"Fighting for Survival": How Representative Assemblies Survived Early Modern European State Formation

In the Early Modern Period, transaction costs declined as a result of improvements in literacy, numeracy and infrastructure. At the same time, military developments in gunpowder, technology and infantry tactics created an additional advantage for larger, centralised organisations. Together, these changes undermined the feudal system of power-sharing between central rulers and their vassal nobility for which representative assemblies had been designed. No longer required to collect taxes on behalf of the ruler or able to threaten rebellion, the nobility and their parliaments lost their original function. Still, many parliaments survived, leading scholars to propose several long-term causes, often dating back to the early Middle Ages (Ertman, 1997; Graves, 2011; D’Arcy & Nistotskaya, 2018). This paper challenges such theories by proposing a different mechanism, drawing on primary sources as well as a range of secondary literature. Focusing on three prominent case studies of armed conflict between parliamentary interests and the sovereign – the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, the French Fronde and the Dutch Revolt – it argues that while central rulers gained a structural advantage in the Early Modern Period, parliaments could prevail through success in military conflict. This required the confluence of several factors: (1) succession crises that weakened dynastic stability and legitimacy, (2) broad social alliances across different groups against the central ruler, and (3) foreign intervention in support of parliamentary interests.