England, France and their North American Colonies: An Analysis of Absolutist State Power in Europe and in the New World

Using Michael Mann's concepts of "despotic" and "infrastructural" power as a starting point, this paper examines how the political associations between the state elite and dominant groups in "absolutist" England and France gave rise to state mechanisms that resulted in their exercising very different sorts of power, both at home and in their respective North American colonies. It is determined that the system of governance that defined the infrastructural power of the English state was less conducive to trans-Atlantic rule than the system that defined the combined despotic/infrastructural power of the French state. The analysis shows how the social relationships that comprise the structure of a state come to define the source and character of state power, and how the durability of those relationships can have a lasting effect on the exercise of state power.