Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

policy was driven by the king. This was partially, of course, because members of Parliament were elected. But since England was far from being a democracy in this period, this access provided only a modest amount of responsiveness. Among its many inequities was that less than 2 percent of the population could vote in the eighteenth century, and these had to be men. The cities where the Industrial Revolution took place, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, had no independent representation in Parliament. Instead, rural areas were overrepresented. Just as bad, the right to vote in the rural areas, the “counties,” was based on ownership of land, and many urban areas, the “boroughs,” were controlled by a small elite who did not allow the new industrialists to vote or run for office. In the borough of Buckingham, for instance, thirteen burgesses had the exclusive right to vote. On topof this there were the “rotten boroughs,” which had historically had the right to vote but had “rotted away,” either because their population had moved over time or, in the case on Dunwich on the east coast of England, had actually fallen into the ocean as a result of coastal erosion. In each of these rotten boroughs, a small number of voters elected two members of Parliament. Old Sarum had seven voters, Dunwich thirty-two, and each elected two members of Parliament.
    But there were other ways to influence Parliament and thus economic institutions. The most important was via petitioning, and this was much more significant than the limited extent of democracy for the emergence of pluralism after the Glorious Revolution. Anybody could petition Parliament, and petition they did. Significantly, when people petitioned, Parliament listened. It is this more than anything that reflects the defeat of absolutism, the empowerment of a fairly broad segment of society, and the rise of pluralism in England after 1688. The frantic petitioning activity shows that it was indeed such a broad group in society, far beyond those sitting or even being represented in Parliament, that had the power to influence the way the state worked. And they used it.
    The case of monopolies best illustrates this. We saw above how monopolies were at the heart of extractive economic institutions in the seventeenth century. They came under attack in 1623 with the Statute of Monopolies, and were a serious bone of contention during the English Civil War. The Long Parliament abolished all the domestic monopolies that so impinged on people’s lives. Though Charles II and James II could not bring these back, they managed to maintain the ability to grant overseas monopolies. One was the Royal African Company, whose monopoly charter was issued by Charles II in 1660. This company held a monopoly on the lucrative African slave trade, and its governor and major shareholder was Charles’s brother James, soon to become James II. After 1688 the Company lost not just its governor, but its main supporter. James had assiduously protected the monopoly of the company against “interlopers,” the independent traders who tried to buy slaves in West Africa and sell them in the Americas. This was a very profitable trade, and the Royal AfricanCompany faced a lot of challenges, since all other English trade in the Atlantic was free. In 1689 the Company seized the cargo of an interloper, one Nightingale. Nightingale sued the Company for illegal seizure of goods, and Chief Justice Holt ruled that the Company’s seizure was unlawful because it was exercising a monopoly right created by royal prerogative. Holt reasoned that monopoly privileges could be created only by statute, and this had to be done by Parliament. So Holt pushed all future monopolies, not just of the Royal Africa Company, into the hands of Parliament. Before 1688 James II would quickly have removed any judge who made such a ruling. After 1688 things were different.
    Parliament now had to decide what to do with the monopoly, and the petitions began to fly. One hundred and thirty-five came from interlopers demanding free access to trade in the Atlantic. Though the Royal African Company responded in kind, it could not hope to match the number or scope of the petitions demanding its demise. The interlopers succeeded in framing their opposition in terms not just of narrow self-interest, but of national interest, which indeed it was. As a result, only 5 of the 135 petitions were signed by the interlopers themselves,