Verso World History

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781684634
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, left off, Lineages traces the development of Absolutist states in the early modern period from their roots in European feudalism, and assesses their various trajectories. Why didn't Italy develop into an Absolutist state in the same, indigenous way as the other dominant Western countries, namely Spain, France and England? On the other hand, how did Eastern European countries develop into Absolutist states similar to those of the West, when their social conditions diverged so drastically? Reflecting on examples in Islamic and East Asian history, as well as the Ottoman Empire, Anderson concludes by elucidating the particular role of European development within universal history.

II. Eastern Europe

1

Absolutism in the East

It is now necessary to revert to the Eastern half of Europe, or more accurately that part of it which was spared the Ottoman invasion that over-ran the Balkans in successive waves of advance, subjecting it to a local history separate from that of the rest of the continent. It has been seen how the great crisis which struck the European economies in the 14th and 15th centuries produced a violent manorial reaction east of the Elbe. The seigneurial repression unleashed against the peasants increased in intensity throughout the 16th century. The political result, in Prussia and Russia, was an Absolutism of the East, coeval with that of the West yet basically different in lineage. The Absolutist State in the West was the redeployed political apparatus of a feudal class which had accepted the commutation of dues. It was a compensation for the disappearance of serfdom, in the context of an increasingly urban economy which it did not completely control and to which it had to adapt. The Absolutist State in the East, by contrast, was the repressive machine of a feudal class that had just erased the traditional communal freedoms of the poor. It was a device for the consolidation of serfdom, in a landscape scoured of autonomous urban life or resistance. The manorial reaction in the East meant that a new world had to be implanted from above, by main force. The dose of violence pumped into social relations was correspondingly far greater. The Absolutist State in the East never lost the signs of this original experience.

Yet at the same time, the internal class struggle within the Eastern social formations and its outcome, the enserfment of the peasantry, do not in themselves provide an exhaustive explanation for the emergence of the distinctive type of Absolutism of the region. The distance between the two can be measured chronologically in Prussia, where the manorial reaction of the nobility had already rolled over much of the peasantry with the spread of the Gutsherrschaft in the 16th century, a hundred years before the establishment of an Absolutist State in the 17th century. In Poland, classical land of the ‘second serfdom’, no Absolutist State ever emerged, although this was a failure for which the noble class was eventually to pay with its national existence. Here, too, however, the 16th century witnessed decentralized feudal rule, dominated by a representative system totally under aristocratic control, and very weak princely authority. In Hungary, the definitive enserfment of the peasantry was accomplished after the Austro-Turkish War at the turn of the 17th century, while the Magyar nobility was successfully resisting the imposition of a Habsburg Absolutism.¹ In Russia, the installation of serfdom and the erection of Absolutism were more closely coordinated, but even there the onset of the first preceded the consolidation of the second, and did not always develop pari passu with it thereafter. Since servile relations of production involve an immediate fusion of property and sovereignty, lordship and landlordship, there is nothing in itself surprising in a polycentric nobiliary State, such as initially existed in Ostelbian Germany, Poland or Hungary after the manorial reaction in the East. To explain the subsequent ascent of Absolutism it is necessary first of all to reinsert the whole process of the second serfdom into the international state system of late feudal Europe.

We have seen that the pull of the more advanced Western economy on the East has often been exaggerated in this epoch, as the sole or main force responsible for the manorial reaction there. In fact, while the corn trade undoubtedly intensified servile exploitation in Eastern Germany or Poland, it did not inaugurate it in either country, and played no role at all in the parallel development of Bohemia or Russia. In other words, if it is incorrect to ascribe central importance to the economic bonds of the export-import trade from East to West, this is because the feudal mode of production as such – by no means finally surpassed in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries – could not create a unified international economic system; it was only the world market of industrial capitalism that accomplished this, radiating out from the advanced countries to mould and dominate the development of backward ones. The composite Western economies of the transitional epoch – typically combining a semi-monetarized and post-servile feudal agriculture² with enclaves of mercantile and manufacturing capital – had no such compulsive pull. Foreign investment was minimal, except in the Colonial Empires and to some extent Scandinavia. Foreign trade still represented a small percentage of the national product of all countries except Holland or Venice. Any wholesale integration of Eastern Europe into a Western European economic circuit – often implied by historians’ use of such phrases as a ‘colonial economy’ or ‘plantation business concerns’ to refer to the Gutsherrschaft system beyond the Elbe – is thus inherently implausible.

