Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
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Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
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Friday 14 April 2023 08.30 - 10.30
U-9 POL09 Local Autonomy in Decline: Legislation and Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Low Countries (c. 1450-1800)
Västra Hamngatan 25 AK2 133
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Jim van der Meulen
Organizer: Jesse Hollestelle Discussants: -
Jesse Hollestelle : Non-Revolutionary Abolition of the Feudal System? A Sketch of an Alternative Trajectory
With the annexation of Flanders by the French Republic all seigneurial privileges were abolished in 1795. This abolition of seigneuries is traditionally understood as a momentous watershed in public order management in village societies because in Flanders, just as elsewhere, seigneurial administrations were entitled to more or less act independently ... (Show more)
With the annexation of Flanders by the French Republic all seigneurial privileges were abolished in 1795. This abolition of seigneuries is traditionally understood as a momentous watershed in public order management in village societies because in Flanders, just as elsewhere, seigneurial administrations were entitled to more or less act independently in the administration of criminal justice within their domain. In contrast to other parts of Europe, it was not even possible in Flanders to appeal the criminal sentence of a seigneurial court with a higher court.
This paper will confront this narrative of revolutionary change by arguing that a tendency towards centralization of criminal justice had set in at least fifty years before the death of the seigneurial regime. The drivers for change were the castellanies – the mid-level political institutions governing the sub-provinces of Flanders – in collaboration with seigneuries. Critical scrutiny of ordinances issued by the central government and the paper trail of negotiations between lords and castellanies suggest that lords themselves were also actively seeking major reforms in the judicial system, not in the least to avoid the considerable costs entailed by public order management in the face of problems with vagrancy. The implications of the Flemish case for ongoing discussions about justice and state formation in Ancien Regime Europe will be tease out with a comparative discussion of similar research for eighteenth-century France. (Show less)

Yannis Skalli-Housseini : Beyond the Rise of the Fiscal State: Processes of Centralization in the 18th Century Austrian Netherlands
The question of local autonomy in the early modern period was inseparably connected with one phenomenon: the so-called ‘rise of the fiscal state’. Requiring evermore revenue for expensive wars, the ‘domain state’, in which resources were derived from the king’s domain, became a ‘tax state’, in which inhabitants of a ... (Show more)
The question of local autonomy in the early modern period was inseparably connected with one phenomenon: the so-called ‘rise of the fiscal state’. Requiring evermore revenue for expensive wars, the ‘domain state’, in which resources were derived from the king’s domain, became a ‘tax state’, in which inhabitants of a territory (who turned into taxpayers) became involved in providing revenue for the sovereign. Unsurprisingly, the question occupying historians has thus long been: what made a fiscal state successful? In a sense the debate about centralization and local autonomy discussed in this session, can been seen through this historiography. It has shifted from a focus on political centralization as a means of achieving fiscal extraction, for example in 18th century France, to an emphasis on the limited (coercive) capacities of early modern states and negotiations with elites at different administrative levels, in the recent global comparative approach taken by the ‘New Fiscal Sociology’.
The Austrian Netherlands, which was characterized by a decentralized political and fiscal system, is a case study that can provide excellent insights into this ‘negotiated’ rise of the fiscal state. This paper will show how a mediated fiscal system – in which negotiations between the central government and provincial authorities about taxes were quintessential – combined with ever-increasing fiscal demands, led to powerful regional/sub-provincial political constituencies, which had financially benefitted from the rise of the fiscal state, but would lose much of those benefits if centralization was taken further. In a context of declining provincial autonomy, these sub-provincial castellanies – taking over important provincial competences in the fiscal realm – proved an important obstacle to increasing centralization. By focusing on tax reforms between 1749-1790 in two contrasting case studies – the castellany of Aalst, characterized by fragmented landownership and strong urbanization and the castellany of Veurne with its concentrated landownership and agrarian capitalism – this paper will show that this negotiated rise also crucially depended on the social-economical characteristics of the castellanies and their elites. In line with the New Fiscal Sociology literature, this paper will lastly argue that the rise of the fiscal state was far from only a political (centralization) and economic (more fiscal extraction) process: normative and ideological questions – which placed the well-being of individual taxpayers at the forefront – played an important role in attempts to erode the local, sub-regional and provincial autonomy in fiscal matters. (Show less)

Klaas Van Gelder : Policing the Village: Seigneurial Police Regulations in the County of Flanders as Indicators of Local Autonomy, 13th-18th Centuries
Two distinct but often overlapping sets of local rules regulated village life in the medieval and early modern County of Flanders. On the one hand there was the local customary law, originally transmitted orally but since the late Middle Ages and the 16th century increasingly often written down. Local customs ... (Show more)
Two distinct but often overlapping sets of local rules regulated village life in the medieval and early modern County of Flanders. On the one hand there was the local customary law, originally transmitted orally but since the late Middle Ages and the 16th century increasingly often written down. Local customs chiefly concerned penal law and private law, the latter including the rules of inheritances, marital property, orphans, contracts, etc. On the other hand there were rules that governed daily life and took the character of local ordinances. Already in the 13th century the tradition arose to bundle these rules into compilations that were recalled annually before the entire village community, and from the 15th century onwards these rules were increasingly called “police ordinances” (ordonnantien politicque). Regularly the preamble stated that “good police and justice” had been the incentive for enacting them. They regulated the harvest, crop protection, weights and measures, the functioning of taverns, public order (especially also in the church and in the cemetery), the state of the roads, fire safety, local markets, and the quality of the food traded. Taken together, they offer a unique glimpse into the ideals that the local rural authorities stood for. Moreover, their preamble is often a telltale sign of the genesis process of these rules, suggesting both power struggles and forms of cooperation among the lord, the village notables, and the villagers in general.
In this lecture some 70 compilations of police regulations from village lordships (French: seigneuries; Dutch: heerlijkheden) in the County of Flanders, dating from the late 13th to the 18th century, will be analyzed. The topics that were regulated by these police regulations are placed in a long-term perspective. This paper shows the range of action of the seigneurial authorities, and thus indirectly it is a prism to study the local autonomy that came under increasing pressure in the early modern period. Moreover, this lecture will not only map and explain the main developments of these seigneurial police regulations, but also the importance of quantitative research for studying the law, and the usefulness and challenges of tagging the articles by means of a keyword list. Finally, the comparative and quantitative approach of a hitherto largely underexposed source type for a highly urbanized region allows us to reconstruct the organization of rural life in Flanders and to test the extent to which this organization was or could remain a local matter. (Show less)



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