Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789

A book of constitutional theory as precisely delineated as Myers' volume is a rare and happy find. And Myers' narrative moves pretty briskly, only occasionally bogging the reader down in the scope of developments he has to survey. Plus, it's generously illustrated, and that makes it hard to put down once you've started reading. Since my purpose was to get a quick overview of the antecedents of today's legislative privileges and powers, I'm not in a position to comment on "historiography circa 1975" that's frames Myers' version of events. But this book proves incredibly useful as an introduction, and, despite a thin index, pretty handy as a reference later. This account is especially good at making sense of "peripheral" histories, and has some discussion of forces propelling changes in everyplace from Iceland to Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). The other point of interest is how representative legislatures were rolled back during the age of absolutism, and in some cases disbanded entirely in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a nutshell, this is what I took Myers as implying: The centralization of executive powers (monarchical absolutism) was driven by the wars of the Protestant Reformation. In turn, monarchs became dependent on representative legislatures for taxation. But this process of political mobilization also broke the hold of the old redoubts of privilege. The clergy fell as a result of dispossession of their productive landholdings, and the princes fell through the rise of national armies that had formidable enforcement powers. Yet representation was never driven beyond the framework of "estates," and that posed deep problems of corruption and housecleaning. Sensible enough. There are a few limitations, and so if you are looking for any of the following, you will have to go dig elsewhere. 1. Myers doesn't particularly break down the specific procedures used in various legislative bodies. Moreover, he tends not to clearly categorize the development of different purposes in legislatures, like representation versus consultation, statute-making or oversight. 2. Myers does not include a discussion of the English Parliamentary tradition to any great extent. (He's British, and presumes the reader brings a certain familiarity.) 3. This is not an intellectual history. If you want to understand the cross-pollination of ideas and events, you'll need a different volume.

A book of constitutional theory as precisely delineated as Myers' volume is a rare and happy find. And Myers' narrative moves pretty briskly, only occasionally bogging the reader down in the scope of developments he has to survey. Plus, it's generously illustrated, and that makes it hard to put down once you've started reading. Since my purpose was to get a quick overview of the antecedents of today's legislative privileges and powers, I'm not in a position to comment on "historiography circa 1975" that's frames Myers' version of events. But this book proves incredibly useful as an introduction, and, despite a thin index, pretty handy as a reference later. This account is especially good at making sense of "peripheral" histories, and has some discussion of forces propelling changes in everyplace from Iceland to Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). The other point of interest is how representative legislatures were rolled back during the age of absolutism, and in some cases disbanded entirely in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a nutshell, this is what I took Myers as implying: The centralization of executive powers (monarchical absolutism) was driven by the wars of the Protestant Reformation. In turn, monarchs became dependent on representative legislatures for taxation. But this process of political mobilization also broke the hold of the old redoubts of privilege. The clergy fell as a result of dispossession of their productive landholdings, and the princes fell through the rise of national armies that had formidable enforcement powers. Yet representation was never driven beyond the framework of "estates," and that posed deep problems of corruption and housecleaning. Sensible enough. There are a few limitations, and so if you are looking for any of the following, you will have to go dig elsewhere. 1. Myers doesn't particularly break down the specific procedures used in various legislative bodies. Moreover, he tends not to clearly categorize the development of different purposes in legislatures, like representation versus consultation, statute-making or oversight. 2. Myers does not include a discussion of the English Parliamentary tradition to any great extent. (He's British, and presumes the reader brings a certain familiarity.) 3. This is not an intellectual history. If you want to understand the cross-pollination of ideas and events, you'll need a different volume.