Stephen Jacobson

Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective

By the close of the nineteenth century, most continental Europeans tacitly accepted, if they thought about it at all, the notion that a civil code governed multiple personal and familial relationships in their daily lives. Like so many legislative structures, intellectual suppositions, and cultural artifacts, what was once regarded as a novel or even a major break with the past came to be understood as one of the many requisites of modernity. Contemporary historians have adopted a similarly indifferent posture, their curiosity only piqued when encountering specific provisions entangled with other political issues. In a strikingly dissimilar approach to that adopted toward penal law, they have been disinclined to explore the relationship between civil legal endeavor and political culture or the history of ideas. Only with respect to Germany have scholars considered these topics worthy of in-depth analysis; in so doing, they have demonstrated that understanding juridical culture is fundamental to appreciating the textures and peculiarities of the liberal nation state.

Lawyers on the Spanish Atlantic on the eve of the revolutionary era

ABSTRACT Why did lawyers grow sympathetic to revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century? This article addresses this question by examining the legal profession in the Spanish empire. It relies on the work of historians who have analysed the bar in specific places in Iberia and the Americas, as well as additional sources. At the same time, it avoids dividing lawyers into “metropolitan” and “colonial” practitioners, given similarities in legal practice and royal justice in the various crownlands on both sides of the Atlantic. It examines the Bourbon Reforms, the juridical Enlightenment, and social-class origins. It discusses how the onslaught of the French Revolution led Charles IV to sponsor a campaign against lawyers, undermining a relatively harmonious relationship between crown and bar that had existed during the Enlightenment. On the eve of the revolution, many young and entrepreneurial lawyers professed radical ideas about sovereignty, equality, and judicial reform, but faced a saturated profession in which they were prejudiced by royal laws and the recalcitrance of elders. Many came from middle-class backgrounds and represented heterogeneous clienteles. They were eminently familiar with feudal and racial tensions on the eve of the disintegration of the Old Regime.

The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain

issue is framed in terms of the role of stakeholders, another problem arises. The members of Amsterdam’s city council certainly saw themselves as representing the wealth and property of their city. But the same could be said, and with equal justice, for the magnates and nobles who dominated the estates of most German-speaking territories, and who also controlled territorial finances. Amsterdammay have done better at building a reputation for itself in the credit markets than, say, Bavaria orWürttemberg, but one ought to recognize that burghers and landed nobles were using similar techniques to manage state debt. Furthermore, Stasavage seems to assume that there was a single high road to fiscal/ political modernity, running from city-states of a certain type through small territories that allotted merchant groups a significant role in their representative assemblies. He never considers the possibility that sovereigns could create serviceable forms of long-term debt that did not involve any representative process. For example, he does not mention the common practice of issuing rentes against revenues of the domain, controlled by the ruler. Although he is aware that the French crown was issuing rentes as early as 1332 (these were domain rentes), he starts his history of France’s public credit only in 1522, when the Paris city government was called upon to back the king’s credit. In the case of Castile, he rightly stresses the role of the Cortes in the subsidies known as servicios de millones of the late sixteenth century, but does not mention the juros (bonds), based on the king’s alcabala (sales tax) income, and sold to the public from the late fifteenth century; this was the principal form of state debt for nearly 150 years. There is also no mention of the papacy, which from the middle of the sixteenth century issued luoghi (equivalent to rentes) on which interest was so reliably paid that they often sold at a price well above par. In the end, there is a clash of disciplines. If the stereotypical historian is a stubborn nominalist who refuses to recognize any two phenomena as having anything important in common, the stereotypical political scientist is a determined idealist, seeking to establish a hypothesis that will cover as many phenomena as possible. In this case, Stasavage gives Clio’s disciples much to ponder, by making often plausible comparisons that historians seldom undertake. Conversely, political scientists might think a bit more about the possibility that the same end-point in a process of institutional development is reachable by many different roads.