Early Modern State Research Articles

Accounting and the Papal States: The influence of thePro commissaBull (1592) on the rise of an early modern state

The aim of this article is to explore the role played by accounting in the building of the early modern Papal States. In particular, the study shows how the control and accountability system set up by the Pro commissa Bull (15 August 1592) allowed the Pope to concentrate and centralize political power, fostering the shift of the Papal States towards the configuration of an absolute state which can be considered the first major institutional embodiment of the modern state in the early modern period. Besides contributing to the literature on accounting and state building, this research also provides insights into the role of accounting in religious institutions. The analysis, in fact, is carried out in one of the most important religious institutions in history. Moreover, the fact that the Pope was both the political and the religious head of the Papal States allows the inference that this peculiar “dual role” could have affected the setting up of the abovementioned control and accountability system.

Ceremonial Theater and Tragedy from French Classicism to German Classicism

This essay investigates tragic theater from French classicism to German classicism in relation to the ritualized ceremonies and spectacles of the early modern state, which I summarily refer to as ceremonial theater. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the relationship between tragedy and ceremonial theater went through four major phases: 1) sponsored by the state, tragedy was initially continuous with ceremonial theater; 2) finding a new source of the tragic in the implacable conflict between public sovereign power and insistent desires of the royal flesh, Racine created a tragic theater that contested ceremonial theater; 3) after Racine, ceremonial theater and tragedy moved in sharply diverging directions, with the former falling into a steady decline and the latter turning towards the sentiments and concerns of private persons; 4) in German classicism, especially in Schiller's classical dramas, ceremonial theater and tragedy were joined together again—by means of the appropriation of ceremonial theater by the tragic stage. Now the tragic stage established itself as an autonomous realm of the imagination, in which the moribund ceremonial theater came back to life. In the course of these centuries, the aesthetics of tragedy had changed, while the political world witnessed dramatic transformations. A study of European tragic theater in relation to political rituals during this eventful period, therefore, provides a new perspective on the interaction between aesthetics and politics.

Intelligence, reason of state and the art of governing risk and opportunity in early modern Europe

Drawing upon primary and secondary historical material, this paper explores the role of intelligence in early modern government. It focuses upon developments in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, a site-specific genealogical moment in the broader history of state power/knowledges. Addressing a tendency in Foucauldian work to neglect pre-eighteenth-century governance, the analysis reveals a set of interrelated processes which gave rise to an innovative technique for anticipating hazard and opportunity for the state. At the intersection of raison d’État, the evolving art of government, widespread routines of secrecy and a post-Westphalia field of European competition and exchange, intelligence was imagined as a fundamental solution to the concurrent problems of ensuring peace and stability while improving state forces. In the administrative offices of the English Secretary of State, an assemblage of complex and interrelated procedures sought to produce and manipulate information in ways which exposed both possible risks to the state and potential opportunities for expansion and gain. As this suggests, the art of intelligence played an important if largely unacknowledged role in the formation and growth of the early modern state. Ensuring strategic advantage over rivals, intelligence also limited the ability of England's neighbours to dominate trade, control the seas and master the colonies, functioning as a constitutive feature of European balance and equilibrium. As the analysis concludes, understanding intelligence as a form of governmental technique – a way of doing something – reveals an entirely novel way of thinking about and investigating its myriad (historical and contemporary) formations.

The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French India

In the French colony of Pondichéry, French and local actors alike drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political and commercial agendas. Recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and imperial expansion. This essay deploys this insight in the colonial context, to examine how indigenous families in the Tamil region entered into the European colonial project. For native commercial brokers, involvement with European newcomers could actually strengthen local family ties. Simultaneously, French employees of the Compagnie des Indes were eager to insert themselves into Tamil networks and did so by deploying public and inscribed performances of kinship.

