Territorial Politics and Early Modern

Abstract

"Territorial Politics and Early Modern 'Fiscal Policy': Taxation in Savoy, 1559-1580," This article makes new suggestions about the structure and function of political interactions during the sixteenth century through an examination of tax practices in the French-speaking lands of Duke Emanuel Filibert of Savoy (1528-1580), The article documents fiscal and political relationships which crisscrossed social divides and political boundaries in the transalpine Savoyard domains, The author proposes the term "territorial politics" as a way of describing practices designed to project power over spaces. "Territorial politics" refers to the interactions that structured the way domination was exercised, without privileging particular actors (rulers, subjects, clergy), particular problems (taxation, urban protest, diplomacy), or a particular scale of political analysis (states, dioceses, towns, families), This study of the fiscal parameters of Savoyard territorial politics shows how informational control, widely based political opinion, and different kinds of political configurations involving numbers of actors from a range of social positions structured taxation patterns.