Early Modern State Research Articles

Odysseys to Planetary History

44 Historically Speaking · September 2003 The ability ofcertain states to raise formidable armies and theworld'sleadingnavies and to conduct aggressive foreign policies reflected the relative strength ofdieiradministrative systems, which were also dependent on the consent, assistance, and ofteninitiative oflocal government and the socially powerful , particularlythearistocracy. Bothprocesses were more apparent from the mid-17th century onward than earlier, and this adds an important chronological dimension and dynamic Societiesdiatputapremiumoncontinuityand orderreacted againstthe political, religious, and social turmoil ofca. 1520-1660 and searched for an order based on stability and (sociallycircumscribed) consensus. Conversely, it is misleading to draw a directline from the dismantlingofdie indoctrinating institutions and practices of die Counter/Catholic Reformation to the outbreakofthe revolutionarycrisisin the 1780s, aldiough die multiple ideological tensions of Catholic Europe, particularly in the Habsburglands , inpartrelated to the dismantling ofdie confessional state. A similar strand can be seenwitiiin die British Empire from 1775 to 1801, when the authority ofthe Church of England and the nature of confessionalism were challenged. Thus die confessional state should be seen as avital adjunctofabsolutism, and dieroleof confessionalism in both international relations and domesticpoliticsneeds tobe reexamined. As, more generally, with die relationship between crowns and elites, it is necessary to treatdie ideological and cultural dimensions ofdiis issueseriouslyand on theirownterms, and not simply to adopt a functional and instrumental account of the situation. Anodier subjectdiat deserves more scholarlyattentionis therelationship between early modern states and commerce. The liberal political systems ofdie United Provinces and Britain were notably successful in eliciting the cooperation oftheir own and other capitalists , producinga symbiosis ofgovernment and private sector that proved valuable for developing naval strength and mercantile enterprise. As Europe's range increased, cooperation between European states and merchants enabled negotiations with nonEuropean mercantile and territorial interests. These negotiationswere centralto muchthat is misleadingly seen as distincdy European, ranging from the Adantic slave trade to the trade between Western Europe and South Asia. Slavery underlines the point diat such negotiations often came at die expense of others. Yet the development ofa maritime capability,which enabled some Europeans to direct much ofthe process ofglobalization, should notbe extrapolated to the entire continent , much ofwhich did not see comparable developments. This approach opens the way to a revisionistperspective on the 19th and 20di centuries , not least on the various projects for modernity offered during this period. Although, particularlyafter 1850, mostgovernments were self-consciously committed to improvement through change, it is possible to argue for continuity in terms ofdie limited purchase ofliberalism; the degree to which conservatism rested on popular support , not coercion; and the fragility ofpolitical ideologies that encouraged audioritarian governments to neglect domestic opinion. Jeremy BlacksKing's, Nobles, and Commoners : States and Societies in Early Modern Europe, a RevisionistHistoryis forthcomingfromLR. Taurisin November 2003. Itwillbe distributed in the U.S. by PalgraveMacmillan. Odysseys to Planetary History Clark G. Reynolds IN "CROSSING BORDERS" (Historically Speaking, November 2002) Peter Paretreflectedon hisdistinguishedcareeras a military and art historian. Parets essay was thefirst in a series ofautobiographical sketchesbyseniorhistoriansthatwillappear in thesepages. The seriesprovidesprominent andaccomplished historians with the opportunity tocommenton theircareersand to offerreflections onprofessionallivesdedicated to historicalinquiry. Our second installment isfrom the recently "retired" (from teachingonly) Clark Reynolds. One ofthe nationsleadingnaval historians, Reynolds is knownfor his work in the history ofnavalaviation andfor his brilliant conceptualanalyses ofhistory and thesea. The NavalInstitute Proceedings selectedhisThe Fast Carriers: The ForgingofanAirNavy (McGraw-Hill, 1968) asoneofthe ten bestEnglish-languagenaval bookspublished in the Institutesfirst one hundredyears, andhis 1975 essay "American Strategic History and Doctrines: A Reconsideration" (reprintedin Historyand die Seaj received the American Military Institutes Moneado Prize. Forbetter orworse, no history graduate studenttomyknowledgehas everbeen encouraged, much less subsequendy hired, to focus on global historyperse. Our pedagogical canon demands specialized preparation in European, U.S., Asian, or any national history except as linked to some broadersub-discipline like the historyofscience , technology, religion, gender, orthe military . Anything bigger—namely, the universal history which went out ofstyle between die world wars—has been eschewed by die profession until die very recent (and still problematic) vogue forworld history. September 2003 · Historically Speaking 45 Yet I was not only encouraged by my graduate teachers to think beyond the specialty but was expected to do so. As a result, I moved toward world history, thoughbyno means consciouslyoreven deliberately. Ihave continued to harbor deep suspicions ofmost of those...

