Havens and Cages : Reinventing States and Households in the Modern World-System

In the work of Immanuel Wallerstein the concepts of modern worldsystem and capitalist world-economy are used interchangeably; they are alternative names for the historical system we are currently living in. In the substance of his work, however, Wallerstein has been more concerned with capitalism than modernity. At one level this is unimportant because, if they are indeed ‘two sides of the same coin,’ understanding one must enhance inevitably our knowledge of the other. But, of course, it is never as simple as

that.When we choose to think of our contemporary world as either capitalist or modern, we take on board a different social theoretical baggage.It was this train of thought which led me to ask "what' s modern about the modern world-system?"(Taylor, 1996a) and this essay is part of a continuing project (Taylor, 1996b;1999) to link Wallerstein' s (1984: chapter 3) 'institutional vortex' to Marshall Berman' s (1982: Introduction) 'modern maelstrom.' The argument focuses upon two of the four 'major institutions of the modern world ' which Wallerstein (1984:29) identifi es.Whereas there are large literatures which provide 'modernist' interpretations of both classes and nations, this is less clear-cut in the cases of states and households.This may well be because of the simple continuities in spatial form with the latter two institutions.In the case of states, for instance, the medieval English kingdom is one of several states which cover approximately the same territory as the successor early modern kingdom implying continuity rather than a discontinuity.In the case of households, continuity can be represented by the dictum ' an Englishman' s home is his castle.'It is these simple spatialities which have encouraged me to explore the modernities of states and households through a critical territoriality approach.
Territoriality is a form of behaviour which is expressed as power to control access to a bounded territory (Sack 1986).As such it seems to be a ubiquitous behavioural strategy, trans-historical and even trans-species in nature.Hence the interest is in the historical specifi cities of its practice.So what is modern territoriality?Given the explicit concern for power in territorial behaviour, it is perhaps not surprising that it is political scholars who have used territory to defi ne the modern: international relations researchers distinguish between pre-modern and modern in terms of territorial behaviour.By referring to the modern states system as the 'Westphalia system' it is argued that territorial sovereignty is the distinguishing characteristic of modern states.To be sure there were multiple interacting states in previous eras, but none of these operated through a territorial ordering based upon mutual recognitions of sovereignties.In the modern inter-state system all sovereign states have the mutually agreed right to control access across their boundaries.The message is clear: modern states are essentially territorial in nature.However, this territorial framework is largely taken for granted, territoriality has not been critically interrogated in the study of international relations (Ruggie 1993).
The territoriality of households has been interrogated even less than states.However, it is relatively easy to draw parallels between the two institutions in their uses of space.Like modern states, modern households operate through a collective budget to maintain and enhance their territory (residence) to which they claim the formal power to control access.Just as a state is destroyed when its territory is conquered so also is a household fatally undermined when made 'homeless': this was the basic threat of the pernicious Victorian 'workhouse' system for instance.Of course ' governments-in-exile' may eventually reconstitute their state just as households may be brought back together in happier times, both recoveries being dependent upon a renewed capacity to defi ne boundaries.
There are two sides of modern territoriality.First, it can provide order, the 'haven' in my title.But this is only half the story, a top-down view of the world.Second, looking up from the bottom, for those who do not control the boundaries territory can be a prison, the ' cage' in my title.Unfortunately treatment of modern states is typically concerned with their ordering potentials which thus encompasses a limited view of their modernity-see, for instance, McClelland' s (1996: chapter 14) discussion of 'the modernity of the modern state' and Burch' s (1997) addition of modernity to international political economy.Similarly, the classic feminist critique of the ' sociology of the family' literature argues that studies of modern households focus upon order rather than power differentials within the institution (Friedman 1984: 41-2).In this essay I treat both sides of territorial behaviour as means to understand the ambiguities of modernity.A modern territoriality is posited based upon place-space tensions that defi nes a geography within modernity.

