Peasants and Parliaments: Agrarian Reform in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe

This project aims to reexamine the relationship between representative institutions, property rights, and long-run economic growth in preindustrial Europe. We argue that (some) early parliaments contributed to growth not so much by restraining the sovereign from violating his subjects’ property rights as by facilitating the elimination of obsolete, anti-developmental property rights. Through comparative case studies of eighteenth-century agrarian reform in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia, the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and Prussian Silesia, we identify which forms of parliamentary organization and procedure made the retirement of “bad” property rights possible, and which, contrariwise, hindered it. Our findings promise to have significant implications for the study of political economy of development.

Faculty Supervisor:

Brendan McElroy

Student:

Partner:

National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Public Service, Policy, and Governance

University:

University of Toronto

Program: