Preliminary Programme

Thanks to the recent contributions of the socio-history, the historians have the possibility of addressing historiographical issues by applying new research trends. This allows to renew the historical knowledge.
The aim of this communication is the understanding of the society of Renaissance from a local perspective and from a particular case up to general questions which are not given the character of the structure.
The village of Almazarrón in the 16th century offers a socio-political context for the analysis of the changes and continuities in the ways of interaction between groups and social agents of the Renaissance.
Through the donation of a royal right in a municipal property is therefore produced the overlapping of two forces of power and two different ways of understanding it: from a social point of view, not legal, the Marquis of Villena and Vélez are "lords" in Almazarrón and their influence and power, that was exercised through their estates governors, were manifested while remained the exploitation of the mines.
Our proposal expects to show the important change that occurs in the administration of Mazarrón, after their emancipation and the formation of the Council . This change refers to relations between the Marquis, their governors and the newly established local oligarchy, since the governors act as brokers or intermediaries giving a new change of direction to the strict and feudal relationships lord-vassal –placing it now in terms of bureaucratization and professionalism-. In addition this change will have a significant influence on the society of Mazarrón.
Although Weber considers the administrative power prior to the Industrial Revolution discontinuous and often ephemeral , the development of the Administration and the "primitive" bureaucracy caused a process of transformation in the relations of power. This transformation imposed a "dominance at distance" that was exerted through indirect actions thanks to the means of action that the bureaucracy introduced. A new type of relations, that Noiriel called "distance relationships" , arose between the Lords and the community through the administrators. The new relationships allowed totally exceed "the sphere of direct exchanges based on the inter-expertise".
Our proposal also tries to show distance relationships in the Renaissance are "staple" and "often ephemeral" because, as Noiriel concludes, this system of domination at distance using the methods offered by the bureaucracy, is not carried out until the 19th century.
However, the analysis of the "genesis" of the bureaucratic model with its actors is very new, and not sufficiently analyzed by historiography yet. In addition it presents an innovation in the relationship with the local oligarchy of Mazarrón, such as the direct relations or kinship among them. (Show less)

This paper explores the social and cultural characteristics of the Victorian professions in provincial Britain. It is based on a prosopographical study of 1,000 members of the professions residing in eight very different towns and drawn from the 1851 census. The members of the cohort and their families have been followed through four generations, beginning with the cohort’s parents and ending with their grandchildren. The paper will introduce the two major conclusions of the study. In the first place, the long-held but untested assertion by some historians of nineteenth-century Britain that the professions formed a fourth class, distinct from the other sections of the middle class and embracing a statist ideology, is not supported by the cohort’s family history. Members of the Victorian professions outside London were part of the broader middle class: they were not a separate caste. The cohort’s fathers came from all sections of the middle class; the cohort married across the middle-class spectrum; and their children were placed in a range of middle-class careers, even if two-thirds did enter a profession. There were differences in profile between the old, the state and the new professions, not to mention between the pukka professions and those working more on the professional fringe in the arts (frequently viewed as disreputable) or in ancillary occupations (such as clerks). But in no way were members of the professions hermeneutically sealed from the other sections of the middle-class, as they were for the most part from landed society and the lower orders. In the second place, the professions in provincial Britain were not part of a national, let alone an imperial, community. The cohort and their families belonged to a series of discrete local societies. In their parents, their own and their children’s generation there was limited movement away from the provincial town in which the family was rooted; there was small sign of emigration to the metropolis and virtually none to the colonies; only a few children were sent away to school and hardly any to the top public schools and Oxbridge; and the families in their voting behaviour and associational life remained locked in their local community. This conclusion throws interesting light on the structure of Victorian Britain more generally and suggests a limited national integration, and perhaps even if national consciousness, even with the coming of the railways and the growth of the metropolitan media. (Show less)