place-space tensions
The English language is rich in words to answer where-and-what questions.In Roget's Thesaurus (Browning 1986), for instance, 'Words relating to space' constitutes one of only six main classes of words.Quite remarkably, this category in turn is organised under 133 separate headings.This fecund lexicon has allowed the use of many terms to answer where-and-what questions in situations where space has entered social theory: region, territory, location, area, locality and landscape have all featured in their own specifi c theories of behaviour.I am going to concentrate upon the two concepts of place and space which I will treat as more basic terms than the other concepts mentioned above.There is a sense in which the other terms can be reduced to either space or place: functional regions, economic locations and sovereign territories seem to qualify as spaces whereas homogeneous regions, urban social areas and cultural landscapes are more likely to be called places.But what is this ' sense'?Careful defi nition is in order.
The fi rst point to make is that place and space are distinct and separate categories.This is a necessary starting point not just because the terms are popularly used interchangeably but also because several otherwise excellent social research studies blur the distinction (see, for instance, Shields 1991 andUrry 1995).I follow Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) in asserting that place and space are distinctively different.But how do they differ?"'Space" is," according to Tuan (1977:6), "more abstract than 'place.'"This idea is basic to most understandings of the two terms with space treated as general and place as particular: space is everywhere, place is somewhere.Moreover place has content; the idea of an empty place is eerie, an empty space is merely geometrical.The politics of this distinction are quite interesting.This can be appreciated by adding the adjective safe to each term: a safe place implies lots of people around as famously described by Jane Jacobs (1961), a safe space is one monitored by cameras.
These distinctions are important defi nitionally, but I will follow Tuan in focussing on relations between place and space.For instance, he refers to place as 'humanised space ' (1977:54).This implies a process whereby space is transformed into place.The best example of such a transformation occurs commonly in moving residence.The empty house or apartment which is inspected consists of spaces, functional rooms that have to be imagined as a potential home.It becomes the latter, a familiar place, when a new resident moves in and modifi es the spaces to suit her or his needs in terms of content and decor.Furthermore, the idea of home can be enhanced beyond familiar place: it can be a much more intimate place even going as far as impinging directly on personal identity.This becomes clear in metaphoric uses of home at larger scales of activity: hometown and homeland are particularly special places because they encompass a politics of identity.
The last example highlights the fact that place can exist at different scales.This is not always the way place is interpreted.There is a widespread tendency to equate place with local.This leads to the idea of space as 'the stable framework that contains places' (Sack 1992:12).There is a good reason why places are often viewed as local: 'humanising' space is most easily accomplished through micro face-to-face contacts.But there is no need to limit place creation to this one process especially in political studies where the imagined community of the nation with its homeland place is central to so much research.Thus, Tuan (1977:149) insists that places exist at different scales from at ' one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth.'Of course, since it is commonplace that space occurs at different scales, providing place with the same multiple-scale property means that relations between place and space can be explored beyond the local up to and including the geographical limit as both 'whole Earth' (an environmental place) and ' one world' (a globalization space) (Taylor 1999).
In this essay I go beyond Tuan by introducing the concept of place-space tensions.The key starting point is the notion that the same location can be both place or space: everywhere, in fact, has the potential for being both place and space.This can be historical as when a space is transformed into a place or vice versa.For instance, from the point of view of an expanding society, the movement in time of a frontier across the land is a transformation of an initially explored space to fi nally settled places.(Of course, in actuality, this involves the destruction of indigenous people' s places and their replacement by new settlers' places.)Alternatively, transformation can be contemporaneous as when the same location is viewed from different perspectives.For instance, city planners may see space to plan where residents experience a place to live in.A classic example is Robert Moses, the planner, who by creating New York' s ' expressway world,' destroyed the Bronx neighbourhood of Marshall Berman, the resident (Berman 1982:290-311).Such processes defi ne what I call place-space tension between the producers of space and the makers of place.When place and space constitute a single entity they defi ne a geographically-focused, contested politics.The questions of who defi nes an institution in spatial terms and who sees it as a place creates a modern politics of space and place.It is just such territorial politics which I apply to states and households to illustrate their reinvention as modern institutions.But before I do that I need to set this analysis into its concrete geohistorical context: I will interpret place-space tensions as a particularly geographical expression of ambiguity within modernity.

