This chapter reviews the evidence from the Greek world for tribute and taxation. It begins with some comparative considerations about tributary regimes and the impact of Achaemenid imperialism on the fiscal development of the Greek city-states, including the Delian League and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The transition from tribute to taxation is cast as a significant indicator of state formation. A fundamental theme in ancient Greek taxation is the relationship between coercion and consent, especially how political institutions facilitate the sharing of communal burdens by the rich. Extraordinary levies on property and persons were a common feature of city-states, which Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms also adopted. Finally, the chapter treats indirect taxes, which are thought to provide a much larger and more regular portion of state revenue in the Greek world.

Institutions produce social effects, and one vocabulary for thinking about these effects derives from economics and focuses on efficiency and inefficiency. Neoclassical economics held little space for institutions, beyond the sparest notion of uncoerced market exchange. Over the course of the twentieth century, problems associates with transaction costs, bounded rationality, strategic interaction, and puzzles of macroeconomic growth called forth welfare-impacting institutions. Beyond merely impacting incentives (e.g., by economizing on transaction costs), institutions came to play a central role in explaining thorny problems such as collective action and credible commitment. We survey a range of applications in economics or working broadly within its rational choice framework which speak to the increasing centrality of theories of institutions in explaining central social outcomes such as development. Efficiency approaches to institutional origins are superficially attractive, modeling them as choice outcomes, but can slip easily into problematic post hoc ergo propter hoc functionalism. By contrast, they show real comparative strength in accounting for institutional stability and change.

The second great transition is the organic development of the Western legal system – from legal frameworks for succession and transmitting landed property to the oaths of fealty, on into a macroscopic nexus of institutions, practices, and beliefs that formed a hypernetwork within the wider society. The evolution of the legal tradition, forging a system of strong but limited states, is a story of increasing returns. No legal document or pact like the Magna Carta exists in China. Its aristocracies never gained sufficient military, political, or ideological strength to demand rights that could constrain the sovereign via institutions. Imperial officialdom did not intend to negotiate with a corporate body in possession of its own resources and rights. Nor did the bureaucratic clans have any incentive to stem the centralization of authority. They acted as representatives of the state’s interests, not those of civil society. The legalist/Confucian state exercised authority over economic resources to an extent that no European monarch could hope to accomplish. It also counterbalanced power with a code of ethical responsibilities to ensure the basic needs of the population.

This book is about how politicians govern the experts they put in charge of public decisions. It aims to challenge some common assumptions scholars of governance often make about how experts come to be given power in liberal democratic states, and how subsequently they retain that power. There is a large and sprawling theoretical and conceptual literature on ‘the politics of expertise’ in governance and public policy that demands attention and informs what Andrew Gamble (1990) calls a conceptual ‘map’, which this book uses to frame the empirical case studies. This map does not involve the deduction of hypotheses and their empirical testing; it is a way of framing, in an encompassing manner, the empirical dynamics the book identifies in the following chapters. This map is what the book terms the expert–politics nexus, which refers to diverse political relationships between elected governments and civil servants, and ‘arm’s length’ expert-led agencies. To do so, the book offers a new approach to combining and linking previously disparate approaches to ‘expertise’ in governance research.

In October 2016, The Guardian published a story about what it called ‘The Cult of the Expert’, which had dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century (Mallaby, 2016). Following the global financial crisis, the chair of the US Federal Bank, Ben Bernanke, was asked by a congressional committee whether he had $85 billion to inject into the economy. ‘I have $800 billion’, he replied. ‘Somehow’, the Guardian noted, ‘America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity’. Scholars have noted since the 1990s how political issues have tended to be put in the hands of so-called experts; scientists, lawyers, clinicians, economists and the like (Fischer, 1990; Barker and Peters, 1993; Hoppe, 1999; Maasen and Weingart, 2006). As political scientist Alasdair Roberts argued in his evocative 2011 book The Logic of Discipline, ‘the pervading sense was that liberal democracies lacked the capacity to make hard choices and that mechanisms were necessary to force those choices or empower technocrat-guardians who would make them on society’s behalf’ (Roberts, 2011, p. 144). Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Francis Fukuyama’s famously flawed ‘End of History’ thesis, ‘by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed’ (Mallaby, 2016).