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Overview
People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories, and demonstrates how agents have actively contributed to the reproduction and transformation of the British state over the long term.- A valuable corrective to recent characterizations of territory as a static and given geographical concept
- An explication of the political geographies of state reproduction and transformation, through its focus on state territoriality and the variegated character of state power
- Considerable empirical insight into the consolidation of the British state over the long term.
Synopsis
People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories. The text develops a conceptual understanding of the state as a continually emerging and contingent territorial organization, which is reproduced, transformed, and contested by state personnel. Rhys Jones demonstrates how the iterative practices of state actors may give meaning and permanence to – or, alternatively, may question and transform – the state apparatus. In addition, Jones highlights how the state’s territory is continuously negotiated and translated by those individuals working within this state apparatus, and he illustrates how the identities and practices of state personnel have been influenced by the organizational and territorial networks of power that characterize the state. People/States/Territories views the state, along with the process of state transformation, as the product of a continual – yet temporally specific – interplay between state personnel, state organizations, and state territories.
Featuring accessible, relevant case studies of four key periods in the transformation of the state within Britain, this book focuses specifically on: the medieval process of state formation in Wessex, north-west Scotland, and north Wales; the consolidation of state organizations that took place in England and Wales during the early modern period; the peopling of a state- and territorially-organized process of government inspection in the nineteenth century in the north of England; and the territorial, organizational and peopled contexts for the current process of devolution being experienced in the UK.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Peoples/States/Territories is an extremely important book. It provides a compelling historical analysis of the British state and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, historians and sociologists. It is the best account we have on the territorial foundations of British political authority and demonstrates the enormous potential of integrating techniques and ideas from both historical and political geography."Mike Heffernan, University of Nottingham
"This is an original and well written book that will add significantly to arguments about state formation in the UK. It brings a valuable historical perspective to the debate and turns an overdue spotlight on the role of people in the shaping of state institutions."
Joe Painter, Durham University