the embedded ambiguity of modernities
The use of the adjective modern in contemporary language is so common as to seem ubiquitous.Advertisers have long realized that saying something is new and modern is a sure-fi re means of promoting sales.But use of modern is not necessarily that purposive, in ordinary language modern is used to describe all manner of things from modern armies to modern zoos.Academics are not immune to the attractions of this word: in one bibliographic search of the social science literature since 1990 I managed to fi nd over fi ve thousand publications with modern in their title.One example is the Cassell Dictionary of Modern Politics (East and Joseph 1994) which, most revealingly, does not have an entry for modern.In this case modern is used as a self-evident idea in no need of defi nition and discussion.I assume that in most of the other writings in this search list modern is similarly taken for granted, that is to say it is not interrogated as a concept.We can infer that the idea of being modern is embedded in the way we think about the society we live in.
Currently modernity is the term used in social science and the humanities to capture the condition of being modern.There are two types of study of modernity relating to how the enbeddedness of modern is treated, the analytic and the synthetic.Analytic study identifi es different and separate sectors of behaviour in which the modern is embedded.This is the way 'international modern politics' is used in relation to Westphalia and also how 'modern politics' is treated in the publication highlighted above.In this usage international relations scholars and political scientists are in good company.In Stuart Hall' s (1992) recent text on modernity he refers to four realms of modernity encompassing modern political relations, modern economic relations, modern social relations and modern cultural relations.This division of modernity into separate sectors is, of course, how social science has traditionally divided up its subject matter into disciplines.In contrast, Wallerstein has always promoted an approach which cuts across social science disciplines.This is synthetic study which interprets the embeddedness of modernity as necessitating a more holistic approach.Using broad concepts such as modern world, modern era, modern society, and, of course, modern world-system, the underlying assumption is that the realms or sectors identifi ed by the social scientists are not autonomous but fundamentally depend one upon the other.That is to say, each so-called 'realm' is embedded in the other 'realms' for which it depends for its successful reproduction.For instance, modern politics is a necessary prerequisite for modern economics and vice versa.More common amongst humanities scholars, including geographers and historians, the geohistorical perspective on modernity I use in this paper is pre-eminently synthetic in nature.
But which modernity am I referring to?In contemporary social theory the word most associated with modernity is ambiguity.There are, according to Lash and Friedman (1992:2), 'two faces' of modernity: one emphasizing change, the other stability.This has been expressed in many different ways; two recent examples are Peter Wagner' s (1994) treatment of modernity as an interplay between liberty on the one hand and discipline on the other, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos' s (1995:2) identifi cation of 'two pillars' of modernity, 'regulation' and ' emancipation.' No wonder Zygmunt Bauman (1991:4) has argued ' order and chaos are modern twins' (emphasis in original).Hence, the really intriguing thing about the two sides of modernity is that they are polar opposites: it is one of those rare concepts with an antinomy inherent to its meaning.The key point for studying the condition of modernity is to treat both order and chaos which Berman (1982) has pioneered.
According to Berman (1982:15), to live in the modern world is to live in ' a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.'The modernism movement which burst on to the arts scene a century ago explicitly provided the visions and images to try and capture, to make sense of, the maelstrom of modern life.Of course, coping with modernity extends far beyond artistic movements, ordinary people have to deal with it in their daily lives.To live in the modern world is a very paradoxical affair.Men and women experience rapid change as both opportunity for a better world and as destroyer of their existing world.In this context modern behaviour can be viewed as the attempt to avoid being an object of change by becoming your own subject.Hence the modern world' s obsession with planning.All modern organizations operate by planning for the future in order to have a future.Corporations, both public and private, defi ne strategic plans as part of the ordinary business of doing business.The turn of the last century was a classic time when 'planning' was all the vogue: at approximately the time modernists were attempting to capture change on their canvasses, there were numerous 'plan-ning movements' geared to controlling change in several practical fi elds.For instance, 'urban planning' was created to impose order to the chaotic nineteenth century city, and the new 'management science,' was devised to ensure maximum effi ciency and thus some security in the precarious world of business.I shall call these attempts to plan and manage the future, and thus to tame change, modernity projects.Despite their great variety, such projects share one basic property, to defi ne an order within the modern maelstrom.
