Julia Adams is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
Seldom have two hundred pages displayed such ambitious goals and
achieved them with such a remarkable fluency. Julia Adams examines
state formation and familial institutions in three early modern
European countries: the Netherlands, France, and England. In so
doing, she restores the Dutch experience to the centrality that it
commanded in the seventeenth century. The book also suggests to
national historians and historical sociologists that a narrow focus
just cannot answer the big questions posed by the very histories so
ubiquitously practiced by the current generation of one-nation
historians. Comfortable being both genuinely comparative and firmly
grounded in her own field, historical sociology, Adams further
argues that the old categories deployed by historical
analysis—state structures, class, religion, and patronage—cannot
address the complexity of power without also addressing gender—more
precisely, patrimony—as a force of immense historical
significance.... This is a book that should now become required
reading in every graduate seminar in early modern European history.
It challenges us all to think outside the box that is the history
of the nation, and it rewards such thinking with fresh insight into
issues of gender, class, and state formation. It is a triumph.
*Journal of Modern History*
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