Book Review: The Politics of Power. Elites of an Early Modern State in Germany

Book Review: The Politics of Power. Elites of an Early Modern State in Germany

Book Review: The Politics of Power. Elites of an Early Modern State in Germany

Book Review: The Politics of Power. Elites of an Early Modern State in Germany

The Project of Modernity: Can Architecture Make It?

The title of this essay suggests that architecture's relation to modernity is acomplex one. What needs to be discussed is the specificity of architecture'sconflict with modernity. While historical analysis theorizes socio-cultural andpolitical phenomena, the thematic of architecture's entanglement with capitalismnecessitates an argument, addressing the dialogical relationship betweentheory and practice. Historical analysis is one thing; mobilization ofhistory to change the present situation is another. This much is clear from thediscourse of thinkers who are associated with ‘critical theory,’ and the work ofarchitectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, among others. This essay attempts to read Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia: Design andCapitalist Development, translated into English in 1976,1 in the context ofcurrent critical theories and to demonstrate the relevance of his argumenttoday. To be more specific, the intention is to approach Tafuri's text from theargument presented in the first chapter of Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld andCatastrophe.2 The author re-writes the interaction between the early modernstates and avant-garde artists in reference to space and time. Her paradigmsuspends the idea of Zeitgeist and shows how space (territory) was the subjectmatter of an idea of progress that was imagined by both capitalist and socialiststates of the 1930s. Secondly, Buck-Morss discusses the ways architectureoccasionally went out-of-time in the historical cosmology, formulated by theforces of modernization that were unravelling during the early decades of thelast century. Her discourse provides a system of periodization that surpasseshistoricism. Tafuri's vision of history also questions historicism,3 but if read inthe light of Buck-Morss's discourse, one can see ideas in Tafuri which areperhaps more relevant to architecture's situation today than when they werewritten.

The Reconstruction of Imperial Mathematics in China During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)

AbstractContrary to astronomy, the early modern Chinese State did not systematically sponsor mathematics. However, early in his reign, the Kangxi Emperor studied this subject with the Jesuit missionaries in charge of the calendar. His first teacher, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) relied on textbooks based on Christoph Clavius' (1538-1612). Those who succeeded Verbiest as imperial tutors in the 1690s produced lecture notes in Manchu and Chinese. Newly discovered manuscripts show Antoine Thomas (1644-1709) wrote substantial treatises on arithmetic and algebra while teaching those subjects. In 1713, the emperor commissioned a group of scholars and officials to compile a standard survey of mathematics (Shuli jingyun, "Essential principles of mathematics"). This work opened with the claim that mathematics had its roots in Chinese Antiquity. However, it can be shown that the Jesuits' lecture notes were the main source of the Shuli jingyun. The reconstruction of mathematics under Kangxi's patronage is thus best characterised as the imperial appropriation of Western learning.

Women, Private Property, and the Limitations of State Authority in Early Modern Venice

This article explores the relationship between middle-class women and the early modern state in Venice by examining the wills of women who entrusted charitable institutions with the oversight of their wills. Women's testamentary practices helped to shape political power in early modern Venice by entrusting charitable institutions rather than the central government with the oversight of wills. Furthermore, women used these charitable institutions to protect their private property against claims by male kin, especially husbands. This article builds on recent reinterpretations of the nature and configuration of state power in early modern Europe, especially Italy, which emphasize how the boundaries between public and private power were contested and redrawn. Women's sizeable gifts to charitable institutions helped sustain these institutions as alternative sites of political power, different from and at least partially autonomous from the centralized state.

Elena Ciletti. Review of "The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno" by Karen-edis Barzman.

Elena Ciletti. Review of "The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno" by Karen-edis Barzman.

