One early October morning in 1687, the ground under the large Spanish colonial city of Lima, Peru rumbled. If longstanding historiographical portraits of Spanish government as inefficient and weak were true, the earthquake that was about to shatter Lima should have devastated it beyond repair. The study of the aftermath of this natural disaster reveals that behind the landscape of destruction, the pillars of the colonial state in Lima not only held up but also permitted its rapid recovery after the event. As part of a more recent historiographical trend that reappraises the Spanish decline during the seventeenth century, my dissertation reevaluates the performance of colonial administration in Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. It focuses on deliberate changes carried out during the 1680s, when the metropolis implemented a series of fiscal and administrative reforms, whose effects were interrupted but not destroyed by the challenge posed by the earthquake of 1687. The use of extensive contemporary archival sources, both official and private, provides a multifaceted vista on the performance of royal agents and colonial subjects responding to the earthquake. A close reading of these sources unveils the rebuilding of the state in various facets: government attempts to impose authority and bring order to the chaos; the patrimonial logic of rules that colonial administrators faced when trying to implement rebuilding projects; colonial subjects’ expectations of royal agents and each other; negotiations among authorities and ordinary people over the terms of rebuilding the city; and the importance of inhabitants’ understandings of justice, founded in law and custom, to carrying out city reconstruction.

This thesis studies the negotiation of political power between the Danish absolutist state, the local government on Bornholm, and its subjects there during the winter of 1738–1739. The aim is to better understand how political power was negotiated in a peripheral region of an early modern state, but also to explore what caused this interaction to begin with and why its eventual outcome was a compromise by the state. The empirical evidence consists mostly of documents created and obtained by an investigative commission formed by the Danish king in 1738 in response to an anonymous letter that accused the local government on Bornholm of corruption and serious criminal offences. The local government had become complicit in peasants’ squatting on disputed land that technically belonged to the king. It will be argued that there existed a distinct political culture on Bornholm that shaped these negotiations and their outcome. Furthermore, the work of the commission and the eventual compromise made by the state demonstrates how this political culture collided with Copenhagen officials’ designs for the island at the time. The investigation into the behaviour of the governor of Bornholm and his eventual treatment sheds light on the role and boundaries of such early modern local officeholders, but also reveals how officials such as him were protected by nepotism and kinship within the Danish absolutist state. Finally, it will be argued that the anonymous letter that led to the establishment of the commission was the product of local conflicts that had escalated to a point of desperation. / <p></p><p></p>

This dissertation is devoted to the study of who used the formal channels of interaction in the early modern era and why. It examines the full range of the political conversation in early modern Sweden, as seen in the supplications to the Diet in the Age of Liberty (1719–1772), and more specifically the supplications submitted to the parliamentary committee tasked with handling them, the Screening Deputation. The literature yields few systematic studies of this official channel, and supplications have long been terra incognita in the early modern political landscape. Their exact importance is uncertain, to say the least. Using a database built on three samples from the beginning, middle, and end of the Age of Liberty, the Diet's supplication channel is shown to have been used by two groups: supplicants from state-affiliated households primarily tried to use it to pursue their claims on the state, to settle various issues related to employment, or to receive some sort of support through hard times; and, increasingly, commoners, especially delegates in the Estate of the Burghers, used the channel for their gravamina concerning commerce, taxation, and the like, and state support for public amenities, a group for whom the Screening Deputation offered an alternative route to getting their grievances heard by the Diet. Both groups increasingly used the Diet's supplication channel was appeal the verdicts of the King in Council (Kungl. Maj:t). Although most were not appeals against the Judicial Audit, the results reveal an active use of appeals, and thus a de facto erosion of Kungl. Maj:t's supremacy. The results also show that as many as three-fifths of all supplicants had their supplications accepted by the Screening Deputation for further examination by the Diet. Although the acceptance rate was definitely lower in the 1730s and 1740s, the committee seems to have been fairly benevolent in its interpretation of the rules on petitioning. The results, lastly, show that although the Diet's supplication channel allowed excluded groups direct access to the Diet - including women of all classes, commoners of rank, and unrepresented groups - it mainly catered to men with the social status or wealth that put them in the middle and upper strata of society. Although this supplication channel stood open to anyone, its egalitarian potential was seemingly never realized. The use of March and Olsen's institutional theory about the logic of appropriateness, has revealed that certain institutional templates and norms that would have enabled these groups more access to the channel succumbed and made room for other institutional foundations. Supplications were part of the medieval and early modern centralization of legal and political power, the formation of the state, the protection of the privileges of Swedish subjects, and, during the Age of Liberty, the power struggle between the Diet and the kings. Each supplication viewed by itself might seem trivial, but nonetheless played a part in each and every one of these major processes. An ordinary Swede could have an impact on early modern politics when acting in concert with other supplicants, like rain eating away at rock.

