Why does the leading economic power of its time lose its dominance? Competing theories are tested through a comparison of four historical cases—the Florentine city-state, the Spanish empire, and the Dutch and British nation-states. Institutional context determined social actors’ capacities to apply their polities’ human and material resources to foreign economic competition. Specifically, the dominant elites in each polity established the social relations and institutions that protected them from domestic challenges from rival elites and classes. But these relations and institutions had the effect of limiting elites’ capacities to adapt to foreign economic rivals: Elites acting locally determined their capacities to act globally.
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