In the course of the early modern period, the capacity of European states to raise finances, wage wars, subject their own and far away populations, and exert bureaucratic power over a variety of areas of social life increased dramatically. Nevertheless, these changes were far less absolute and definitive than the literature on the rise of the "modern state" once held. While war pushed the boundaries of the emerging fiscal military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rulers remained highly dependent on negotiations with competing elite groups and the private networks of contractors and financial intermediaries. Attempts to increase control over subjects often resulted in popular resistance, that in their turn set limits to and influenced the direction of the development of state institutions. Written in honour of the leading historian of war and state formation in the early modern Low Countries, Marjolein 't Hart, the chapters gathered in this volume examine the main drivers, beneficiaries and discontents of state formation across and beyond Europe in the early modern period.
Author(s): Pepijn Brandon, Lex Heerma van Voss, Annemieke Romein
Series: Routledge Research in Early Modern History
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 310
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction: The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries, and Discontents
Section I: War, Economy, Representation
1. Powerless Representatives?: Warfare’s Contrasting Impact on Early Modern Political Participation
2. The State and the Economic Acceleration of the Dutch Republic, 1585–1637
Section II: Institutions and Law
3. Paper Suits of Armour: Sauvegarde, Brandschat, and Security in the Countryside during Wartime in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands
4. The Formative Role of Early Modern Books of Ordinances: The Low Countries and Their Overseas Lands
Section III: Finance and Contracts
5. The States’ Army of Flanders and the English Roads, 1577–c.1610
6. Finance, Money, Corruption, and the English Exchequer Bill Scandals of 1697–1699
7. The Military-Commercial Complex: Contracting the Eighteenth Century British Army
8
. The Politics and Geopolitics of the British Debate on Monetary Policy for Warfare against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1793–1821
Section IV: Transnational Agents
9. Ministers on Demand: French Senior Government Officials as Transnational Agents of Modernity in Napoleon’s Brother Kingdoms
10. Grasping Opportunities in Times of Crisis?: The Community of Dutch Maritime Traders in the Port of Antwerp During the French Period
Section V: Labour and Contention
11. The State, Taxes, and Popular Protest in the Netherlands in the Napoleonic Period (1806–1813)
12. Varieties of Force: State-Organized Production, Industrialization, and Coerced Labour in Nineteenth-Century Naval Shipyards
Selective Bibliography
Index