Conquering Demons: The “Kirishitan,” Japan, and the World in Early Modern Japanese Literature by Jan C. Leuchtenberger (review)

Reviewed by: Conquering Demons: The “Kirishitan,” Japan, and the World in Early Modern Japanese Literature by Jan C. Leuchtenberger Peter Nosco Conquering Demons: The “Kirishitan,” Japan, and the World in Early Modern Japanese Literature. By Jan C. Leuchtenberger. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2013. 240pages. Hardcover $65.00; softcover $25.00. One of the more vexing problems in the study of the social and cultural history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Japan concerns the memory of Christianity. The common wisdom on the subject has long been that after Christianity was proscribed in the 1610s and the priests were subsequently expelled, most Christians in Japan renounced their faith, and the few who did not were driven underground. Because of the absence of priests, the Catholic Church had long tended to discount the integrity of the faith of these underground Christians. In a remarkable reversal, however, on 15 January 2014 Pope Francis said of them, “They maintained, even in secrecy, a strong spirit of community because baptism made them become one single body in Christ: they were isolated and hidden, but they were always members of [End Page 275] the people of God, of the Church.”1 Japanese scholarship on the Tokugawa state has generally exaggerated the effectiveness of the Bakuhan state’s efforts to eradicate the despised creed and has tended to represent Tokugawa religious life as if the waters simply closed over Christians, Christianity, and their memory with nary a ripple. More recent scholarship in English has challenged this narrative, though often indirectly, by focusing on anti-Christian rhetoric of the early seventeenth century. Building on the work of George Elison’s Deus Destroyed (Harvard University Press, 1973), both Nam-lin Hur’s Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007) and Kiri Paramore’s Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009) demonstrate how anti-Christian rhetoric contributed in various ways to the formation and subsequent character of the early modern Japanese state. But left unaddressed in this scholarship has been the intriguing question of whether what Charles Boxer and others have styled “Japan’s Christian Century” survived in the popular imagination of subsequent centuries, and if so, in what manner. The volume under review adds an important dimension to this earlier scholarship by focusing on the demonized Christian/European Other in both seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese literature, thereby taking us away from the world of ideology and political rhetoric and into the world of narrative and popular memory. Conquering Demons begins with the official end to the European missions to Japan in 1614 and carefully traces the image of Christian missionaries and priests—author Jan Leuchtenberger argues in favor of the Japanese term “Kirishitan”—through their caricatured appearance in three works: Baterenki (History of the Padres), Kirishitan monogatari (The Christian Story), and Kirishitan shūmon raichō jikki (True Account of the Arrival of the Kirishitan Sect in Japan). Leuchtenberger then extends the analysis into late-Edo discourse up to and including Aizawa Seishisai’s 1825 Shinron (New Theses). Except for Shinron, the exact dates of these works are not known. Baterenki dates from around 1610, when European priests were still much in evidence. Kirishitan monogatari dates in printed form from 1639, but the fact that the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638 is unmentioned in most variants of the text indicates that it was almost certainly written earlier. Kirishitan shūmon raichō jikki dates from the Kyōhō era (1716–1735), i.e., the first twenty years of the culturally liberal bakufu of Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–1745). Although their precise dates are uncertain, the sequence of these three works is crystal clear, and so in Conquering Demons we have for the first time in English a study that provides a sense of the “evolving discourses on Japan and its Others,” whereby the Kirishitan Other is transformed from “a relentless would-be conqueror to a grotesque and uncanny foreigner who uses money, magic, and medicine to lure the gullible” (pp. 4–5). The volume also includes annotated translations of Baterenki and Kirishitan shūmon raichō jikki, the latter in a variant titled Nanbanji [End Page 276] monogatari (Tale of...

