Adriane Fresh is Assistant Research Professor at Duke University, where she’s a member of both the Political Science Department and the Interdisciplinary Data Science Program. Her research is about the political economy of development, with a focus on elite persistence in the context of economic and institutional change. She studies a diverse set of historical and country cases including England during the Industrial Revolution, the Civil Rights-era U.S. South, and Pinochet-era Chile. She received her MA in Economics and PhD in Political Science from Stanford University.
She’ll present work entitled “Trade, Contestation and Representation During England’s Long 17th Century.”
Talk will be on Zoom, Wednesday, October 22, 19:00 (BJT).
Abstract: Expansions of international trade have significant distributional consequences and are therefore often viewed as a key source of domestic political conflict. This paper asks about the political consequences of the 17th century growth of the Atlantic economy — often viewed as one of the most important periods of early globalization. This economic change has been famously linked to national conflicts over property rights and institutional configurations, pitting an ascendant commercial elite against a traditional landed class. However, to date, no work has systematically examined whether and to what extent this national cleavage was reflected in competition for parliamentary seats in the constituencies. In this paper, I collect new data on the universe of 17th century English parliamentary returns, the incidence of electoral contests, and characteristics of the MPs that were returned, as well as many of their challengers. I pair this with localized data on the volume of trade from historical customs accounts (the Port Books). Preliminary results suggest that, despite the importance of commercial change during the period, it played a limited role in producing electoral contests. MPs representing the expanding commercial sector obtained representation, but this was geographically circumscribed and was not a function of winning electoral contests. This suggests both that commercial cleavages were between rather than within local geographies, and that recourse to other cleavages are needed to fully explain the rise of contests during the period.
