Rethinking the state : Family strategies in early modern Tuscany1

Abstract

Family strategies played a key role in the process of state formation in early modern Europe, yet this critical dimension of state consolidation has been largely ignored. Family and state have been treated as two separate historiographical issues. Historians of the family have analysed family patterns in relation to socio-economic and demographic trends, but have rarely related them to politics. Research on state formation has been concerned with explaining the successes and failures of central authority, the emergence of new institutions and the role of the more powerful bureaucratic provincial elites. It has thus focused on political and institutional issues and failed to analyse state-building as a socially embedded process. This article argues that families of lesser provincial elites were not only passive recipients of larger socio-economic and political circumstances, they were also active participants in the larger changes surrounding state consolidation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European rulers steadily expanded the institutions of their states and strengthened their authority over local powers. From the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, the image of the early modern state was dominated by the classic works of Jacob Burckhardt and Max Weber. Burckhardt's vision of the state as a work of art and Weber's observation on the creation of impersonal bureaucracies provided the conceptual framework to study the state and identified the state either with the policies and personalities of central rulers or with the activities of new bureaucracies. Their research thus emphasized centralization and absolutism as the main characteristics of early modern European political systems.2