The Façade of Legitimacy: Exchange of Power and Authority in Early Modern Russia

From the middle of the nineteenth century until recently, the only acceptable way to discuss political developments in early modern Europe was in terms of the rise of absolutism. “Absolute monarchy” was the political theory of early modern states formulated by ideologues of their respective regimes. Later historians accepted this ideology as the way these monarchies operated and formulated a model called “absolutism,” which posits a monarch who accrues power at the expense of the nobility. During the last three decades, however, a number of historians, whose studies focus on elite politics, have undermined this historiographical model. Through their archival research on the operation of regimes in early modern Europe, these historians have instead described an interlocking relationship between ruler and nobility in which the ruler acted as legitimizer of the nobility and adjudicator of differences among its members.Adamson has described the emerging pattern of understanding this way: “At the most ‘absolutist' of courts, the exercise of authority was always in some sense a negotiation founded, in the final analysis, upon the community of interest between the crown and the noble elites. The court, far from being an instrument whereby monarchs could weaken the nobility, as was once supposed, provided the forum in which that compact could be subjected to a regular process of revision and renegotiation.” John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court 1500–1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 39. Then, in a strongly argued book, The Myth of Absolutism, Nicholas Henshall delivered what many specialists consider to be the coup de grâce to the absolutism model as a worthwhile way of discussing early modern European governments.Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992). See also Henshall “The Myth of Absolutism,” History Today 42 (June 1992): 40–47. He pointed out that “absolutism” is a term coined in 1823 to apply to the contemporary ruler Ferdinand VII of Spain, and argued that it is an anachronism for us to apply it to earlier centuries.

Divine sovereignty: the origins of modern state power

How did the modern state become the Leviathan that Hobbes described? Engster challenges the common assertion that the state emerged from a new secular philosophy at the time of the Renaissance. He argues instead that early modern theorists legitimized state power by portraying it as a sanctified force for moral order within an otherwise secular and contingent world. Engster traces the modern development of state authority to the breakdown of medieval ideas of order encompassed in the great chain of being. He then shows how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and statesmen such as Montaigne, Bodin, Richelieu, Bossuet, and Hobbes redefined the main principles of the state including legislative sovereignty, executive prerogative, governmental regulation, and bureaucratic rationality in ways that underlie state organization even today. Providing a broad synthesis of early modern state theory and practice, Divine Sovereignty suggests that these writers envisioned the state as the center of divine and natural order in a world that had strayed from divine guidance. In revealing how early modern theorists and statesmen justified the new powers of their Leviathan, Engster also illuminates conflicts and paradoxes within the modern nation-state.

ŞEVKET PAMUK, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. 301. $69.95 cloth.

The title of Şevket Pamuk's book is misleading. Far from restricting himself to monetary phenomena—interest rates, coinage, inflation, and availability of specie—the author has chosen to cast his study of money during the Ottoman period (1300–1918) in the widest possible terms. Viewing some of the crucial issues of Ottoman economic and political history through a monetary lens has produced new and interesting insights—in some cases, the result is a revision of old arguments—but on other matters, Pamuk has produced provocative new hypotheses. Furthermore, the book offers a timely addition to the rapidly developing field of global history. Although most of Pamuk's comparative remarks relate to early modern Europe, his study establishes a benchmark against which the analyses of monetary and economic phenomena in the other two early modern Middle Eastern states—the Mughal and the Safavid—can be measured.

Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State

A group of works written in the mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands shows many defenders of commerce and republicanism embracing some of the most unsettling tenets of the new and experimental philosophy. Their political arguments were based on a view consonant with Cartesianism, in which the body and its passions for the most part dominate reason, instead of the prevailing idea that reason could and should dominate the passions and through them the body. These arguments were in turn related to some of the new claims about the body that flowed from recent anatomical investigations, in a time and place comfortable with materialism. If ever there were a group of political theorists who grounded their views on contemporary science, this is it: Johann de Witt, the brothers De la Court, and Spinoza. They believed that the new philosophy showed it was unnatural and impoverishing to have a powerful head of state, natural and materially progressive to allow the self-interested pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Reformation, Regulation and the Image: Sumptuary Legislation and the Subject of Law

This article considers the development of the individual subject of law and his constitutional status in the early modern English State, within the context of sumptuary legislation enacted by the Crown and the Inns of Court. During the sixteenth century, the legal community took upon itself the role of exemplifying the correct use of symbols and of elucidating the purpose of sumptuary law. The image of the lawyer was manipulated to represent the inherent divinity of common law. The reformation of the image was inevitably influenced by the doctrinal concepts of the European Reformation and is a graphic indication of the centrality of Anglicanism to the development of early modern common law. I discuss these developments with reference to theories of the image proposed by Goodrich, Legendre and Marin. I refer also to Carlyle's satirical treatise on the symbolism of clothes,Sartor Resartus. The constitution of clothes represents the idea of citizenship and the centrality of reason to the body-politic. The rediscovery of classical texts during the Renaissance was instrumental in shaping a constitution in which an embryonic social contract was apparent, as represented in the sumptuary legislation of the Inns of Court.

