Kerice Doten-Snitker (Chapman University)

Political and Population Networks in Medieval Europe

Please note that this is a pre-circulated paper. Those with Stanford-affiliated emails can access the paper by clicking this link. For those outside of the Stanford community, email cmemsinfo [at] stanford.edu (cmemsinfo[at]stanford[dot]edu) to receive a copy of the paper. 

Responses by Jenna Phillips and Lauren Urbont. 

This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. 

The abstract for the talk:

European historical political economy has a blind spot: interdependence in the trajectories of cities and nascent states. Most theoretical and empirical work on European state formation presupposes independent development. Yet historical accounts and more recent social science emphasizes interconnection and interdependency. I introduce a new relational dataset of ties between cities and between political elites through co-dominion and population movement, constructed through records of dominion over Jews and Jewish migration in medieval Germany and nearby environs. Co-dominion incorporated political elites into wide but sparse networks that became more fragmented and consolidated alongside territorialization. Migration followed urbanization and also tied political elites informally. Relational datasets like this one help fill our theoretical gaps on how cities were linked and what those links facilitated.