The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents: Essays in Honour of Prof. Dr. Marjolein ’’t Hart

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.

Pepijn Brandon is chair of Global Economic and Social History at VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Annemieke Romein is postdoctoral researcher in early-modern political-institutional/legal history at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Heerma van Voss is the former director of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and emeritus professor in the history of social security at Utrecht University, the Netherlands