Title: Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution
 

Abstract: State legal and collective capacity contributed to economic development during the Industrial Revolution. In England and Wales, the Monarchy and Parliament relied on local magistrates, known as Justices of the Peace (JPs), to enforce property rights and administer market regulation. We  use new data on JP duties to document the expanding scope of state intervention in the economy after the 1689 Glorious Revolution. We find that counties with more JPs in 1700---and hence ability to enforce a range of new laws developed by Parliament---experienced more population growth and economic development over the following 140 years. Plausibly conditional exogenous variation in JPs, driven by historical political factors, suggests that this relationship is causal. Several mechanisms and channels are documented, indicating the wide breadth of JPs' impact on the economy.