UC Berkeley

The argument of this dissertation is that the origins of the modern English state lie not with government agents or institutions but rather with the emergence of novel responses among private members of society to the unprecedented convergence of economic and social change experienced in the period of roughly 1520 to 1620. Large-scale economic instability and social restructuring created incentives, particularly for property owners, to find methods for cultivating financial and social predictability among increasingly mobile and anonymous populations. The result was a culture of impersonality and homogeneity that constructed both capitalism and the modern state in a unified but diffuse historical process. This dissertation studies the development of the state through five interdependent aspects. First is the widespread use of written financial accounts and increasingly hierarchic organization of managerial labor on landed estates that became bureaucratization. Second, a close analysis of early mapmaking shows that cartography was initially a technology of real property litigation and estate management, and that the government scrambled to catch up with the process of territorialization. Third, territorial conceptions of real property put pressure on courts of law to protect changing types of claims to property, which resulted in a theoretically universalizable legal system based in artificial reason rather than custom, allowing for the expansive monopolization of justice. Fourth, popular perception of vagrancy as a national crisis challenged the traditional practice of mobility as a trait of rulership, eventually motivating the idea of spatially centralized governance in relation to increasingly peripatetic subjects. Fifth, and last, cultural anxiety caused by awareness of these social and economic behaviors becoming political practice is demonstrated in the literature of the time culminating in the utter finality of Hobbes’s Leviathan as a political philosophy of sovereignty grounded in a spatial theory of human sense perception. Each study shows that these technologies had social and economic origins to which the government was forced to adapt to, and eventually adopt, thus becoming a modern state.