Historical sociology (HS) is not a typical approach to International Relations (IR). Rather, it is a fascinating scholarly tradition that offers rewarding conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools to the student of IR. HS explores how past events, formations, and developments shape contemporary political units, actors, and ideas. It examines how and why actors – such as regimes, political movements, or individuals – interact within constraining contexts to generate intended and occasionally unintentional consequences. HS frees the analysis from seemingly timeless concepts such as ‘state’ or ‘anarchy’. This chapter explores HS in two main sections. Section 2.1 explores the sociological origins and main tenets of HS by engaging key founding theorists in this tradition. Section 2.2, the case study, examines the social origins of the 1952 revolution in Egypt and its impact on its foreign policy. The section illustrates how social factors, which originated in the eighteenth century, and colonialism coupled with changes in the international balance of power in the post-World War II period contributed to the revolution and, subsequently, a revision of Egyptian foreign policy in the period 1952–1970.

Prisons were emblematic of early modern state formation, expanding in tandem with the growing impingement of state officers and the legal system on everyday life. Chapter 1 focuses on the institutional development of prisons, the officers who ran them and their place within the officeholding state. It surveys the variety of prisons in England, the product of gradual and uneven development that gave rise to institutions that operated within a series of overlapping jurisdictions and that struggled with a rapidly expanding carceral population. This decentralised carceral infrastructure – so typical of the early modern state – also posed challenges for prison governance and regulation, opening the system to claims of corruption and profiteering. Thus, this chapter explores the place of the gaoler within the wider dynamics of early modern officeholding authority and the disciplinary maintenance of economic and social stability. It argues that as unpopular state agents, gaolers posed challenges to political legitimacy, in extreme cases generating hostility towards state and legal authority.

Between 1560 and 1700, England became an increasingly carceral society; that is, a society in which the prison became a dominant tool of order, permeated by a disciplinary logic that began to shape social relations well beyond the prison walls. Imprisonment posed an ever greater threat to men and women across the social spectrum thanks to the quickening activity of the criminal justice system, growing political and religious conflict and a precipitous rise in civil litigation. This Introduction outlines the significance of these developments, before explaining their significance to wider historiographies of credit and debt, legal practice, state formation and political conflict in early modern England. It suggests that a focus on growing levels of debt imprisonment (which served particular class interests) helps explain how rapid socioeconomic change and social stratification forced many people into often involuntary and negative participation in state institutions and the law. In turn, this conditioned an emergent politics of prison abolition that became increasingly important to the radical politics of the English Revolution, helping to explain interactions of social change and political conflict. Finally, this Introduction outlines the source base for this study and summarises the chapters that follow.

Remarkable forms of self-governance and collective identity developed within these carceral communities, another means of dealing with the deprivations of captivity. They encouraged solidarity and mutual support, especially among poorer prisoners. And yet, ironically, they could enable greater social control within the prison. Chapter 4 analyses the corporations – headed by elected or customarily selected stewards – through which prisoners managed life inside. They provided the foundations for practical and symbolic collective identities that prisoners also communicated to the wider world. Based around the administration of charity, this culture of self-governance gave rise to customs and practices by which prisoners collectively negotiated their time in prison. Yet although potentially empowering, the formal extension of officeholding to prisoners also represented the wider diffusion of early modern state power into prison populations and an attempt to exert greater social control over them. Indeed, this chapter challenges our view of early modern self-government – often understood as a mechanism of local autonomy and negotiation with higher powers – by discussing an extreme example in which participants could be actively involved in constricting their own liberty.

The conclusion places the findings of this study within contemporary debates about Germany’s colonial past, using the Humboldt Forum as an entry point. It contrasts the official culture of remembrance, shaped by a redemption narrative, with a broader argument about global interconnectedness: German colonialism shaped not only societies in Africa, the Pacific, and China, but also the metropole and its political system. Yet these entanglements remain largely hidden, as their structural effects were absorbed into the institutions of the nation-state. To counter this obfuscation, the study traces the colonies’ imprint on imperial (later presidential) authority, the accountability of political officials, parliamentary leverage, the growth of the federal administration, naval expansion, increasing fiscal centralisation, the nationalisation of citizenship, and the expansion of civil society, revealing these developments as responses to the varied challenges of colonial governance. Taken together, they contributed to Germany’s consolidation as a more centralised nation-state. The argument culminates in a lateral theory of state formation, highlighting the pathways and mechanisms through which cross-border entanglements have shaped European nation-states.

