Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society

Abstract

Recent work in social history has given great emphasis both to the variety of forms of hierarchy in early modern society and to the ways in which the experience of hierarchy and subordination was negotiated. At the same time historians, in¯uenced perhaps by the linguistic turn, have become more sensitive to the fact that order was culturally constructed and that life chances were affected not just by material issues but also by the ways in which the social world was imagined and described. We are now confronted by a picture of the early modern world in which there existed a variety of hierarchies ± class, status (variously determined), gender and age ± justi®ed with reference to a variety of languages which were all, to some degree, unstable and contested. Recognition of the polyphony that this has created has important consequences for a broader understanding of how the social order was represented and constructed. The underlying picture of how power operated and was experienced in the early modern period is, accordingly, more complex. The chapters in this volume offer an alternative reading of the political relationships between dominant and subordinate groups in the construction of social order. By examining this process across a variety of arenas, the essays challenge the appropriateness of a series of binary models (of which the elite/popular dyad is only the most familiar) for capturing the multiplicity of exchanges by which domination was achieved and subordination negotiated. By turning to micro-sociologies of power and of social roles, they seek to develop an account of early modern social order which is sensitive both to the variety of forms of hierarchy and to the possibilities available to the relatively weak for limiting its effects on their lives. The disadvantaged in early modern society navigated their way in a world which afforded many sources of in¯uence to their more powerful contemporaries. But in negotiating

“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State

“…15 At the same time, much of this work has also offered a vision of a "polymorphous" early modern state, in which violence was barely controllable, borders flexible and permeable, and the state less a "binary" relationship between ruler and ruled than "grids of power" in which individuals from the local to the global "were able to locate themselves on a number of hierarchies," over both space and time. 16 Within what J. H. Elliott has identified as "a Europe of composite monarchies," political communities now appear never to have been straightforward and simple but, rather, overlapping networks of local and regional power that stood in varying and complex relationships to shared and multiple centers. 17 Despite all this much-needed nuance and complexity, however, there is a way in which all of this work still serves to root the history of politics and political thought instinctively in national contexts.…”

“…84 Of course, Sandys's lawyers objected strenuously to this argument but in so doing also provided a good deal of insight as to its profound implications. William Williams, one of Sandys's lawyers and later solicitor general, argued that vesting 80 Report of the Attorney General Concerning Interlopers, 16 , 10:379-80. 84 This argument was taken up again in a way, after the Company's abolition, by no less a figure than John Stuart Mill, who argued that the only way for a free people to rule a dependency as different as Britain was from India, particularly with regard to religion, was to have a "delegated body of a comparatively permanent character," which he lamented England, in fact, had in the East India Company.…”

The price of the poor's words: social relations and the economics of deposing for one's ‘betters’ in early modern England

“…Due to a combination of the available sources and an interest in showcasing the ‘agency’ of the labouring population, historians have tended to focus on comparatively exceptional aspects of social relations, such as riot and ‘resistance’ (broadly defined). See Walter, Crowds and popular politics ; idem, ‘Public transcripts’; Braddick and Walter, ‘Grids of power’; Wood, Riot . Deference and subordination have been comparatively neglected; for recent discussions, see Wood, ‘Deference’; idem, ‘Subordination’; idem, ‘Fear’.…”

Personating leadership: Shakespeare's Henry V and performative negotiation

“…This concept -which I term 'performative negotiation' -relies upon physiological and verbal cues to transmit an image of leadership which the subjects-as-audience choose to accept or reject. Braddick and Walter (2001) discuss the early modern relationship of leadership role to audience acceptance explicitly in terms of 'negotiation':…”

“…Instead, they are active players who work with the leader to construct his or her charismatic identity' (p. 34). This aspect of 'working with' the leader, I argue, is the process of negotiation identified by Braddick and Walter (2001), and can be seen in the exchanges between Henry and his subjects, and is designed to draw attention to the parallel relationship between the audience-as-populace and their monarch.…”