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Russia emerged as a European power in the early eighteenth century with a suddenness that alarmed its neighbors – and indeed some of its more distant potential supporters. Russia’s newfound prominence was in large part the outcome of a series of international conflicts often referred to as “the Northern Wars.” Conflict over the fate of the eastern Baltic littoral had entered a new phase near the middle of the sixteenth century with the decline of the Livonian Order and the growing territorial ambitions of nearby states. Aside from the crusading Order itself, which had formally disbanded by 1561, the nearby states of Denmark, Sweden, Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and Brandenburg persistently battled one another over the fate of the littoral, in varying configurations but with surprisingly few intermissions until 1721. The more important of these multilateral conflicts are conventionally identified as the Livonian War (1558–83), the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts among Sweden, the Commonwealth, Muscovy, Brandenburg, and Denmark that included the Thirteen-Years’ War (1654–67), and finally the “Great Northern War” (1720–21) which ended in Russian victory. While the earlier conflicts remained relatively confined, in diplomatic and military terms, to Northern and Eastern Europe, the outcome of the last Northern War not only established the Russian Empire as the dominant Baltic state; it also led to Russia’s broader recognition as a major force in the broader European diplomatic world.
This is by far the longest chapter in the book. It takes the archaeological picture and returns to the biblical material, as analyzed critically in Chapter 2. Putting names and details to the generalities, it shows how the move to centralized sites fits with the biblical picture of Saul, the expansion of the highland polity into the surrounding areas fits with the biblical picture of David, and the building program plus investment in copper mining fits with that of Solomon. The chapter delves into many specifics such as the evidence from Khirbet Qeiyafa, David’s competition with Ish-Boshet, and the list of Solomon’s officials. It uses both minute archaeological information and specific details from the biblical descriptions to present a thorough reconstruction of the sociopolitical developments of the tenth century, and of the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon.
The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.
The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.
Contrary to popular belief, states long have played crucial policy-making roles in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps).The goals of state involvement has evolved as various interest groups have gained and lost power and as those groups’ attention to SNAP has risen or fallen. In the program’s early days, many states saw themselves as disciplinarians of the poor, anxious to keep food assistance from dampening low-income people’s willingness to perform hard labor for small wages. As agriculture mechanized and urban areas asserted greater power in state politics, states shifted to seeking to maximizing federal SNAP funding, both for themselves and for low-income households.The federal quality control (QC) system pitted state administrators’ interests against those of recipient households.It also led to two decades of strife between states and federal administrators, destabilizing the program. More recently, right-wing groups have sought to make state SNAP policy a vehicle for ideological warfare.The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and allied groups have won passage of legislation requiring states to adopt options that deny food assistance to many low-income households in genuine need.