The Board of Trade and the regulatory state in the long 19th century, 1815–1914

Perri 6 and Eva Heims

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: How does regulatory statehood develop from the regulatory work which governments have always done? This article challenges conventional views that regulatory statehood is achieved by transition to arm's length agencies and that it replaces court-based enforcement or displaces legislatures in favor of less accountable executive power. To do so, we examine the major 19th-century surge in development of micro-economic regulatory statehood in Britain, which had followed more gradual development in early modern times. We show that when the transformation of the Board of Trade is understood properly, a richer appreciation emerges of how regulatory statehood is institutionalized generally and of British state-making in particular. To demonstrate this, we introduce a novel conceptual framework for analyzing and assessing change on multiple dimensions of regulatory statehood, distinguishing depth of regulatory capacity and regulatory capability along six dimensions.

Keywords: state-making; Board of Trade; regulatory capability; regulatory capacity; regulatory state (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2025-01-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Regulation and Governance, 31, January, 2025, 19(1), pp. 182 - 199. ISSN: 1748-5991

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/122982/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:122982

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().