The conclusion places the findings of this study within contemporary debates about Germany’s colonial past, using the Humboldt Forum as an entry point. It contrasts the official culture of remembrance, shaped by a redemption narrative, with a broader argument about global interconnectedness: German colonialism shaped not only societies in Africa, the Pacific, and China, but also the metropole and its political system. Yet these entanglements remain largely hidden, as their structural effects were absorbed into the institutions of the nation-state. To counter this obfuscation, the study traces the colonies’ imprint on imperial (later presidential) authority, the accountability of political officials, parliamentary leverage, the growth of the federal administration, naval expansion, increasing fiscal centralisation, the nationalisation of citizenship, and the expansion of civil society, revealing these developments as responses to the varied challenges of colonial governance. Taken together, they contributed to Germany’s consolidation as a more centralised nation-state. The argument culminates in a lateral theory of state formation, highlighting the pathways and mechanisms through which cross-border entanglements have shaped European nation-states.

The governance of politics, the economy and security has evolved in the Gulf States since independence. State formation describes the process by which states have grown in capacity and resources for the governance of different public policy areas: security, economic welfare and political representation. Theoretical approaches to state formation propose to look at war-making and resource mobilisation as drivers of this. However, war-making has in the Middle East often destroyed states, rather than helped build them. Moreover, rulers of the Gulf States have benefited from abundant revenues from oil and gas that have allowed them to govern without the need to mobilise domestic revenues. The specific governance model that has emerged is described as a rentier state bargain. Rulers are expected to ensure security, provide welfare and allow for representation of their citizens. This chapter describes the evolution of these processes in the Gulf States, including how certain societal groups have been central in state formation. The chapter also discusses expectations for a social contract beyond the rentier bargain.

Chapter 1 starts by exploring the history of the term ‘settlement’. Having traced its emergence in the seventeenth century, the chapter investigates the making of the ‘settlement’ act of 1662. A study of parliamentary records uncovers the emergence of new legislation in the post-Restoration context and illuminates the final stages of the process when amendments were made that shaped the settlement legislation for centuries to come. Subsequent laws led to the introduction of new ‘settlement certificates’. The third section traces the spread of the ‘settlement’ system and its impact on both local administrations and the negotiating strategies of the poor – central issues pursued throughout the book. These explorations draw on records from two corners of England, Sussex in the south-east and Lancashire in the north-west. Additional sources are employed from metropolitan London and other localities.

By 1776, when a parliamentary survey was held to assess poor law expenditure in England and Wales, the ‘settlement’ system was a familiar feature in local communities, regulating access to poor relief and if necessary removal since the previous century. The introduction explores the broad historiography on the topic and suggests how key provisions emerged in the Restoration era, a development examined in Chapter 1. The discussion proceeds to introduce the arguments of the remaining chapters, in which some of the unintended consequences of the legislation are explored: from the emergence of a huge body of administrative forms to the regulation of kinship and family for the purposes of migration, and on to impacts on parish and county administration, community life, and even the state’s capacity to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars.

The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765) records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas, and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

The conclusion brings together the book’s several arguments to explain the impact of the settlement legislation on family, community, and national life during our period. Discussions highlight how legal changes taking place in the Restoration era, and developed thereafter, affected English society and state formation in ways little imagined by the legislators, and how the focus on parish settlement has brought together an array of fields not often studied together and has enabled the book to engage with local experiences as well as broad processes of historical change.

Chapter 2 branches out to study one of the most noticeable – if unintended – impacts of the settlement legislation: the emergence of a huge body of administrative paperwork relating to the settlement of the poor. This chapter begins with the role of printers and stationers, masters of the metropolitan Stationers’ Company, who played a key role in the production and distribution of the settlement forms. Drawing on our north-western and south-eastern samples, the chapter explores how the business of forms took root. It also investigates the continued and highly significant use of manuscript. Influential social and political theorists – from Max Weber to Michel Foucault – have emphasised state control of bureaucratic procedures. Here we see how, while dealing with the settlement laws, influences emerged from the bottom up, as stationers, scribes, local officers, and even paupers contributed to the rise of the form.

In Chapter 3, notions of kinship and family come to the fore. Once belonging had been articulated by the settlement laws, and moreover was seen to have been invested not only in individuals but in families, the question soon arose: who counted as ‘family’ for the purposes of the law? For example, when and under what circumstances would the status of ‘child’ expire? What would be the effects of marriage and remarriage? A study of legal sources helps distil the changing regulations – another unintended consequence of the settlement laws which affected millions, and echoes today. A case study concerning one woman illustrates the effects of the settlement laws on kinship and community relations. Local and regional samples suggest how the law was implemented in near and distant localities.

Chapter 1 is a detailed guide to the multifaceted historical backdrop of the Safavids, charting their first transformation, from a Sufi order to a potent Shiʿi empire in Iran. In this exploration, Anatolia holds particular importance, illuminating the region’s significant impact on the Safavid journey and unveiling the movement’s origins within Ottoman territories. This chapter also contends that a rigid understanding of sects and sectarianism does not adequately capture the nuanced emergence of the early Safavid movement and its spread into neighboring regions. Instead, it posits that the Safavid order (and later the state) was the product of a syncretic and turbulent religious, cultural, and political landscape in Southwest Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This perspective is particularly pertinent when connecting Safavid history to recent scholarship that highlights the coexistence and long-term transformations of religious identities in regions such as Anatolia and the Iberian Peninsula, rather than reducing the narrative to one of perpetual tension and abrupt ruptures.

Chapter 8 focuses on Machiavelli’s mature theory of the state in the Discorsi. It begins by drawing attention to the extent to which his theory continues to be mounted as an attack upon the prevalent pattern of neo-classical political discourse in the humanist writings of his predecessors, which had defined and explicated the civitas, the populus, and the res publica as forms of civil association. Their political arguments had been predicated upon a belief in natural human sociability. As in Il Principe, so in the Discorsi, Machiavelli’s theory of the state involves him in rejecting these philosophical presuppositions entirely and in supplying a new philosophical picture of the state as a body. After identifying some new challenges which now face Machiavelli in his account of ‘the free state’, this chapter shows how Machiavelli uses Book 1, chapter 2, to furnish two novel pieces of his theory. The first consists in a conjectural history of the state; the second articulates a genealogy of virtue. That Machiavelli’s explanation of the generation of a moral vocabulary among humans is ensconced within his account of the formation of the state is of lasting significance for our understanding of the architecture of his philosophy.

Chapter 7 systematically re-examines Machiavelli’s beliefs about lo stato as they emerge in his early political writings and culminate in the first full statement of his theory in Il Principe. The architecture of that theory is clarified: it is an account of both free and unfree states, and it is shown to be articulated according to a theory of rhetorical definition which was instantly recognizable to his humanist contemporaries. The place of Machiavelli’s thinking about liberty and its absence in the princely state is then investigated, as is his account of state formation, which is demonstrably conducted in equally rhetorical terms, recurring not only to the concepts of form and material to describe how political bodies are artfully assembled and shaped, but also to rhetorical ideas about invention and disposition in Machiavelli’s view of the creative work involved in founding new states. The chapter identifies the evolving role of a theory of political obligation within Machiavelli’s account of the state, before culminating in an analysis of his understanding of Fortuna’s role in state matters and his rejection of the Senecan wisdom which elsewhere informed Renaissance thinking about the remedies for good and bad luck in human affairs.