This book re-evaluates the role of local agency and provides a new perspective to the political
social and cultural history of state formation taking a microhistorical approach and through
close analysis of archival sources between 1550 to 1700. The backcountry of the Republic of
Genoa is a laboratory for gauging the weight and significance of two elements which according
to Charles Tilly and other scholars have characterized the construction of the modern state:
judicial administration and fiscal extraction. The instruments employed in this respect were
arbitration and compensation. Interactions between center and periphery occurred within a
stratified and discontinuous fabric of fluid jurisdictions and segmented residential
topographies which constituted spaces of mediation. Such spaces were generated by conflicts
between kin groups (feuds and factional alignments) and managed both by Genoese officials and
by local notables and notaries who translated a whole set of localpractices into judicial
procedures. This book offers a rich contextualization of material life family relationships
economic activities and power struggles in a corner of the Mediterranean world that was
extremely important but about which very little has been published in English.
