Police and the Territorial State in Sixteenth-century Württemberg

Abstract

Historians of early modern Europe have long been fascinated with the creative role of the state in social, cultural and economic affairs. This interest has taken many forms: sometimes a Whig view of the state’s progressive and modernising role, sometimes a Marxian view of the state as a coercive means of ensuring class domination, sometimes an anthropological understanding of a process of ‘acculturation’, in which rural culture was eroded by a state directed by educated urban elites.¹ Central to all these views is an understanding of the territorial state as an entity developing, from the sixteenth century onwards, a bureaucratic, military, fiscal and policing apparatus increasingly exercising control over the lives of its subjects. Grounding itself on sixteenth-century theories of sovereignty, the state began to employ law codes and regulations which progressively extended its political control into all areas of life. It gradually enforced a general obedience to its will enabling it to create new forms of social order, which one recent work has summed up under the rubric of ‘the well-ordered police state’.²