People - States - Territories: The Political Geographies of British State Transformation - Softcover

Jones, Rhys

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405140348 ISBN 13: 9781405140348

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007

Synopsis

People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories, and demonstrates how agents have actively contributed to the reproduction and transformation of the British state over the long term.

• 
  
• A valuable corrective to recent characterizations of territory as a static and given geographical concept
  
• An explication of the political geographies of state reproduction and transformation, through its focus on state territoriality and the variegated character of state power
  
• Considerable empirical insight into the consolidation of the British state over the long term.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories. The text develops a conceptual understanding of the state as a continually emerging and contingent territorial organization, which is reproduced, transformed, and contested by state personnel. Rhys Jones demonstrates how the iterative practices of state actors may give meaning and permanence to – or, alternatively, may question and transform – the state apparatus. In addition, Jones highlights how the state’s territory is continuously negotiated and translated by those individuals working within this state apparatus, and he illustrates how the identities and practices of state personnel have been influenced by the organizational and territorial networks of power that characterize the state. People/States/Territories views the state, along with the process of state transformation, as the product of a continual – yet temporally specific – interplay between state personnel, state organizations, and state territories.

Featuring accessible, relevant case studies of four key periods in the transformation of the state within Britain, this book focuses specifically on: the medieval process of state formation in Wessex, north-west Scotland, and north Wales; the consolidation of state organizations that took place in England and Wales during the early modern period; the peopling of a state- and territorially-organized process of government inspection in the nineteenth century in the north of England; and the territorial, organizational and peopled contexts for the current process of devolution being experienced in the UK.

About the Author:

Rhys Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, whose research interests lie in the political geographies of state transformation. His work has appeared in a number of papers published in international social science journals.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1405140348
• ISBN 13: 9781405140348
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232