a graduate student at the time and I was fortunate enough to attend a week-long
seminar and another conference here in 2002 and when I got the job offer at Falkirk University
last year, I excitedly told my wife that one of the best things about living in Montgomery
When Hans Hoppe's book, Democracy, the God that Failed, first appeared, I read some reviews
and familiarized myself with its thesis concerning democracy's inferiority to monarchy without
actually reading the book.
I think the price tag on the hardcover edition scared me away since I was still a student at the time I've since acquired and read it but I remember musing even back then that if what Hoppe was saying were correct then much of early modern and modern European and American history would have to be re-examined or even rewritten including the history of the field in which I specialized in graduate school 16th and 17th century England the period of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties I continued to
I had to toy with this idea for a few years and decided that if no one beat me to it, I would try my hand at a Hoppeian analysis of early modern England once my PhD was finished and I was comfortably ensconced in a tenure-track university position somewhere.
My conversations with Joe Stromberg at a recent conference inspired me to get serious about that project again, and so here I am today.
What I propose to do is share some preliminary thoughts on how the nature of civil government in early modern England illustrates Hoppe's thesis concerning the relative merits, or more appropriately demerits, of monarchy and democracy.
And I say illustrates, not proves, since of course Hoppe's theory is reached deductively and therefore not subject to empirical verification.
In the interest of time, I've chosen to focus on the 17th century, the period of the Stuart Dynasty.
This period is of particular interest because it includes England's experiment in Republican government under Oliver Cromwell,
as well as the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, which marked a big step in the direction of democracy in England.
Most of you are probably familiar with the Huyg interpretation of history,
which was dominant in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries and which Murray Rothbard
sharply criticized in his own historical writings. The Whig historian's central assumption was that
in the words of J.P. Kenyon, throughout our history we have progressed steadily and it seems
inevitably towards a state of social and political near perfection located in the present day or in
in this case on the eve of World War I.
Stuart England occupied a key place
in the classical Whig interpretation
as the period when significant progress
towards that ideal parliamentary democratic system
was made when parliament established itself
as the monarch's equal or even superior.
Two of the most famous works of the Whig School,
namely Gardener's account of the civil wars
and Macaulay's treatment of the Glorious Revolution
deal with the Stuart period.
The falling from favor of the Whig interpretation
in the 1920s and 1930s was a serious blow to English
and more specifically Stuart historians
who now had no generally agreed upon theoretical framework
from which to construct an assessment of the past.
The orthodox Marxist interpretation, which like the Whig
was teleological and linear in its approach,
found some adherence but never became standard
and it has since been discredited
even among mainstream historians.
Although in recent years,
the race class gender deconstructionism
endemic in literature departments,
unfortunately has made some headway
in the heretofore more sensible history departments.
No overarching theory of history has yet arisen
with the potential to replace the Whig interpretation
and sweep the field of its competitors.
To quote Kenyon again,
Instead of striding along a brightly illuminated high road, the historian now shuffles uneasily
in a thick fog from one lamppost to another, the lampposts wide apart and eccentrically
sited and frequently shifting their position.
What's exciting to me about Professor Hoppe's theory is its potential to clear up the center
of the confusion in this field.
It provides a framework within which we can more clearly evaluate important developments
and events like the Glorious Revolution.
At the same time, its non-teleological nature frees us
from slavishly searching for predetermined outcomes
such as the triumph of democracy or of the proletariat.
Likewise, because Hoppe's thesis
does not purport to explain everything,
it leaves room for appreciation of other incentives
that motivate historical actors,
some of which may run counter to and even overpower
the incentives Hoppe sees as being inherent
in the Structures of Monarchical and Democratic Government.
In the case of Stuart England, as we will see, religious conviction plays a very powerful
role in this regard.
The genealogy of the Stuart dynasty that I've passed out comes from the British Monarchy's
official website, and I hope it will help everyone keep up with the discussion today.
I'll give a brief overview of each of the monarchs to establish a chronology of the
The First Stuart King of England was James I, who inherited the throne in 1603 from Elizabeth I, his first cousin twice removed.
