Serve the Power(s), Serve the State: America and Eurasia

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. Review "I consider the work edited by Garavaglia, Braddick and Lamouroux to be a text of interest, not only for those who work within the state-building process in different territorialities, but I also think that it could be of great use within the classroom. The historiographic balances made, the emphasis on conceptual discussion, the inclusion of sources and reflections on the reading and translations thereof, as well as the question of how to overcome the teleological analyses, make this an important source for critical reflection of the historian's work in the classroom."Karla EscobarRechtsgeschichte Legal History, Rg 25 (2017) About the Author Juan Carlos Garavaglia is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Emeritus ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. His most recent publications are Latin American Bureaucracy and the State Building Process (1780–1860) (2013) and Las fuerzas de Guerra en la construcción del Estado: América Latina, siglo XIX (2012). Michael J. Braddick, FBA, is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on aspects of state formation, popular politics and forms of political resistance in early modern England, including State Formation in Early Modern England (2000) and, as co-editor with John Walter, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (2001). He has also published work on the English revolution, including God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008) and The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (2015). Christian Lamouroux is Directeur d’études at the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. As a Song historian, his publications include “Song Renzong’s Court Landscape: Historical Writing and the Creation of a New Political Sphere (1022–1042)” in Journal of Song-Yuan Studies and “À travers le Miroir. Une controverse politique sous les Song” in Études chinoises. His recent work also includes Professional Cultures and the Transmission of Specialized Knowledge (in Chinese, 2010), and two special issues of Revue de synthèse on Travail et savoirs techniques dans la Chine pré-moderne.