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Summary

CHAPTER OUTLINE

We have seen that words or constituents can remerge. Remerge, also known as movement, explains a lot of things. Thanks to Remerge we are able to understand that a constituent can appear in a position far removed from the case and θ-role assigner on which it depends. And, by assuming that subjects start out in the VP and are subsequently remerged, we are able to treat all syntactic dependencies on a par, including the previously problematic nominative case relation between a subject and Fin. But what we don't yet understand is why elements must remerge. Why do subjects remerge into FinP, and Wh-phrases into CP? In this chapter we address this question, and we will conclude that the same feature-checking mechanism that we have already used to characterise syntactic dependencies provides us with the trigger for such instances of Remerge.

Insight: Agreement Triggers Remerge

In the previous chapter, we established that constituents – heads and phrases alike – can be remerged into the structure we build, thereby giving rise to the effect that we know as movement. By adopting this notion of Remerge we were able to understand a number of phenomena that would otherwise remain rather mysterious. In addition, it allowed us to maintain generalisations that would otherwise be lost, such as our unified characterisation of syntactic dependencies in terms of [F]–[uF] feature checking.

The fact that we can analyse certain phenomena as involving Remerge, however, does nothing to explain why these instances of Remerge actually take place. Take two significant Remerge operations that we have considered: (i) Remerge of a Wh-constituent to a clause-initial position and (ii) Remerge of the subject from VP to FinP.

(1) a. Which yellow chair has Adrian always liked <which yellow chair>?

b. The teachers are all <the teachers> dancing on the table.

Assuming that Remerge has taken place in (1a) allowed us to maintain our restrictions on case agreement, and to assume that θ-role assignment is strictly local, and always takes place within the VP. These reasons also accounted for remerger of the subject in (1a) from spec-VP to spec-FinP, and for the presence of the floating quantifier all between the auxiliary and main verb.

Summary

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In the previous chapter we encountered a particular syntactic dependency: case. Even though sentences containing constituents with the wrong case marking would be semantically good, syntax does not allow them. In this chapter we will see that case is not the only kind of syntactic dependency that can be identified. There are more constructions that, from a semantic perspective, would be good, but that syntax does not like. For instance, sentences like *I walks (instead of I walk) or *She walk (instead of She walks) are bad. Other examples are sentences like *John hopes that Mary loves himself (instead of John hopes that Mary loves him), or *I love me (instead of I love myself). These sentences are clearly ungrammatical, even though it is not that hard to figure out what they could mean. The big question that arises is whether all these syntactic dependencies are different in nature, or underlyingly the same. The latter would be the best outcome, since in that event there is only one mechanism in syntax that we need to understand rather than several. Indeed it turns out that all these syntactic dependencies are the result of a single mechanism: agreement.

Insight: Agreement Reflects Syntactic Dependencies

The previous two chapters introduced two main constraints on what you can create with the Merge operation: θ-theory and Case theory. θ-theory is essentially a semantic constraint; verbal categories that merge with too few or too many arguments yield degraded sentences, since the meaning of the verb dictates how many arguments it should merge with. θ-theory has an effect on syntax, since it partly determines the structural size, but it is not a syntactic constraint. Case theory, by contrast, is a syntactic constraint. Sentences that are perfect from a semantic point of view (She loves I instead of She loves me) are ruled out by the syntax. Every DP should be assigned case, and particular structural positions are responsible for particular case assignments.

A question that may now arise is whether there are more syntactic dependencies than just those involving case assignment. The answer is yes.

Summary

In this book, we have moved from looking at the grammar of English as a set of basically arbitrary rules toward looking at the grammar of English as a set of rules that are the result of a restricted set of principles underlying them. To put it differently, we have uncovered several fundamental patterns underneath the surface rules.

Here is an example. The fact that in English a Wh-constituent must be in clause-initial position is a surface rule that is caused by the underlying fundamental principle for interpretable features to c-command their uninterpretable counterparts. The former (surface) rule is not fundamental for English, the latter is: the former is a consequence of the latter and not the other way around. And the latter principle captures not just the surface rule that Wh-constituents appear in clause-initial position, but it captures all syntactic dependencies.