If you ask the man on the street what he knows about James, he will probably say something about the King James Version of the Bible, which was published in 1611.
He might also tell you that James was homosexual, and given Professor Hoppe's experience, perhaps I shouldn't comment on how this alleged homosexuality might have affected James' time preference.
In fact, the evidence for James' homosexuality is inconclusive, and there are solid grounds for believing that he was not so inclined.
James' reign was largely a peaceful one by the standards of the day, and he might be judged the most successful Stuart King by Hoppean standards.
Despite his strident defense of the divine right of kings, in practice he frequently negotiated with parliament and otherwise acted in a prudent manner.
Upon his death in 1625, James was succeeded by his second son, the first had died prematurely, Charles I.
Charles ran into difficulties with parliament in his early years over, what else, money, and his frustration led him to dissolve parliament in 1629
and attempt to govern without it, relying only on his traditional sources of revenue for the next 11 years.
This effort was reasonably successful until Charles made a disastrous attempt in 1637 to impose the English Book of Common Prayer on the Church of Scotland.
James and Charles were both King of England and King of Scotland simultaneously, although the two remained separate countries.
The members of the Church of Scotland generally believe that the English prayer books skirted too closely to Roman Catholicism.
The Scots revolted against this suspected potpourri and actually fielded an army which invaded and occupied the northern English counties.
Charles did not have sufficient revenue on his own to raise an army to repel the Scots and by 1640 he found himself compelled to summon a new parliament in order to secure the needed funds.
Unfortunately for Charles, repelling the Scots was not the new parliament's top priority.
Many members, indeed, sympathized with the Scots' aims.
And it demanded concessions from Charles before voting him any money.
Charles angrily dissolved the body and called for new elections,
which returned an even more resolute set of gentry,
determined to end what they viewed as royal abuses of prerogative.
The second parliament of 1640 has gone down in history as the long parliament,
in the Long Parliament because it did not officially dissolve until 1659.
It ordered the arrest and impeachment of Charles' most trusted advisors and demanded that Charles permanently give up some of his traditional feudal rights.
The inability of the two sides to reconcile led to an outbreak of civil war in 1642.
The royalists, or cavaliers, and the parliamentarians, or the roundheads,
clashed repeatedly with the Scots occasionally intervening on one side or the other until 1648, at which point the Parliament had triumphed.
In January 1649, Parliament, now a rump purged of its moderate elements and under the influence of the Charismatic General Oliver Cromwell,
took its most radical step yet by executing Charles and abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords.
This inaugurated an 11-year period known as the Interregnum during which time England had a Republican government under the leadership of Cromwell.
This regime became unstable after Cromwell's death in 1658, and in 1660 a general monk and his troops seized control of London and issued an invitation to Charles I's son, also named Charles, who was then living in France, to return to England and become king.
This invitation was eagerly accepted, and Charles II was restored to the throne in triumph in 1660.
Charles' reign was marked by several catastrophes, including war, outbreak of plague, the Great Fire of London, and the formation of the first political parties.
However, none of them was severe enough to bring about his downfall.
He died in 1685, leaving behind 13 children, unfortunately they were all illegitimate, and thus the succession devolved on his younger brother, who became James II.
James appeared to be in a very strong position on his accession, despite his publicly avowed Roman Catholicism, which had occasioned alarm in parliament during the latter years of Charles II.
2. Both his daughters, already adults by that time, had been raised Protestants and were next in the line of succession, and the general feeling was that James, who was already old by 17th century standards in his mid-fifties, would not be around long enough to cause any lasting problems.
However, within three years, he had alienated Parliament by, among other things, attempting to form a permanent standing army and claiming the authority to suspend any law that displeased him, such as the ban on Roman Catholic office holders, at any time.
The final straw for committed Protestants came in 1688 when James' second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, who would undoubtedly be raised as a Roman Catholic, thus raising the prospect of an endless succession of papist kings.
