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Dynasties and Dynastic Rule between Elite Reproduction and State Building in Europe, 1300-1600
Discussions on the nature and evolution of pre-modern European polities are as old as history itself as an academic discipline. When the scholarly enquiry into the past found a home in universities, first in the German-speaking world with the efflorescence of Historismus in the early nineteenth century and soon after in other parts of the world, historians were first and foremost preoccupied with tracing the genealogies of their own political projects, that is, the nineteenth-century states. The first question is how to conceptualise the dynastic union of two or more territories as a political and social project. For this, this chapter focuses on classic essay of John H. Elliott on composite unions in early modern Europe which was published in 1992 in Past & Present. The best approach to test whether processes of dynastic unification and disintegration among princely dynasties and regional elites were structurally identical or not is to compare whether both milieus saw the same trend towards concentration.