Sunday, November 2, 2014
Comment on Benjamin & Marcy Norton's Methodology
Benjamin makes a good point about how perceptions can change and new thoughts emerge after class discussion of authors' works have been debated. Maybe post-blog comments can be added in some manner to the overall class grade in coming semesters.
Marcy Norton's analysis of the role that tobacco played in the rise of Spanish absolutism not only enhances her interpretation of events, but places commodity history in its proper context. "The seventeenth-century state," Norton writes, "grew as the result of actions by interest groups – particularly a group of merchants-cum-state financiers – as much as it did as the result of royal bureaucracy. An examination of the state through the lens of tobacco also becomes an investigation of Portuguese New Christians . . . who administered the monopoly and whose own syncretic religious prerogatives dictated in significant ways the organization of the state institution." (p. 12)
By tracing the trajectory of commodities through time and different cultures in which they enter, a greater understanding of history can be gleaned. Norton correctly sees how tobacco was first "transformed" into a "non-necessity" which could then be "monopolized" and taxed to bolster the financial position of the emerging absolutist Spanish Crown.
Norton is on weaker ground, however, in her explanation of the state and absolutism (pp. 201-03). Spain and most of Europe at the time were not actually under "state rule" where the state is defined as an agency or institution which has a monopoly of force and sole arbitrator of disputes within a given territory. Instead, Europe was feudal, where political power was decentralized with the resolution of disputes held among lords, vassals, princes, cities and churchmen. The power to tax, where it existed, was also limited.
By the 16th century this system was breaking down as dominant feudal lords became "super" overlords. Yet, despite these lords amassing more power, much of the old feudal structure remained, which contained no precedent for revenue raising by the new dominant kings. Thus, the need for these "absolute" kings to look for other sources of income – hence monopolies on tobacco and other goods. Norton's analysis could have been strengthened by looking at the period from this perspective
The Israeli historian, Martin Van Creveld, in The Rise and Decline of the State discusses this important transformation.
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I don't know Martin Van Creveld but I have studied William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. Beik provides a very clear description of how elite interest groups in Languedoc collaborated with the administration of Louis XIV. Provincial institutions obtained important financial benefits by agreeing to support Louis' demands for money. Beik argues that French absolutism was a feudal institution based upon the ruling class's exploitation of the peasants. Norton seems to understand that the Portuguese traders who controlled the tobacco monopoly were satisfying their own objectives and helping their own community. The majority of Spanish people did not benefit from the tobacco monopoly. The Spanish state continued to provide incentives for its subjects to behave outside the law. The chapter on the tax monopoly was a peculiar addition to Norton's book. Like James I think other people have covered the growth of the absolute state in a more perceptive fashion.
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