People - States - Territories The Political Geographies of British State Transformation

by Jones, Rhys

• ISBN13: 9781405140331
• ISBN10: 140514033X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-18
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories. It emphasizes the role of the agency, and stresses the ways in which the form can influence the subjectivities of state personnel. In doing so, the book highlights the contingent character of the state, seeing it as a political process in motion. People/States/Territories adopts the theoretical approach of an emergent state as a conceptual underpinning in the book, in order to demonstrate how agents have actively contributed to the reproduction and transformation of the British state over the long term. People/States/Territories draws on extensive empirical research in order to demonstrate the ls"peopledrs" character of the British state during four time periods medieval, early modern, high modern and late modern. Despite the empirical focus on the UK state, the discussion will inform interpretations of the emergence of other states. In particular, the insights of the theory of the emergent state will illustrate a new methodological approach to studying the development of other states.

Author Biography

Rhys Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, whose research interests lie in the political geographies of state transformation. His work has appeared in a number of papers published in international social science journals.

Table of Contents

Series Editors'

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: state personnel and the reproduction of state forms

Analysing an emergent state: state actors and a territorial state apparatus

Thinking about the state....Medieval and early modern political theory: conceptualising political authority

Weber and the bureaucratic machine of the modern state

The human geographies of strategic-relational state theory

Exploring the networked state

Bringing it all together: analysing an emergent state

Peopling the medieval state

A case of stating the obvious?.People and the feudal state

State leaders and the emergence of medieval state forms in the British Isles

Local government and the validation and contestation of state forms

The medieval state: different not worse?

Embodying early modern state consolidation

Peopling the central state apparatus

The body politic: JPs and the political constitution of England and Wales

Shaping and steering the local state

State personnel and the embodiment of early modern state consolidation

The state of high modernity: the age of the inspector

The nineteenth-century revolution in government

The age of the inspector

Leonard Horner and the regulation of factory production

Embodying a tentative state consolidation

Breaking-up: people and the late modern UK state

The challenges of executive devolution in the UK

New devolved organizations, new organizational cultures

State personnel and the 'joining up' of regional governance

Territorial identities and the reproduction of devolution

Devolution in prospect

Conclusions: peopling the state

Bibliography

Index

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