Another one. The rule that in English you must say eat a sausage and not a sausage eat is not an arbitrary fact about verbs and objects in English but follows from the more fundamental choice in English to linearise complements after their heads. This is not just true for verbs and objects but also for determiners and nominal phrases, and for complementisers and clauses. It is, in fact, the rule within English phrases in general.

Many more examples can be given. Syntacticians try to capture general, underlying patterns on the basis of the surface patterns we observe, and formalise these into a theory. The theory we developed in this way for English meets a couple of requirements we can set for any scientific theory:

Summary

Timeline

1171 Start of Henry II's conquest of Ireland, creation of Lordship of Ireland

1263 Collapse of Norse power over Western Isles

1280s Edward I defeats Welsh princes, establishes Principality, begins to build castles

1286 Edward I claims Scottish throne (start of wars of independence)

1314 Scots defeat English at Bannockburn

1320 Declaration of Arbroath (declaration of Scottish independence)

1357 English recognise David II as King of Scotland; end of wars of independence

1400–9 Glyn Dŵr's rebellion

1415 Agincourt

1422 Henry V succeeded by Henry VI

1452 James II murders the Earl of Douglas

1453 English driven out of France; fall of Byzantium

1469 Scots acquire Shetland from Norsemen

Introduction

The first two chapters will consider the societies and governance of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in about 1450. Chapter 1 will focus on the workings of power and law, with particular emphasis on kings and their more powerful subjects. Chapter 2 will consider the economy – above all the relationship between landlords and peasants – together with the lower levels of government and the functioning of communities, concluding with a discussion of ‘mental worlds’, above all religion and the spirit world. Both chapters emphasise diversity, which derived from ethnic and linguistic differences and the fundamental contrast between highland and lowland societies. Highland regions tended to be sparsely populated, dependent primarily on pastoral farming, with few towns and limited trade. Lowland regions focused more on arable farming, with larger villages, significant towns, and more developed manufactures and trade. In social and cultural terms the most striking contrasts were those between Celtic and what I shall very crudely describe as ‘feudal’ societies and governments, such as those of England and Lowland Scotland. We shall consider the development of systems of law and parliaments, which became the mechanisms through which kings could negotiate with their more powerful subjects, levy taxes and make laws. We shall also consider the ways in which ‘feudalism’ changed, in terms of the relationships between lord and peasant, between greater and lesser lords, and between lords and the king, concluding with a discussion of the supposedly degenerate ‘bastard’ feudalism found in England by the mid fifteenth century.

Summary

The American political commentator and an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, introduced his book on public opinion with the following story: ‘There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was therefore with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony gathered at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting on behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.’ Lippmann used the story to illustrate the way in which public opinion was shaped by the flow and control of information. It also illustrates that war was not widely expected in the summer of 1914.

From the well-connected diplomat to the agricultural labourers in the field, many Europeans were confident that peace between the great powers, which had been tested by a series of severe crises between 1911 and 1913, would endure. At the beginning of 1914, Arthur Nicolson, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, suggested that the governments of the great powers would have their hands full with domestic affairs. The Home Rule crisis in Britain, the revolving door of government in the French Third Republic, the scandal over military abuse of civilians in Zabern in Germany, and the perennial concerns about the nationalities in the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire meant governments wanted international stability so that they could deal with domestic problems. Only Russia, he thought, had no such internal distractions, but he did not consider the Tsarist regime a threat to international peace. Whereas Nicolson was writing about the immediate prospects of the international system, others believed that they lived in ‘the golden age of security’, as Stefan Zweig put it in his memoirs. Peace and stability characterised the permanent condition of life in Europe before 1914, or so many contemporaries believed.