The result was the Glorious Revolution, in which leading bishops and whigs issued an invitation to James' son-in-law and daughter, William of Orange and Mary, the rulers of the Netherlands,
to come to England with an army and save the country from the tyranny which threatened it.
They agreed to do so and encountered little resistance,
James having lost his nerve and fled the country before testing his luck on the battlefield.
This is another reason why the revolution was considered glorious,
in addition to the fact that the Whigs won, there was virtually no bloodshed.
William and Mary were declared king and queen by parliament,
but from this point on it was quite clear that parliament was to be the senior partner in government.
and Government, the body to whom the joint sovereigns owed their position.
Mary died in 1694, followed by William in 1702.
They were childless, and at that time Mary's younger sister Anne, also childless, became
queen and reigned until her death in 1714.
James II's son, James Francis Edward Stuart, was still living in exile at that time but
The Parliament refused to allow the Crown to pass to him, opting instead to offer it to George, the Elector of Hanover, who was the grandson of Charles I's sister, Elizabeth.
George, who could not even speak English, accepted the offer and became George I, the first English monarch from the House of Hanover, which still occupies the British throne today under the name of Windsor.
They changed the name during World War I because Hanover sounded too German.
So much for the overview of the chronology of Stuart England, I would now like to point
out some specific developments of the period which I believe illustrate Hoppe's theory
of monarchy and democracy. Hoppe characterizes the monarchy as a situation in which the state
and its attendant monopoly of violence are privately owned by the monarch. This was essentially
the case in the England of 1603, even though the precedent had been established during
in the course of the Middle Ages that Parliament had to approve any new tax before it could
be lawfully collected. The English, over time, had developed the quite sensible belief that
under normal circumstances the king was to live of his own, that is to say, provide for
the expenses of government from his own pocket. Taxes, with the exception of customs duties,
were only to be levied in extraordinary conditions such as war. Thus, the summoning of Parliament
traditionally had been received throughout the realm with trepidation and suspicion because it was perceived to have few other functions in that of raising taxes.
One of the reasons the reign of Elizabeth I was considered a golden age is because she hardly ever summoned Parliament.
As was customary in the era, Parliament voted to grant the traditional customs duties to James for life upon his accession,
but he was expected to make do with no other tax revenue in peacetime.
James did have other sources of income. In addition to his revenue from the crown lands,
along with revenue from fines and forfeitures, he enjoyed several incidents of feudal overlordship.
Among these were wardship, which was the right to take custody of estates whose owners were
considered ineffectual. For example, there were miners or widows or lunatics or something
And then he also has the right of marriage, which is the authority to arrange the marriages of the heirs of these estates that he has taken into custody. And normally he would be compensated for this by whoever gets to marry the heir to the estate.
He also has the right of respite of homage, which is a sort of estate tax.
The heir to an estate had to pay this fine to James before he could take custody of the estate.
James also has the right of disdraint of knighthood,
which is the requirement that anyone possessing property valued at 40 pounds or more assume knighthood
and perform the duties of a vassal to the king.
and also the right of purveyance, which was the authority to levy food and transport for the royal court at below market prices.
So together these sources of income produced a considerable sum each year, despite the fact that Elizabeth I had sold off roughly a third of the crown lands.
And they should have been sufficient for peacetime administration had James been a frugal man, which he was not.
Deficit spending was a problem for him from the beginning, and from at least 1611 there was talk of striking a bargain with Parliament under which James would give up some of his feudal prerogatives, which graded on some 17th century sensibilities, in exchange for a permanent increase in his tax revenues.
Nothing much actually happened on this front during James' reign, and the traditional sources of royal income were still such that Charles I could make a go of governing without Parliament at all during the peaceful 1630s, although he was compelled to revive some prerogatives which had fallen into disuse in the Middle Ages, and also make very creative use of some others in order to guarantee a sufficient revenue to keep the government operational. Contrast this situation in which the monarch funds the lion's
William III was almost entirely dependent on parliament, not only for wartime financing, but also for the normal expenses of the government and even of his own household.
