John Walter

Michael J. Braddick

Braddick, Michael J. Braddick

Walter John

Addressing the dynamics of power in early modern societies, this book challenges the existing tendency to see past societies in terms of binary oppositions - such as male/female, rich/poor, rulers/ruled - in which the disadvantaged have influence only in moments of direct confrontation. Drawing on recent social theory, the essays offer a series of micro-sociologies of power in early modern society, ranging from the politics of age, gender and class to the politics of state-building in the post-Reformation confessional state. They explore the weapons with which subordinated groups in their everyday lives could moderate the exercise of power over them. Recovering the agency of the disadvantaged, the book also explores the limits to the power that the disadvantaged could claim in the past. Its findings also have relevance for thinking about inequality in present-day societies.

Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland

Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, theHandbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution

Juan Carlos Garavaglia

Christian Lamouroux

The companion volume to Latin American Bureaucracy State and the State Building Process (1780–1860) (2013), this book examines the organization and the consolidation of various groups – including judicial officers and tax agents, administrative clerks and soldiers, and merchants and money lenders – acting to create (or reacting to ruin, in the case of the collective resistance to taxes) newly emergent forms of social and political power. Chapters range across Latin America and the United States, Spain, Modern England, Russia, India and the Far-East, and the longue durée of Eurasian history (12th–19th centuries). They reveal that, beyond the general impact of kinship networks, different processes resulted in the consolidation of a new authority based on specialized knowledge and professionalization. The importance attached to the role played by these new servants by imperial, royal or feudal courts led to new forms of recruitment, new procedures of evaluation and the regularization of daily work. It also led to the establishment of new hierarchies, and to the reinforcement of the identity of these various groups who were aggregating to defend shared interests, develop alliances, create methods of intervention, and define fields of expertise. In this respect, the concept of “State” is revisited here as a diverse and locally varied process grounded on differing historical experiences, but which produced similar public officers, who saw themselves as powerful servants managing a part of the public authority.

Michael J. Braddick

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