Summary

CHAPTER OUTLINE

So, let's start. In the introduction we stated, very ambitiously, that by studying the rules underlying proper English sentences we may ultimately be able to better understand what is going on in the human mind or brain. So how do we study those rules? We will begin by looking at simple sentences and reveal an important insight: syntactic rules do not apply to particular words, but rather to particular categories that words belong to, e.g. nouns and verbs. That simple but fundamental insight already reduces the number of potential syntactic rules in a drastic way, and therefore saves us a lot of work. Moreover, we will see that words belong to a particular category because they carry features that are purely syntactic, and that must be distinguished from features that tell you how to pronounce those words or that tell you what they mean. These features will play a very important role throughout the book, and, for starters, they will help us make a first syntactic discovery: there are words that are never uttered.

Insight: Words and Categories

Syntax tries to understand why certain sentences (like Mary loves Suzanne) are good English sentences, whereas other ones (such as loves Mary Suzanne or Mary snores Suzanne) are bad English sentences. What causes them to be either good or bad?

Language consists of words. Words are elements that can be combined into sentences. In a way, you can think of words as the building blocks (like Lego blocks) with which sentences can be built. A simple sentence like Mary loves Suzanne consists of three words. The first idea therefore might be to say that there are certain rules in language (in this case, the English language) that allow the words loves, Suzanne and Mary to be combined in a particular order.

In essence, then, you need rules. If there weren't any rules, nobody could explain the correctness, often called the grammaticality, of some sentences and the ungrammaticality of others. There would be no way of stating the distinction if there were no rules. But how specific must these rules be?

Summary

CHAPTER OUTLINE

We saw in the previous chapter that every syntactic dependency reflects a relation between an interpretable and uninterpretable feature of the same type. In this way, we were able to generalise over case assignment, agreement relations and binding phenomena. However, we were not at that stage able to provide a uniform analysis for [F]–[uF] agreement, since nominative case agreement did not really fit in: the [uFin] feature on the subject in spec-FinP c-commands the [Fin] feature on the Fin head (and not the other way around), whereas other dependencies show the opposite c-command relationship. We have seen that an attempt to simplify the system usually leads to new insights. We will therefore hypothesise that we have not yet been able to account for agreement in a uniform way because we are still missing something. This chapter introduces this missing piece of the puzzle, which is a topic in its own right. It involves the recognition that constituents sometimes appear in positions in which we do not interpret them. They seem to move around. Syntactic movement, we will show, is not a new property of syntax. Rather, it follows immediately from the building procedure we already have: Merge. The existence of movement phenomena is therefore a prediction, and a confirmed one, made by the Merge hypothesis.

Insight: Constituents Can Move

So far, we have created structures by binary application of Merge. What does this mean? It means that you take two constituents and put them together. And if you want to build something bigger, you take a new constituent and add that to the structure you previously created. So if you have a sentence like Adrian has always liked this yellow chair, you take yellow and chair and merge them, and you merge the result yellow chair with this. Then you merge the DP this yellow chair with liked; this result you merge with always, you then take has and merge it with what you have. Finally, you merge that product with Adrian and you get Adrian has always liked this yellow chair.

Summary

Between 1871 and 1914, there were no wars between the acknowledged great powers. At first, this seems like an outrageous run of good fortune. After all, the international system had emerged from a series of wars in the 1850s and 1860s, there had been no general peace conference at which the great powers acknowledged the legitimacy of the system, the great powers embarked on aggressive expansionist policies by the early 1880s, and there were regular crises throughout the period. Yet peace was maintained for more than four decades, the longest period of peace between the great powers until the end of the Cold War. The maintenance of peace owed much to the development of the alliance system, the relative flexibility of great power alignments, the expansion of the great powers around the globe, and their willingness to expand at the expense of weaker states, including the ‘dying nations’, as the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, called them, the Ottoman, Chinese, and Persian empires, rather than each other. Tensions were leavened by long-standing practices and norms in European politics, including great power congresses and compensation.

