This paper studies the role of fiscal capacity in European state consolidation. Our analysis is organized around novel data on the territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period. Territories implementing an early fiscal reform were more likely to survive, increased in size, and achieved a more compact extent. We provide evidence for the causal interpretation of these results and show key mechanisms: revenues, military investments, and marriage success. The imposition of Imperial taxes, quasi-random in timing and size, increased the benefits of an efficient tax administration on the side of rulers, driving the implementation of fiscal centralization. Within territories, Chambers became the dominant administrative institution, tilting the consolidating states toward absolutism.

We examine how the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest conflict in pre-modern Europe, gave rise to absolutism. We use planned troop movements from secret military communications to estimate the effect of town-level troop presence on the expansion of ruler-controlled fiscal and military capacity and the dismantling of parliaments. During the war, troop supply demands raised the value of delegating resource mobilization to rulers. After the war, rulers used this capacity to form coalitions with landed elites and weaken parliaments. Courts and city leagues limited parliamentary decline, consistent with lower contracting frictions and stronger local outside options. With parliaments eliminated, militarized absolutist regimes persisted for centuries. Our findings highlight a dynamic trade-off between dictatorship and disorder during states of emergency.

How does culture respond to institutional change? We study the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (1789–1815), when half of Central Europe changed rulers. Using 44 million birth records from hundreds of cities between 1700 and 1850, we measure cultural traits in real time. Cities that experienced ruler change saw greater naming turnover, dispersion, and novelty. We construct control groups using diplomatic records to isolate these effects, which emerged immediately and persisted. The collapse of hegemonic authority weakened state-aligned identities while strengthening religiosity and nationalism. These shifts undermined subsequent state building, highlighting challenges of ideological integration after regime change.

We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to newly digitized population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members remained distinctly different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as proxied by membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.

Many states exhibit high degrees of capacity without the fiscal resources necessary to fund a modern bureaucracy. We argue that they achieve this by exploiting features of the social structure of the societies they govern to motivate individuals to engage in bureaucratic and governance tasks without pay. We develop and illustrate the concept of the “Embedded State” using a unique survey of British urban government from 1835. Since British local authorities had few resources, only two-thirds of positions were paid. We first show that unpaid positions were significantly more productive than paid ones. We then show that unpaid positions conveyed prestige and were ‘stepping stone’ positions, provided different on-the-job incentives, and were taken up by the socio-economic elite. We also show that the successful Embedded State featured patronage and corruption and could not fully motivate unpaid bureaucrats to implement onerous tasks.

This note represents a progress report on the digitization of city directories in Munich, 1845–1914. With information on names, occupations, and residential locations, directories provide a valuable source of microdata especially in a context where individual-level census records did not survive. We construct linked, complete-count data of over one million household-years based on 15 directories. Additionally, we precisely geolocate all historical addresses, drawing on a wide range of supplementary data. We discuss the construction of this dataset and present a novel approach to classify occupational standing based on the noun components of occupation titles. Finally, we show a series of descriptive findings on city growth, spatial inequality and social mobility that shed light on city development in one of the largest and fastest-growing, industrializing urban centers of Central Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. We view our approach as a pilot study towards the use of city directories as a source of rich individual-level microdata to study the economic and social history of cities.

We study the role of market power in German industrialization. Between 1882 and 1933, cartel contracts became legally enforceable and came to organize more than half of industrial output. Over the same period, the country reached the technological frontier, became a leading exporter, and built industrial capacity mobilized in two world wars.

We link 2,374 cartel contracts to a panel of 30,793 joint-stock firms to estimate how enforceable cartel agreements affected members and downstream firms. Guided by historical evidence, we develop a framework in which cartel rents relax financing constraints, creating a dynamic tradeoff: market power imposes static allocative losses but, when retained earnings finance high-return investments, can raise firm performance and welfare.

Empirically, we use fragmented German markets and staggered variation in cartel enforceability across time, regions, and industries, combining difference-in-differences, event studies, and an instrumental-variable design based on imperial court decisions that shifted the legal cost of cartel contracting. Cartel membership increased firm value, exports, and innovation, especially where investment returns were high and financing constraints were binding. Upstream cartel exposure initially reduced downstream performance, but these losses attenuated as cost reductions accumulated, particularly where vertical contracts enabled two-part tariffs. Cartel finance also made firms more central to the war economy through procurement contracts, military innovation, production coordination, and forced labor use.

The results suggest that, where cartel formation occurred in sectors with high developmental or strategic value, cartel law operated as delegated industrial policy.