to them, the Absolutist State also, and above all, of course, taxed the poor. The economic transition from labour dues to money rents in the West was accompanied by the emergence of royal taxes levied for war, which in the long feudal crisis at the end of the Middle Ages had already been one of the main provocations for the desperate peasant upheavals of the time. ‘A chain of peasant uprisings clearly directed against taxation exploded all over Europe. . . . There was little to choose between foragers and friendly or enemy armies: one took as much as the other. Then the tax-collectors appeared and swept up all they could find. Lastly the lords recovered from their men the amount of the “aid” they themselves were obliged to pay their sovereign. There is no doubt that of all the ills which afflicted them, the peasants suffered more painfully and less patiently from the burdens of war and remote taxation.’32 Virtually everywhere, the overwhelming weight of taxation – taille and gabelle in France, or servicios in Spain – fell on the poor. There was no conception of the juridical ‘citizen’ subject to fiscality by the very fact of belonging to the nation. The seigneurial class was in practice everywhere effectively exempt from direct taxation. Porshnev has thus aptly dubbed the new taxes imposed by the Absolutist States ‘centralized feudal rent’ as opposed to the seigneurial dues which formed a ‘local feudal rent’:33 this doubled system of exactions led to a tormented epidemic of rebellions by the poor in 17th century France, in which provincial nobles often led their own peasants against the tax-collectors so as the better to be able to extort their local dues from them. Fiscal officials had to be guarded by units of fusiliers to be able to perform their duties in the countryside: re-embodiments in a modernized guise of the immediate unity of politico-legal coercion with economic exploitation constitutive of the feudal mode of production as such.
The economic functions of Absolutism were not exhausted, however, by its tax and office system. Mercantilism was the ruling doctrine of the epoch, and it presents the same ambiguity as the bureaucracy which was intended to enforce it, with the same underlying reversion to an earlier prototype. For mercantilism undoubtedly demanded the suppression of particularistic barriers to trade within the national realm, and strove to create a unified domestic market for commodity production. Aiming to increase the power of the State relative to that of all other States, it encouraged exports of goods, while banning exports of bullion or coins, in the belief that there was a fixed quantity of commerce and wealth in the world. In Hecksher’s famous phrase: ‘The State was both the subject and the object of mercantilist economic policy.’34
Its characteristic creations were the royal manufactures and state-regulated guilds in France, and the chartered companies in England. The mediaeval and corporatist lineage of the former scarcely needs comment; the tell-tale fusion of political and economic orders in the latter scandalized Adam Smith. For mercantilism exactly represented the conceptions of a feudal ruling class that had adapted to an integrated market, yet had preserved its essential outlook on the unity of what Francis Bacon called ‘considerations of plenty’ and ‘considerations of power’. The classical bourgeois doctrines of laissez-faire, with their rigorous formal separation of the political and economic systems, were to be its antipode. Mercantilism was precisely a theory of the coherent intervention of the political State into the workings of the economy, in the joint interests of the prosperity of the one and the power of the other. Logically, whereas laissez-faire was consistently ‘pacifist’, urging the benefits of peace among nations to increase mutually profitable international trade, mercantilist theory (Montchrétien, Bodin) was heavily ‘bellicist’, emphasizing the necessity and profitability of warfare.35 Vice-versa, the aim of a strong economy was successful prosecution of a conquering foreign policy. Colbert told Louis XIV that the royal manufactures were his economic regiments, and the corporations his reserves. This greatest practitioner of mercantilism, who restored the finances of the French State in ten miraculous years of intendancy, then launched his sovereign on the fateful invasion of Holland in 1672, with this expressive piece of advice: If the king were to subjugate all the United Provinces to his authority, their commerce would become the commerce of the subjects of his majesty, and there would be nothing more to ask.’36 Four decades of European conflict were to follow this sample of economic reasoning, which perfectly captures the social logic of Absolutist aggression and predatory mercantilism: the trade of the Dutch treated as the land of the Anglo-Saxons or the estates of the Moors, a physical object to be taken and enjoyed by military force as the natural mode of appropriation, and possessed permanently thereafter. The optical error in this particular judgement does not make it unrepresentative: it was with such eyes that Absolutist States gazed at one another. The mercantilist theories of wealth and of war were, indeed, conceptually interlocked: the zero-sum model of world trade which inspired its economic protectionism was derived from the zero-sum model of international politics which was inherent in its bellicism.
Trade and war were not the only external activities of the Absolutist State in the West, of course. Its other great effort was invested in diplomacy. This was one of the great institutional inventions of the epoch – inaugurated in the miniature area of Italy in the 15th century, institutionalized there with the Peace of Lodi, and adopted in Spain, France, England, Germany and throughout Europe in the 16th century. Diplomacy was, in fact, the indelible birth-mark of the Renaissance State: with its emergence an international State system was born in Europe, in which there was a perpetual ‘probing of the weak points in the environment of a State or the dangers to it emanating from other States’.37 Mediaeval Europe had never been composed of a clearly demarcated set of homogeneous political units – an international State system. Its political map was an inextricably superimposed and tangled one, in which different juridical instances were geographically interwoven and stratified, and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anomalous enclaves abounded.38 Within this intricate maze, there was no possibility of a formal diplomatic system emerging, because there was no uniformity or parity of partners. The concept of Latin Christendom of which all men were members provided a universalist ideological matrix for conflicts and decisions, which was the necessary obverse of the extreme particularist heterogeneity of the political units themselves. Thus ‘embassies’ were sporadic and unpaid voyages of address, which could equally well be sent by a vassal or a rear-vassal within a given territory, or between the princes of two territories, or a prince and his suzerain. The contraction of the feudal pyramid into the new centralized monarchies of Renaissance Europe produced for the first time a formalized system of inter-State pressure and exchange, with the establishment of the novel institutions of reciprocal fixed embassies abroad, permanent chancelleries for foreign relations, and secret diplomatic communications and reports, shielded by the new concept of ‘extra-territoriality’.39 The resolutely secular spirit of political egoism which henceforward inspired the practice of diplomacy was limpidly expressed by Ermolao Barbaro, the Venetian Ambassador who was its inaugural theorist: ‘The first duty of an ambassador is exactly the same as that of any other servant of a government, that is, to do, say, advise and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state.’
Yet these instruments of diplomacy, ambassadors or state secretaries, were not the weapons of a modern national State. The ideological conceptions of ‘nationalism’ as such were foreign to the inmost nature of Absolutism. The royal States of the new epoch did not disdain to mobilize patriotic sentiments in their subjects, in the political and military conflicts which constantly opposed the various monarchies of Western Europe to one another. But the diffuse existence of a popular proto-nationalism in Tudor England, Bourbon France or Habsburg Spain was basically a token of bourgeois presence within the polity,40 and it was always manipulated by grandees or sovereigns more than it governed them. The national aureole of Absolutism in the West, often apparently very pronounced (Elizabeth I, Louis XIV), was in reality contingent and borrowed. The ruling norms of the age lay elsewhere. For the ultimate instance of legitimacy was the dynasty, not the territory. The State was conceived as the patrimony of the monarch, and therefore the title-deeds to it could be gained by a union of persons: felix Austria. The supreme device of diplomacy was therefore marriage – peaceful mirror of war, which so often provoked it. For, less costly as an avenue of territorial expansion than armed aggression, matrimonial manoeuvring afforded less immediate results (often only at one generation’s remove) and was thereby
