the state. Commercial and trading interests had always been a part of the dominant coalition in England, but in the seventeenth century, the growing importance of commerce, both domestic and international, engendered a shift of emphasis within the coalition, away from landed interests and toward commercial and manufacturing interests. These adjustments were not accomplished without bloodshed and disorder.

Two aspects of the seventeenth-century English struggles are worth noting. First, these struggles were not simply between parliament and king, as so many histories suggest, but a struggle between the elements in the dominant coalition – particularly commercial interests – which sought more power and new rules to benefit its interests. Second, many of the new rules sought by the commercial constituency were in the form of greater rights and impersonality. Paralleling the demands of earlier landed elites who sought to restrict the king’s ability to adjust the dominant coalition through redistributing rights in land, the subject of the next chapter, the new commercial constituency sought greater security from arbitrary decisions by the king to adjust the coalition to changing circumstances.

Similar to France, it was difficult to institutionalize the impersonal aspects of organization. In a very important sense, aspects of the seventeenthcentury claims of the king’s arbitrary action parallel our observations about the Roman emperor and the popes being above the law. As heads of natural states, all of these rulers used their powers to maintain the natural state coalitions. From a modern, constitutional perspective of an open access order, this behavior looks arbitrary; but from the perspective of the natural state, this behavior is a logical consequence of natural state coalition maintenance under changing circumstances.42

2.9 Natural States

The progression of natural states involves increasing more complex societies, requiring increasingly complex institutions that support more complex organizations. In all natural states, economics is politics by other means: economic and political systems are closely enmeshed, along with religious, military, and educational systems. The close interrelationship between the church and the state in medieval Europe from Charlemagne through the sixteenth century illustrates the futility of drawing hard and fast

42Our perspective helps explain the behavior of the king prior to the Glorious Revolution, which North and Weingast (1989) took as given.

lines around governments in natural states and calling them the state. Power is dispersed in natural states.

We have stressed the importance of institutions that enable the organization of elites as the primary element in moving from fragile to basic to mature natural states. Organizations in fragile natural states are usually closely tied to powerful individuals. The emphasis on personal identity begins with the identification of specific individuals with specific privileges in a dominant coalition. The dominant coalition is the organization of organizations that powerful elites are associated with. As societies move toward basic natural states, these identities become less associated with specific individuals and more with social personas that become associated with powerful organizations. As societies move from fragile to basic natural states, these organizations become clearer and better defined. Organizations begin to become institutionalized. This process initially occurs simultaneously in the public and private sector; indeed, it is a primary reason that governments in most limited access societies appear so corrupt to observers from open access societies: Most important basic natural state organizations are closely associated with the (private) individual identities of the elites who inhabit them. These organizations span the boundary of public and private, personal and social.

In mature natural states, credible institutions evolve that provide organizations a measure of rule of law. As more complex organizations develop, both inside and outside of the formal government, the distinction between public and private organizations begins to appear. The first steps toward Weberian states or governments with consolidated, monopoly control over the military occur in mature natural states. Sustaining some amount of rule of law for elite organizations appears to be incredibly complicated to pull off and is the beginning of the doorstep conditions.

No teleology pushes states through the progression from fragile to basic to mature natural states. The dynamics of natural states are the dynamics of the dominant coalition, frequently renegotiating and shifting in response to changing conditions. If adjustments lead to more power and rents based on personal identity, institutions become simpler and organizations less sophisticated, and the society moves toward the fragile end of the progression of natural states. If adjustments lead to more power based on durable agreements, institutions become more complex and organizations become more sophisticated, and societies move toward the mature end of the progression. No compelling logic moves states in either direction. As governments becomes more sophisticated and institutionalized across the natural state progression, they also become more resilient to shocks. Mature

natural states are more stable than basic natural states, which are more stable than fragile ones.

We define the progression of natural states – fragile, basic, mature – in terms of the organizations they can support. Paralleling this increasing organizational sophistication is an increasing institutional sophistication. Growth in state capacity is equally important as that of private organizations. Creating more sophisticated and complex organizations therefore requires that the state becomes more sophisticated and complex; it must be capable of greater tasks and a greater range of credible commitments that create durability and predictability, including the emergence of the rule of law.

Basic natural states are richer in organizations and more institutionally complex than fragile natural states. They have greater specialization and division of labor among organizations and institutions, often including organizations specializing in trade, education, religion, production (e.g., mineral extraction), and taxation. These societies often also have a range of other institutions, such as succession rules for determining the next ruler when the current one dies; institutions for dividing spoils of conquest; and perhaps an official forum in which nobles formally negotiate with the ruler, such as a cortes or parliament. Basic natural states also tend to differentiate public from private law.

Mature natural states are yet more institutionally complex than basic ones. To support a wider range of private organizations, these societies must develop institutions to better support private organizations, including a form of legal system for administration of intraand inter-organizational contracts and more secure commitments to protect private organizations from expropriation by the state and the dominant coalition. In other words, a more complex rule of law must emerge in mature natural states. Because rule of law cannot be improved by fiat – which is too easily undone – many attempts to enhance and extend the rule of law in basic natural states fail. The institutions providing these services must also be embedded in the state and society in a way that protects them from the rearrangement of privileges among members of the dominant coalition.

One of the principal institutional issues that emerged in this chapter concerned the problem of constraining personality: putting the king under the law. At the level of societies, the head of the dominant coalition – whether the pope or the Catholic Church, the emperor of Rome, or the king of a European state – reflects the realities of these natural states: the ruler is often above the law. This allows him or her to adjust the rules, privileges, rights, and laws to suit the needs of the coalition as the fortunes of various elites rise and fall. Elites gaining power must be granted more privileges and

twentieth century. Some sites were deleted from the statistical analysis and some skeletons lacked estimates of age or did not have the requisite bones for study of trauma.

Table 2.1 shows estimates of the incidence of violent trauma based on evidence of head or weapon trauma in a sample of 3,431 adult Native Americans. The estimates controlled for age, elevation of the site, and time period, as well as whether the skeleton was located in a mobile group, village, or city (Steckel and Wallis, 2006). Surprisingly, both the lowest and highest rates occurred in urban areas, natives who lived in pre-Columbian cities versus blacks who lived in nineteenth century cities. Violence in pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers was nearly twice that of European Americans. Trauma was lower among village tribes in the early post-Columbian period, and lowest in the pre-Columbian cities (although) the somewhat low proportion of males among the dead suggests the level may be underestimated by burial of men in other locations). The skeletal evidence is clear: the shift from hunting-gathering societies to sedentary urban societies was accompanied by a marked reduction in the level of human induced violence.