Search results

Section 1. Navies and national identities -- Groom of the sea: Venetian sovereignty between power and myth / Luciano Pezzolo -- National flags as essential elements of Dutch naval ideology, 1570-1800 / Gijs Rommelse -- Towards a scientific navy: institutional identity and Spain's Eighteenth-Century Navy / Catherine Scheybeler -- The French Navy from Louis XV to Napoleon I: what role and by what means? / Patrick Villiers -- Section 2. Monarchical Projects -- Fleets and states in a composite Catholic monarchy: Spain c. 1500-1700 / Christopher Storrs -- "Great Neptunes of the main": myths, mangled histories, and "maritime monarchy" in the Stuart Navy, 1603-1714 / J.D. Davies -- Colbert and La Royale: dynastic ambitions and imperial ideals in France / Alan James

This article examines relationships between historical administrative systems and civil service politicization across Europe. I argue that to appreciate when and how history matters, we need to consider public service bargains struck between politicians and senior bureaucrats. Doing so complicates the relationship between historical and current administrative systems: a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century state infrastructure is necessary for the depoliticization of ministerial bureaucracies in present-day Western Europe. However, the relationship does not hold in East-Central Europe since administrative histories are tumultuous and fractured. Combining data from across the European continent, I provide evidence in support of these propositions. Points for practitioners This article addresses policymakers dealing with reforms of personnel policy regimes at the centre of government. It considers the importance of history for politically attractive reforms, as well as the limits of this importance. I argue that 18th-century state infrastructures shape the extent to which political appointments are politically attractive tools for administrative control. I show that only in countries that feature a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century infrastructure are ministerial top management occupied by a permanent, as opposed to politically appointed, staff. However, in East-Central Europe, a ruptured administrative history ensures that the distant past does not similarly shape the extent of political appointments.

This paper focuses upon the prevalent complementary definitions of myth and history and questions their analytic utility with reference to literary documents that bespeak the transition between mythic and historic cognition. In the style of ethnosemantic analysis, these definitions are treated as a semantic domain and subjected to formal analysis. The components elicited constitute a new definition—more precisely, a two‐dimensional model of the relationship between myth and history. Subsequently, the model is applied to a series of books from the Bible with the conclusion that men and women are structurally equal since, in their roles as social actors, both represent different components of myth as well as history.