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The Early Modern English State and the Question of Differentiation from 1550 to 1700

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Michael Braddick
Michael Braddick
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

It is frequently said that, while historians are theoretically naïve, sociologists are insensitive to the particularities of specific historical situations; and that this insensitivity can seriously affect the usefulness of theory. What follows is an attempt to marry the critical insights of sociologists on a central issue, the state, with the sensitivity of historians to the modalities and particularities of the exercise of political and social power in a particular context, seventeenthcentury England. The result, it is hoped, is an account that benefits from the strengths of both.

Type
The Constitution of the State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 92 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1996

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References

Earlier versions of this essay have been read at seminars at the universities of Sheffield and Oxford, and I am grateful for comments from participants on those occasions. A number of people have discussed these issues with me or read drafts of this article. In particular I am grateful to Mark Greengrass, Ian Kershaw, Stephen Salter, Gareth Stedman Jones, John Walter, and John Watts for their help.

1 “State and Society, 1130–1815: An Analysis of English State Finances,” in Zeitlin, M., ed., Political Power and Social Theory, vol. I (1980), 165–208Google Scholar. Much of the material and argument was incorporated into his book, The Sources of Social Power, I, of A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

2 “State and Society,” 166.

3 Ibid., 196.

4 Williams, P., The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), 77Google Scholar.

5 In the work of Conrad Russell, for example. See, most recently, his The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar.

6 This material is discussed in Braddick, M. J., Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth Century England: Local Administration and Response, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 70 (Woodbridge, 1994Google Scholar). For a more general account of national finances in this period, see Braddick, , The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996Google Scholar).

7 Fletcher, A. J., Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, 1986), 316Google Scholar.

8 Stater, V., “The Lord Lieutenancy on the Eve of the Civil Wars: The Impressment of George Plowright,” Historical Journal, 29:2 (1986), 279–96, especially 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Such accounts are, in my view, excessively “statist.” On this term, see Tilly, C., Capital, Coercion and European Slates AD 990–1992 (Oxford, 1992), 5–9Google Scholar.

10 Krader, L., Formation of the State (Englewood-Cliffs, 1968), 13Google Scholar.

11 See, for example, Roberts, S., Order and Dispute (Harmondsworth, 1979Google Scholar).

12 The literature here is extensive. See, among others, Cohen, R. and Service, E. R., eds., Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution (Philadelphia, 1978Google Scholar), and Claessen, H. J. M. and Skalnik, P., eds., The Early State (The Hague, 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

13 Braddick, M. J., “State Formation and Social Change in Early Modern England,” Social History, 16:1 (1991), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 This summarises a vast amount of work. For an introduction, see Wrightson, K., English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982Google Scholar), and Sharpe, J. A., Early Modern England (London, 1987Google ScholarPubMed).

15 Mann, “State and society,” 166. Weber was sceptical about the possibility of distinguishing states from other collectivities in terms of function. “It is not possible to characterise a political organisation—and thus, in particular, ‘the state’—by reference to the ends to which it orients its activity. On the one hand there is no end, be it the provision of food or the protection of the arts, which has not been pursued, albeit occasionally, by some political organisation. On the other hand, there is no end, be it the assuring of the individual's security or the enforcement of laws, which has been pursued by all political organisations. It is for this reason that the nature of such an organisation can only be defined by referring to a means which may not be exclusive to it, but which is specific to it and intrinsic to its essence (and which occasionally becomes an end in itself)—force” (Weber, quoted and trans, in Poggi, G., The State. Its Nature, Development and Prospects [Oxford, 1990], 14Google Scholar). Again the distinguishing feature of the state is the ultimate sanction of legitimate force. In this sense, I would imagine that Poggi would argue that legitimate force is not a function but a distinctive source of power: political power. Control over this resource is what lay behind the authority of the magistracy of early modem England.

16 Mann, “State and Society,” 166.

17 In his paper at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 1990. See also the argument of Goldstone, cited below.

