(with T. Brero & E. Graham-Goering), ‘Dynasties and Dynastic Rule between Elite Reproduction and State Building in Europe’, in: P. Srodecki, N. Kersken & R. Petrauskas (eds.), Unions and Divisions. New Forms of Rule in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London – New York: Routledge, 2023), 40-52 (original) (raw)

Discussions on the nature and evolution of pre-modern European polities are as old as history itself as an academic discipline. When the scholarly enquiry into the past found a home in universities, first in the German-speaking world with the efflorescence of Historismus in the early nineteenth century and soon after in other parts of the world, historians were first and foremost preoccupied with tracing the genealogies of their own political projects, that is, the nineteenth-century states. Leaning heavily on the reflections of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) on language, collective identities and historical change, historians such as Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) imagined history as a great pageant in which language communities evolved into national communities, which in turn developed modern states as the container and protector of national interests. 1 In consequence, early research on ancien régime polities often carried considerable ideological ballast. Glossing over persistently problematic concepts of nations and nationalism and ignoring the imperial aspirations of many polities to rule over multiple national communities, historians were prone to hold up the trajectories of England and France, for example, as exemplars of early and successful nation-states, while the relatively late unification of German principalities, for example, into a larger political project provoked much hand-wringing reflections about a Sonderweg in the panoply of European histories. 2 In the twentieth century, and especially in postwar scholarship, historians worked hard to unburden political history from inherited ideological commitments and questionable assumptions, but for all this intellectual house-cleaning, current debates still bear the stamp of these older traditions. On the one hand, many historians are persistently prone to imagine pre-modern European polities as "states", a conceptualisation that usually rests on Max Weber's (1864-1920) famous definition of modern states as institutions with a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence-public order management as opposed to socially