The disintegration of the Ottoman and Chinese empires, however, exacerbated great power tensions. Both were managed, just about, without war between the great powers, although Russia and Japan, the latter not being considered a great power, fought in the Far East in 1904–5. The disintegration of Ottoman power, partly the outcome of great power policies, partly due to the internal problems facing the empire, accelerated from 1908, and especially from 1911 onwards. Moreover, in 1912 and 1913, the great powers lost control over the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, as smaller Balkan states – Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia – carved out their own foreign policy agendas. These wars also upset the already fragile norms that had underpinned great power since 1871. Austria-Hungary was the great power most affected by these developments, and by 1913, the stability of the international system rested on whether its perceived decline could be arrested or managed without a war.

The Development of the Alliance System, 1871–1894

Between 1854 and 1871, all the great powers had fought in a series of wars, which destroyed the remnants of the 1815 Vienna Settlement. The wars of Italian and German unification had forged two nation-states, which took their place alongside the other great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria, and France.

Summary

Much of this book has suggested that a general war was not an inevitable, or even a probable, outcome of international rivalries before 1914. Between 1871 and 1914, the international system was able to accommodate vast economic, social, and cultural changes. The maintenance of peace was a fundamental condition for many of these changes, particularly economic globalisation. Peace also facilitated cooperation on everything from agreements on scientific standards to the development of international associations to promote sport. The international system did not remain static, but evolved considerably during the forty-four years separating the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War. Imperial expansion and the shift in the relative power of the great powers put pressure on the international system. However, these changes were accommodated by a combination of cooperation, alliances, ententes, and armaments. There were periodic crises, particularly in the final years of peace, but these were resolved without the recourse to general war. Every political system – domestic and international – endures crises. The test of a system lies not in its ability to prevent crises, but in its ability to resolve them. The fact that crises recurred in the same areas – the Balkans, North Africa, and the Far East – is testimony to the fact that solutions were based on compromise, not a final settlement of differences. A final reckoning of these differences would have led to war.

Viewing international relations before 1914 as the prelude to war places historical research into something of a teleological tunnel. Histories privilege conflict at the expense of restraint, crises at the expense of their solutions, recklessness at the expense of compromise. Of course, these were important features of international politics in this period. Nonetheless, an awareness of the different possibilities and the open-ended, contingent nature of history enables a broader and more nuanced understanding of international politics before the First World War. The history of international relations in this period is not simply an account of the origins of the war, but also of the maintenance of peace. It is a history of achievements, as well as of ultimate failure. Both require explanation and the explanation of one enhances our understanding of the other.

There were powerful restraints on a general war between the great powers before 1914.

Summary

Since the first edition appeared in 2010, a wealth of new scholarship about the origins of the First World War has been published. These works have sparked a renewed debate about numerous issues, including the July crisis, Russian foreign policy, the significance of the Balkan Wars, the relationship between great power politics and globalisation, and the changing normative environment in which international politics was conducted. I have benefited from conversations with friends and colleagues, from reviewers who highlighted questions and problems raised by the first edition, and from readers who alerted me to the odd error.

In particular, I would like to thank Catherine Holmes for encouraging me to write a review article on the new literature that appeared in the English Historical Review in 2014 and Jack Levy and John Vasquez, who invited me to participate in a round-table debate at the International Studies Association in 2013, later the basis for an edited volume. I also had the good fortune to co-edit a volume on the Balkan Wars and international politics with Andreas Rose and Dominik Geppert. I would like to thank them and the contributors to that volume for helping me to think through old questions and encounter new ones.

Over the past few years, I have benefited from stints at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and from a EURIAS fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Although I worked on other projects at these institutes, one project tends to seep into another. The conversations at these institutes were at once far removed from, but resonant with, the debates about the origins of the First World War. Such are the advantages of the inter-disciplinary environment. I would like to thank the staff, members, and fellows of these two institutes for sharing their thoughts.