18 For constables, see Wrightson, K., “Two Concepts of Order,” in Brewer, J. and Styles, J., eds., An Ungovernable People? (London, 1980), 21–46Google Scholar, and, more generally, Kent, J., The English Village Constable (Oxford, 1986Google Scholar). For gentry justices of the peace, see A. J. Fletcher, “Honour, Reputation and Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England,” in Fletcher, A. J. and Stevenson, J., eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 92–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Poggi, The State, 9–12.

20 See above, note 15.

21 Carlton, C., Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (London, 1991), 214Google Scholar.

22 Morrill, J., ed., The Impact of the English Civil War (London, 1991), 9Google Scholar.

23 O'Brien, P. K. and Hunt, P. A., “The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815,” Historical Research, 66:160(1993), 129–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chart 1.

24 This material is discussed in Braddick, Nerves of State, ch. 1.

25 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 360 and passim; Coleby, A.M., Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Coleby has been criticised by Norrey, P. J., “The Restoration Regime in Action,” Historical Journal, 31:4 (1988), 789–812CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by J. Morrill, “The Sensible Revolution,” reprinted in Morrill, J., ed., The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), 419–53Google Scholar, especially 451 and note 98. Doubt is also cast on Coleby's findings with regard to religious dissent by A. J. Fletcher, “The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts 1664–1679,” in Sheils, W. J., ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (1984), 235–46Google Scholar.

26 K. Sharpe, “A Commonwealth of Meanings: Analogues, Ideas and Politics,” reprinted in Sharpe, K., ed., Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London, 1989Google Scholar); Collins, S. L., From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State (Oxford, 1989Google Scholar); Hanson, D. W., From Kingdom to Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA, 1970CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

27 Braddiek, Parliamentary Taxation. For the consequences of increased military mobilisation after 1690, see Brewer, J., The Sinews of Power (London, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

28 Brewer, Sinews; Braddiek, Parliamentary Taxation; Braddiek, Nerves of State.

29 Kishlansky, M. A., Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge, 1986CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Harris, T., London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar and “The Problem of ‘Popular Political Culture’ in Seventeenth Century London,” History of European Ideas, 10:1 (1989), 42–58Google Scholar.

30 For a brief discussion of the importance of the 1640s, see Braddick, M. J., “An English Military Revolution?,” Historical Journal, 36:4 (1993), 965–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 I use the term here as shorthand to describe the possibility of shared socioeconomic interests among a group defined by a common relationship to the means of production and exchange, rather than in the sense of a fully conscious class formation, something which has not been shown to exist in this period.

32 Axtmann, R., “The Formation of the Modern State: A Reconstruction of Max Weber's Arguments,” History of Political Thought, 11:2 (1990), 295–311Google Scholar, at 295.

33 Slack, P., The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990), 195Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 300.

35 Ibid., 303.

36 Ibid., 303–4.

37 For godly magistracy in general, see Collinson, P., The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar ch. 4, and Underdown, D., Fire from Heaven (London, 1992Google Scholar).

38 Jones, E. L., The European Miracle (Cambridge, 1987Google Scholar), especially ch. 2.

39 For a concise discussion of the conceptual and empirical difficulties of isolating the interests that lie behind the exercise of power, see Lukes, S., Power. A Radical View (London, 1974CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

40 On this, see L. Gowing, “Language, Power and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Kermode, J. and Walker, G., eds., Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), 26–47Google Scholar, and Meldrum, T., “A Women's Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London's Consistory Court, 1700–1745,” London Journal, 19:1 (1994), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For some observations on scolds in the earlier period, see M. Ingram, “ ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?,” in J. Kermode and G. Walker, eds., Women, Crime and the Courts, 48–80. There is, of course, a much more extensive literature available with which to consider this question. I am grateful to Robert Shoemaker and Faramerz Dabhoiwala for discussing this material with me.

41 Lukes, Power, especially at 26.

42 Poggi, The slate, 48–49.

43 J. M. Rosenheim attributes this in part to the routinisation of local government and even to “a measure of professionalization to service in the magistracy” (“County Governance and Elite Withdrawal in Norfolk, 1660–1720,” in Beier, A. L., Cannadine, D., and Rosenheim, J. M., eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 95–125Google Scholar, at 122).

44 Goldstone, J. A., Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 1991Google Scholar), 5n.