This dissertation is the result of a study of power relations between the crown and the church in Sweden during the 17th century. The study is focused on the Swedish Parliament and how the Estate of the Clergy responded to royal pretensions. The Swedish Clerical Estate is viewed as essential for the Swedish state formation process. The argument in the study is inspired by theories suggesting that state building and state formation were outcomes of a bargaining process between rulers and local power holders. The perspective presented by the historian Jan Glete is of great importance. He defines the early modern state as a complex organization providing protection and violence control. He emphasizes that the power of the state and the state’s character were dependent upon how the state could assert power. In order to do this, the rulers bartered with their subjects using protection as a commodity while in return the subjects paid required taxes. This bargaining process is interpreted as interactive. The rulers linked various local interests to the state and in doing so gained control of the society and the use of violence. The Swedish Clerical Estate played an important role in this process. Due in part to this fact, the clergy differed from the other subjects of the realm such as the nobility or the peasants. The clergy did not own any sizeable amount of property and did not exert any economical influence. Instead the Clerical Estate negotiated using their ideological, cultural and political resources. These commodities became essential in how the king organized the state. In exchange for royal protection, the clergy were given the task of supporting and explaining the crown’s economical and military needs. By doing so, the Clerical Estate legitimated the royal power in the parliament and in the society as a whole. At the same time, this negotiation signified a definition of the role of the clergyman within the state. Though the Clerical Estate sometimes tried to reject royal claims, it was the king who decided the conditions of negotiation. The parliament as a political field was created by the king and for the king. From a political point of view, religion and a theological framework became of great importance and were adopted by the crown in order to exploit resources. Taking this into consideration, the 17th century Swedish state seems to be more effective than other European early modern states.

Entre le début du XVIe siècle et le commencement de la guerre de Trente Ans en Lorraine, en 1633, les conditions d’exercice du pouvoir d’État se transforment profondément dans les duchés de Lorraine et de Bar : un droit écrit et des procédures judiciaires formalisées sont élaborés, un impôt permanent est créé et une armée régulière est mise sur pieds. Ces évolutions impliquent une augmentation du nombre des officiers qui composent le service du Prince, officiers dont il est possible de connaître la carrière grâce aux lettres patentes de provision en office et aux registres des comptes depuis lesquels ils sont rémunérés. Pour ces hommes, le service du Prince est l’occasion d’un enrichissement personnel et d’un avancement dans la société lorraine, aussi s’efforcent-ils d’étendre les droits de leur maître pour obtenir de lui des faveurs diverses (dons, pensions,anoblissement, érections de terres en fief noble, etc.). À mesure que le nombre et la technicité des affaires à traiter s’accroissent, le Prince laisse à ces hommes une autonomie accrue, ce qui modifie considérablement les modalités de fonctionnement de l’État ducal. / Between the first years of the 16th century and the beginning of the Thirty Years War in Lorraine, in 1633, the shape of State power is deeply transformed in the duchies of Lorraine and Bar: a written law and judicial proceedings are defined, a system of permanent taxation is established and a standing army is raised. All these evolutions implies a higher number of State officers, for whom careers in the service of the prince can be known using the letters establishing them in office as well as the account books recording the payment of their wages. For those men, the service of the prince can be a mean to get rich and to improve their social position, which is the reason why they try to extend the rights of their master, hoping that he will reward them with favours (such as bounties, pensions, letters of ennoblement, conversions of land in fiefs, etc.). As the number and the technicality of the cases involving the State raise, the prince gives to those men an increasing autonomy, which leads to a drastic change in the operating processes of the ducal State.