READ: State Centralization and Resistance

As empires expanded and states centralized, not everybody benefited. In fact, some people found the new system to be terrible, and they found many ways to resist.

The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.

Second read: key ideas and understanding content

Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

According to the article, what were major trends in the way that states changed in this period?
What does historian James Scott mean by the term “peasant weapons of the weak”?
What does the author argue that Tacky’s revolt symbolizes?How was it more than just a single revolt?
What was the goal of Popé’s revolt, and what was the outcome?
Why did aristocrats revolt in France in the rebellion known as the Fronde?
What are some ways, besides war, that the Joseon aristocrats resisted the Qing Dynasty?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

To what extent does this article explain the effects of the development of state power from 1450 to 1750?
Two of the revolts described in this article involve resistance by aristocrats, and two involve resistance by conquered or enslaved people. These were two very different groups of people, but they both resisted the growth of state power. How were the complaints that led to these acts of resistance similar, or different?

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.

State Centralization and Resistance

By Trevor Getz

As empires expanded and states centralized, not everybody benefited. In fact, some people found the new system to be terrible, and they found many ways to resist.

What is resistance?

You may have noticed a pattern emerging over the last few units. From 1400 to 1750, lots of states grew bigger. Empires expanded, taking over new territory. The vast landmass of Eurasia was split among Safavid, Ottoman, Mughal, and Ming (and later Qing) Chinese administrations. European states carved out oceanic empires and gradually occupied much of the Americas. In these empires, and even in smaller states, government tended to become more centralized. That meant decisions were made further and further away from the people who were actually affected. At the same time, government’s interference in people’s daily lives intensified—more taxes, more laws, and often more oppression.

For the peasant, the enslaved person, or the nomadic herder, government interference could be anything from a minor pain to constant cruelty. Even for elites, like nobles or wealthy merchants, a centralizing government might cut into their power or profits. So people resisted. Of course, government could also provide services such as building infrastructure and defending people, and many people were willing to put up with it, generally. Some people were more oppressed or affected by the system than others. Most often, resistance was against a particular policy or practice, rather than the whole government. But sometimes, as with the European regimes in the America that supported plantation slavery, resistance was aimed at the entire system.

Resistance of the weak(er)

When we think of resistance, we usually think of violence and large-scale revolts. We’ll get to those, but there’s a different form some call “everyday resistance” that’s also important. This refers to the kinds of strategies available to a person whose power is minimal or non-existent in comparison to their oppressor. Historian James Scott called these strategies the “peasant weapons of the weak”. He said:

“... to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance—the prosaic [humdrum] but constant struggle between peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents and interest from them. Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.”

There are a lot of complex terms in that paragraph, but they’re really pretty simple ideas. Weak people lied to escape or oppose the powerful. They ran away. They pretended to do things but then didn’t. They stole. They slowed down their work. They destroyed things when they could get away with it.

These strategies were mostly for the individual; acts a person could take on their own. But when groups of people suffered together, and things really got bad, resistance became organized. Let’s look at some examples of resistance that were organized, to see the wide range of ways it appeared in the early modern world.

Maroon society and King Tacky’s revolt

One of the types of resistance that we don’t think about a lot is just running away, or leaving. In the Americas, enslaved people often escaped from the terrible oppression of the plantation, if they could. This kind of flight was called marronage, and the people who escaped were often called maroons.

Marronage was resistance because it denied the slavers the labor they relied upon. In fact, some historians have even argued that some enslaved people would resist by killing themselves in order to deprive plantation owners of their labor. But marronage also gave rise to more resistance, so these individual actions soon became a more organized resistance. Many maroons formed runaway communities called palenques or macambos. In the seventeenth century, a province in Brazil called Bahia had thirteen such communities. The biggest was called Palmares, and in 1645 it had as many as 220 buildings. They also had a sophisticated foreign relations policy, including an alliance with the Dutch against the Portuguese.

From these communities, the maroons could launch attacks on plantations and, in many cases, free other enslaved people. In the 1730s, maroons in Jamaica fought the government of that British island colony. It ended in a draw, forcing the British colonists to recognize the maroons’ freedom. This promise was not always honored, however. Then, in 1760, a maroon leader named Takyi (also spelled Tacky) who had been a leader among the Fante people of West Africa, launched a major rebellion in Jamaica. The rebellion took over several plantations, and inspired enslaved Africans all over Jamaica to rise up. It was put down in the end, but only through brute force. This was just one campaign of a running war that saw as many as 100 rebellions between enslaved people and plantation owners. It would culminate four decades later with the Haitian Revolution.

