Egyptian Fiscal History in a World of Warring States, 664–30 bce

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Andrew Monson

From China to the Mediterranean, interstate competition transformed the political, economic, and social order in the mid-first millenniumbce. The case of Egypt from the Saite reunification in 664bceto the Roman conquest in 30bceillustrates this phenomenon, which resembles the rise of fiscal-military states under the pressure of war in early modern Europe. The New Fiscal History that has sought to explain this rise in Europe tends to produce a linear historical account of centralization and increasing fiscal capacity from feudal societies to the modern tax state. In Egypt, by contrast, the process was interrupted by integration into the imperial structures of Achaemenid Persia and Rome. It thus provides a convenient laboratory to compare the development of fiscal institutions in a political environment characterized by warring states, and one dominated by a single empire.

Caritas ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay

Caritas was an idea with resonance across early modern Europe, but given shape and form within particular national or religious contexts. This chapter introduces how the Scottish Kirk envisioned caritas as an embodied ethic—an experience of love that was manifested in deportment, thought, feeling, and behaviour—as well as its widespread take-up as a cultural norm. It particularly highlights that the family—the holy household—was imagined as the basis of a social order founded on caritas and introduces how the idea of caritas shaped the practice of the family-household relationships in eighteenth-century Scotland. It explores how the family was located not just as a site of patriarchal discipline, but also of peace and comfort, where fighting and quarrelling (excesses of passion) should be minimized. The family-household was not formed in private, however: its loving behaviours were interpreted and given meaning by a watching community.


Author(s):  
Eyal Zisser

This article describes how in the middle of the winter of 2010 the “Spring of the Arab Nations” suddenly erupted without any warning all over the Middle East. However, the momentum of the uprisings was impeded rather quickly, and the hopes held out for the “Spring of the Arab Nations” turned into frustration and disappointment. While many Israelis were focusing their attention in surprise, and some, with doubt and concern as well about what was happening in the region around them; suddenly, in Israel itself, at the height of the steamy summer of 2011, an “Israeli Spring” broke out. The protesters were young Israelis belonging to the Israeli middle class. Their demands revolved around the slogan, “Let us live in our land.” However, similar to what happened in the Arab world, the Israeli protest subsided little by little. The hassles of daily life and security and foreign affairs concerns once more became the focus of the public's attention. Therefore, the protesters' hopes were disappointed, and Israel's political, economic, and social order remained unshaken. Thus, towards the end of 2017, the memory of the “Israeli spring” was becoming faded and forgotten. However, while the Arab world was sinking into chaos marked by an ever deepening economic and social crisis that deprived its citizens of any sense of security and stability, Israel, by contrast, was experiencing years of stability in both political and security spheres, as well as economic growth and prosperity. This stability enabled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party to remain in power and to maintain the political and social status-quo in Israel.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 451-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros

AbstractThis article offers a detailed investigation of Byzantine and post-Byzantine perceptions of the political organization of the Italian city-states. Drawing on philosophical and historical writing produced by Byzantine and post-Byzantine authors between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, it identifies the main patterns and motifs that informed Byzantine discourse about the constitutional arrangements of such Italian cities as Genoa, Venice, Florence, and Milan. It shows how these come into play in the writings of major figures of Byzantine and post-Byzantine intellectual life such as Theodoros Metochites, John Kantakouzenos, Nikephoros Gregoras, George of Trebizond, Cardinal Bessarion, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and John Kottunios. It also explores the ways in which the classical legacy of political thought was applied by Byzantine writers in their analysis of various constitutional forms. The findings of this survey provide new insights into cross-cultural exchanges between the Byzantine world and medieval and early modern Europe and the formation of Byzantine identity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3


1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

ABSTRACTIn early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 803
Author(s):  
Zeki Tekin ◽  
Gülnaz Okumuş