To his chagrin, parliament decided to reduce his allowance on at least one occasion in the 1690s.
and even of his own household.
To his chagrin, Parliament decided to reduce his allowance
on at least one occasion in the 1690s.
This change in the primary source of government revenue
dated from the 1640s and remained entrenched
even after the restoration in 1660.
This is why I think we can say
that by the late 17th century,
England, despite being a monarchy,
had made an important shift in the direction
of Hoppe's definition of a democracy,
that is a government that is publicly owned and which is administered by officials who function as caretakers, not owners.
Once parliament is in the driver's seat as far as the government's budget is concerned, it inevitably becomes the ultimate arbiter of state policy.
This is also reflected in the increasing frequency of sessions of parliament, whereas it was not unusual in the early 17th century to go for several years between sessions.
By the end of the century, laws were on the books requiring regular convening of the body and reauthorization of crucial spending.
And then in the 1690s, a law entitled the Demise of the Crown Act was passed, which provided for the continued meeting of parliament in the event of the monarch's death.
So here we have the unstated assumption that the government can exist and act in the absence of the king.
That was a concept that would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier.
and of course there are much lower barriers to entry in parliament than there are into the royal family.
So certainly we cannot stretch this point too far.
The England of 1688 was by no means a democracy in the modern sense,
but the contrasting incentives of monarchical and democratic government described by Hoppe are present,
it seems to me, in this shift toward parliamentary dominance in Stuart England.
So if my reasoning here is correct,
We should expect to see Hoppe's monarchical incentives in the Ascendant in the period before 1642, when the Civil War breaks out, and his democratic incentives dominant thereafter, but especially so during the Interregnum period and after 1688, after the Glorious Revolution.
Some of the areas Hoppe focuses on are not really applicable to the Stuart period.
I'm thinking here mainly of his discussion of the welfare state and the bias towards it in democracies.
Obviously, that monster was nowhere near raising its ugly head in the 17th century.
However, there is still plenty of relevance to observe in other aspects of 17th century state activity.
So in the time I have remaining, I'd like to focus on taxation, debt, the expansion of the state, and foreign policy.
Hoppe argues that because the monarch is the government's owner, his incentives are those of an owner,
and he will tend not to try to maximize his current income at the expense of the capital value of his assets.
This leads him to favor a policy of relatively low taxation because he understands that excessive expropriations would reduce the incentive of his subjects to produce, which could result in his having nothing to expropriate in the future.
He thus does well to adopt policies that increase not only his own prosperity, but also that of his subjects, hence low tax rates.
By contrast, because officials in a democracy are caretakers and not owners, they control only the current use of the state and not its capital value.
They thus have less incentive to give attention to and maintain total government wealth.
They rather tend towards maximizing current income during their limited time in office, a policy that makes capital consumption unavoidable.
and a particularly egregious example of this occurred in 1651 when Parliament auctioned off Charles I's outstanding art collection in an effort to raise money and art historians are still complaining about this 350 years after the fact.
Moderation is not in the interest of a caretaker because what he does not consume now he may never be able to consume.
So in tax policy this means that democratic government will tend towards relatively high rates of taxation.
As I mentioned earlier, the bulk of the government budget in 1603 was paid out of James' personal revenues.
With the exception of customs duties, relatively little was collected in the way of taxes, even if we count James' futile sources of revenue as taxation.
He did occasionally request, and less frequently received, subsidies from Parliament, and in the 17th century, the word subsidy has a specific meaning.
is a kind of property slash income tax, the assessment of which was based primarily on the
realized rental value of one's land. Even this tax was much less onerous than it could have been
because the tax rules had not been updated in 50 years and there's at least one example of the
nobleman being taxed on an amount that was 90 percent less than the actual level of rent he
was receiving from his tenants. In fact, it's easy to find historians who marvel at how undertaxed
Charles I used as many creative strategies as possible to maximize his income without parliamentary aid in the 1630s.
For example, he revived the forest laws, which levied fines on anyone who encroached on the royal forests.
The burdens of this law were so great that it was almost impossible for him to make ends meet.
