Please join us for this PPE Workshop with Anna Grzymala-Busse who will present their paper. “What Counts as a State? State Development and Fragmentation in Europe” The fragmentation of territorial authority is the critical starting point for much of the scholarship on European state development. Yet scholars examining historical state development differ in their conceptualizations of states and state fragmentation. We seek to answer three questions: First, how do we define Europe? To what extent are the findings of the literature robust to more inclusive definitions of Europe, and what are the tradeoffs in using the different boundaries of Europe? Second, what counts as a state? Should we count city-states, duchies, republics, and the constituent units of empires as equivalent to nascent national states such as France, England, or Spain? Third, in examining the historical fragmentation of territorial authority, what are the tradeoffs and distinctions we find in using different measures (count-ing borders, logs of state size, Herfindahl index)? In short, we examine whether the different conceptualizations of Europe, states, and fragmentation have an impact on how we conceive of state formation. Please note that space is limited. For a link to the paper please email alytheia_laughlin@brown.edu.

Please join us for the Imagining Democracy Book Series with Jonathan Schroeder (RISD) and panelists Keidrick Roy (Harvard) and Jasmine Syedullah (Vassar) in conversation about Schroeder’s book: John Swanson Jacobs, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.

In the midst of this research, Schroeder discovered a lost autobiography, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery (Chicago, 2024), that changed the course of his career. Written by Harriet Jacobs’ brother, John Swanson Jacobs, and published in Australia in 1855, this narrative is written in frank truth-to-power language that is unapologetic and defiant—and that urgently needed to be brought back into the world. In his attempt to do justice to John Jacobs, Schroeder produced an “auto/biographical” edition that complemented Jacobs’ autobiography with a biography. The resulting publication, Despots, has been reviewed by The New York Times, All Things Considered, The Boston Globe, WNYC and many other outlets.