Week 8 - The Emergence of the Modern State and Sovereignty

Week 8 - Introduction and Assignment Feedback

• Welcome to week eight; the speaker hopes everyone had a good break, including rest and work.
• Acknowledgement of Country:
  • The speaker acknowledges the Royal Medical Clan as custodians of the Darug Nation and pays respect to elders, past and present and to Indigenous people present in the room and online.
  • The speaker acknowledges the controversy around the acknowledgement of country and why it is important for them to say, particularly due to the critique and discussion of sovereignty in the unit this week.
• This week's topic: The invention/emergence of the modern state and its relation to imperialism and colonialism.
• The speaker will address assignment feedback after catching up on emails and requests for meetings after the break.

General Assignment Feedback

• The speaker dreads marking but was gratified by the thoughtful engagement with difficult material demonstrated in the essays.
• Universities are often part of the culture war, with debates about what should be taught and the value of different disciplines.
• The speaker acknowledges that their teaching may not directly lead to specific professions but believes it provides a greater understanding of the world and how it came to be.
• The speaker was moved by the students' engagement with challenging material, such as the fights between popes and Holy Roman emperors, peasant revolts, and humanist excitement about statues.
• The speaker appreciates the effort put into the assignments and hopes that it has helped students think about the world in a more expansive, critical, or generous way.
• Despite potential attacks on universities and the humanities, the speaker finds meaning in producing knowledgeable individuals who can understand complex issues and shape the future.

Common Errors in Assignments

• The speaker will unpack common errors in assignments, noting that these are common in first drafts and part of the writing process.

Overuse of the Term "Bias"

• The term "bias" is often overused; every historical source is biased because it comes from a particular point of view, time, and place.
• Saying a text is biased is stating the obvious; making a sharper analytical point is recommended.
• Instead of saying a source is biased, explain what the source tells us about a particular perspective.
• Examples:
  • Instead of: "Foissard's account of the Peasants' Revolt is biased."
  • Use: "Foissard's account of the Peasants' Revolt offers insight into how elites were likely to have perceived the rebellion."
  • Instead of: "Papal decrees are biased to the papacy."
  • Use: "Papal decrees are useful sources that enable us to understand the official language within which the papacy articulated its claim to authority."
  • Instead of: "Humanist letters are biased towards rich men."
  • Use: "Humanist letters provide evidence for the revival of classical ideas on the Italian Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
• Historians explore the time, place, and people that produced a source and how representative that source is of that context.
• The word "bias" is acceptable if attached to a qualitative judgment (e.g., "biased towards the insights of elites").
• Avoid implying that a source is of limited value simply because it is biased; every source has limited value in a particular sense.
• Even seemingly accurate sources like the census are biased because of the questions they ask, reflecting the interests of the government.
• It's crucial to understand whose interests a source represents, even if it seems neutral.

Messy Use of Pronouns as Subjects

• The speaker points out that this is a common mistake in first drafts.
• Example:
  • "The peasants were poor and oppressed living in terrible circumstances due to famine. This was the reason for their rebellion."
  • The problem is that it is not clear what this refers to.
• Solution: clarify the reference:
  • "The peasants were poor and oppressed living in terrible conditions due to famine and plague. These circumstances were the reason for their rebellion."
• Use "this" or "these" as adjectives to clarify the noun you're referring to.
• Avoid starting a sentence with "this" on its own.
• Avoid using "it" as an object without clear reference. Instead of "Because of it they rebelled," use "Because of these circumstances they rebelled."
• Clarify who is doing the action (verb) in the sentence.
• Even in simple sentences, ensure clarity (e.g., "The cat sat on the mat, it was relaxed" is unclear; specify "the feline relaxed").
• If the previous sentence has only one subject, using "it" can be okay (e.g., "World War One was catastrophic. It was an event that will live on in people's minds forever.")

Passive Voice

• The passive voice occurs when there is no clear doer in the sentence.
• Example:
  • "During the Renaissance, there was a flowering of learning and interest in classical antiquity."
  • This is not wrong, but it's not particularly helpful in making a historical argument.
• A better construction is to name the agent:
  • "During the Renaissance in Italy, scholars and artists engaged with classical learning."
• If confused about the passive voice, think about politicians who say "mistakes were made" to avoid responsibility.
• The passive voice enables avoiding assigning responsibility.
• Avoid the passive voice to identify the doers and the people to whom things are done.
• The passive voice is okay when the agent is unclear or when discussing impersonal forces, (e.g., "Europe was beset by famine").
• The passive voice can be used for suspense (e.g., in detective fiction: "A murder was committed").
• Using the passive voice might seem annoying, but the focus on style is to enable clarity and articulate actors in historical processes to give you the tools to make your points as clearly as possible.

Unit Overview and Revision Tips

• The speaker will review each week of the unit to aid in thinking about the reflective essay.
• Revision tip: Go back and listen to the first couple of lectures; you'll understand much more now.
• Same idea for the readings; revisiting them will provide a deeper understanding.