Narratives of Nation or of Progress? Genealogies of European Folklore Studies

Folkloristics, like all disciplines, has its story to tell. Avant la lettre, Herder's conceptualization, folklore narrated a national tale that (in its francophobia) looked forward to a world without grand narratives. To William Thoms, who coined the word, folklore could be understood through a narrative of progress. It described a passing world of curious cultural forms to be replaced by superior ones, but which deserved nonetheless its modest place the genealogies of nation and humanity. Folklore then was defined either aesthetically by the var- ious narrative forms of Volkspoesie or socially by certain cultural forms proper to the lower classes of the residual agrarian world.1 When understood as an aesthetic narrative form, it had its greatest impact. Artistic texts are self-contained and principle are bound by the parameters of the concrete world. Oral narrative could soar above the hardships of rural life, and its artistic fullness, free from the vicissitudes of history, prefigured other kinds of independence. On the other hand, to define folklore socially, the only narrative that gave meaning to it was that of progress: it was without value, but was destined to be superseded the onward march of modern civilization.2The establishment of chairs, university departments, and research institutes devoted to modern scholarly disciplines derives large part from the proliferation of nations, nation-states, and, indeed, colonial empires. But political boundaries set de facto limits to the remit-geographical, at least-of scholarly disciplines.3 It is important, nevertheless, to make a distinction-ambiguous and all though it may be-between a field of study and a discipline. A field of study exists without formal professionalization; a discipline cannot. This essay sketches the two orientations folklore studies traced above and argues that the narrative and aesthetic definition of the field privileged the national frame while the social definition privileged the provincial and the colonial. The distinctions are always clear cut, but it is hoped that the reflections on these questions may contribute to the history of folklore studies (cf. Bauman and Briggs; Briggs and Naithani).I.The modern European nation-states that developed from the late eighteenth cen- tury had two different origins. In one, the early modern dynastic state developed under a preexisting ethnic high culture, with a rich accumulation of historical and artistic heritage along the way-the best examples being England and France. In the other, distinct ethnic groups occupied compact territories. But they lacked their own aristocracy and a continuous high culture, their ruling class was of foreign origin, and they were impoverished insofar as the accumulation of a historical and artistic heritage that could be understood national terms was concerned, since this was, to a large extent, the legacy of a state.4 There was also, of course, an intermediate type, Italy and Germany before unification, but also Poland- though Lithuania-after partition (Hroch 79-80; Gellner 139). Norbert Elias argued that the English and French notion of civilization represented a process of expansion and assimilation, reflecting the history of England and of France. Civilization, deriving from civitas, city, by implication grows at the expense of the local and provincial: it universalizes. The opposing German notion of Kultur, on the other hand, emerged from a nation that was consolidated very late, was unsure of its boundaries, and self-conscious about its identity. If civilization described a process of moving outward from a center, Kultur delimited, stressed differences between peoples, particularized, and referred to cultural products in which the individuality of a people expresses itself (Elias 4-5).The folklore studies that developed the first type of state might be called metropolitan folkloristics. The word folklore, originating this context, is not the happiest of terms, savouring as it does of the mental slumming of a victorian savant, as one folklorist put it (O Danachair 5); to apprehend folklore, this socially based definition, one had to seek out the people (of whom, by definition, one was a part). …

Military Revolution in Early Modern Japan

Military changes that took place in Japan during the late sixteenth century bear a striking resemblance to those in Europe at about the same time. This essay argues that the Roberts thesis of military revolution – widely applied to Europe – provides a useful framework for identifying a series of cascading developments that, once realized, constituted the fundamental elements of a similar revolution in early modern Japan. These included: the almost universal adoption of firearms, the development of tactics for the effective deployment of those firearms, and finally, a change in the composition and organization of armies leading to the professionalization of warfare. Most important, by revolutionizing the way armies were organized and wars were fought, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi contributed directly to the emergence of new notions of centralized authority that were critical to the creation of a unified and peaceful early modern state.

From “ Bête Noire ” to “ le Mal de Constantinople”: Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State

Ottoman perceptions of and responses to epidemic diseases changed dramatically in the sixteenth century. Until that time, plagues were viewed in mostly supernatural-apocalyptic terms. However, with the development of a new body of knowledge and interpretations, plagues came to be seen in a more naturalistic-medical framework. Moreover, this new approach was used for justifying administrative and legal practices implemented for the control of epidemic outbreaks. This article explores the historical context in which this paradigmatic change took place, with a view to establishing the complex relationship between the expanding powers of early modern state governance and the discourses of plagues maintained by the Ottoman society.