One way in which the ambiguity of modernity operates can now be understood.Modern people and institutions devise projects which aspire to ordering their world but without fully appreciating that modernity encompasses the antithesis of order.The modern world, therefore, is a perpetual battle between makers of order and the incessant change which is the condition of modernity.Obviously institutions and individuals vary widely in the successes of their projects and, in particular, in terms of how long their projects remain viable.In a perpetually changing world, all projects inevitably become out-of-date as soon as they begin to operate.They may be maintained by adapting to new circumstances but in the modern maelstrom they all eventually succumb to disintegration and are replaced by new projects.In recent years Soviet socialist planning, Keynsian economic planning, welfare state planning, third world development planning, Cold War military planning, urban structure planning, and Fordist corporate planning have all faced disintegration and have disappeared or been reformed to be replaced by new organisation incorporating rather less order.
Given the nature of modernity, it seems unlikely that any reasonably sustainable success story can ever be simply planned.And yet, certainly in its own terms, the modern world has been supremely successful.It has operated like a spiral of evermore growth, vanquishing all before it with evermore new products being bought by evermore new consumers year on year, decade on decade, century on century.To a very large degree this success has been the result of surreptitious modern modes of change rather than explicit modernity projects.By surreptitious I mean the cumulative result of a multitude of decisions operating through ' normal' everyday living.Basically such modes of change are successful when they capture ongoing trends wherein certain behaviours are rewarded at the expence of others.Two examples are particularly relevant here.First, the rise of suburbia in the twentieth century is an example of such a development in modernity.Although examples can be found of government and corporate promotion of this revolutionary urban development, for instance the Hoover Report of 1931 which saw single family housing consumption behaviour as the key route out of economic depression, the intellectual establishment of architects and planners were always very much against this 'urban sprawl' (Hall 1988:297).Nevertheless, suburbia was so in tune with the growing aspirations of millions of ordinary men and women that it has vanquished all its enemies to change totally the nature of cities in the twentieth century (Fishman 1987:4).Second, the more recent rise of contemporary globalization is a similar case in point.Although manifest in many different processes, one important dimension has been Americanization and subsequently a more generalised consumerism (both intimately related to suburbia, of course), which have provided the enabling social conditions for globalization: Daniel Miller (1995:34) even goes as far as portraying the 'housewife' as ' global dictator'!These are processes I have elsewhere called ' ordinary modernity,' everyday ways of life cumulatively creating massive changes in the social order (Taylor 1996a(Taylor , 1996b(Taylor , 1999)).modern tensions: nation-state and home-household And so we return to households and states.Although these two institutions are as old as history itself, transcending the modern world, the argument I develop here is that under conditions of modernity, they have both been reconstituted through a politics of place-space tension.The modern practices of nation-building and home-making have created new places to be combined with the spaces which are states and households.The modern maelstrom has created the need to reinvent state as nation-state and household as home-household thus creating place-space tensions at the heart of our modern existence.
Nation-state and home-household are modern humanised spaces.Building upon territorial behaviour focusing on defence, they have become geographical havens within modernity, intimate places which provide important elements of identity to modern people.This positive interpretation is complemented by negative uses of their territoriality.The latter political strategy is never simply benign, the distribution of power within state and household ensures that the created nature of a given territory favours some at the expence of others.In fact, far from being a simple haven, both nation-Havens and Cages 554 state and home-household have been portrayed as a ' cage' for the mass of citizens and ' captive wives' respectively.This haven-cage is the tension which constitutes these very modern institutions.I shall begin with the notion that space is more abstract than place which immediately relates space to rationality, bureaucracy and the state.In this argument states are space-producers in their designation and recognition of boundaries.States impose spaces on places.The places being collected together or divided by the boundaries drawn by state elites are locations in which material life is reproduced in the everyday routined behaviour.Such places can become centres of resistance to state penetration.Spaces, therefore, are the outcome of top-down political processes; places can be the site for bottom-up opposition.But the world is not this simple; the political processes do not stop there.Although initially imposed, boundaries can themselves become familiar, become embedded in society, and have their own effects on the reproduction of material life.In this way what were spaces are converted into places.
