Was Europe’s development of institutions for collective action from the Late Middle ages onwards exceptional?
Recent research indicates that the degree to which Western Europe from the twelfth century onwards (in the wake of the ‘legal revolution’ of the eleventh-twelfth centuries, Berman, 1983) developed and used the concept of ‘a corporate body’ (universitas), clearly differed from other parts of Eurasia. There similar concepts and corporatist forms of collective action did not emerge, or the concepts concerned (e.g. the Waqf in the Islamic Middle East) did not have the same kind of flexibility and popularity (Kuran, 2001). De Moor (2006) demonstrates that there were many similarities in the institutional design of various forms of collective action that started to emerge in town and countryside to a previously unknown extent and intensity in North-Western Europe from the late middle ages onwards. Hypothetically, a combination of factors such as weak family ties, decentralised and weak stately powers and developing labour markets made this ‘silent revolution’ in North-Western Europe possible
