What was the State? Officiating and Litigating in Early Modern England
Research into early modern state-building has developed quite a bit over the past decades, lending more depth and complexity to such processes. There is still a tendency, however, to conceive of state-building as a game of two players, that is authorities on the one and subjects on the other hand, participating in processes of state-building through rule and resistance respectively. What tends to get lost in such a view are actors and actor groups that were not intending to contribute to the negotiation of political authority, but did so inadvertently. My talk will highlight a class of such actors in early modern England - namely: common informers - and will discuss the conceptual consequences of acknowledging the role of such groups in the history of state-building.