Summary

In early 1450 South East England was seething with discontent. English rule over large areas of France, which had endured for centuries, was unravelling at alarming speed, raising the prospect of French coastal raids and even invasion. Henry VI's government seemed to lack the competence or the will to stem the tide. Those around the King seemed more concerned to pursue personal feuds and to extort money, and the King seemed unable to restrain them. These alleged ‘traitors’ and extortioners were widely known and there were many calls for them to be brought to justice. As the King failed to act, people took matters into their own hands. In January 1450 Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester and lord privy seal, went to Portsmouth to pay some of what was owing to seamen and soldiers. They accused him of trying to cheat them, ‘fell on him and there killed him’. In April the most hated of the King's advisers, the Duke of Suffolk, was impeached by the Commons in Parliament, who accused him of extortion, embezzlement and helping the French King to reconquer Normandy. The King declared that on the last charge Suffolk had no case to answer, and that as punishment for his other alleged offences he should be banished for five years. Londoners attacked Suffolk's retinue as he left. He got safely on board a ship, but it was intercepted by another, the Nicholas of the Tower, whose crew seized him and brought him into Dover ‘and there upon the ship's side struck off his head and after laid the body with the head upon the land and then departed again to the sea’. As a contemporary poet savagely exulted: ‘Such a pain pricked him [Suffolk] he asked [for] a confessor./ Nicolas said, “I am ready thy confessor to be.”/ He was holden so that he ne[ver] passed that hour.’ In June another of the King's close associates, William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, was dragged from the altar of the abbey church at Edington, Wiltshire, where he had been saying Mass. ‘And then,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘they led him up unto a hill there beside, and there they slew him horribly, their father and their bishop, and spoiled him unto the naked skin and rent his bloody shirt into pieces and bore that away with them … and made boast of their wickedness.’

Summary

TIMELINE

1536 Pilgrimage of Grace

1549 Agrarian risings

1563 Witchcraft Act

1569 Rising of the northern earls

1589 Cottages Act

1594–7 Consecutive bad harvests

1598, 1601 Poor Laws

1604 Witchcraft Act (pact with the devil)

1607 Midland rising

Introduction

During this period the population rose substantially. The demand for food and land grew faster than the demand for labour, so food prices and rents grew faster than wages. While small farmers struggled, those who produced a significant surplus profited from rising food prices. Landlords could profit, but only if they could increase their tenants’ rents; many began to manage their estates commercially, driving out unprofitable tenants. A growing gulf appeared between rich tenant farmers and their poorer neighbours, many of them now dependent on wages. The plight of the poor led to protests and petty crime. The threat of disorder led central and local government to intensify their control of the poor. They clamped down on theft and disorder, but also sought to relieve the worst effects of poverty. These developments were most apparent in England, in towns and arable areas, of which there were relatively few in Wales. The responses to poverty, developed in large towns and in villages where self-government (by the ‘better sort’) was strong, were eventually applied nationwide.

Population and Prices

Population

Sixteenth-century Englishmen worried that England was over-populated. Thomas Malthus later argued, in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), that population always tended to rise faster than food production, until it was cut back by famine, disease or war. (Contraception was not in general use.) He was vague about the relationship between these three scourges. Famine could clearly be linked to population growth and/or harvest failure. Disease was sometimes linked to hunger and malnutrition, but not always: epidemic diseases like ‘sweating sickness’ (probably a severe form of influenza), smallpox and the plague often struck when food prices were low. War's impact on population could be devastating, but it was rarely a response to population growth. The link between population growth and famine seems clear in the early fourteenth century, but then recurrent visitations of the Black Death reduced the population to well below what the land could support.

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7 - Unifying Movement and Agreement

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List of Maps

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5 - Agreement and Uninterpretable Features

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Contents

List of Tables

Frontmatter

Index

Afterword

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Acknowledgements

1 - Kings, Lords and Peoples

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1 - Introduction

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1 - Categories and Features

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Bibliography

6 - Movement and Remerge

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2 - Security and Expansion: The Great Powers and Geopolitics, 1871–1914

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7 - Conclusion

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Preface to the Second Edition

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Prologue: Kent, 1450

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6 - State and Society 1536-1625 1: England and Wales

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