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Rachel Renault Address correspondence to Rachel Renault, Le Mans Université, UFR LLSH, Laboratoire TEMOS UMR CNRS 9016, Avenue Olivier Messiaen 72085 Le Mans, France. Email: rachel.renault@univ-lemans.fr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
Journal of Social History, shad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad045
Published:
12 August 2024
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Rachel Renault, Popular Control of Taxation, Accountability, and the Redefinition of Political Subordination (Germany, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries), Journal of Social History, 2024;, shad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad045
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Abstract
Taxation is a well-known major instrument in the control of populations by powers, and in the collection of information about them. Starting from early modern Germany (Thuringia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), I would like to show how it was also, conversely, an instrument of non-institutionalized control of the authorities by the taxpayers. By refusing to pay taxes to the Emperor, ordinary taxpayers constructed a means of negotiating political and social domination, creating a form of ordinary intelligence about the authorities’ practices, tax figures, and amounts and by making both of them public. What was at stake in those protestwas indeed not only the burden of taxation, but also the transparency of its collection, the fairness (Billigkeit) of its distribution, and the delicate issue of tax consent. Transparency, equity, and consent were central, but debated political concepts, so that popular control also consisted of influencing the definition of those concepts and having a part in the definition of their concrete content. This also implies that popular control was neither marginal nor transitory, nor did build some kind of linear evolution towards modernity. While examining the specificities of the entangled configuration of power in Germany, which created specific forms of popular agency, this article would like to show how Empire taxation, as a regalian tool involving the definition of common good and the question of political representation, was a powerful vector for a demand for accountability from below, which aimed to redefine the conditions of subjection.
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Issue Section:
Special Issue: Popular Control in Pre-modern Europe
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See also
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Companion Articles
- Radical Thought and Political Practice: Officeholding and Accountability in Seventeenth-Century Britain
- Vigilance, Popular Control and Neighborhood Surveillance in Besieged Paris (1589–1591)
- Rege Ribaldum: Participatory Punishment in the Pursuit of Urban Justice in Late Medieval Southern France
- Popular Control through Public Accountability in Iberia (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
- The Boundaries of Popular Control in Late Medieval English Towns
- Introduction to Popular Control in Pre-modern Europe
- The Ambiguities and Vagaries of Popular Control: Trust and Parochial Corruption in Early Modern England
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