For example, he revived the forest laws, which levied fines on anyone who encroached on the royal forests.
The burdensome thing about these laws is that it was the 1189 boundaries of the forests that were specified in the laws,
and a lot of whittling away at those borders had occurred in the 450 years since then.
So suddenly you have landowners whose families had occupied these estates for several generations,
and now they're being told that they were encroaching on the king's forests,
and were to be fined accordingly.
So they weren't too happy about that, obviously.
Another expedient of Charles was the extension
of the ship money levy,
which was a tax traditionally assessed
in the coastal counties to fund the Navy,
whose job was mainly to stop piracy in this period.
The extension of that tax to the inland counties.
So these and other innovations
certainly increased royal revenues,
but even so the overall level of taxation
was certainly not excessive compared to what became normal after 1642.
By contrast, once parliament assumed the dominant role in government, taxes jumped to record
levels.
A subsidy in James I's reign was expected to bring in around 80,000 pounds.
And even when parliament was feeling well disposed towards the king, the grant of more
than one subsidy in any given year was unthinkable, even in wartime.
On the other hand, during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Parliament merrily exacted the
equivalent of one subsidy per month from the hapless English taxpayers within its jurisdiction.
This was achieved by the imposition of brand new excise taxes as well as a new land tax,
euphemistically referred to as an assessment. On top of this, Parliament engaged in wholesale
confiscation of property belonging to royalists and to the Church of England. It can be argued
and that the decision to abolish episcopacy in 1646 was driven as much by the desire
to lay hands on the bishop's property as by any philosophical opposition to that form
of church government. At the Restoration in 1660, the excise joined customs duties as
a permanent feature of the English tax structure, so perhaps we might call this an early example
of Robert Higgs' ratchet effect. The land tax, on the other hand, was judged too radical
for a normal peacetime measure and during the restoration period, that is from 1660 to 1688, it was levied only during war.
However, in 1692, the cash strapped parliament revived the land tax once again and it took its proud place alongside the excise and customs never to go away.
Thus, by the end of the Stuart period, the English people labored under a far greater tax burden than their great grandparents had
and I think we can attribute a significant amount of responsibility for this situation to the incentive structure of the increasingly democratic form of government.
In the case of debt, we see a similar pattern, again using 1642 as a benchmark year.
Hoppe's theory states that monarchs are relatively restrained in their attempts to borrow money and at first blush this seems an absurd statement to early modern historians
The monarch and his heirs, as the owners of the government, are personally liable for all debt that the state incurs. Early modern rulers could and did declare bankruptcy, Philip II of Spain, one of the 16th century's most powerful monarchs.
and his heirs as the owners of the government
are personally liable for all debt that the state incurs.
Early modern rulers could and did declare bankruptcy.
Philip II of Spain, one of the 16th century's
most powerful rulers, did so on multiple occasions.
And they occasionally were compelled by their creditors
to liquidate part of their estates
if they ever hoped to borrow again in the future.
would-be creditors realized that kings were normally poor credit risks and set interest rates on royal loans accordingly.
These considerations provided strong incentives for rulers to minimize their debts.
Now, the early Stuart monarchs were no strangers to borrowing. James I inherited a debt of over 400,000 pounds from Elizabeth I in 1603.
3, thanks to some astute financial management, this number had been reduced to 280,000 pounds
by 1610 before the deficits resumed, and by 1620, crown debt stood at 900,000 pounds.
Charles I, faced with parliamentary intransigence and unwilling creditors in his early years,
resorted to a notorious expedient that has gone down in history as the forced loan, a
Strong-Arm Tactic, which raised over 230,000 pounds from 1626 to 1628, and Charles' debt
by the mid-1630s exceeded 1.1 million pounds. However, next to the post-1642 Parliament,
James and Charles were pikers when it came to borrowing money. From the mid-1640s all
the way through the 1650s, the pay of the army, navy, and militia was in arrears despite
Parliament's Massive Expropriations During the Period. And by 1658, the government had run up 1.5 million pounds of new debt and was operating with an annual deficit of nearly half a million pounds. This situation stabilized after the restoration, but the post 1688 period provided ominous precedence for the future. In 1693, during a war with Louis XIV of France, the government came up with the idea of selling a
The first year of 1694 saw an event that all libertarians should lament. That's the chartering of the Bank of England, the world's first modern central bank.
