Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700 (review)

This book promises a great deal. The author’s avowed purpose is “to describe and account for the variety of ways in which ordinary people have shaped their own political histories.”xi His canvas is a broad one, both topically and chronologically, for he hopes to synthesize the social history of European politics from the Protestant Reformation through the resolution of the “crisis” of the seventeenth century.

In writing a political history that tries to account for the processes by which “ordinary people” (by that the author means, rather sweepingly, everyone who was not within the realm of officialdom) created their own political destinies, Te Brake hopes to replace the “old, elite-centered histories of European politics with something significantly new.”[3] By bringing together the history of popular political practice with “the main line of political history,” [p. 5] he stresses that he is going beyond the “teleological accounts of ‘national’ state formation, which often boil down to retrospective institutional analyses of the most militarily competitive states.” [p. 183–84] He offers instead “to describe and account for the broad variety of interactions of subjects and rulers over relatively long stretches of time.”[p. 184]

Historians well-versed in Early Modern popular politics, or in the processes of state-building (in both cases where negotiation between ruler and ruled has been at the heart of the historiography for several decades), may question Te Brake’s aggressive claim for originality. Nor will many be surprised to see Te Brake conclude that the late medieval “composite states” followed three identifiable trajectories from 1500 to 1700: toward “segmented sovereignties” (made up of sovereign city-states and confederated provinces), “layered sovereignties” (Free cities, peripheral provinces, and territories and principalities), and “territorial sovereignties” (comprised of autocratic monarchies and constitutional monarchies). And does anyone really consider any political regime as the teleological endgame of a linear, progressive historical development? Unlikely, and this makes the author’s claim that his perspective of viewing regimes as “transient outcomes within ongoing political processes” [p.187] is novel ring a bit hollow.

To be fair to Te Brake, he does ask us to consider politics in ways that can open new and important questions. We can applaud his desire to consider intentional action of popular political players, but also to recognize that agency is only part of the story. We must also consider “consequential action” [p.5], most of which was an unintended result of the ongoing political bargaining process. And welcome is Te Brake’s call to conceptualize this interactive bargaining process in spatial terms, about how people fill “the political spaces available to them”[11], for considering “political spaces” gives him a structural constant which in turn permits a comparative perspective across and between polities. Te Brake wisely hastens to add that attention to structural constants does not necessarily lead to the flawed reasoning of deducing political outcomes directly from structural conditions, but rather permits us to recognize comparable developments within almost endless varieties of particular conditions and indeterminate situations.

All of this is laid out in Te Brake’s first and last chapters, and by far they are the most interesting in the book. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the histories of uprisings, rebellions, revolts, or revolutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will find little new in terms of subject matter in the intervening chapters. Still, the book does provide a synthesis within a comparative, European framework which would be useful for an introduction to the field (the bibliography is quite extensive and current), for we find concise sketches of almost all of these uprisings.

The eyebrows of scholars who have tried to “put religion back into the Wars of Religion” will arch, no doubt, when they see Te Brake unrepentantly put politics back into religion (the practice of religious dissent—as opposed to its ideology—is invariably presented within the analytical framework of political insurrection). Perhaps Te Brake can be forgiven this perspective...