Governing Agrarian Diversities

In a country as large and diverse as India, governance meant a welter of institutional and customary arrangements, particularly in the agrarian sector. Globally, the early modern state’s fiscal well being depended on agriculture. In India, the demands of an expanding maritime commerce made this more complex. Contrary to prevalent views of the state as an economic predator, this article shows how the sixteenth-century initiated novel and creative techniques of agrarian governance, which enabled it to consolidate power, extract revenue and protect diversities at the same time. This was a new dispensation, which cannot be explained by seamless notions of the ‘medieval’. These new strategies of governance can only be understood in the frame of an early modernity, which was a shared global experience. For India, agrarian governance involved, inter alia—the consolidation of private property and transactions based on contractual obligations. These were some of the important ways in which the state facilitated the making of an early modern economy in sixteenth-century India.

Reason of State: Whose Reason? Which Reason?

Since we tend to think of the state as a construct of law, how is it possible for a category of state action to exist somehow outside or beyond the law? Using the term ‘reason of state’ to specify this special category, the paper asks two more specific questions. When someone talks about reason of state, whose reason and which reason do they mean? Two attempts are made to answer the first question. One attempt seeks inspiration from early-modern state theory. The second looks to 18th century ‘jealousy of trade’ politics, particularly the sovereign claims of the East India Company. The second question is addressed tentatively, the paper suggesting (i) that reason of state may be seen as the mirror-image of Coke’s defence of the common law as artificial reason and (ii) that the basic structure of reason of state may be identified as semi-secret, based in reason allied to experience, offering guiding intelligence, and sovereign in a ‘soft’ sense.

Guiding the Seafarers: The South African Hydrographic Office and the Contribution of the Three Proteas

As seafarers require a comprehensive record that provides information on coastlines, the seabed and sea conditions, cartography dates back to antiquity. During the early modern period, states and merchant companies employed cartographers to collect and report important nautical information. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), for example, created valuable nautical charts and provided detailed sailing instructions on the South African coast. Open exchange of such information is a twentieth-century phenomenon dating back to the creation of the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) in 1921. The SA Navy was created in 1922. One of its first ships was the survey ship HMSAS Protea, which was laid up in 1933. During the two decades following the Second World War, hydrographic survey work was done by three converted former Royal Navy vessels (SAS Protea, SAS Natal and SAS Haerlem). South Africa became a member of the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) in 1951 and the SA Navy established its own Hydrographic Office in April 1955. The SA Navy’s Hydrographic vessels were always outdated or redundant ships, but in 1972 the SA Navy commissioned its first purpose-built hydrographic survey ship (the current SAS Protea).

The Empire’s Scorched Shore: Coastal China, 1633-1683

Abstract In the mid-seventeenth century, the Qing empire of China reacted to piracy and rebellion by forcibly depopulating the coast and burning its shoreline into wasteland for twenty years. As unique as the scale and brutality of this response may be in maritime history, the Qing state was not inherently isolationist or anti-maritime. Its underlying imperatives were shared by other early modern states: a desire to establish sovereignty, impose subjecthood, and constrain the mobility of peripheral populations. This article places the Qing Coastal Depopulation of 1661-1683 in the context of fifty years of maritime militarization, invasion, and civil war in the coastal province of Fujian. It portrays the Depopulation as not just a military act to combat pirates or the powerful sealord Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), but also an act of social engineering to subjugate the coastal population by removing it behind an artificial land boundary. At the same time, the article shows that the Qing state’s practice of “outsourcing” coastal control to regional lords helps to account for the policy’s longevity and some of its severest abuses.

Ruler and state, state and society in Ottoman political thought

It can be argued that the late seventeenth century marks the transition of the Ottoman entity into an early modern state, with one of its main features identified as the distinction between the ruler and the state apparatus. The paper aims to explore whether, when and how such a process reflected in contemporary political thought. It analyzes the ways Ottoman elite authors represented society vis-à-vis the sultan; also, the development of the notion of “state” in the same authors and how it came to be considered different from that of the “ruler”.

