Immerwahrend Und Ausserordentlich: Steuern, Herrschaft Und Sozialordnung Im Alten Reich (17.-18. Jahrhundert)

This book examines conflicts surrounding the payment of the imperial tax in the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the centre of the analysis are the drivers of the spatial and social construction of power, the consent to submission and its refusal. Taxation is a vector for the ordering of the social world, as a sovereign prerogative and as an instrument of power affirmation. But it is also a vector of protest. From the ordinary taxpayer to the imperial prince, the network of loyalties and dependencies can be traced on the basis of the tax. The imperial tax is an observation post for how the social world holds together and is held together in an Ancient Reich characterised by the persistence of surprising forms of power.