Kinship, Property, and Authority

• Author: Vivek Swaroop Sharma
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571279
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2015, Vol. 43(2) 151 –180

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571279

pas.sagepub.com

Article

Kinship, Property, and

Authority: European

Territorial Consolidation

Reconsidered

Vivek Swaroop Sharma

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

This article is a step towards a rethinking of the emergence of the modern state

in Europe. Traditionally, war has been viewed as the central mechanism of state

formation. This approach claims that war caused the emergence of the modern

state in two significant ways: 1) by consolidating the politically fragmented world of

the middle ages through conquest; and 2) through the pressure of competition in a

Darwinian international system, which forced the polities of Europe to create the

bureaucratic structures fundamental to the authority of the modern state. This article

seeks to undermine the first of these mechanisms by showing that the territorial

consolidation of Europe was a logical result of dynastic lordship. I seek to show that

the consolidation of territory and authority into fewer and fewer hands was a direct

consequence of dynastic successional practices and therefore that the emphasis on

coercion in European political development has been overplayed.

Keywords

political authority, state formation, property rights, war, territoriality

Corresponding Author:

Vivek Sharma, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, opgang E, DK-1353 Copenhagen K,

Denmark.

Email: clioinarms@gmail.com

571279PASXXX10.1177/0032329215571279Politics & SocietySharma

research-article2015

152 Politics & Society 43(2)

The social science engagement with early modern Europe has been wrought with

unintentional teleologies. Part of this is a function of the fact that early modern Europe

is not an object of study in its own right and instead, engagement with it has to be justi-

fied to the larger discipline on some grounds that links it with modernity. There is

nothing inherently wrong with searching the past for an understanding of the origins

of ourselves or to expect that such an endeavor would generate real insights of signifi-

cance, for the same reason that anthropologists consider the study of human evolution

to be a basic component of their overall project to understand ourselves as simply one

species among many others.

The problem with the way in which this professional agenda impedes sustained

engagement with early modern Europe on its own terms is that it obscures underlying

patterns and logics of organization that, because they do not appear to be germane to

the story of continuity, automatically get filtered out. This article seeks to show what

has been missed by hewing too close to the story of continuity and not enough to the

logics of social organization itself, in one domain of the state formation literature: ter-

ritorial consolidation in Europe. This article can, therefore, be usefully conceived as an

attempt to show what taking a leaf out the basic mental apparatus of historical anthro-

pology can yield when we treat ourselves as simply one society among many others

and therefore no more or less legitimate than any other society that has ever existed.

One of the basic empirical puzzles of European political development is how the

apparently ‘Pollock-ess’ map of authority and jurisdiction of medieval Europe came

to be ordered along principles that are recognizably ‘modern.’ This problem, since

the intervention of Charles Tilly, has been understood in primarily coercive terms

and expressed in a vocabulary that is derived from the modern period (war, violence,

and conquest) and underpinned by the build-up of the administration of the state.

While subsequent scholars have modified (for example, Michael Mann and Tom

Ertmann)1 or explored different aspects of the evolution of European political order

(for example, Hendrik Spruyt, Philip Gorski, and Julia Adams)2, the central edifice

of the empirical problem at the heart of the European political development litera-

ture—the triumph of the center over all other segments of society—has remained

untouched and unquestioned.

This article seeks to reopen the question of how European territorial consolidation

occurred. In opposition to the fundamentally coercive and formal administrative

emphasis of much of the European political development literature, I seek to show that

European territorial consolidation was instead grounded in logics endogenous to a key

domain of the social institutional structure of early modern European society: the

nexus between property, authority, and kinship best understood as dynastic lordship.

The emphasis of this article is on how the logic of dynastic property accumulation is

the principal mechanism for explaining the traditional puzzle of territorial consolida-

tion in Europe (which is explicitly also linked to the emergence of formal administra-

tion). The emphasis in this article is on the emergence, evolution and consequences of

a key dimension of authority: the intertwining of proprietary notions of public author-

ity with that of the structure of the family. The argument presented in section 2 is that

European territorial consolidation must be understood as being principally