The governance of politics, the economy and security has evolved in the Gulf States since independence. State formation describes the process by which states have grown in capacity and resources for the governance of different public policy areas: security, economic welfare and political representation. Theoretical approaches to state formation propose to look at war-making and resource mobilisation as drivers of this. However, war-making has in the Middle East often destroyed states, rather than helped build them. Moreover, rulers of the Gulf States have benefited from abundant revenues from oil and gas that have allowed them to govern without the need to mobilise domestic revenues. The specific governance model that has emerged is described as a rentier state bargain. Rulers are expected to ensure security, provide welfare and allow for representation of their citizens. This chapter describes the evolution of these processes in the Gulf States, including how certain societal groups have been central in state formation. The chapter also discusses expectations for a social contract beyond the rentier bargain.

Chapter 1 starts by exploring the history of the term ‘settlement’. Having traced its emergence in the seventeenth century, the chapter investigates the making of the ‘settlement’ act of 1662. A study of parliamentary records uncovers the emergence of new legislation in the post-Restoration context and illuminates the final stages of the process when amendments were made that shaped the settlement legislation for centuries to come. Subsequent laws led to the introduction of new ‘settlement certificates’. The third section traces the spread of the ‘settlement’ system and its impact on both local administrations and the negotiating strategies of the poor – central issues pursued throughout the book. These explorations draw on records from two corners of England, Sussex in the south-east and Lancashire in the north-west. Additional sources are employed from metropolitan London and other localities.

By 1776, when a parliamentary survey was held to assess poor law expenditure in England and Wales, the ‘settlement’ system was a familiar feature in local communities, regulating access to poor relief and if necessary removal since the previous century. The introduction explores the broad historiography on the topic and suggests how key provisions emerged in the Restoration era, a development examined in Chapter 1. The discussion proceeds to introduce the arguments of the remaining chapters, in which some of the unintended consequences of the legislation are explored: from the emergence of a huge body of administrative forms to the regulation of kinship and family for the purposes of migration, and on to impacts on parish and county administration, community life, and even the state’s capacity to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars.

The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765) records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas, and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

The conclusion brings together the book’s several arguments to explain the impact of the settlement legislation on family, community, and national life during our period. Discussions highlight how legal changes taking place in the Restoration era, and developed thereafter, affected English society and state formation in ways little imagined by the legislators, and how the focus on parish settlement has brought together an array of fields not often studied together and has enabled the book to engage with local experiences as well as broad processes of historical change.

Chapter 2 branches out to study one of the most noticeable – if unintended – impacts of the settlement legislation: the emergence of a huge body of administrative paperwork relating to the settlement of the poor. This chapter begins with the role of printers and stationers, masters of the metropolitan Stationers’ Company, who played a key role in the production and distribution of the settlement forms. Drawing on our north-western and south-eastern samples, the chapter explores how the business of forms took root. It also investigates the continued and highly significant use of manuscript. Influential social and political theorists – from Max Weber to Michel Foucault – have emphasised state control of bureaucratic procedures. Here we see how, while dealing with the settlement laws, influences emerged from the bottom up, as stationers, scribes, local officers, and even paupers contributed to the rise of the form.

In Chapter 3, notions of kinship and family come to the fore. Once belonging had been articulated by the settlement laws, and moreover was seen to have been invested not only in individuals but in families, the question soon arose: who counted as ‘family’ for the purposes of the law? For example, when and under what circumstances would the status of ‘child’ expire? What would be the effects of marriage and remarriage? A study of legal sources helps distil the changing regulations – another unintended consequence of the settlement laws which affected millions, and echoes today. A case study concerning one woman illustrates the effects of the settlement laws on kinship and community relations. Local and regional samples suggest how the law was implemented in near and distant localities.