People/States/Territories (Paperback)

"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.