Towards a History from below of the Holy Roman Empire: Domination from Ordinary People's Point of View (1701-18th Century)

The paper analyzes the adequacy of the notions of "popular history" and "history from below", for the interpretation ofpower relations and of social domination in the Holy Roman Empire. German historiography has long written history "seeing like a states games Scott), and has been deeply structured by Weberian premises. Although the more recent literature has tried to reverse these "top-down" paradigms, it has only rarely taken into account the Empire itself. This paper, by analyzing protests against imperial taxation, suggests some possibilities for a history from below of this so-called archaic and "monstrous" Empire. By observing how ordinary people social and political strategies contribute to shape the imperial body politic, the very notion of "modernity", which was the often implicit core of Weberian model, is reloaded with a new social density.