This open access book explores the role of continuity in political processes and practices during the Age of Revolutions. It argues that the changes that took place in the years around 1800 were enabled by different types of continuities across Europe and in the Americas. With historians of modernity tending to emphasise the rise of the new, scholarship has leaned towards an assumption that existing modes of action, thought and practice simply became extinct, irrelevant or at least subordinate to new modes. In contrast, this collection examines continuities between early modern and modern political cultures and organization in Europe and the Americas. Shifting the focus from political modernization, the authors examine the continued relevance of older, often local, practices in (post)revolutionary politics. By doing so, they aim to highlight the role of local political traditions and practices in forging and enabling political change. The book argues that while political change was in fact at the centre of both the old and new polities that emerged in the Age of Revolutions, it coexisted with, and was indeed enabled by, continuities at other levels.
Author(s): Judith Pollmann, Henk te Velde
Series: Palgrave Studies in Political History
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 339
City: Cham
Contents
List of Contributors
1 Civic Continuities in an Age of Revolutionary Change: Europe and the Americas, c.1750–1850
Introduction
‘Residual Powers’
The Power of Practice
Experiencing and Domesticating Change
Part I Residual Powers
2 Distance and Proximity. Parliamentary Representation and the Persistence of Local Ties in Britain, France and the Netherlands, C. 1780s–1850
Edmund Burke: (In)dependence of the MP
French Representatives: Austere Independence (In Theory) and Mutual Deference (In Practice)
Local Self-Government, Corruption and Representation in Britain
The Local Dimension of Politics: Parochialism, Oligarchy, Private Interestand Democracy
Public vs. Private Law and Interest in the Netherlands
Conclusion
3 Post-revolutionary France: The Ultimate Test Case?
Local Politics
Sociability
Pays. The Politics of Place
Repertoires of Contention
4 Regional Resilience in the Age of Revolutions: The Persistence of the Dutch Provinces, 1748–1848
Concordia Res Parvae Crescunt
The One and Indivisible Republic
Unity or Diversity?
The Many-Faced Nation
The Old Times Will Revive
Conclusion
5 Order, War and Religion: The Chilean Republic Between Tradition and Change
The Possibility of the Republic
Order
Religion
War
Rituals
Concluding Remarks
Part II The Power of Practice
6 The ‘Sanction of Precedent’: Publishers and Political Dissent in Central Europe During the Age of Revolution
Censorship and the Repertoire of Circumvention
A Decentralized Publishing Landscape
Bookshops and Local Civic Practice
Conclusion
7 Maintaining Order in Revolutionary Times—The Political Practices of a Mercantile Elite in the Rhineland, 1770–1830
Ruling and Squabbling in Stable Times
Looking for Stability: The Wupper Valley During the Revolutionary Wars
Rupture Above, Stability on the Ground—The Wupper Valley as French Territory 1806–1813
The Continuous Effects of Political Tradition: The Wupper Valley as Part of Prussia
The Maintenance of Order in Ever-Changing Times
8 Indigenous Citizens and Black Republicans: Continuities and Evolutions of Subalterns’ Political Visions and Repertoires in Post-independence Colombia and Mexico
9 Restoring the Moral Order of the Community: The Symbolic Repertoire of Collective Action in the Dutch Age of Revolutions
The Narrative of the Dutch Revolution
The Patriot Era
The Orangist Restoration and the Batavian Revolution
Blurred Boundaries
Conclusion
Part III Experiencing and Domesticating Change
10 The Experience of ‘Reform’ in English Local Governance in the Era of the ‘Reform Ministry’ (1830–1841)
The ‘Age of Reform’
Reforming English Local Governance
Reform Remembered
An Experiential Perspective
11 ‘The Free Action of the Collective Power of Individuals’: Vernacular Democracy and the Sovereign People
From Nothing to Start, into Being
Declaring Interdependence
We the People
Mobs in Myriad
12 The Spirit of the Belltower: Chronicling Urban Time in an Age of Revolution
Accelerated Time and the Benefits of Hindsight
Domesticating the New
Public Space and Local Change
Chronicling Change
The Return of the Golden Age
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
