Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Revisions of papers presented at a conference entitled Parliaments, Peoples, and Powers held at Yale University in 2005.
About the Author
Maija Jansson is Director of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History and teaches in the Yale University History Department.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Realities of Representation--Maija Jansson *
Part I: England * The Representation of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain--H.T. Dickinson * Parliament and the Idea of Political Accountability in Early Modern Britain--Paul Seaward * Boroughmongering, Biography, and the Reform of Parliament: James Boswell and the Earl of Lonsdale-Gordon Turnbull *
Part II: France * The Unrepresentable French?--David Bell *
Part III: Germany * Noble Corporations and Provincial Diets in the Ecclesiastical Principalities of the Holy Roman Empire--Ronald G. Asch *
Part IV: Ireland * Power, Politics and Parliament in Seventeenth-Century Ireland--Jane Ohlmeyer *
Part V: Scandinavia * Repression and Representation: Political Culture in Early Modern Scandinavia--Knud J.V. Jespersen *
Part VI: Spain * An Unbalanced Representation: the Nature and Function of the Cortes of Castile in the Habsburg Period (1538-1698)--José Ignacio Fortea *
Part VII: European America * Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America--Jack P. Greene * Governing a Colony
pas commes les autres: the Dilemmas of Unplanned Conquest--Ramsay Cook * Conclusion: New Approaches to Early Modern Representation--Steven Pincus * Afterword: Representative Government: How Sure a Thing?--Robert Zaller