This is not to say, however, that the impact of Western on Eastern Europe was not determinant for the state structures which emerged there. For transnational interaction within feudalism was typically always first at the political, not the economic level, precisely because it was a mode of production founded on extra-economic coercion: conquest, not commerce, was its primary form of expansion. The uneven development of feudalism within Europe thus found its most characteristic and direct expression, not in balances of trade, but in balances of arms, between the respective regions of the continent. In other words, the main mediation between East and West in these centuries was military. It was the international pressure of Western Absolutism, the political apparatus of a more powerful feudal aristocracy, ruling more advanced societies, which obliged the Eastern nobility to adopt an equivalently centralized state machine, to survive. For otherwise the superior military force of the reorganized and magnified Absolutist armies would inevitably take its toll in the normal medium of inter-feudal competition: war. The very modernization of troops and tactics brought about by the ‘military revolution’ in the West after 1560 rendered aggression into the vast spaces of the East more feasible than ever before, and the dangers of invasion correspondingly greater for the local aristocracies there. Thus, at a time when infrastructural relations of production were diverging, there was a paradoxical convergence of superstructures in the two zones (itself, of course, an index of an ultimate common mode of production). The concrete form which the military threat from Western Absolutism initially took was, fortunately for the Eastern nobility, historically circuitous and transient. It is nevertheless all the more striking how immediately catalytic its effects were for the whole political pattern in the East. To the South, the front between the two zones was occupied by the long Austro-Turkish duel, which for two hundred and fifty years focussed the Habsburgs on their Ottoman enemies and Hungarian vassals. In the Centre, Germany was a maze of small, weak states divided and neutralized by religious conflicts. It was thus from the relatively primitive North that the attack came. Sweden – most recent and surprising of all the Western Absolutisms, a new country with a very limited population and rudimentary economy – proved to be the Hammer of the East. Its impact on Prussia, Poland and Russia in the ninety years from 1630 to 1720 bears comparison with that of Spain in Western Europe in an earlier age, although it has never received the same study. Yet it was one of the greatest cycles of military expansion in the history of European Absolutism. At its height, Swedish cavalry rode victoriously into the five capitals of Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden and Prague – operating across a huge arc of territory in Eastern Europe that exceeded even the campaigns of the Spanish tercios in Western Europe. The Austrian, Prussian, Polish and Russian state-systems all experienced its formative shock.

Sweden’s first overseas conquest was the seizure of Estonia, in the long Livonian Wars with Russia in the last decades of the 16th century. It was the Thirty Years’ War, however, which produced the first fully formalized international state system in Europe, that appropriately marked the decisive onset of the Swedish irruption into the East. The spectacular march of Gustavus Adolphus’s armies into Germany, rolling back Habsburg power to the astonishment of Europe, proved the turning-point of the war; while the later successes of Baner and Torstensson scotched any long-term recovery of the Imperial cause. From 1641 onwards, Swedish troops permanently occupied large parts of Moravia,³ and when the war ended in 1648, were camped on the left bank of the Vltava in Prague. The intervention of Sweden had definitively broken the prospect of a Habsburg imperial state in Germany: the whole course and character of Austrian Absolutism were henceforward to be determined by this defeat, which deprived it of any chance of a consolidated territorial centre in the traditional lands of the Reich, and – to its cost – shifted its whole centre of gravity eastwards. At the same time, the impact of Swedish power on the evolution ot Prussia, less visible internationally, was domestically even deeper. Brandenburg was occupied by Swedish armies from 1631 onwards, and although technically an ally in the Protestant cause, was immediately subjected to ruthless military requisitioning and fiscal exactions, such as it had never known before: the traditional privileges of the junker Estates were dismissed out of hand by Swedish commandants.⁴ The trauma of this experience was compounded by the Swedish acquisition of Western Pomerania with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ensured Sweden a large and permanent beachhead on the southern shores of the Baltic. Swedish garrisons now controlled the Oder, posing a direct threat to the hitherto demilitarized and decentralized ruling class of Brandenburg, a country with virtually no army at all. The construction of Prussian Absolutism by the Great Elector from the 1650’s onwards was in large measure a direct response to the impending Swedish menace: the standing army which was to be the cornerstone of Hohenzollern autocracy, and its tax system, was accepted by the junkers in 1653 to deal with an imminent war situation in the Baltic theatre and resist external dangers. In fact, the Swedo-Polish War of 1655–60 proved to be the turning-point in the political evolution of Berlin, which itself avoided the brunt of Swedish aggression by participating as an apprehensive junior partner on the side of Stockholm. The next great step in the construction of Prussian Absolutism was once again taken in response to military conflict with Sweden. It was during the 1670’s, in the throes of the Swedish campaigns against Brandenburg that formed a Northern theatre of the war unleashed by France in the West, that the notorious Generalkriegskommissariat came to occupy the functions of the earlier privy council and to mould henceforward the whole structure of the Hohenzollern State machine. Prussian Absolutism, and its ultimate shape, came into being during the epoch and under the pressure of Swedish expansionism.

