Lordship and State Transformation: Bohemia and the Habsburg Fiscal-Financial-Military Regime, 1650–1710 - Hardcover

Sander-Faes, Stephan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0228022908 ISBN 13: 9780228022909

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Although state transformation – continuous struggle and bargaining between rulers and their subjects, producing an unpredictable variety of political structures – is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organizational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation. In Austria, the monarchy’s emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between Crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from the centralizing nation-state exemplified by Britain or France. The nascent Habsburg fiscal-financial-military regime transformed regional and local authority, leading to armed conflict and causing disintegration of the administrative and social fabric. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, power – whether local or central, or social or political – would undergo enormous changes. Grounded in extensive research into Czech archives and spanning an era from the Thirty Years’ War to the coronation of Charles VI, Lordship and State Transformation delves into the complex transitions that characterized the first instance of a balance of power in Europe, with a focus on its underresearched great power, the Habsburg monarchy.

About this title

About the Author

Stephan Sander-Faes is associate professor of early modern history at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228022908
• ISBN 13: 9780228022909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 472