Samuel Clark. State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe.

Abstract

In State and Status, Samuel Clark surveys the rise of the state and its relationship to aristocratic power in two zones in western Europe, the British Isles and France and its eastern periphery. The core of Clark's argument examines the ways in which ruling aristocracies were restructured by state formation, particularly the emergence of political centers. As monarchs became more important arbiters of the manifold flows of resources, the exercise of power, status awards, and cultural grammars, older and more dispersed forms of feudal lordship were unevenly transformed. Lordship eventually declined, but meanwhile the actions of centralizing monarchs could shore it up or retool it as aristocracies were rearticulated into emergent states. This was a two-way street, for the decline and restructuring of lordship also sped state formation (pp. 153–4). There were other factors at issue, and the book discusses some of them—for example, commercialization as tied up with statemaking—but the emergence of political centers has been neglected, Clark thinks, and deserves more emphasis.