The Bank of England was created to extend the loan to the people of England.
The bank was created to extend the loan to the people of England.
England, the world's first modern central bank. The Bank of England was created to extend
a loan of 1.5 million pounds to the government and its privileged status also allowed it
to operate on a fractional reserve basis from day one. By 1697, a national debt had been
created which stood at 13.5 million pounds, a sum undreamed of by the early stewards.
Now, there's no evidence that the government ever had any intention of liquidating this debt.
According to Hoppe, this sort of behavior should not surprise us, since democratic office holders and their heirs are not personally liable for the debts they incur on behalf of the government.
The debts are public to be repaid by future and equally non-liable governments.
This fact removes most of the incentives towards restraint in borrowing that weighed upon monarchs.
It is true that in the case of late Stuart England we do not have a nice and neat example of this because the king was still considered to be nominally responsible for the government's operations and expenditures.
Still, parliament was in ultimate control of the budgetary process and there was an implied parliamentary guarantee where the debt was concerned.
By way of analogy, Wheeling III in the 1690s was in a situation similar to that of a child who receives a weekly allowance from his parents.
It's understood that the parents are ultimately liable for any debts their adolescent children incur, and Parliament was in this position vis-a-vis the King.
So I think we can view Stuart England's explosion of debt through this Hoppean lens.
As you probably surmised, higher taxation and greater debt go hand in hand with growth in the size of the state, and Hoppe's theory leads us to expect this development in the case of Stuart England.
Hoppe states that a monarchical system of government creates a sort of class consciousness among the subjects.
Those who have no hope of entering the royal family through marriage or of receiving patronage from the king normally adopt a posture of opposition to any attempted expansion of state authority since they cannot personally benefit from such a development.
This puts the brakes on the state's natural tendency to aggrandize itself and expand its control over the populace.
By contrast, in a democracy where few barriers to entry into the government are present,
that class consciousness erodes as more and more people see a potential personal benefit
from the growth of the state.
To an extent, this latter incentive structure is present in the parliament-dominated government
of late Stuart England, and so I believe Hoppe's insights are applicable in our case.
As we've seen, a taxation was relatively low in the reign of James I, but still there
There were frequent attacks on the king's exercise of his feudal rights, such as wardship
and purveyance.
These were frequent topics of discussion in the parliaments of the era, and this fact
confuses some historians who go back to the 17th century convinced that all the debates
are going to be about these grand abstractions like freedom of speech and natural law and
all this sort of thing.
And when the abortive negotiations were going on to establish a permanent parliamentary
income for James in exchange for the surrender of certain feudal rights, the annual stipend
James sometimes even had great difficulty acquiring funds to do essential things, for example, when his wife Anne of Denmark died, her embalmed body lay in state for ten weeks before the Treasury could come up with the money to bury her.
The 17th century is a period of price inflation, thanks in part to the influx of bullion from the Americas. Combined with the natural tendency of government to expand, by Charles I's reign, the budget numbers were somewhat higher. In 1635, a year in which the budget was balanced,
The government spent £618,000.
Again, public resistance to Charles' aggressive revenue measures was fierce.
The parliament, of course, had been dissolved for refusing to vote Charles the funds he thought he needed.
During the 1630s, opposition came from other quarters.
Probably the most famous example is the Ship Money case,
in which a robust challenge to the legality of Charles' collection of ship money in the inland counties was mounted.
Finally, the opposition to Charles' allegedly excessive methods of raising revenue formed the foundation of what ultimately became the rebellion against him in 1642.
Once again, government growth increases substantially once parliament is in power.
Next to the millions of pounds being thrown around in the interregnum, Charles I's budgets look positively dinky, and we have another instance of the ratchet effect in 1660.
