Regardless of the intellectual coherence of hierocratic theory and the pope’s formal status as head of the universal Catholic Church and lynchpin of its central administration, the practical reality of papal monarchy had to reconcile that curial centralism with the logistical impossibility of exercising and enforcing direct control over all of Catholic Europe. Configured by local variables and interests, the integration of regional churches and polities within the papal network rested insecurely on a delicate balance combining delegation of authority, administrative decentralization, and local acquiescence. Incomplete subjection left space for local agency to exploit the perceived benefits of papal authority and obstruct its unwelcome intrusions. Using England as a case study, this chapter considers various manifestation of those complex ties (the activities of papal emissaries, and responses to and exploitation of the legal, fiscal, and dispensatory claims and structures), emphasizing the bottom-up perspective on medieval papal monarchy.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.