Pueblo revolts

Indigenous Americans also resisted centralized rule by European-based empires, the expansion of European borders, and the arrival of European settlers. This resistance was difficult because of the rapid spread of new diseases among their populations that had arrived with the settlers. Still, whether as individuals or in groups, there was plenty of indigenous resistance to European expansion in the Americas.

One example was the Pueblo revolt of 1680. The Pueblo lived—and still live—in the Southwest region of what is now the United States. Beginning in the 1540s, Spanish forces began to push into this region from the colony of New Spain (modern day Mexico). They were followed by a wave of Spanish settlers, who often took over vast areas of land. These settlers tried to force the local populations to work for them, often by taking their land and depriving them of the ability to live independently. Meanwhile, priests who accompanied the settlers often tried to force the Pueblo to abandon their own religious practices.

Pueblo religious leaders, in particular a shaman named Popé, ledthe resistance to both settlers and priests. Popé and his followers set a goal to expel the Spanish and restore the old order. They even recruited some people from neighboring communities like the Apache and Navajo. Indeed, the revolt drove the Spanish off most Pueblo territory. The victorious Popé ordered that everyone return to their traditional religion and abandon any Spanish culture. However, the fighting continued between the Pueblo and the Spanish, and in 1682 Spanish troops recaptured the region

The Fronde

People who had been invaded or enslaved had plenty to resist, but there were others who resisted the growing intensity of government in this period. In many societies, nobles and other elites resisted when monarchs and the state tried to centralize power. One such monarch was France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). While Louis XIV was just 10 years of age at the time, Anne of Austria, his mother and regent, and her advisor Cardinal Mazarin attempted to reduce the power of regional lords. They desperately needed more tax money to come directly to the state rather than through the nobles in order to pay for a number of costly wars with neighboring European states. One way they found to do this was to sell government positions, and the aristocratic titles that went with them, to the highest bidders.

The land-owning lords were not amused—they didn’t like new aristocrats, they didn’t like losing access to tax money, and they didn’t like their own power being decreased. The lords demanded the system go back to how it was before. To make this point, many led a revolt in 1648 that drove the royal court into the countryside. The result was a civil war between the crown and much of the nobility that was known as the Fronde. In the end, however, the nobles were too divided, and could not win. By 1653, the King and his advisors were back in charge, having agreed to some concessions including pardoning the nobles who participated in the Fronde.

Joseon resistance

Over in Asia, another powerful group that resisted a growing, centralized state were the rulers of Joseon (sometimes spelled Choseon). This was the state that governed Korea for much of this period. Joseon had been a state allied with the Ming dynasty for much of this period, and indeed the Ming emperors had supported them when they had been invaded by Japan in the 1590s

As the Ming dynasty fell to the invading Manchu of the Qing dynasty, those nobles still resisting the Qing called on their allies in Korea to join them. At first, the King of Joseon tried to be neutral, but his own nobles and generals wanted to stay loyal to the Ming. Eventually, one of these nobles overthrew the king and declared himself King Injo (r. 1623–1649). The Koreans supported the Ming resistance until it ended.

Even after the Qing dynasty invaded Joseon itself, Joseon aristocrats found ways to resist change. They continued to wear the clothing and hairstyles popular during the Ming dynasty in both China and Korea, and did not adopt the long “queue” hairstyle the Qing demanded. This was just one sign of their continued resistance to the Qing.

Conclusions

Can we identify certain patterns of resistance? We are looking at very different groups of people, and in many cases they were resisting different things—invasion, forced cultural change, the centralization of power in the hands of a king, enslavement. But they all resisted, and they found many strategies for doing so in this period. Some were very overt, like wars, while others were subtler, like running away or using a hairstyle as a form of protest.

But we simply cannot study centralization and expansion of empires and big states in this period without recognizing the long and complex history of people who resisted these trends. Their actions help us to understand the real experiences of people living in this era, the choices they made, and the limits put on their choices by the growing strength of states in many parts of the world.

Author bio

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Sources Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt. Boston: Belknap Press, 2020.

Scott, James Campbell. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Image credits

Cover image: Frontispiece of Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes, 1651; engraving by Abraham Bosse. © Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images.

Maroons preparing to ambush a force from a British plantation in Jamaica, 1795. British Library. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/carviews/t/largeimage69789.html

A statue memorializing Popé in New Mexico. Architect of the Capitol. https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/popay-statue

French nobles giving tribute to the child King Louis XIV, after the Fronde. © Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

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