Goethe’s Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen

In what sense can we say that Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen is an historical drama? How do the historical and poetic dimensions of the play fit together? Until recently, questions of this sort found less than satisfactory answers in scholarship on Goethe's 1773 play. For much of the twentieth century, critics viewed Goethe's treatment of history in the play as secondary, anachronistic, or even false. To the extent that history came into focus, it was seen as a backdrop the Charakterdrama that pitted a natural, authentic hero against an inauthentic courtly culture.1 However, once critics began to develop a more nuanced understanding of the play's hero, revealing that the idealized image of Gotz foundered on his verstummelte subjectivity, it was no longer possible to read the play in such straightforward terms. Yet critics who spearheaded this revaluation of Gotz continued to approach history in the play as either secondary to the Charakterdrama2 or as a reflection of Goethe's eighteenth-century class concerns.3 Only in the mid-1980s did scholars begin to undertake a serious revaluation of history as a dimension of the play itself,4 showing how the dramatic conflict and the hero's downfall are rooted in the historical transformations of the period the play depicts. In two of the most notable interpretations to date, Mariane Willems and Horst Lange have argued that Gotz depicts the tragedy of a character who clings to a premodern feudal order that is being displaced by the modern state.5 Both have shown that the historical situation of early modem Europe is indispensible to interpreting the play. As such,Willems and Lange have succeeded in placing front and center questions about the play's representation of history, as well as the relation of this history to the play's poetics. My reading of the play will unfold in part as a dialogue with their work. At stake in this discussion are larger questions about how the young Goethe understood the relation between individual persons and historical processes, answers to which bear on what I will call Goethe's historical particularism.6A major goal of the new historical interpretations has been to reconcile the insights of scholars such as Graham and Nagele with an understanding of the historical transformations depicted in the play. As Lange points out, these scholars recognized that Weislingen, and not Gotz, is the pivotal character in the plot, the person on whom everyone else's success or failure depends.7 Nagele (following Graham) shows that Weislingen's position in the plot is underscored by the symbolism of the right hand. Weislingen is the Bishop's right-hand man and the missing right hand under Gotz's iron hand, which becomes a detachable prop that gets traded back and forth between the Bishop and Gotz in a manner that mirrors Weislingen's vacillations.8 Lange has recognized that the success of the new historical interpretations rests on making sense of this dimension of the play's plot and symbolism.9 His interpretive question is, as I see it, the central one of the play: Why does the entire plot have Weislingen as its fulcrum, or in other words, why is he singled out as the one who engineers the triumph of the modem state?10 Lange's answer is that Weislingen represents the modern individual for whom the existence of the sovereign fulfills an inner need. Weislingen's ego displays a quasi-Freudian tripartite structure that is intimately tied to the modern (187). Lange attempts to link up this psychological reading to his historical account of the play by arguing that this tripartite self is an essential psychic feature of the kind of person upon whom the modern state depends: the administrator (187).While Lange poses the crucial question of the play, I find his answer dissatisfying because his diachronic reading of the play's historical narrative is at odds with his synchronic reading of Weislingen's psyche. Recognizing this incongruity, Lange concludes that the play's design has a fundamental flaw (190). …

Bible, King, and Common Law: Genealogical Literacies and Family History Practices in British America

For centuries, genealogical fads with historically distinctive qualities have appeared in disparate societies around the globe; from totalitarian to authoritarian to merely traditional societies, genealogy has served the interest of states that promote the significance of ancestry. We are unused to thinking about genealogy in America and an implicated American state in this context. But in British America an ideological coalition of religion, government, and law—constituent parts of the early modern state—was heavily invested in the authority of lineage and promoted both genealogical literacy and genealogical production. Protestantism, Anglo-American political cultural tradition, and the law all encouraged an understanding of the deep significance of lineal ancestry; each asked for the creation and maintenance of family history. This essay, then, both reveals the extent of intimate expressions of family connection in British America and queries the logic of their production. It centers the state in stories of the family and puts family stories at the center of state interests from the colonial period and into the foundational era of the United States.