:The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno

Part I. Culture and Politics: The Academy under the Medici Principate: 1. Cosimo I de' Medici and the foundation of the Compagnia ed Accademia del Disegno 2. The evolution of the Universit..., Compagnia, ed Accademia del Disegno from Francesco I to Cosimo II 3. Institutional reform of the Academy under Ferdinando II 4. The rise of an administrative class and the decline of the Academy as a Medici Institution under Cosimo III and Giangastone Part II. Discourses and Power: Disegno and Corporate Unity in the Formation of the Academy: 5. Disegno as a disciplinary practice: the Academy school 6. Fellowships of discourse: the Academy's confraternity and guild Postscript Reflections on the archive: the rule of the Academy Appendix Bibliography Index.

Konfliktfelder und Konfliktparteien im Prozeß der lutherischen und reformierten Konfessionalisierung - das Fürstentum Anhalt und die Hochstifte Halberstadt und Magdeburg im 16. Jahrhundert

Article Konfliktfelder und Konfliktparteien im Prozeß der lutherischen und reformierten Konfessionalisierung - das Fürstentum Anhalt und die Hochstifte Halberstadt und Magdeburg im 16. Jahrhundert was published on December 1, 2001 in the journal Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History (volume 92, issue jg).

What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650–1750

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)

The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State. The Discipline of Disegno

The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State. The Discipline of Disegno

State Buildng by Bargaining for Monopoly Rents

Starting from the proposition that the feudal political system functioned as a market for military security where no territorial monopolies and consequently no states in the modern sense of the word existed, state formation is here explained as the outcome of efforts to restrict competition in this market. The explanation draws on the theory of regulation which focuses on bargaining between interest groups and political authorities as the cause of the creation of entry barriers to markets. Which interest groups and authorities were concerned in late medieval and early modern state building is analyzed on the basis of three historical cases, two of which led to the creation of territorial monopolies of security while in one instance corresponding efforts failed.

Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education

This article addresses some of the problems inherent in attempts to understand citizenship education through the concept of popular sovereignty and the formation of self-governing citizens. It does so via a historical investigation of the processes responsible for the separation of sovereignty and government and sovereignty and moral truth in the early modern state. It is argued that in losing sight of the importance of these separations for the formation of liberal pluralist states, current philosophical liberalism risks turning the school system into an instrument of moral coercion, jeopardizing its role as an instrument of social governance.

Cuius exercitus, eius religio? Konfession und Heerwesen im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs

Article Cuius exercitus, eius religio? Konfession und Heerwesen im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs was published on December 1, 2000 in the journal Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History (volume 91, issue jg).

Figurations and State Authority in Early Modern Italy: The Case of the Sienese Protomedicato

In 1559 Siena became part of the Tuscan Grand Ducy, but it retained its own institutional, administrative, and legal structures, and this included the College of Doctors of Philosophy and Medicine. Responsible for granting degrees, the college acquired the authority to examine, approve and license all those practising, or wishing to practise, the “healing arts.” It also assumed the right to try offences such as non-payment for treatment and unlicensed or illicit medical practice. These functions were all exercised by a special magistracy set up within the college, known as the Protomedicato. The analysis of the Protomedicato's licensing and judicial functions over some 250 years, involving a wide range of practitioners and patients, is offered as a test-case of the ideas of the sociologist-historian Norbert Elias about figurations. Elias proposed the construction of “figuration models” as a way of investigating the scope for action and the interdependence of individuals and groups within changing social structures. The Sienese Protomedicato's deliberations and decisions were the result of an ongoing process of negotiation, where each group or individual involved sought to manipulate the system to its own advantage. Such practices, formal and informal, were accepted means of negotiating authority, power, and obligations in the early modern state. In this figuration the state is best seen as “process”, in which power does not necessarily gravitate towards the centre, but may lie in relations between different levels of society.