The most important such space to place transformation is the nationstate.In the modern world-system sovereign states existed long before the rise of nationalism.These states administered spaces-sovereign territories-created by a mixture of medieval legacy, dynastic alliances and military conquests.Although in early modern Europe small politico-military elites displayed some loyalty to these states, for the mass of those living in the state territory the state remained remote and, to the state, they were merely population to be counted and taxed within the territory.All this has changed in the last two hundred years.Nations have been constructed as imagined communities each with their own place in the world, their own homeland, some as 'fatherland,' others as 'motherland.'By combining state and nation in nation-state, sovereign territory has been merged with sacred homeland to convert a space into the place.Notice that, given the scale, this is an 'imagined place' but is nevertheless reproduced in routine everyday behaviour which Michael Billig (1995) has famously called banal nationalism.Modern states are so powerful because they have become constructed as places out of spaces.
This contemporary power should not blind us to the fact that nationstates have been both enabling and dis-enabling.Nineteenth century social theorists warned of the dangers of the modern state; Max Weber specifi cally saw increasing rational bureaucatization leading to an 'iron cage' confi ning 'modern man' (Giddens 1971:242).However, the political nationalization of the state led to franchise extensions which provided new electoral opportunities for radical movements.Hence, towards the end of the nineteenth century radical political debate turns from emphasis on destroying the state to consideration of how to use the state.Only the anarchists really maintained the view that states were inherently dis-enabling: short term political gains came at long-term cost (Taylor 1991).Taking a global view today, from the point of view of the ordinary citizen it seems there are more dis-enabling states, constraining life potentials, across the world than there are enabling ones.
The creation of homes within households is a much less well-known story than the political rise of the nation.The home is the pre-eminent comfortable modern place.This is what lies behind the hall, the small entry room where the stairs begin and outside clothes are hung in the typical contemporary house.Of course, premodern houses of nobility and merchants famously had their halls but these were very different, dominating the whole house.These contrasting house arrangements represent two completely different worlds.The great halls of the past were multiple use spaces that were essentially public in nature: a location for transacting business, for cooking and eating, for entertainment and for sleeping at night (Rybczynski 1986:25).Today, the hall has been reduced to a small transition zone between a private home and a public outside.It is the modern home' s frontier, the zone for entering and leaving and where visitors are dealt with.Although important for providing a home' s initial image to the outside world, the hall does not have to be comfortable like other rooms because it is not a place where people are expected to stay for long.If the visitors are friends they may be invited beyond the hall to specialised rooms that are prized for their comfort and convenience-living room or lounge, dining room, kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms.
It is this private place of the home that has been an essential locus for the everyday experience of modernity, historically in town houses and country houses and, today, typically in suburbia.The key process has been the physical separation of work from residence, defi ning a boundary between public and private worlds (Hayden 1981).The effect of this division has been very different for men and women.For the former, home could become Peter J. Taylor 555 Havens and Cages 556 a haven from a harsh demanding outside world.The position with regards to women has been more ambiguous (Mackensie and Rose 1986).On the one hand, the home could be seen as a 'woman' s realm' thus providing a place of purpose and power.At the same time, it could be seen as severely limiting to the life chances of women by limiting their access to operate in the public sphere, Hannah Gavron' s (1966) ' captive wife.'In this way the modern home-household has been both haven and cage.I would argue that, like the nation-state, the home-household is a politically ambiguous institution, both enabling and dis-enabling, being created as both place and space.