Noble strategies in an early modern small state: the Mahuet of Lorraine

Noble Strategies in an Early Modern Small State addresses a subject few other scholars of early modern Europe attempt: the hundreds of small states that made up the overwhelming majority of Europe's political entities before the nineteenth century. Author Charles Lipp studies the elite of the duchy of Lorraine, a territory strategically placed geographically and culturally along the frontiers dividing France and Germany, and a region contested for centuries by the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Valois and Bourbons of the kingdom of France. Rather than focus on either the dukes of Lorraine or the dynasties like the Guise or the Bassompierre, as other studies have done, this volume analyzes a family belonging to the lower nobility, the Mahuet, over several generations from the late-sixteenth through the early-eighteenth centuries. The book explores how this family rose to social prominence during a chaotic period in their homeland's history, a time marked by foreign invasion, military occupation, and an outbreak of the plague, among other trials. Charles Lipp is assistant professor of history, University of West Georgia.

The Impact of Climate on Southeast Asia, circa 950–1820: New Findings

AbstractThe recent discovery of continuous tree-ring series starting as early as 1030 CE has for the first time made possible the reconstruction of historical climates for much of mainland Southeast Asia. Perhaps the most dramatic finding is that wide cyclic fluctuations in the reach and volume of monsoon rains contributed substantially to both the genesis and the collapse of the charter civilizations of Angkor, Pagan, and Dai Viet. Fromcirca1450–1820 climate continued to influence political and economic development, but its impact appears to have diminished both because the amplitude of hydrological fluctuations decreased markedly, and because new sources of power rendered early modern Southeast Asian states more resilient. A pioneering collaborative effort by a historian and a paleoclimatologist, this paper promises three benefits: It can help to solve a variety of local historiographic puzzles, it can facilitate construction of a synchronized historical narrative for mainland Southeast Asia as a whole, and it can aid comparisons between mainland Southeast Asia and other sectors of Eurasia.

Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500-1800 Matthew James Crawford Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500-1800. By J.H. Elliott. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. 352 pp. $38.00 (cloth). History can be full of surprises if you know how to find them. It takes skill and, often, the problem is one of perception rather than discovery. With this most recent collection of essays, J. H. Elliott demonstrates his masterful ability to recognize and interpret the surprising and the improbable even when it comes to some of the most well-trodden areas of early modern history. For example, in an essay on the interplay between Spain and Britain as they engaged in colonization of the Americas, Elliott offers the surprising tidbit that Bartolomé de las Casas, a prominent sixteenth-century critic of Spanish conquest and settlement in the Caribbean and the Americas, looked to the work of the Venerable Bede, an eighth-century chronicler of Anglo-Saxon England, for a better model of colonization (p. 149). This seemingly [End Page 846] "improbable connection" highlights one of the persistent themes throughout this volume: for all of their divisiveness and proclaimed singularity, a significant amount of exchange and mutual influence pervaded early modern European states and societies—even in the case of archenemies like Spain and Britain (p. 149). While there are no major revelations here, especially for those familiar with Elliott's other work, this volume provides many outstanding examples of good historical thinking and writing. For readers of world history, moreover, many of these selections demonstrate the utility of looking beyond the nation-state and its narratives of exceptionalism to explore broader connections and comparisons. Although this volume is a sequel to Elliott's 1989 collection, Spain and Its World, it is not as exclusively focused on Spain in favor of more comparative and regional perspectives. All of the fourteen essays have appeared previously as journal articles, essays, or lectures from 1990 to 2007. Here, they are divided into three parts titled "Europe," "A Wider World," and "The World of Art." Although the third part reflects Elliott's scholarly interests in art and the relationship of a society's cultural production to its political, social, and economic experience, part 3 sits a little awkwardly alongside the other two parts. Part 1 examines different aspects of the political history of Europe. The first essay offers a comparative analysis of the ways in which the Spanish, French, and British monarchies navigated the forces of unity and disunity that pervaded their composite states. Here, Elliott emphasizes the flexibility and longevity of these composite monarchies as a counterbalance to characterizations of European political history as "an inexorable advance towards a system of sovereign nation states" (p. 5). Such a claim might not seem as provocative today as it was in 1990, when the essay was first published, but that is evidence of the broad impact of Elliott's approach to early modern states and political institutions. The next essay challenges the assumption that mutual hatred between early modern Britain and Spain resulted in little interaction outside of antagonism. Instead, he shows that both the British and the Spanish studied each other closely and that lines of influence ran in both directions. The third essay offers an invaluable insider's perspective on the major developments in the debate over the thesis of a "General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" first proposed by Eric Hobsbawm in a 1954 article in Past and Present. Elliott has been a participant since the genesis of this debate and so, this essay offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of Hobsbawm's thesis. Elliott next focuses on the political dimensions of the crisis through a comparison of a mid seventeenth-century society that did not experience a major [End Page 847] revolt, Castile, with those that did, mainly France. Elliott finds that similar preconditions existed in Castile as in France and argues that it was the ability of Castile's poderosos—powerful aristocrats and bureaucrats—to engineer a more complete failure of the reforms of the minister-favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, that ultimately precluded the need for outright...