Meanwhile, it was in these same decades after Westphalia that the heaviest Nordic blow of all was unleashed in the East. The Swedish invasion of Poland in 1655 quickly shattered the loose aristocratic confederation of the szlachta. Warsaw and Cracow fell, and the whole Vistula valley was torn up by the march and counter-march of Charles X’s troops. The main strategic result of the war was to deprive Poland of any suzerainty over Ducal Prussia. But the social results of the devastating Swedish attack were far more serious: Polish economic and demographic patterns were so badly damaged that the Swedish invasion came to be known as the ‘Deluge’ which for ever after separated the previous prosperity of the Rzeczpospolita from the irretrievable crisis and decline into which it sank thereafter. The last brief revival of Polish arms in the 1680’s, when Sobieski led the relief of Vienna against the Turks, was soon followed by the second Swedish ravage of the Commonwealth, during the Great Northern War of 1701–21, in which the main theatre of destruction was once again Poland. When the last Scandinavian troops withdrew from Warsaw, Poland had ceased to be a major European power. The Polish nobility, for reasons which will be discussed later, did not succeed in generating an Absolutism during these ordeals. It thereby demonstrated in practice what the consequences of not doing so were, for a feudal class in the East; unable to recover from the lethaL blows delivered by Sweden, Poland ultimately ceased to exist as an independent state.

Russia, as always, presents a somewhat different case, within a common historical field. There, the impulse within the aristocracy towards a military monarchy was evident much earlier than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. In part, this was due to the pre-history of the Kievan State, and the Byzantine imperial tradition it transmitted across the chaotic Russian Middle Ages, through the ideology of the ‘Third Rome’: Ivan III had married the niece of the last Paleologus Emperor of Constantinople and arrogated the title of ‘Tsar’ or Emperor in 1480. The ideology of the translatio imperii was doubtless, however, less important than the constant material pressure on Russia of the Tartar and Turcoman pastoralists of Central Asia. The political suzerainty of the Golden Horde lasted until the late 15th century. The successor Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan launched constant slaving incursions from the East until their defeat and absorption in the mid 16th century. For another hundred years, the Crimean Tartars – now under Ottoman overlordship – raided Russian territory from the South; their looting and enslaving expeditions kept most of the Ukraine a depopulated wilderness.⁵ Tartar horsemen lacked the capacity to conquer or occupy permanently, in the early modern epoch. But Russia, ‘sentinel of Europe’, had to bear the brunt of their attacks, and the result was an earlier and greater impetus towards a centralized State in the Duchy of Muscovy than in the more sheltered Electorate of Brandenburg or the Polish Commonwealth. But from the 16th century onwards, the military threat in the West was always much greater than that in the East, field artillery and modern infantry now easily outclassing mounted archery as weapons of warfare. Thus in Russia too, the really decisive phases of the transition towards Absolutism occurred during successive phases of Swedish expansion. The pivotal reign of Ivan IV in the late 16th century was dominated by the long Livonian Wars, of which Sweden was the strategic victor, annexing Estonia by the Treaty of Yam Zapolsky in 1582: a springboard for mastery of the Northern Baltic littoral. The Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, which ended with the critical accession of the Romanov dynasty, saw Swedish power unfurled into the depths of Russia. Amidst mounting chaos, a corps commanded by De La Gardie fought its way to Moscow to shore up the usurper Shuisky; three years later a Swedish candidate – Gustavus Adolphus’s brother – came within an ace of election to the Russian monarchy itself, only just being blocked by that of Mikhail Romanov in 1613. The new regime was promptly obliged to cede Karelia and Ingria to Sweden, which within another decade had seized the whole of Livonia from Poland, giving it virtually complete control of the Baltic. Swedish influence was also extensive within the Russian political system itself, in the early years of Romanov rule.⁶ Finally, of course, the massive statal edifice of Peter I in the early 18th century was erected during and against the supreme Swedish military offensive into Russia, led by Charles XII, which had started by shattering Russian armies at Narva and was eventually to thrust deep into the Ukraine. Tsarist power within Russia was thus tested and forged in the international struggle for ascendancy with the Swedish Empire in the Baltic. The Austrian State had been turned back from Germany by Swedish expansion; the Polish State disjointed altogether; the Prussian and Russian States, by contrast, withstood and repelled it, acquiring their developed form in the course of the contest. Eastern Absolutism was thus ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• I. Western Europe
• II. Eastern Europe
• III. Conclusions
• Two Notes:
• Index of Names
• Index of Authorities
• Copyright