Week 2: Christendom and Encounter

• The emergence of a distinct European Christian identity informed how Europeans configured and understood themselves in relation to the world.
• The Crusades:
  • Culturally important in creating the vision of the glorious knight.
  • Less important economically or geographically.
  • Created a fantasy of the Christian knight protecting Christianity beyond Europe's borders.
  • Gave Christians a sense that they had a right to go to other parts of the world and take territory.
  • Not colonial in the classical sense, but animated by a spirit of entitlement.
  • Crusading produces the heroes, knights devoted to Christianity (Timothée Chalamet versions).
  • Aristocratic class is the warrior class in the Middle Ages.

Week 3: Structures of Authority in the Medieval West

• The papacy in 1215 with Lateran IV develops ideology of Christian universalism and a Christian right.
• Quote from Lateran IV: "There is indeed one universal church of the faithful outside of which nobody at all is saved."
• Claim for Christian primacy that informs relationships with those outside the borders.
• Many kings resented the authority of the pope.

Week 4: Crisis and Transformation in the Late Middle Ages

• Famine and plague troubled feudal and papal structures.
• Fundamental structures of medieval Europe were affected by famine and plague.
• The claim of the church falls apart during the plague because priests were dying too, and the sacraments were not able to take people to salvation.
• Famine exposed the failure of aristocratic landowners to make sure that their serfs were fed.
• Rise in wages generated an early form of class identity on the part of wage laborers.
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales shows a society coming apart at the seams.

Week 5: Renaissance and the Rise of the City States

• Emergence of city-states challenged prevailing social orders.
• Revival of older forms of government.
• More cosmopolitan; developed structures like banking.
• Produced new cultural fantasies about what a good society looks like.
• Nobles had very little means of getting cash.
• Rise of the Ottomans in the East cut off traditional trade routes for Western Europeans.
• Clever Venetians did a deal with the Ottomans.
• City states are all in competition with each other.
• Advancements in trade, additions of literacy and different languages

Week 6: Encounter and the New World

• Increasing wealth and the emergence of states produced a wealthy elite international community.
• Spain and Portugal get all of the silver and gold from their new colonies and basically flooding Western Europe with cash.
• Encounter: Move away from the Ottomans towards the Atlantic.
• In the Atlantic that Western Europe will become the powerhouse that it becomes, particularly through the trading of people.
• The Bible doesn't talk about The Americas that's confusing, and that all these texts, all the ways Europeans understand the world they hadn't managed to imagine this entire continent.
• Portuguese and the Spanish get lots of money that enables them to be stronger and more powerful

Week 7: Reformation

• The fracturing of the Catholic Church is the other thing that really needs to break down.
• Diverse forms of Christianity: Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism.
• Means that the church can no longer claim to have this sovereign authority over the continent.
• Catholic church is still really rich and still really important but it doesn't provide that cultural hegemony anymore.
• Traced how those things that people thought would be there forever slowly became unstuck and replaced by different ideas, different institutions, different fantasies, different hopes, different ambitions.
• There is nothing natural about European or Western dominance.

Additional Notes

• A student asks about the third question for the reflective essay about how you would format or organize the answer.
• It is suggested that you might break it up by placing the first image you want to show on a word document or a PDF then write the text that you would give to that image underneath. So turn it into a document by inserting the images and then have the text underneath that you would use to speak to that image.

The Emergence of the State

• In the sixteenth century, Jean Baudin wrote a book called On Sovereignty.
• Baudin developed a new theory of sovereignty based on ancient sources.
• Key statement: Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth. He meant a polity or a state or a political unit, a territorial political unit which the Latins call Maestas, the Greeks, whatever the Italian Senuria, It is the highest power of command.
• Significance: The French state, the sovereign of that state, has absolute and perpetual power because it is the state itself that has that sovereignty. France itself is sovereign.
• The state is the sovereign thing, not the person.
• Difference from feudal relationships where authority is piecemeal because someone would say, for example, I have authority because these lords have vested in me this authority. It's all pretty piecemeal. He doesn't say, I have authority because the authority of the holy Roman emperor itself, the empire, is sovereign. His sovereignty his authority, sorry, is based on all of those feudal relationships that have produced him as the emperor.
• Important for engendering a civil society, coherent military strategies, and participating in colonialism.
• The state transcends the people who are in charge of it. Conceptually, the state is like a god.

Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan (1651)

• Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651 to argue for the state as the best way to maintain peace. He's saying that, basically, humans for humans, the natural state is a state of war because we humans are hopeless. We humans are competitive, and we are driven by desire and lust and competition. And, basically, we're always if if we don't have someone to protect us from ourselves, we will always be in a state of war.
• Humans' natural state is a state of war due to competition and desire. This has caused a century of continuous European warfare.
• Consequences of war (according to Hobbes):
  • No place for industry.
  • No culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of commodities, no large building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as society requires. There's no knowledge.
  • No arts.
  • No letters.
• Famous quote: "The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
• The state enables human society to flourish.
• Influential and dangerous aspect: Hobbes looks at non-Western civilizations to explain how nasty and brutish things are if we don't have states.
• Posits savage peoples as living in a pre-state mess. A colonializing move because it posits the sovereign state as being developmentally mature, the place we get to when we mature and we understand ourselves and we know we need it.
• Acknowledges Hobbes is expressing views common at the time, not demonizing him.
• Significant intellectual and political moves: articulate sovereignty is abstract and perpetual. Development sovereignly as the condition of a mature and civilized political community.

Why Did the Sovereign State Become Necessary (1550-1650)?

• Price Revolution:
  • Spanish and Portuguese got lots of silver and gold from the colonies.
  • They just flooded Western Europe with money.
  • Analogous to quantitative easing.
  • In theory, the new form of economic flourishing would have to develop to keep producing that good that would mean you have to pay laborers and you would have to build structures and infrastructure to produce the goods and all of these things generate well-being in the economy that is shared across the economy ideally.
  • But nothing worked except just a shitload of money coming into the economy.
  • It is because it's the first time they've had a big influx of cash from outside.
  • Inflationary environment.
  • Radical inflationary moment.
  • The people doing well are people who make luxury goods and sell them, and the people who are doing well are bankers. So there's a lot of new money taking advantage of this wealth with no increase in productive capacity.
• Aristocratic populations are dependent on fixed yields, as are monarchs.
• Monarchal revenue comes from tolls, taxation, revenues that they get from their nobles.
• Nobles get their money or resources from the agricultural yield of the serfs working the land.
• This influx of money does nothing to change that productive capacity.
• Most of society remains on fixed incomes; no wiggle room.
• Massive population growth.
  • Between 1450 Population fifty million, 1600 Population ninety million.
  • Catching up to where it was before the Black Death.
  • More mouths to feed.
  • Crown income falls across the continent.
  • Peasantry has little means to improve their situation and they have more babies to feed.
• The great promise of colonialism to make Europe rich occurred with dire consequences.
• The wealthy are severely penalized by this inflationary moment.

Religious Warfare After the Peace of Augsburg (1555)

• Whoever was the prince or the king of a territory could declare the religion of that territory.
• Attempted to stop religious strife but resulted in religious refugees.
• Every time a monarch dies, warfare occurs as Protestant princes try to claim the crown.
• Baudin wanted to articulate the sovereignty as an abstraction to separate the state from its leader.
• Wars are never just for religious reasons.
• Territories sought after to get more land for revenues.
• Messy time: Solidarity where agricultural workers join with a local with a lord to help him fight to get another territory.
• After the she cast the wars in Germany (wars in Germany) or you want to agree with that. We've got to stop this shit, this is nonsense. And the peak the the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, that's when Europe gets carved up into sovereign states.

Treaty of Westphalia (1648)

• Recognizes states, agreeing no state has the right to invade another state.
• Fundamental shift in Western political culture.
• Strong boundaries; mutual agreement that sovereignty will not be interfered with.
• Sovereign states have the right to exist.
• Religious minorities must be tolerated in these several states (just Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism).
• The start of what we call the international order.
• It's a formal organization designed to protect and protect the autonomy, the dignity of and the dignity of sovereign states.
• Create a structure that would build peace.
• Draw boundaries where this state ends and that one begins.
• But that is that this becomes the way Europeans start to think about what constitutes a legitimate political community.

Implications of the Sovereign State

• Used to judge non-Western societies.
• increasingly, when we meet indigenous peoples perhaps exploited traded with negotiated with, also decimated by this is you know, a complex set of interrelations. What we say are images of indigene peoples that depict them as what we see in those images we can find out that kind of innocent and child like in comparison to the to the Westerners who are encountering them.
• See images of indigenous peoples as kind of innocent and childlike in comparison to the to the Westerners who are encountering them.
• Drawing on ideas of the Garden of Eden.
• Renders indigenous people as innocents who have not matured yet to sovereign states.
• Adam and Eve by Jura in fifteen o four and then we have an allegory of America Fifteen Eighty Nine in which the woman, the indigenous woman, is represented as being in the state of nature.
• State of nature is a category that tends to get applied to indigenous peoples and in which they are are pictured as if they are in the Garden of Eden.
• When there are images of some indigenous societies, for example in North America, that see very politically organized and have harmony in society then this is not recognised by the Westerners.
• Colonists would always say, well we can't negotiate with them because we only negotiate with States.
• Then get the rationale for not making treaties and exploitation of lands.
• Sovereign State. That's why we get the sovereign state And then the articulation of the sovereign state in fact, and I don't think this is by design produces thing of jus justification for going and getting more riches from those colonies including human riches, which is which is the kind of biggest tragedy and devastation devastation of the whole thing.