Charles II was voted a permanent income of 1.2 million pounds by the Parliament, and by the time James II came to the throne, that figure was up to 1.9 million pounds, and certainly this is not all attributable to inflation.
Much of the increase was due to the creation of England's first ever standing army under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s and its subsequent maintenance on and off throughout the Restoration period.
The so-called civil list that Parliament voted for William III's ordinary expenses, not including upkeep of the military, was 700,000 pounds per annum in the 1690s, a sum several times what James was hoping for 90 years before.
Also, by the 1690s, Parliament was spending roughly 5 million pounds per year just on its war with France.
France. Again, these were sums beyond the wildest dreams of the early stewards and representative
of a huge increase in the size of English government.
Finally, I'd like to look at foreign policy, and here we have an example of incentives
running counter to those described by Hoppe. Hoppe argues that the class consciousness
present in a monarchy leads to a more restrained foreign policy, and the reasoning is that
Although monarchs are naturally expansionist, their subjects view foreign policy as the ruler's private affair and are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary for financing wars. Instead, the monarch finds it expedient to acquire new territory through predominantly marriage alliances. Democratic officeholders do not normally have this option because they are only caretakers, and war is the most likely strategy for permanent acquisition of new territory
and its Attendant Expansion of the Tax Base.
The people in democracies are more likely to condone war
if they believe that this enlarged tax base
will bring them personal benefits.
However, we find that in Stuart England,
a powerful incentive not described by Hoppe,
namely religion, exercised an important sway
over the subject's view on foreign policy.
To a large degree, Protestantism defined
the early modern English identity,
particularly after the epic wars with Spain,
of which the most famous incident
was the attempted invasion of England
by the Spanish Armada in 1588.
This war lasted for several decades in the late 16th century.
Englishmen who considered themselves good Protestants
were not satisfied unless hostilities
with some Roman Catholic country were ongoing.
Thus, James I's signing of a peace treaty with Spain
in 1604 was hugely unpopular,
as was his attempt to marry his son
to a Spanish princess in the 1620s.
When the 30 years war broke out in 1618
in the German states, public opinion demanded
that James send military assistance
to his Protestant son-in-law, Frederick,
the Elector of the Palatinate,
against the Austrian Habsburgs who were Catholics.
And all this was despite James's reluctance to do this.
When Charles I came to the throne,
England had been pressured into war with Spain again.
and the peace when eventually negotiated was roundly condemned.
So we have a situation here where James and Charles
by and large preferred a peaceful foreign policy
but were pressured into war by their subjects.
In this case, the incentives Hoppe described
as influencing a monarchy subjects were overpowered
by a contrary impulse based on religious doctrine
and sentiment.
However, attention to Hoppe's theory will prevent us
from being surprised when we learn
that despite its insistence that England go to war with 17th century Europe's great powers,
parliament proved reticent to appropriate the funds necessary to maintain a respectable
war effort, particularly in the case of the Spanish War of the 1620s. And one of Charles's
chief grievances that led him to dissolve parliament in 1629 was this lack of parliamentary
assistance in fighting a war that Charles himself had never been that interested in
in the first place.
Now, after 1642, wars became an even more regular feature
of English foreign policy
and their scale increased as well.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with
the so-called Wars of Commerce against the Dutch
between 1652 and 1674,
which were waged by both Cromwell's interregnum regime
and Charles II, and religion is not really a factor here
since both the English and the Dutch were Protestants.
but we also find Cromwell in the mid 1650s deciding based on his religious
beliefs that England had to go to war with someone and the only question was
who will we attack, France or Spain? We have to fight one of them as his
religious beliefs are dictating this policy and then of course the wars
against Louis XIV in the late 17th century were the largest yet
responsible for huge increases in government spending and borrowing as
So the behavior of the post-1642 English government certainly tracks with Hoppe's observations in this area. During the Stuart period, therefore, we are able to see the conflicting incentives inherent in the monarchical and democratic systems as described by Hoppe. We have established that, from the Hoppean perspective, the early Stuart government was relatively monarchical and the later Stuart government was relatively democratic. We have observed
have observed that in several areas the Stuart State acted during these respective periods in a manner consistent with what a Hoppean analyst would have predicted.
