Chapter 16 concerns national, public credit, with two axes. First, it argues that Staël’s theory of credit is richer than that of the tyrants, from Convention to Empire, who exiled the woman they owed two million francs. She calls such tyranny myopic, like building an economy on theft; modern states require public credit. Second, later history again denied Staël credit, exiling her from their all-male Revolution canon by seeing women’s chatter where her dialectic stood. This dialectic is retraced throughout Staël’s works but primarily in her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française.

Italy’s Romantic debate was literary in name only: In Napoleon’s aftermath, Italy had to be reinvented. Chapter 15 reviews Staël’s 1816 Italian articles, which cut to the heart of this debate – hence an immediate impact that dwarfs that of her friends Schlegel and Sismondi. The shape of Europe underlies this discussion, and Staël, with firsthand knowledge from London to Moscow, is in large part responsible for that scope. This chapter retraces the impact of Staël and her writings on every major Italian Romantic, in the highly charged atmosphere of Austrian-occupied Milan after Waterloo. Stendhal’s career as a writer begins in this matrix, a European architecture unthinkable without Staël’s visit. How sweet to see that grand architecture resurface.

This chapter uses documents and methods from both traditional political history and social history to argues that the origins of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) can be identified in tensions surrounding the abolition of slavery in Uruguay in the 1840s and the definitive ban of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These tensions were at play in the disputes over the consolidation of local nation-states and are central to an understanding of the historical process that fed into the Paraguayan War. By the early 1860s they would reach a point of no return. This argument places slavery and Black agency at the center of Brazil’s nineteenth-century international relations, breaking a silence carefully constructed by statesmen and diplomats of the Brazilian Empire.

This chapter contributes to debates about the relational dynamics of Brazilian slavery, focusing especially on enslaved wet nurses. While the relationships between masters and slaves in the private sphere did involve affection and loyalty, they were also gestated in an environment of abuse, humiliation, and physical and symbolic violence, all of which were essential features of slavery as an institution. Interactions that might be read initially as paradoxical or ambiguous were in fact constitutive of slavery’s ideology of domination, experienced and enacted in various ways by both masters and slaves. The figure of the wet nurse and the practice of relegating breastfeeding to enslaved women – which was generalized among Brazil’s dominant classes during the Empire – helped to forge a slavocratic habitus, a kind of second nature, in which future masters experienced the social relationships of slavery within their intimate circles and everyday lives from a very tender age. This chapter analyzes these domestic and extremely conflictual interactions as an integral part of the slave system, critical to the symbolic and social reproduction of Brazil’s master class.

Chapter 2 traces the balancing or buffeting of our author between private and public spheres, beneath the burning sky of the Revolution. It follows the appearance of her first published work, the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in granular detail, amid the highly charged context of 1788–1789, as the French Revolution began; it then traces the publication in context of her story Zulma and her Recueil de morceaux détachés, in 1794–1795, arguing for a radical redating of several pieces in this collection.

This chapter discusses the existence and reproduction of enslaved families during Brazil’s second slavery through a case study of the Guaribú fazenda (plantation), located in the Vassouras region of Rio de Janeiro’s Paraíba Valley, which was at the time the world’s most productive coffee region. Guaribú’s history allows us to advance three arguments. First, we demonstrate the ways in which the concepts of “agrarian empires,” “plantation communities,” and “slave neighborhoods” can help us to understand both familial relationships and those that developed between slaves and masters. Second, we show that slave families living on large plantations had better chances than those who lived on smaller estates of remaining together across generations in stable family formations. And finally, we argue that this familial stability enabled Brazil’s “mature slavery,” during which positive birth rates ensured the preservation of enslaved labor even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850.

This chapter explores the transition from a medieval picture of manorial courts as being focused on seignorial concerns to an early modern picture of being focused on community concerns. Through categorising presentments, it demonstrates that the role of manorial officials went through two transitions between c.1300 and c.1650. Firstly, there was a shift away from seignorial and royal business to a community-focused ‘little commonwealth’ where courts worked to maintain local infrastructure and common lands. In a second transition, in the seventeenth century some courts began to be purely focused on land registration and transfers. However, these changes occurred in the context of local variation and a wider East Anglian versus western/south-western divide. These findings support two conclusions. Firstly, they challenge a narrative of the decline of manorial structures, showing how the adaptability of courts allowed them to be put to a wide range of uses by communities. Secondly, they highlight that manorial institutions were not imposed by lords in a top-down process, but were shaped by local officials, who recognised the utility of these institutions for their own purposes.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

This chapter investigates the connection between officeholding and serfdom in light of new interpretations which have suggested that serfdom, rather than being a significant liability that the unfree fought hard to remove, was instead characterised by routine obligations and disappeared quickly after the Black Death. Through comparing lists of officers with records of landholding and personal status, it finds that both free and customary landholders served in office. It also demonstrates that serving in office was rarely resisted as an obligation and that while officials did help enforce some aspects of serfdom, they were no longer doing this by the mid-sixteenth century, and even before this only enforced limited aspects of personal unfreedom which likely did not disadvantage tenants in a meaningful way. These findings highlight that the division between unfree and free landholding was breaking down in the late Middle Ages, but also, more significantly, show that officials were not put-upon unfree servants. Communities of tenants were not forced to serve in office but recognised the utility of manorial structures for meeting their own objectives.

This chapter explores the concerns about their community which might have led manorial officials to govern their communities in the way described for the middling sort by historians of early modern England. It begins by examining the way officials controlled misconduct, finding that elites did use office to monitor those perceived as troublemakers, but the level of attention varied significantly over time and space. It then examines the way management of the landscape and resources led to governance which promoted community coherence but also differentiation. It finds that while officials everywhere were concerned with preventing the abrogation of communal rights by neighbouring communities, the extent of monitoring of tenants varied by settlement type and landscape. While in communities which were heavily enclosed, or consisted of dispersed hamlets, there is little evidence of hierarchical governance, in communities with large nucleated villages and extensive commons, officials utilised bylaws to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbours. This suggests that a ‘proto-middling sort’ could be created through officeholding but this was a locally specific process.