The spatial strategies of the urban elites in mediaeval Nijmegen: combining territories with networks Kees Terlouw (corresponding author) Department of Human Geography & Spatial Planning Faculty of Geosciences Utrecht University PO Box 80115 NL 3508 TC Utrecht Netherlands
[email protected] Job Weststrate Department of History Faculty of Arts University of Groningen Netherlands
[email protected] Introduction: medieval urban elites and development theory The Middle Ages is used in many theories on social development as the prelude to modernity.1 These narratives focus on the contradictions between rural feudalism and urban 1 autonomy. The subsequent development of territorial states is seen as key component in the transformation of these fragmented traditional societies and as the starting point of their modernisation. Development is traditionally conceived as the development of separate states, which all travel along the same path towards modernisation, although with different starting points and with varying speeds.2 There is a wide variety of explanations of the differences in development between states. Some focus differences in natural resources, others on class-structure, political history or cultural characteristics. These differences hide a basic agreement that neatly bounded states are the units of analysis to study social and economic development. The current mosaic of separate nation-states is the dominant framework from which social change is studied. Even many alternatives to modernisation theory, still fall into the territorial trap of studying development within the fixed territorial containers of entire nation-states3. They fall into what Saskia Sassen calls the endogeneity trap of limiting the analyses to the subject studied4.