ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the theoretical argument presented in Chapter 17 is applied on five cases: medieval Leon-Castile, medieval Aragon-Catalonia, medieval England, ancient China, and early modern Russia. In the three Western European cases, I take the intensification of geopolitical pressure in the late twelfth century described in earlier chapters of the book as the starting point. Against this backdrop, I trace the development of representative institutions from the first recorded incidences around 1200 up until the early institutionalization in the decades after 1300. In the Chinese and Russian cases, I take a similar intensification of geopolitical pressure as the starting point and attempt to understand why, at most, it led to aborted attempts to create equivalents to representative institutions – and ended up strengthening autocracy instead.
