Suchergebnisse

With the following two contributions the International Review of Social History hopes to focus scholarly attention on a rather neglected theme: the labour conditions of the ordinary foot soldiers in rebel armed forces. Although quite disparate in time, social setting, and method, both articles deal with the position and circumstances of common soldiers; both study these soldiers during a period of civil war; and both deal with rebel forces that were ultimately to emerge victorious and eventually be transformed into a regular army. Erik Swart's contribution on the soldiers in the army of the northern Netherlands is set in the late sixteenth century, just after the start of Holland's war of independence. Within a couple of years, the military underwent a comprehensive process of professionalization. The consequences for ordinary soldiers were far reaching: lower wages, fewer privileges, fewer rights, and an obligation to carry out digging work and other forms of manual labour. By contrast, their predecessors (the Landsknechts) had enjoyed a significantly higher status, with a system of organization not much different from that of nineteenth-century trade unions.

"In the course of the early modern period, the capacity of European states to raise finances, wage wars, subject their own and far away populations, and exert bureaucratic power over a variety of areas of social life increased dramatically. Nevertheless, these changes were far less absolute and definitive than the literature on the rise of the "modern state" once held. While war pushed the boundaries of the emerging fiscal military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rulers remained highly dependent on negotiations with competing elite groups and the private networks of contractors and financial intermediaries. Attempts to increase control over subjects often resulted in popular resistance, that in their turn set limits to and influenced the direction of the development of state institutions. Written in honour of the leading historian of war and state formation in the early modern Low Countries Marjolein 't Hart, the chapters gathered in this volume examine the main drivers, beneficiaries and discontents of state formation across and beyond Europe in the early modern period"--

Protest is a ubiquitous and richly varied social phenomenon, one that finds expression not only in modern social movements and political organizations but also in grassroots initiatives, individual action, and creative works. It constitutes a distinct cultural domain, one whose symbolic content is regularly deployed by media and advertisers, among other actors. Yet within social movement scholarship, such cultural considerations have been comparatively neglected. Protest Cultures: A Companion dramatically expands the analytical perspective on protest beyond its political and sociological aspects. It combines cutting-edge synthetic essays with concise, accessible case studies on a remarkable array of protest cultures, outlining key literature and future lines of inquiry