Since most of the literature on both nation-state and home-household has been largely positive in nature, I will conclude this section with particular reference to their territoriality as cages.I focus upon violence because of Weber' s oft-quoted defi nition of the modern state as being the sole legitimate wielder of violence within its territory.Supposedly necessary to eliminate rival sources of power and to ensure order, such legitimacy is dangerous as recognised by the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights which contradicts territorial sovereignty.Born just after the Holocaust, the Declaration has had a limited effect: subsequent genocides have still been 'protected' by territoriality because of the general reluctance to intervene in the internal affairs of another country.On a smaller scale of violence, the same practical principle obtains: a majority of states in the world have been indicted by Amnesty International for cruel and inhuman treatment, including torture, of portions of its caged citizens.And this caged violence looks set to increase: the great disaster of modern states is that there are many more potential nations than likely future viable states.The result is the rise of civil wars and ' ethnic cleansing' operating behind state boundaries: states are routinely becoming cages in which ' crimes against humanity' are carried out.
A parallel process has operated with households as cages in what Gelles (1974) calls the 'violent home.'Even more secretive than state crimes, there has been a similar territorial licence for violence within households.Traditionally using religious arguments to justify wife-beating, the head of the household, like the head of state, was seen to wield legitimate violence.In fact resistance, that is violence by women, was referred to as 'petty treason' (Davidson 1977:17).Thus, ' chastisizing' wives was legally condoned (short of murder and attempted murder) until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The change in law undermining the territorial sovereignty of the husband may have come earlier than the 1948 Declaration for states but the same reluctance to infringe upon territoriality has been found.The ' discrepancy between the law and criminal justice policy' was a major issue for the women' s movement in the 1970s (Dutton 1988:11).Not intervening in the internal affairs of a foreign country has its territorial parrallel with the custom, for both police and neighbours, of not interfering in relations between 'man and wife.' early modern contrasts: the historical priority of 'bottom up' over 'top down' Given the theoretical stance which emphasises the invention of novelty of modern institutions, I will illustrate some of the practices of invention in the early modern period by advancing an argument about historical priority.Tracing place-space tensions at this time has one particularly interesting historiographical implication.Because the fi rst creation of homes came before the creation of nations, this means that a key component of modernity was created fi rst at a micro-scale, 'bottom-up' as it were, in the everyday bourgeois behaviour of ordinary persons.Macro-scale modern territorial behaviour as practised at Westphalia was too divorced from everyday life to construct more than an imperfect or incomplete component of modernity.Put in another way, in the modern world-system both home-households and nation-states defi ne secular havens from a troubled and changing world.In other nonmoderm world systems, haven is mediated through religious interpretation: heaven as the ultimate haven from an evil world.Modern haven on Earth was fi rst produced at a micro-scale in seventeenth century Netherlands.
According to Rybczinsky (1986:51), 'there was one place where seventeenth century domestic interiors evolved in a way that was arguably unique, and that can be described as having been, at the very least, exemplary.'This was the Dutch Republic where economic successes were accompanied by new cultural behaviours.Dutch merchants and artisans were family-oriented and lived in small households with few or no servants.Children were integral to the new family life and instead of being apprenticed stayed at home and attended school.In this way the Dutch invented what today is understood as childhood (Rybczynski 1986:60).New town houses were built or converted to adapt to these new practices and therefore eliminated the traditional mix of work with residency.The ground fl oor was still treated as a public space to entertain visitors but the upper fl oors were a special family place.Friends allowed access to the upstairs were required to remove their street shoes so as not disrupt the cleanliness of the home.This boundary between public spaces and private places was the new cultural idea which enabled houses to become homes (Rybczynski 1986:66).
