Religion and Social Institutions in Historical State Building in Europe

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel aims to incorporate deeply historical, religious, and social perspectives into our understanding of state building by focusing on informal, non-state collective actors: the Church and social institutions. The middle ages are increasingly analyzed as critical to European processes of state-building and regime change. However, most of this research has overlooked the importance of religious-lay interactions and social institutions. The medieval Latin West was shot through with Christian values and ecclesiastical institutions, and ecclesiastical and secular history need to be analyzed together. Moreover, social institutions and networks bound elites together when they faced external threats. Against this backdrop, a new literature has called for factoring in non-state actors—the Catholic Church and informal social institutions—when analyzing medieval and early modern European state-building.

Doucette and Møller argue that the roots of the development of medieval self-government are to be found in the 11th-century conflict of church and state and that being the seat of a bishop facilitated the spread of urban self-government after this juncture. Grzymala-Busse examines how medieval warfare, Church influence, and other factors contributed to state growth beginning in the medieval era. Kokkonen, Møller, and Sundell show that warfare and convocations of parliaments first went hand in hand, but prolonged periods of warfare had a negative effect on parliamentary activity. Chiopris and Wang study how social institutions, such as marriages, provided “mutual hostages” and were thereby a source of credible commitment for public debt repayment in premodern Venice. Overall, this panel contributes to a new research agenda by focusing on religious-lay interactions and social institutions in three developments that are singled out as key to European state-building: the advent of the multistate system (rather than hegemony or empire), the advent of political institutions of constraints (rather than absolutism), and the advent of proto-bureaucratic institutions (rather than administrations based on the royal households).

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• The Crisis of Church and State and the Rise of Self-Government in Europe - Jonathan Doucette, University of Copenhagen; Jorgen Moller, University of Aarhus

• Medieval War and State Building in Europe - Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University

• Warfare and the Rise and Fall of Representative Institutions - Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg; Jorgen Moller, University of Aarhus; Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg

• Elite Social Network, Public Debt, and State Building in Early Modern Venice - Caterina Chiopris, Harvard University; Yuhua Wang, Harvard University

Chair

• Lisa Blaydes Stanford University

Discussants

• Lisa Blaydes Stanford University

• Scott Abramson University of Rochester