Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700.

Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700. By Wayne Te Brake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xiii plus 221pp.).

This book promises a great deal. The author's avowed purpose is "to describe and account for the variety of ways in which ordinary people have shaped their own political histories."[xi[ His canvas is a broad one, both topically and chronologically, for he hopes to synthesize the social history of European politics from the Protestant Reformation through the resolution of the "crisis" of the seventeenth century.

In writing a political history that tries to account for the processes by which "ordinary people" (by that the author means, rather sweepingly, everyone who was not within the realm of officialdom) created their own political destinies, Te Brake hopes to replace the "old, elite-centered histories of European politics with something significantly new."[3] By bringing together the history of popular political practice with "the main line of political history," [p. 5] he stresses that he is going beyond the "teleological accounts of 'national' state formation, which often boil down to retrospective institutional analyses of the most militarily competitive states." [p. 183-84] He offers instead "to describe and account for the broad variety of interactions of subjects and rulers over relatively long stretches of time."[p. 184]

Historians well-versed in Early Modern popular politics, or in the processes of state-building (in both cases where negotiation between ruler and ruled has been at the heart of the historiography for several decades), may question Te Brake's aggressive claim for originality. Nor will many be surprised to see Te Brake conclude that the late medieval "composite states" followed three identifiable trajectories from 1500 to 1700: toward "segmented sovereignties" (made up of sovereign city-states and confederated provinces), "layered sovereignties" (Free cities, peripheral provinces, and territories and principalities), and "territorial sovereignties" (comprised of autocratic monarchies and constitutional monarchies). And does anyone really consider any political regime as the teleological endgame of a linear, progressive historical development? Unlikely, and this makes the author's claim that his perspective of viewing regimes as "transient outcomes within ongoing political processes" [p.187] is novel ring a bit hollow.

To he fair to Te Brake, he does ask us to consider politics in ways that can open new and important questions. We can applaud his desire to consider intentional action of popular political players, but also to recognize that agency is only part of the story. We must also consider "consequential action" [p.5], most of which was an unintended result of the ongoing political bargaining process. And welcome is Te Brake's call to conceptualize this interactive bargaining process in spatial terms, about how people fill "the political spaces available to them"[11], for considering "political spaces" gives him a structural constant which in turn permits a comparative perspective across and between polities. Te Brake wisely hastens to add that attention to structural constants does not necessarily lead to the flawed reasoning of deducing political outcomes directly from structural conditions, but rather permits us to recognize comparable developments within almost endless varieties of particular conditions and indete rminate situations.

All of this is laid out in Te Brake's first and last chapters, and by far they are the most interesting in the book. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the histories of uprisings, rebellions, revolts, or revolutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will find little new in terms of subject matter in the intervening chapters. Still, the book does provide a synthesis within a comparative, European framework which would be useful for an introduction to the field (the bibliography is quite extensive and current), for we find concise sketches of almost all of these uprisings.

The eyebrows of scholars who have tried to "put religion back into the Wars of Religion" will arch, no doubt, when they see Te Brake unrepentantly put politics back into religion (the practice of religious dissent--as opposed to its ideology--is invariably presented within the analytical framework of political insurrection). Perhaps Te Brake can be forgiven this perspective--the book is, after all, resolutely about politics--but less acceptable are the banalities he packages as redirectives for the field. Would any historian seriously disagree with Te Brake's pronouncement, for example, that the various reformations in the sixteenth century "were complex political processes that yielded a variety of often transient outcomes that served primarily to structure the next round of interaction rather than to freeze any particular state of affairs"? With whom is Te Brake taking issue here?

Te Brake claims that with his framework of analysis we can "reassess the clearly divergent paths of regional political development," but then he comes to conclusions like this that are hardly reassessments at all: "The starkly authoritarian cultural settlement of religious contestation in the southern Netherlands contrasts sharply with the variously successful, if often informal, accommodation of religious difference in France and the northern Low Countries."[p. 104]

Te Brake utilizes several flow charts and diagrams to help us visualize various political trajectories, and these can be useful, but in the end they really do not tell us much more than what we already knew. Do we need them, for example, to come to conclusions like this one regarding the French Wars of Religion? "The likelihood of violence increases as one moves ... toward the armament of both of the coalitions and thus the militarization of the conflict"?[p. 100]

This book certainly has its merits and its functions. One might be inclined to use it in teaching as an introduction to early modern political contestation, and its European scope within a comparative perspective is certainly a welcome addition to the literature. As a ground-breaking reassessment of how we should study popular political practice, however, it does not deliver on its promise.