In state formation research, princely houses have been a blind spot. The development of states has been discussed from many perspectives, like interstate competition, internal social conflicts, ...fiscal-military developments, etc., but at the centre of most European states, there was a princely house. These ruling houses have been overlooked in studies about state formation. What’s more, when discussing such dynasties, the vertical chronological perspective (grandfather-father-son) is all dominating, for instance in the focus on dynastic continuity, dynastic culture and representation, and the like. This collection of essays highlights the horizontal perspective (ruler, all children, siblings, cousins), in asking how the members of a princely family acted as a power network. The quest is to develop an understanding how this family network interplayed with other factors in the state formation process. This volume brings together existing knowledge of the topic with the aim of exchanging insights and furthering knowledge.
Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, ...Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.
Recent scholarship on resource politics has found that the "resource curse" is largely specific to the Persian Gulf states in which British oil interests ensured the survival of small states. ...However, this does not present the entire picture of the relationship between oil and sovereignty. I argue that oil was also involved in the process in which the region protected by colonial powers was divided into certain states out of many possible territorial arrangements, creating states that would otherwise not exist. Based on extensive archival research, I show that when nine Gulf sheikhdoms negotiated under Abu Dhabi's initiative to create a federation, (1) oil production during the colonial period and (2) the protectorate system led Qatar and Bahrain to reject it and achieve sovereignty separately
What determines violent reaction during state formation processes? To address this question, we exploit the uprisings that occurred when southern Italy was annexed to Piedmont during Italian ...unification in the 1860s. We assemble a novel dataset on episodes of brigandage, a form of violent rebellion against the unitary government, and on pre-unification social and economic characteristics of southern Italian municipalities. We find that the intensity of brigandage is ceteris paribus lower in and close to settlements of Piedmontese origin. We argue that geographical distance from these communities is a proxy for cultural distance from the Piedmontese rulers. Thus, our results suggest that, in the context of state formation, cultural proximity to the new ruler reduces social unrest by local communities. After ruling out alternative mechanisms consistent with the economic literature, we provide suggestive evidence of cultural persistence and diffusion in our context, and discuss two possible culture-based drivers of our results: social identification with the Piedmontese rulers, and a clash between local values and some specific content of the new institutions.
Unlike state-building in medieval Europe, America, and Africa, where a combination of security threats and economic incentives led to a swift consolidation of central authority, post-war Europe has ...lacked an essential ingredient of successful state-building: an existential threat. The result, argue Keleman and McNamara, has been a 'gradual, uneven, and dysfunctional' integration process, stopping short of statehood. Ironically, their comparative historical explanation for the EU's shortcomings is strangely 'ahistorical', failing to consider the specific world-historical time at which the EU was born. The EU emerged at a time when (a) existing nation-states were relatively solidly formed, and (b) the territorial state is increasingly anachronistic as a means of amassing and projecting power. In a globalized world, providing for citizens' security and welfare demands global alliance-building more than coercive taxation to build large standing armies. War-deprivation is therefore not what explains the EU's limited statehood. As security threats loom on the EU's borders, concentration of fiscal capacity and coercive power in Brussels remains unlikely. The good news is that - by historical standards - the EU appears to be managing external crises remarkably well with limited 'core state powers'.
Negara-bangsa ialah sebuah negara berdaulat yang mempunyai penduduk dengan kesedaran bahawa terdapat persamaan dalam kalangan mereka. Persamaan tersebut dapat dilihat dari segi tradisi lama, adat dan ...bahasa yang dikongsi bersama-sama dalam kalangan mereka yang tinggal di dalam sebuah wilayah negarabangsa. Dari sudut kewujudannya, sesebuah negara-bangsa merupakan entiti yang bebas daripada konsep dunia empayar. Di Malaysia, konsep asas pembinaan sebuah negara-bangsa telah wujud sejak zaman pemerintahan raja Melayu, manakala sistem pentadbiran ketika zaman penjajahan British pula telah memperkenalkan Tanah Melayu kepada konsep negara-bangsa moden. lusteru, kajian ini bertujuan menyoroti sejarah perjalanan pembinaan negara-bangsa malaysia yang merdeka dan cabaran-cabaran yang dihadapi negara dalam usaha mencapai tujuan tersebut. Makalah yang dihasilkan adalah berbentuk kajian kualitatif sejarah dengan menggunakan kaedah analisis dokumen. Disamping itu, kaedah penulisan dan analisis Sains Sosial juga digunakan bagi menghasilkan analisis penulisan yang lebih luas. Hasil dapatan kajian mendapati bahawa proses pembinaan negara-bangsa di Malaysia merupakan sebuah proses yang berterusan atau ongoing process. Proses tersebut mula terbentuk melalui konsep tradisional negara-bangsa yang wujud sebelum zaman penjajahan British lagi dan seterusnya proses tersebut berkembang ketika zaman penjajahan dan teras berkembang setelah mencapai kemerdekaan mengikut perkembangan Tanah Melayu yang berfungsi sebagai sebuah negara-bangsa. Hingga pada era pasca-merdeka, dasar-dasar yang cuba diketengahkan oleh pihak pemerintah teras memperkasakan konsep negara-bangsa bagi membentuk bangsa idaman dan negara cita yang menj adi menj adi objektif semua negara yang merdeka. Makalah ini diharapkan dapat memberi gambaran terhadap perjalanan sejarah dan cabaran yang dihadapi oleh negara dalam usaha membentuk sebuah negarabangsa idaman.
The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist ...Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.
In state formation research, princely houses have been a blind spot. The development of states has been discussed from many perspectives, like interstate competition, internal social conflicts, ...fiscal-military developments, etc., but at the centre of most European states, there was a princely house. These ruling houses have been overlooked in studies about state formation. What’s more, when discussing such dynasties, the vertical chronological perspective (grandfather-father-son) is all dominating, for instance in the focus on dynastic continuity, dynastic culture and representation, and the like. This collection of essays highlights the horizontal perspective (ruler, all children, siblings, cousins), in asking how the members of a princely family acted as a power network. The quest is to develop an understanding how this family network interplayed with other factors in the state formation process. This volume brings together existing knowledge of the topic with the aim of exchanging insights and furthering knowledge.
