Realities of Representation State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America

by Jansson, Maija

• ISBN13: 9781403975348
• ISBN10: 1403975345
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This books examines the idea of representation and the institutional realities that shaped it in early modern Europe and European America. Contributors demonstrate how a country's history, society, and national experience dictate how representation is realized in political institutions, including Cortes, diets, parlements, parliaments, riksdags and reichstags. During the 16th and 17th centuries these assemblies were dissolved, recalled, reinvented, and reshaped by the experiences of absolute monarchy, civil war, and revolution. This collection reveals how these institutions were a critical component of state building.

Author Biography

Maija Jansson is Director of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History and  teaches in the Yale University History Department.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Notes on Contributors	p. xi
Introduction
Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America	p. 1
Early Modern Europe
England
The Representation of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain	p. 19
Parliament and the Idea of Political Accountability in Early Modern Britain	p. 45
Boroughmongering, Biography, and the Reform of Parliament: James Boswell and the Earl of Lonsdale	p. 63
France
The Unrepresentable French?	p. 75
Germany
Noble Corporations and Provincial Diets in the Ecclesiastical Principalities of the Holy Roman Empire ca. 1648-1802	p. 93
Ireland
Power, Politics and Parliament in Seventeenth-Century	p. 113
Scandinavia
Repression and Representation: Political Culture in Early Modern Scandinavia	p. 113
Spain
An Unbalanced Representation: The Nature and Functions of the Cortes of Castile in the Habsburg Period (1538-1698)	p. 149
European America
Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern Empires in America	p. 171
Governing a Colony pas commes les autres: The Dilemmas of Unplanned Conquest	p. 187
Conclusion
New Approaches to Early Modern Representation	p. 203
Afterword
Representative Government: How Sure a Thing?	p. 215
Index	p. 225
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