Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution

The British state relied heavily on local magistrates—Justices of the Peace (JPs)—to enforce property rights and resolve disputes during the Industrial Revolution. To examine the economic importance of this form of legal capacity, we construct a new dataset on JP residences and other local courts at the end of the seventeenth century in around 700 towns and 9,000 parishes. The presence of a resident JP predicts subsequent town growth and parish-level development in 1850. We also study the effect of legal capacity by exploiting differential exposure to coal-based industrial opportunities, which became economically central only after 1700. Towns and parishes on coalfields in high-JP counties experienced greater urbanization, population growth, secondary-sector employment, and human capital accumulation during the Industrial Revolution. These findings are consistent with contemporary claims about the importance of state capacity in economic development and highlight an underappreciated role for flexible "street-level" legal institutions in Britain's transition to modern growth.