I believe Hoppe's theory of monarchy and democracy has much to contribute to an improved understanding of early modern England,
and I hope that in the future I'll be able to present to you further findings in this area.
Thank you very much.
I have some time for a few questions here. I was interested in the very beginning, the missing element of welfare during this period.
And I guess you wouldn't expect welfare to be a pressing issue if you've got a prosperous country and then you adopt democracy.
You don't have a big demand for welfare until the state screws things up with taxes and remorse initially.
I was wondering when the topic of the poor laws, something that we see a lot of in the 19th century, when did the issue of the poor laws start becoming an issue?
The poor laws actually date to the 16th century. There's some very limited assistance, particularly in the London area, to the poor that's given by the government during the reign of Elizabeth.
But that is always a very limited extent, and of course, as Hoppe would say, the reason that we don't see a big emphasis on welfare during this period is because the people who would be receiving the welfare cannot influence the government in any way in terms of voting or whatever.
So it's not really until the late 19th century, early 20th century that we start to see a big expansion of that kind of, that push for a big expansion of those kind of welfare payments to the low income.
The poor laws themselves actually go back to the 16th century just on a very limited scale
and it was motivated more by the idea of Christian charity, you know, we've got to help these
people and also it was kind of an unsightly thing for these people to be milling around
begging in the capital city and that kind of thing.
Any other questions?
Joe?
This is the end of your hearing, but did you have a chance to look at the incentives for the Treaty of Union in Wisconsin?
I have not. This, what's going on, you said the Treaty of Union?
Yeah.
That's 1707, I believe, 1708.
No, I have not really done, looked into that very closely,
but certainly that would be something interesting to see whether any of these kinds of incentives are at work.
But I can't speak specifically to that at this point.
Another thing that sort of comes up in a historical context, I think, in line with the general story of your thing here is the idea of the colonial trading company,
East India Company and several others.
At this time, there was a transformation from companies which were basically cooperative unions of traders,
working together on joint projects and then all of a sudden after this the
company's become colonial powers with their own military and navies and things
of that nature and that transformation occurs about the same time as you get the transformation in government.
Right, I think the East India Company is chartered in 1603, 1604, right by the time that James comes in and one of the things I didn't
One mention was the monarch's traditional right of granting monopolies.
And so in the 16th and 17th century, the gentry, parliament's always complaining about the
soap monopoly or of course the British East India Company from the very beginning had
a monopoly on trade that was royally granted with the East Indies.
And that transformation of the beginnings of the joint stock corporations and that sort
of thing, that's tracking right along with this and I don't know exactly if you can tie
that into what I was talking about today specifically but that would be interesting to dig into
that a little further.
You go back to the 17th century histories or I should say histories of the 17th century
that you'll see today.
And it's almost all talking about the religious questions
and the political rights and all this kind of thing.
And there aren't really many good discussions
of the economic history.
Historians, for one thing, they're ignorant of economics.
They don't understand it, and they're not really
that interested in it.
So when they go back, about the only real economic histories
that you've seen published in the last 50 years
are those from the Marxist perspective,
because they're trying to set up the eventual revolution
of the Bourgeoisie or whatever, but that's something that really needs to be done. I
think a solid economic history of the period from a good perspective.
I think a lot of economics depends very heavily on nuances in the nature of these companies
and the nature of the Bank of England and the tax structure that, as you said, go unnoticed
in a lot of the historical accounts.
So you're missing some very key aspects.
Yeah, like I said, these standard histories,
you're reading along and they'll talk about
all the military aspects or something like that.
And then they'll say, oh, and by the way,
over the last 50 years,
there have been all these economic developments
and they'll spend a paragraph or two describing it
without really delving into a lot of the interesting details
that can further our understanding of the developments of things like corporations and those sorts of things.