That the market economy inevitably leads to inequality is widely accepted today, with disagreement confined to the desirability of redistributive action, its extent, and the role of government in the process. The canonical text of liberal political economy, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, is assumed even in the most progressive interpretations to accept inequality, rationalized as the inevitable trade-off for increasing prosperity compared to less developed but more equal economies. I argue instead that Smith's system, if fully implemented, would not allow steep inequalities to arise. In Smith, profits should be low and labor wages high, legislation in favor of the worker is “always just and equitable,” land should be distributed widely and evenly, inheritance laws liberalized, taxation can be high if it is equitable, and the science of the legislator is necessary to put the system in motion and keep it aligned. Market economies are made in Smith's system. Political theorists and economists have highlighted some of these points, but the counterfactual “what would the distribution of wealth be if all the building blocks were ever in place?” has not been posed. Doing so encourages us to question why steep inequality is accepted as a fact, instead of a pathology that the market economy was not supposed to generate in the first place.

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Does state weakness lead to representation via taxation? A distinguished body of scholarship assumes that fiscal need forced weak(ened) states to grant rights and build institutions. The logic is traced to pre-modern Europe. However, the literature has misunderstood the link between state strength and the origins of representation. Representation emerged where the state was already strong. In pre-modern Europe, representation originally was a legal obligation, not a right. It became the organizing principle of central institutions where rulers could oblige communities to send representatives authorized to commit to decisions taken at the center. Representation thus presupposed strong state capacity, especially to tax. The revision amends our understanding of the historical paradigms guiding the literature, as well as the application of these paradigms to policies in the developing world. It suggests that societal demands for accountability and better governance (the assumed aims of representation) are more likely to emerge in response to taxation already effectively applied.

Common pleas shall not follow our court but shall be held in some certain place." 1 This was the seventeenth out of the sixty-three conditions that the barons imposed on the king of England in Magna Carta in 1215. Until then, barons seeking to settle disputes under royal jurisdiction, even disputes in which the king was not a party, often had to search for him around the realm.Finding the king could be a wild chase: even after Parliament was fully formed in the 1290s, for instance, Edward I visited more than 1,300 English locations and several Continental ones over a seventeen-year period, spending fewer than four days on average in each (see frontispiece). 2 The image popularized by the economist Mancur Olson of the ruler as "roving bandit" extorting goods and services from the population 3 was not wrong: ruler visits were dreaded across Europe for the destruction they often caused. 4 English kings' retinues accidentally burned down houses; Edward I traveled with lions that killed working animals in Gascony, outraging the locals. Rulers and their retinues (which often numbered in the dozens or hundreds) forced local communities to subsidize these visits with foodstuffs and services. This practice, known as purveyance, was a heavy burden: over three weeks in the 1280s, the Flemish count required 10,600 herrings. 5 But these "visits" were not lawless -Edward I paid compensation for the animals killed, for instancenor was their purpose merely extractive. 6 Most importantly, these roving kings dispensed justice. In this book, I argue that this eager and often desperate demand for justice was fundamental for the development of the parliaments, or polity-wide institutions of representation, that emerged in medieval Europe. Moreover, this demand was tied to the king's status as "lord of all the tenants in the

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