Dr Watts received an AHRC Research Leave award for Michaelmas Term 2007 to complete a book-length interpretative work on the politics of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his book Dr Watts aims to provide a new explanation of the copious political troubles of the period and of the emergence of more internally-stable polities at its end. Specifically, Dr Watts’ approach rejects older notions of 'decline' and seeks to challenge and/or modify more recent grand narratives which tend to explain the course of European politics in these centuries with reference either to changes in the economy, or to the impact of large wars, or to the birth of the modern state. Dr Watts' emphasis falls instead on the development and interaction of the 'political structures' inherited from the great age of legal and institutional growth between c.1050 and c.1250, recognising that these 'structures' included ideologies, practices, social forms and networks, as well as institutions and political formats. It was the reproduction, exploitation and interaction of these structures across the multiple power centres and overlapping jurisdictions of the continent that explains much of the chaos of the period; yet the ideas and technologies made available through these structures, and the political experience of the period itself, also provided the means by which more stable hierarchies of power and authority (the 'polities' of the title) were gradually created.

The Making of Polities, Europe: 1300–1500 was published by Cambridge University Press in May 2009.