The result was the creation of distinctive new places.In their new homes the Dutch could express their personal likes and dislikes to fi t individual family needs such as decorating their walls with paintings.Although seventeenth century Dutch painting is justifi ably famous, it is not always appreciated just how large this cultural phenomenon was: Israel (1995:555) indicates that in 1650 there were some two and a half million paintings in the Republic.With more pictures than people, it can be reasonably assumed that the typical Dutch house at this time would be bedecked with original paintings.And unlike earlier schools of painting, the Dutch were largely secular in their subject matters.Many Dutch families may have been devoutly Calvinist but their houses were certainly not religious shrines.Other domestic commodities reinforced the creation of secular homes.A contemporary English critic of the Netherlands, Sir William Temple, after noting the propensity for monetary tightness among the Dutch, gives one exception: expenditure on furniture and other commodities for the home (Rybczinsky 1986:61).In this way every home was made to be unique to a particular family refl ecting their tastes for different furnitures and genres of painting.All in all, the Dutch produced the fi rst modern homes, cosy settings for the family life of ordinary people.
There is no doubt that these modern home-households acted as havens from the turbulent new mercantile world the Dutch were creating in the seventeenth century.In defi ning a boundary between public and private worlds the Dutch invented modern domesticity (Rybczynski 1986:75).Rybczynski (1986:74-5) interprets this as enabling for women as the house changed to become ' a feminine place, or at least under feminine control' (see also Hufton 1995:47-8).This ' central position of the woman in the Dutch household ' (1986:74) was accompanied by married women of all social positions carrying out their own day-to-day household chores in a manner which can be interpreted as liberating (1986:72).And all this can be seen today in the domestic genre of seventeenth century Dutch painting: During the Renaissance, when women had been solitary fi gures in a painting, it was as Madonnas, saints or biblical personages, the Dutch painters were the fi rst to choose ordinary women as their subjects.It was natural for women to be the focus of de Witte's paintings, because the domestic world that he was depicting had become their realm.The world of male work, and male social life, had moved elsewhere.The house had become the place for another kind of work-specialized domestic work-women's work.... When a male is included in a Vermeer, one has the sense that he is a visitor-an intruder-for these women do not simply inhabit these rooms, they occupy them completely.Whether they are sewing, playing the spinet or reading a letter, the Dutch women are solidly, emphatically, contentedly at home.(Rybczynski, 1986:70-1) But perhaps it was not quite as simple as this.The last line of the quotation brings to mind Gillian Rose' s (1993:56) criticism of humanistic geographers' cosy interpretation of the home: ' only masculinist work could use the image of place as home so unproblematically.'And, of course, the image of the Dutch home bequeathed to us by Dutch genre painting is a male one: painters were organised into city guilds with apprenticeships restricted to young men (Kahr 1993:11).Hence the women' s contentedness in the pictures is a male creation, women' s images of the home are simply not available.As well as enabling as a woman' s place, the home can also be interpreted as dis-enabling, curtailing women' s life chances to just the ' space of the home,' as contemporary feminist critics have argued (Oakley1974:32).
Although seventeenth century Dutch women can be found in the public sphere, notably in charity work, the political economy of mercantile modernity was pre-eminently a man' s world.The place-space tension behind this gender separation is to be found in the new home-households, simultaneously constructed as a space and created as a place.The modern bourgeois notion that ' a woman' s place is in the home' was fi rst realized in the Dutch Republic as both haven and cage.Although currently expressed in a physically different form as the massive swaths of urbanization we call suburbia, seventeenth century Dutch town houses do defi ne a fully modern existence, ordinary men and women coping with the modern maelstrom in ways which we can fully identify with today.
It is much harder for us to identify with the political economy of mercantile modernity.Nevertheless, it is the case that Westphalia created the territorial politics we continue to operate by, with multiple sovereignties producing a modern inter-stateness (Taylor 1995).Confi rming the territoriality of states in 1648 was, of course, an explicit political reaction to spaceconquering armies in the Thirty Year War destroying any places-cities, towns and villages-which got in their way.After Westphalia, the nature of war was changed to a far less destructive form: boundary wars (Luard, 1986).In a very real sense this represented an extension of Dutch practice.Their eighty year war of independence in the Netherlands had long been a boundary war which Israel (1982:97) argues ' could not have been more unlike that waged simultaneously, nearby in Germany.' Whereas parts of central Europe lost a third of the population to war, in the Netherlands: [i]n the main, villages, unprotected towns and prosperous, intensively farmed agricultural land on either side was kept, by mutual consent, and through fear of retaliation, safe from harm (Israel 1982:97).
