Toward a history from below of the Holy Roman Empire: People’s history as an approach to domination (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)

This paper analyzes the adequacy of the notions of “people’s history” and “history from below” for interpreting power relations and social domination in the Holy Roman Empire. German historiography has long approached history as if “seeing like a state” (James C. Scott) and has also been deeply structured by Weberian premises. Although recent literature has tried to reverse these “top-down” paradigms, it has only rarely taken the Empire itself into account. This paper suggests some possibilities for a history from below of this so-called archaic and “monstrous” Empire through an analysis of protests against imperial taxation. Observing how the social and political strategies of ordinary people contributed to shaping the imperial body politic enables a more socially dense understanding of the very notion of “modernity,” the—often implicit—core of the Weberian model.