The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (review)

This book is an ambitious attempt to reinterpret state creation in Early Modern Europe, from a theoretical point of view and also because of the choice of the case study that centers the attention of the empirical research on the Dutch state.

To begin with theory, Julia Adams goes back to Weberian theories about the ideal type of patriarchal patrimonialism. Patrimonial practices were traditional, but Max Weber stated that they could set in motion fundamental transformations like chartered companies, whose explorations expanded accumulation and cultural domination. Adams reviews, perhaps a bit too superficially, the ideas of some of the most important "second wave" historical sociologists in the United States and their interpretations about early modern European politics, which many believe displaced "modernization theory" as the dominant social science paradigm in the interpretation of multiple European political transitions and early modern revolutions in the 1970s and 1980s. For Adams, this "second wave" of U.S. sociologists and their holistic explanation of the transition to modernity are in crisis. Her book would be in fact a sign of such a crisis. A major goal of the book is, in effect, to show that patriarchy cannot simply be added as an additional factor in the interpretations about emergent political systems but must be interpreted as a fundamental way of exercising power that defined the early modern patrimonial state.

Regarding the empirical case study selected to test the importance of patriarchy in the re-definition of emergent European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch state is an intriguing and intelligent choice. The author is well aware of that. She acknowledges that the popular and scholarly image of the United Provinces is typically one of individualistic burghers and not patriarchal power—a capitalist enclave hemmed in by continental feudalisms, a burgher republic very different from the French aristocratic absolutism, and the English mixed monarchical/estatist system. Adams is very successful in demonstrating that despite the enormous differences among these three countries, there were striking and important similarities, as family heads collectively devised ways to grasp their privileges more tightly and invented forms of patriarchal political authority.

The book is organized into an introduction and six chapters. The first chapter presents theories about state formation and the main ideas about patriarchalism and patrimonial state. Chapters two and three describe corporate conflict and state making in the Dutch Golden Age and the rise of the Netherlands. Chapter four concentrates on familiar states and chartered companies in eighteenth-century Europe. Chapters five and six present, on the one hand, the case of the Dutch decline and the importance of patriarchy in a supposedly "bourgeois" state and, on the other, the differences in eighteenth-century France and England.

The first key question the book tries to answer is: Why did not the ruling elite of the Netherlands mobilize their Golden Age wealth to create a strong state to maintain the conditions of their flourishing mercantile system? Strong states made possible and secured world hegemony, according to Adams, so why did the Netherlands fail to realize this and do something about it? Probably, the main weakness of the book is not the answer but the question itself. There are manifold cases of strong states that do not secure world hegemony or economic growth. The other big question is explaining the decline of the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, after the golden age of the seventeenth century. Adams tries to demonstrate that patriarchalism was not only a condition for economic success but also a reason for political decline. That is not very convincing. It assumes that in France or in England, patriarchalism did not play the role it played in the Netherlands, that stronger powers displaced patriarchy in the control of economic resources at state level. But this was not true at all. Politics in Europe since at least the middle ages...