Industrial capitalism in Europe grew up during the closing battles of a centuries-long aristocratic-“absolutist” conflict. Centralized bureaucratic state structures (absolutist states) were formed and originally functioned to protect the power of the traditional nobility. However, over time, rulers sought increasingly to gain autonomy from dominant groups within their domains. One way to do this was to secure an independent source of revenue through the creation of new classes. To achieve this, monarchs increasingly attempted to introduce liberal reforms that would attract foreign and minority elements to their lands and enable them to achieve sufficient freedom and mobility to generate a taxable revenue stream. As the threat of new classes and state autonomy increased, the nobility sought to gain control of state institutions.

THE ARISTOCRATIC-ABSOLUTIST CONFLICT

The absolutist state emerged when, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, a crisis of feudalism threatened to destroy serfdom and thus to undermine the feudal mode of production. At the behest of the landed aristocracy, the feudal seigneuries were combined in the hands of a single seigneur as a means of protecting aristocratic property and privileges. As Perry Anderson describes it, the absolutist state was essentially “a redeployed apparatus of feudal domination, the new political carapace of a threatened nobility” (1974: 18). Although the state assumed some of the political powers previously exercised by the aristocracy, it did not seek to bring about any far-reaching changes in the social and economic domination of the rural aristocracy.