In terms of regulating future war, Westphalia can be interpreted as the Netherlands boundary war writ large across Europe.But there was a price to pay for the new safety.As well as being spaces of peace, sovereign states as designated homogeneous religious spaces were cages for minority religious groups.The best they could hope for in the new states was mere political discrimination in the form of disqualifi cation from public offi ce.
With personal identity still focused upon metaphysical communities based upon religion, states could not become intimate places with which ordinary people could identify.Before the invention of the secular nation, there could be no homeland so that states remained largely spaces in the matrix of early modern politics.Perhaps the seventeenth century Dutch came closest to a homeland concept with the development of their notion of bons patriots (Duke 1990:191) but their war of independence was in no way a ' national revolution.'As Simon Schama (1987:62) points out, such an interpretation tells us more about nineteenth century historians than early modern Dutch politics.Dutch loyalties remained local, and therefore their state consisted of a collection of 'patria' rather than a single homeland.Hence, the Dutch Republic was not a place of prime identity but there is one important sense in which it created a new content for political spaces as a precursor of the later nation-state.
Mercantile theories gave state territories an economic content and the Dutch as the major instigators of mercantile practice were thus directly instrumental in the treatment of states as more than defensive spaces.The key point is that although many of the fi scal and other mechanisms used by state mercantilists were not in themselves new inventions, the manner of their application was in two ways.First, there is the matter of scale.Many mercantile practices had long been used by cities in their competition with other cities but the Dutch economic successes, and English and French reactions to it, produced new economic policies which were system-defi ning.Second, in earlier state use of fi scal policy, it was seen as essentially extractive: the more the king taxed, the poorer his subjects.There was no concept of using fi scal policy to build the wealth of a country to make the tax base larger.With mercantilism it is widely accepted that the richer the subjects, the richer the king.Hence the search for policies to boost state economies, a thoroughly modern activity and one which is on-going.
In the late nineteenth century era of the ' new mercantilism,' especially amongst German writers, traditional mercantilist theories were widely praised as exemplary examples of state-building through controlling the ' national economy' (Heckscher 1955).Such later ' new mercantilisms' could be fi rmly coupled with a populist nationalism, not so the original mercantilism.In its Colbertist form it was quite the opposite, an absolutist mercantilism.Seventeenth century states did not have to be held to account as political places.Mercantile states were both defensive and economic spaces but they were not havens with which one could personally and collectively identify.In other words there was no place-space tension; how could there be before the invention of the nation-state?Hence I conclude that the modernity traits created top down at Westphalia were less developed than that described earlier for the domestic scale.conclusions What has this particular iterative exercise between Wallerstein' s vortex and Berman' s maelstrom using the concept of territoriality achieved?Is it more than an elaborate spatial analogy between states and households?Much of the argument was indeed set up through such analogy but the discussion has advanced beyond similarities, away from parallel processes.This can be summarised in a linked sequence of four cardinal statements.
First, the institutions of states and households can be interpreted as cases of territoriality, with power vested in boundary control.Such identifi cation with territory should not lead to neglect of power differentials within the institutions and therefore, second, place-space tensions are recognised within territories.Places of identity versus imposition of spaces simultaneously creates havens and cages for modern people.Third, there is Peter J. Taylor 561 Havens and Cages 562 an antinomy of chaos and order at the heart of modernity which modern people have to navigate in havens from chaos while avoiding the order of cages.If this represents the geography in modernity then, fourth, inventing modern institutions was completed fi rst with households and then with states as place-space tensions.Micro-level households preceeding macrolevel states counters most orthodox thinking on the making of the modern world where the everyday lives of ordinary people have been traditionally neglected.Of course, Wallerstein, following Braudel, has always insisted that it is changes in this 'material life' of the longue durée which ultimately shifts world-systems. references