State Buildung by War: The Thirty Years' War in the Upper Palatinate

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Traditionally, historical research on war and its significance to processes of state buildung focused on the macro-historical level of resource extraction and administrative structures. Recent scholarship in the field, however, increasingly adds to this macro-historical perspective the notion of statebuilding from below (André Holenstein), thus focusing on how power is negotiated at the local level and asking what effects these interactions could have had on state building. The project presented here wants to use this approach from below in order to understand better the impact of war on processes of state building. Taking the Upper Palatinate as an example, local administrative practices shall be analysed in order to reconstruct strategies for coping with war and the effects those strategies had on power structures. Did administrative routines generate or enforce acceptance for the burdens of war? Or did they lead, on the long run, to a change in the ways subjects and authorities interacted? These questions are to be discussed from a perspective that focuses on practices, routines, and implicit knowlegde. Thus, office bearers as well as subjects are conceptualized as actors, whose practices provoke and document a change in the administrative culture shaped by the experience of war. The project s findings should make a contribution to answering the question whether the Thirty Years War helped pave the way for the accelerated processes of state buildung in the later 17th and 18th centuries.