Charles Tilly

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Trust and Rule asks and answers how and with what consequences members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes. Since different forms of integration between trust networks produce authoritarian, theocratic, and democratic regimes, the book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.

Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created - perhaps for the first time anywhere - mass participation in national politics. Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transmutations in popular collective action during this period. As he unravels the story of thousands of popular struggles and their consequences, he illuminates the dynamic relationships among an industrializing, capitalizing, proletarianizing economy; a war-making, growing, increasingly interventionist state; and the internal history of contention that spawned such political entrepreneurs as Francis Place and Henry Hunt. Tilly's research rests on a catalog of more than 8,000 "contentious gatherings" described in British periodicals, plus ample documentation from British archives and historical monographs. The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation, and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions not only of a wide variety of popular protests but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell. This engaging study offers a vivid picture of Great Britain during a pivotal era.

In this pathbreaking work, Charles Tilly challenges all previous formulations of state development in Europe, including his own Formation of National States in Western Europe. Specifically, Tilly charges that most available explanations fail because they do not account for the great variety of states which were viable at different stages of European history, and because they assume a unilinear path of development resolving in today's national state. Thus the central question for Tilly is this: "What accounts for the great variation over time and space in the kinds of state that have prevailed in Europe since AD 990?"

The book's twelve chapters function as six pairs. Complementing Chapter 1, Chapter 12 reviews the same problems in the light of the intervening historical analysis. The ten chapters in between pair off by period, one chapter dealing with a particular region, the other comparing the experiences of all five regions during the same period. Chapter 2 takes Burgundy from the beginning of the seventeenth century to near the end of the twentieth. Chapter 3 follows the five regions, and France as a whole, through the same four centuries. The two chapters provide an overview of the changes in social organization and in popular contention that later chapters discuss in detail. Chapter 4 concentrates on Anjou during the seventeenth-century experiences of Anjou, Burgundy, Flanders, the Ile-de-France, and Languedoc. And so on through three more chronologically matched pairs.

Consistently provocative, thoroughly original in its methods and conclusions, this book questions virtually every assumption about the conditions underlying collective violence. Written by a sociologist, a historian, and an economist, the study presents a comparative history of group behaviour leading to violence in France, Italy, and Germany. The book demonstrates how urbanization, industrialization, and the concentration of political power in these and other Western countries have affected the means ordinary people have had to act together on their grievances and aspirations.

The history of France in 1792 has been too fully written, and too generally read to leave the novelist any excuse for describing the state of Paris at the close of the summer of that year. It is known to every one that the palace of Louis XVI was sacked on the 10th of August. That he himself with his family took refuge in the National Assembly, and that he was taken thence to the prison of the Temple.