Many historians have written about the financial problems of the Russian nobility, but its overall debt burden has, as yet, not been even roughly estimated (Madariagi 2002, 757; Kahan 1966). Researchers note that little work has been done on income, debt, and credit in eighteenth-century Russia (Munro 1997, 552). It is generally accepted that the debt burden of Russian noblemen was high, which is seen as a result of a reluctance or inability on their part to put their own finances in order and of their typical ignorance of their own financial situation, entirely dependent as it was on the ‘extortion’ of their serfs. Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon throughout Europe, the economic behaviour of the Russian nobility has often been seen as irrational (Kahan 1966).
This assessment underestimates the complexity of the problems Russian aristocrats had to deal with. In the eighteenth century, and particularly in its second half, the upper echelons of Russian society had to adapt very quickly to profound economic changes:
• the emergence of banks and ‘cheap’ state credit;
• an increase in the size and number of sources of personal income;
• a gradual shift towards payment orders through the system of promissory notes;
• higher rates of inflation, caused by, among other things, the introduction of paper money.
These changes all caused a sharp increase in the financial possibilities open to noblemen and in their demands as consumers confronted with a new economic way of life. The need to make sense of these processes led to a growth in the number of manuals for estate management, better-organized accounts, and greater control over financial and other resources (Melton 1990, 680-682; Confino 1967).
In their work on the landowner as an economic agent, researchers have, first and foremost, seen him as a votchinnik, and only rarely as an entrepreneur. In this article, however, we consider how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Russian noblemen tried to find their feet in a rapidly changing financial environment, how they tried to put a value on their financial resources and their possibilities as consumers by producing accounts of their income and expenditure. The focus will be on an exceptionally narrow group of ‘Enlightened Seigniors’ (Mokyr 2005, 289), the richest noblemen in Russia, who belonged to the ‘ruling families in the Russian political order’.
In a departure from the approach that has traditionally been taken in the historiography on the subject, the focus in this article will be on the nobleman’s personal finances rather than on his income from votchiny. In this article, an attempt is made to analyse personal books of revenue and expenditure, in which the annual budgets of high-ranking members of the nobility were itemized, on the basis of the financial papers of Boris Ivanovich Kurakin, the Vorontsovs, the Naryshkins, the Bulgakovs, Alexandra Branitskaia, and others.
The archives contain many types of financial document in use among the nobility: books of monetary revenue and expenditure (RGADA, f. 1261, op. 2, d. 1, d. 36, d. 2, d. 179, d. 182, d. 189, d. 199, d. 340), record books (RGB, f. 41, karton 19, d. 5; karton 155, d. 31, karton 156, d. 15, 17, 22, 19, 23), and sheets of financial calculations. Keeping books of revenue and expenditure—that is, preparing annual inventories of income and expenditure—became one way in which a nobleman could keep his finances in order. Evidence suggests that this type of financial document first appeared in the eighteenth century, since, on the one hand, seventeenth-century equivalents are unknown, and, on the other, such books were already in widespread use by the nineteenth century.
The noblemen themselves kept nearly all of the books analysed in this article. Indeed, the books had more of a personal character, since they were not used as evidence in financial disputes, but could be referenced in private correspondence in the case of a conflict.
By its very nature, the introduction of books revenue and expenditure was a private matter of state importance, since the aim of personal bookkeeping was to save the heavily indebted noble elite from bankruptcy, to regulate financial life, and to align with European practice. The Russian Empire as a whole was confronted with an essentially similar set of challenges, including a disparity between its financial resources and the level of its spending, the fact that its daily spending commitments were undermined by its receipt of large sums of money in irregular instalments, the inevitable difficulties of budgetary planning (given the increase in the number of sources from which it received money and of its spending commitments), the availability of internal loans, and so forth. The magnates who kept books of revenue and expenditure in the eighteenth century were, for the most part, dignitaries, and thus the principles of personal finance and those of state spending were not completely separate in their minds. (Show less)

This is a study of officialdom in Late Imperial Russia. The majority of local bureaucratic elite during revolutionary crisis of 1917 didn't support the Old regime. In our opinion, one of the reasons was the bad economic situation of officials of the lowest and average level.
In scientific literature the question of the economic position of regional officials during the Russian Empire’s late imperial period is little-studied. In the few works mentioning this subject, opposing opinions on this problem are expressed. The paper has the two main tasks: firstly, to find out what was the usual salary received by an official in the Ural provincial cities and what was their minimum living standard; secondly, to divide the officials of the provincial administration into homogenous groups depending on their income, that is to have their rating according to their financial position.
The analysis has shown that the basic lawful (in most cases, the only) source of income for officials of the region was their salary. In late imperial Russia, in connection with a rapid rise in prices, it promptly depreciated. Calculations recorded an increase in the cost of living for a single provincial official, by the most conservative estimates, of three times, from 210 roubles in 1894-1896 to 601 roubles in 1910-1912, while their salaries remained fixed. The officials of the regional administrations in the Ural area in the Late Imperial period found themselves in swiftly deteriorating material conditions which might have been acute for at least one third of them. Such a situation could not help prompting a desire to form their own legal corporate organization of the trade union kind to improve their situation.
The claims of Society against officials which had been at the end of XIX – the beginning of the XX centuries imposed on processes of deterioration of economic position of officials, and also the actual ban of creation of own trade-union network, caused reaction in concrete historical conditions of the First Russian Revolution in the form of self-organization into political force – "The All-Russian Union of Officials serving in Government Agencies" (1905). This attempt was rigidly stopped by the government as leading split of the Empire government. Such attempts also took place in the Urals during the studied period, however the government also rigidly stopped them. Any specialized corporate structure of the Russian officials, even trade-unions, didn't appear during the late imperial period – in spite of the fact that such requirements systematically expressed both before, and in time and after revolution of 1905. It helped to sap morale and weaken the structures of Tsarism from within, led to corruption development. After local officials failed to do so, the legal means to defend their interests being unavailable, the provincial officialdom finally turned into an informal self-organization which purposefully defended and consolidated its position in the social system by means of corruption. With the Power in the country as it was, Russia entered the world war conflict during which during which the Great Russian Revolution occurred. (Show less)