Ethnic and State History as Determinant of Ethnic Fractionalization

This paper presents a new dataset which codes for the approximate founding date of the largest ethnic group in the world's states as well as the wave of state creation in which the particular country emerged. All contemporary questions of nationalism and ethnic conflict begin with the imperfect overlap between ethnic/national communities and political units. Ethnic fractionalization indices provide a quantitative measure of one manifestation of this: the degree of ethnic pluralism in a state. Ethnic fractionalization is produced by the overlay of political fragmentation atop ethnic fragmentation. There are currently close to 200 states overlaid on top of some 6000 ethnic groups producing a variegated ethnic grid that varies from state to state. Fractionalization will tend to decrease as ethnicity and politics move toward congruence. This can occur for three major reasons: a) the number of political units increases; b) the number of ethnic groups decreases or certain large ethnic nuclei attract members away from smaller groups; and/or c) the fit between ethnicity and politics improves. Unfortunately, with the partial exception of Philip Roeder's 1961 and 1985 dataset (Roeder 2001), only cross-sectional ethnic fractionalization data is available. This means that we cannot adequately test proposition a). However, we can derive indicators for the arguably more important processes b) and c). (Bockstette et al. 2002) have already demonstrated a significant negative association between the date of state formation (and degree of indigenous control of the state at the time) and the ethnolinguistic fractionalization index (ELF). Older indigenous political histories tend to be associated with less fractionalized states today. However this was not the primary purpose of their work, so the association was simply noted as an interesting univariate relationship. This paper attempts to build on this state history finding, but goes beyond it by parsing out ethnic and state formation variables. The foundation date of the largest ethnic group in a state serves as a measure of b) above, because we assume that older state-dominant ethnic groups have had more time to assimilate subaltern groups than newer state-dominant groups. According to ethnosymbolist theory, modern nations typically form around premodern ethnic 'core' groups which often engaged in social and ethnic assimilation prior to the modern epoch (Smith 1986). For modernists, modern state creation begins the process of nation-building and diversity reduction. Regardless of which approach one favours, it is worth noting that ethnic groups and states serve as assimilationist actors - large fractionalization-reducing ethnic nuclei - within multi-ethnic states. One question this paper seeks to adjudicate is whether ethnic pluralities or states are more important actors in this process. At one time, dominant minorities were common. With the decline of empire, dominant minorities give way to dominant pluralities or majorities as popular sovereignty and democratization spread (Kaufmann 2004). (Connor 1994a: 39) notes that while fewer than 10 percent of states are ethnically homogeneous, a substantial majority of them have an ethnic majority. All but a handful of states have a significant plurality group. How to measure the founding date of the largest ethnic group? This date is defined as the first imagining of the group by a putative member of the group and is determined through consultation with historians and social scientists who possess expertise on the appropriate country. To tap c) above, the paper distinguishes five waves of state formation: a) pre-1815; b) 1815-1917; c) 1918-45; d) 1946-89; e) 1990-present. Here we posit a connection between the date of state formation and the degree of ethnic-nationalist self-determination. This is not a continuous or ordinal variable as there have been discrete waves of state formation punctuating long periods of relative calm. The relative balance between ethnic self-determination, desire for territorial aggrandizement and other-determination of boundaries governs the congruence of borders. We assume that states which largely emerge through secession from a modern state (1990-present) are most homogeneous. Those springing from the transformation of an early modern state (pre-1815) would be predicted to be next in ethno-national congruence. These should be followed by those which emerged in the wake of Versailles (1918-45) and which were animated at least in part by Wilsonian principles of ethno-national congruence, though largely by Great Power motives and the domestic desire for territory. Early secessions from land empires (many of 1815-1917) should follow, and, finally, decolonizations, where ethnic self-determination is least evident (most of 1946-89 state creations). We also test other popular determinants of ELF such as climate, terrain, colonizer, state size and various indicators of modernization and economic development from several leading datasets.

Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530 (review)

Reviewed by: Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530 Matthew Sneider Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530. By David M. D’Andrea. [Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe, 5.] (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. 2007. Pp. xiv, 214. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-580-46239-6.) David M. D’Andrea’s impressive new book is a study of the Trevisan confraternity of Santa Maria dei Battuti. He traces the confraternity’s importance for the material and spiritual well-being of the city, but also sees it as an important element in Treviso’s civic religion—its fundamentally religious sense of its civic identity. Indeed, the most remarkable sections of his work use the confraternity as a key to understanding the complex relationship between Treviso and Venice. Santa Maria dei Battuti was the city’s preeminent lay religious organization, attracting members, donations, and the support of both church and commune. The confraternity was a devotional family: “brothers” and “sisters” were to live according to a code that fostered piety, were obliged to aid weaker members, and were required to remember the departed with funerals and Masses. The various charitable services that this family provided to the broader community are traced in two fascinating chapters. Its complex of buildings lay at the center of a network of giving that benefited some of the most vulnerable groups in Treviso: widows, foundlings, pilgrims, prisoners, and debtors. It also was the site of a large hospital that provided the poor with medical treatment, aided by the proximity of the medical school in Padua and the spice markets of Venice. D’Andrea suggests that after Treviso yielded its independence to Venice in 1344, the confraternity, at the center of public life, became even more important as a symbol of civic pride. Here was an institution whose liberties recalled the city’s vanished independence; here was a locus of power for a ruling class deprived of sovereignty; here was the source and the sign of divine favor. This “mini-commune” played an important role as a mediator between subject city and dominant city. A particularly fascinating section treats civic processions. These were rituals in which the confraternity “act[ed]” the “self-assertion” of the subject city but in cooperation with the dominant city: Venice defended the primacy of the Battuti in the processional life of Treviso while the confraternity processed in honor of ducal elections [End Page 583] and military victories. The author elegantly uses the processional banner of the confraternity to embody its role as mediator between the universal and the local, between center and periphery: The Virgin Mary appeared on both sides, accompanied on one side by Ss. Peter and Paul and on the other side by St. Mark (the patron saint of Venice) and St. Liberale (the patron saint of Treviso). D’Andrea’s analysis of the political importance of the confraternity reflects scholarship on the early-modern state that emphasizes the balance of cooperation and conflict that existed between center and periphery. Trevisans saw the confraternity as an embodiment of their city’s independent identity within the state while Venetians saw the good governance and the good works of the confraternity as a source of stability and divine favor for the state. It is the wedding of disparate themes—religious association and social welfare to state politics—which makes this book a fascinating contribution to confraternity studies. Matthew Sneider University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press