Offering an approach to the history of the modern state, this text concentrates on the 18th century and on two cases, those of Britain and Germany. Using a comparative study, it deconstructs certain cliches about the two states and forces one to rethink how to study states in the early modern era.

Introduction: Rethinking Leviathan ; Explaining Variation in Early Modern State Structure: The Cases of England the German Territorial States ; The Army and the State in Britain and Germany during the Eighteenth Century ; Reasonable Aims of Civil Society: Concerns of the State in German Political Theory in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries ; Eighteenth-Century Britain: In Search of the State and Finding the Quarter Sessions ; Servants of the Public-Servants of the Crown: Officialdom of Eighteenth-Century English Central Government ; The Prussian Bureaucracy Reconsidered ; The State in Germany: A Non-Prussian View ; Government and Administration: Everyday Politics in the Holy Roman Empire ; The State and the Poor: Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective ; Manners and the Eighteenth-Century State: The Case of the Unsociable Englishman ; A Monument to Frederick the Great: Architecture, Politics, and the State in Late Eighteenth-Century Prussia ; Reform Absolutism and the Codification of Law: The Genesis and Nature of the Prussian General Code (1794) ; Codification, Consolidation, and Parliamentary Statute

articles of real merit and importance for eighteenth-century specialists, while the determination to examine not merely the atypical case or Prussia but also the smaller German states is welcome and succesfully accomplished.

`articles of real merit and importance for eighteenth-century specialists, while the determination to examine not merely the atypical case or Prussia but also the smaller German states is welcome and succesfully accomplished.' American Historical Review, February 2001 `this book ... is most welcome. ... This collection is a veritable chocolate box of interests for anyone interested in eighteenth century history. Perhaps because the essays were first read as papers they avoid much of the academic verbosity that mars much historical writing nowadays.' Contemporary Review, January 2000