Angel Martinez’s Reviews > The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations > Status Update

Commercialization model of Braudel:

history of structure - passage imperceptible, change slow, relationship btwn man & environment
history of conjunctures - slow but perceptible, social history, of groups and groupings
history of events - basically phenomena

correspondingly, we have geographical, social, and individual time. but Braudel doesnt see a totality within these timelines, instead they are separate.

"The persistence of coercive agrarian extraction [Middle Ages] meant that noble appropriation remained ... territorially extensive & politically intensive. Precisely because direct producers remained in possession of the means of subsistence, the capitalist logic of systematic cost-cutting (replacing labor w tech innovations & resultant productivity ⬆️predicated on systematic reinvestments, couldn't take hold" (111).

tbh didnt know jack (besides maybe about Charlemagne) about the Carolignian Empire before this but now im interested. social relations back then really are a bit weird to fathom for my 21st century mind, accustomed to 21st century social relations. some serfs actually were free because they were able to arm and defend themselves. knights didnt pop up until the 10th-11th century as part of the feudal revolution

medieval geopolitical system:
- no int'l/domestic, economic/political dichotomy
- based on relations btwn lords & peasants
- lords organized into 'state of associated persons'
- logic of political accumulation (lord-peasant, lord-lord)
- noble right to bear arms means no monopoly of violence held by this 'state'

"... Weber's historical sociology first and foremost serves comparison by constructing ideal types under which the most diverse historical and geographical cases can be subsumed and stored away. This... implies the transformation of history as an open process into history as a database furnishing evidentiary material for a series of systematized taxonomies. This is the death of history as becoming" (50-51).

Chapter 2 (A Theory of Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages) thesis: "... nature and dynamics of international systems are governed by the character of their constitutive units, which, in turn, rests on the specific property relations prevailing within them" (46).

English transition to capitalism marked by moves from dynastic sovereignty to parliamentary sovereignty (Glorious Revolution of 1688).

* 'blue-water' policy
* power-balancing in a 'mixed' states-system
* playing states off against each other (triangulation) until militarily/financially exhausted
* IR not modern, but modernizing

"In the long run, the breakdown of the absolutist-patrimonial 'tax/office' state was 'externally' induced, deriving primarily from the economic and military pressures exerted by capitalist Britain" (10) - on core argument of chapter 5. seems interesting.

Core Theoretical argument: "...the constitution, operation, and transformation of geopolitical orders are predicated on the changing identities of their constitutive units"

*social property relations define the constitution and identity of these units
*institutions (providing rules & norms) as petrified praxes for reproduction of property relations
*strategies of reproduction define inner/outer unit relations

"...this book argues that 1648, far from signaling a breakthrough to modern inter-state relations, was the culmination of the epoch of absolutist state formation; it marked the recognition and regulation of the international [inter-dynastic] relations of absolutist, dynastic polities... [must] unpack the social relations of sovereignty that underwrote the Westphalian order to reveal its non-modern nature." (3)