Abstract
Reviewed by: Antti Matikkala, University of Helsinki, Finland
Samuel Clark is emeritus professor of sociology, whose previous productions include State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (1995). Clark is not the first sociologist to tackle the question of the history of state honours systems. In 1971, two Swedish sociologists, Gunnar Boalt and Robert Erikson, joined by the American sociologist Herman Lantz and the Swedish numismatist Harry Glück, published a short monograph (153) entitled The European Orders of Chivalry. This book is not cited by Clark, but their sociological approach bears some similarities. Historians have rightly considered the volume by Boalt et al. flawed in its methodology. Clark’s interdisciplinary study is much more sophisticated, and over four decades of historical research into orders of knighthood and other state honours have made the task of writing a broad overview both much easier and more fruitful.
Clark places his discussion of state honours within the primary framework of status. This is not entirely satisfactory in regard to their special nature. Many state honours convey status, but so do, for instance, military ranks, which are visualized by rank insignia. Often a table of ranks or an order of precedence is the backbone that provides the limits for the operation of an honours system. Thus, in the first instance, status is often distributed by other means. Only in the second instance, and often within the boundaries of an earlier given position, is one’s status additionally enhanced by an honour.
Neither is Clark’s tendency to twin honours with rewards entirely felicitous. To give an example, state honours are used for rewarding both citizens and foreigners, but in many cases honours are also given to foreigners as part of the diplomatic exchange of honours. In such cases, they are mostly just honours, not primarily ‘honorific rewards’. In the modern period, it has been usual that foreigners have received a higher number of high-ranking honours than the citizens of a country. Generally speaking, this cannot be explained by stating that government was ‘more interested in handsomely rewarding foreigners that its own meritorious citizens’ (140), but rather by the requirements of the diplomatic culture of courtesy and reciprocity.
From a historian’s point of view, Clark’s wide perspectives, which require wide generalizations, are both a strength and a weakness. Clark operates in fairly abstract terms and the approach in the discussion of different factors that influenced ‘causal processes and mechanisms that accounted for the evolution of state honours’ (341) is rather formalistic. Clark’s focus is on Western Europe (the British Isles, France and the Low Countries), but his cyclically winding disposition ranges as far as Ancient Egypt. Nonetheless, Clark’s approach is refreshing for historians, who all too often tend to be too tightly confined within their chosen temporal boundaries. For a historian specializing in honours systems, Clark’s analysis gives useful tools for conceptualizing main questions in relation to the field. Clark’s learned work draws from a wide range of printed primary sources as well as historical and sociological literature.
Clark is aware of the fact that answers ‘must be historically specific’ since ‘state honours have served different purposes in different ways under different historical conditions’ (88). The chapter-long ‘global analysis’ provides a comparative perspective to other mostly Western European examples. This is supported by a set of ten ‘Cross-Tabulations of Characteristics of Honours and Social-political Characteristics of States and Societies Sampled in the Comparative Analysis’. It is these calculations that bring into the mind the tables by Boalt et al. As a historian, I have difficulties in understanding how, for instance, the relationship of coded ordinal ranks representing coordinated infantry and metallic body ornaments as honorific rewards in societies like the Iñupiaq, Iroquois, Mughals or Zulus is useful for the discussion.
However, Clark’s main thesis is sensible and carefully formulated. He sees the expansion of Western European honours systems as one of the answers to managing larger populations and armies at the time when states became more politically centralized and bureaucratic. Clark regards status competition – among states, factions, groups and individuals – as the crux of the honours systems, and defines it as struggle about two types of status power: status as social esteem and status-distribution power.
A historian who likes the illustrations of a research monograph to make a point or reinforce the argument finds the medals depicted on the front jacket baffling. The Great War campaign medal trio, distributed in millions without regard to rank, hardly provided much of a status on their recipients except merely indicating them as war veterans.