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>Mankind has put forth a special effort to ensure the order of society since the very beginning of it. The Ottoman State, has always ensured the public and social order like other Islamic states in the light of Allah's commandments. However, the present order started deteriorating due to dwindling basic principles (justice, merit, consultancy ...) with time which were imposed by the Shariah Law; to which the Ottoman Empire was subjected.</p><p>The radical developments in the political, economic, social and legal fields that took place in Europe had affected the Ottoman State seriously like other states. Under the influence of all these internal and external dynamics, the Ottoman Empire started quest for a new order and attempted to bring a series of reforms under the name of westernization or modernization. Thus in the Ottoman State, besides these reform movements, the idea of creating a constitution had also emerged.</p><p>This study tries to find out the internal and external dynamics in the formation of Kanun-ı Esasi which was the first constitution of the Ottoman Empire in the modern sense and the consequences of this quest for order.</p><p><strong>Öz</strong></p><p>İnsanoğlu, var olduğundan beri yaşadığı toplumun düzenini temin edebilmek için özel bir çaba göstermiştir. Kuruluşu itibariyle Ortaçağ devletlerinden olan Osmanlı Devleti, diğer İslam devletleri gibi kamu ve toplum düzenini her zaman Allah’ın hükümleri doğrultusunda tesis etmiştir. Ancak Osmanlının   tâbi olduğu şer’i hukukun vaz ettiği temel prensiplerin (adalet, liyakat, meşveret…) zamanla göz ardı edilmesi ile mevcut düzen bozulmaya başlamıştır.</p><p>Avrupa’da meydana gelen siyasal, ekonomik, toplumsal ve hukuk alanlarındaki köklü gelişmeler Osmanlı Devleti’ni ciddi anlamda etkilemiştir. Tüm bu iç ve dış dinamiklerin tesiriyle yeni düzen arayışına giren Osmanlı Devleti, batıcılık ya da modernleşme adı altında bir dizi reform teşebbüslerinde bulunmuştur. Osmanlı Devleti’nde bu reform hareketlerine paralel olarak bir anayasa oluşturma düşüncesi de böylece ortaya çıkmıştır.</p><p>Bu çalışmada Osmanlının modern anlamda ilk anayasası olan Kanun-ı Esasi’nin oluşumuna kaynaklık eden iç ve dış dinamiklerin neler olduğu ve bunların tesirleri ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 0-136
Author(s):  
Raingard Esser ◽  
Andrea Strübind

This special issue is based on papers presented at the international conference “Zwischen Kanzel und Altar. Die (neue) Materialität des Spirituellen” held at the Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek, Emden in April 2016. Continuity and change in church interiors were key concepts addressed at the conference. The studies presented here analyse the impact of confessional change on church interiors and intentionally move away from the cathedrals and parish churches in the political and religious centres of early modern Europe.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 2-13
Author(s):  
Raingard Esser ◽  
Andrea Strübind

The special issue is based on papers presented at the international conference “Zwischen Kanzel und Altar. Die (neue) Materialität des Spirituellen” held at the Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek, Emden in April 2016. Continuity and change in church interiors were key concepts addressed at the conference. The studies presented here analyse the impact of confessional change on church interiors and intentionally move away from the cathedrals and parish churches in the political and religious centres of early modern Europe.


Author(s):  
Anuschka Tischer

Anuschka Tischer starts out with the historical analyses of the book by elaborating the dialectic of war discourses and international order in early modernity: according to Tischer, nearly every prince in early modern Europe came up with a ‘just reason’ when going to war. Whereas the theory of international law represented academic opinions, the political justifications offered the official view which fed into the public discourse. By referring to a general international law in their war declarations (and counter-declarations), the belligerent parties shaped the pattern of today’s modern international law. However, the early modern justifications represented the political and social values of pre-revolutionary Europe. While international law was regarded as universal, the European Christian powers distinguished between wars in and outside of Europe. The chapter reveals the contradictions inherent in this distinction by analysing how princes in early modern Europe justified their wars, which norms and orders were accepted, and how far international law was the result of elaborate discussions and power politics. Tischer’s findings are picked up by Hendrik Simon in his contribution on the nineteenth-century discourse of war and international order.


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