{"id":352,"date":"2021-06-08T14:34:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T14:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/?page_id=352"},"modified":"2021-06-09T14:50:59","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T14:50:59","slug":"kinship-ties-and-collective-action-a-network-analysis-of-the-1691-revolt-attempt-in-the-city-of-basel-switzerland","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/?page_id=352","title":{"rendered":"Kinship ties and collective action: a network analysis of the 1691 revolt attempt in the city of Basel, Switzerland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Niccol\u00f2 Armandola<\/em> and Malte Doehne<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Time and Place:<\/strong> Friday, 02.07., 09:20\u201309:40, Room 2
Session:<\/strong> Kinship and Geneaology<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Context: <\/strong>A revolution attempt against a nepotistic government dominated by a small number\u00a0 of influential families took place in 1691 in the city of Basel, Switzerland. The coup failed after\u00a0 a year of political turmoil, known as 1691er Wesen (Ochs 1786; Schweizer 1931)<\/em>. The event\u00a0 was well documented by both contemporary authors and Swiss historians. Using a\u00a0 comprehensive genealogical database, we analyse the role of multiplex kinship ties in\u00a0 mobilizing collective action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Objective: <\/strong>The revolution attempt was neither a precursor of class movements nor a conflict\u00a0 between guilds, as the rebels were recruited from all the guilds of the town. The historical\u00a0 sources refer to the 1691er Wesen <\/em>as the escalation of family rivalries that had been growing\u00a0 during the previous decades, after the younger generations of two large migration waves\u00a0 overtook important political charges from the old citizenship. In this study, we pursue the\u00a0 intuition that the revolution pitted two loose federations of families against one another. Our\u00a0 aim is to understand how different kinship relations between individual and their families\u00a0 connected and mobilized actors on behalf of either federation. Our work is inspired by Padgett\u00a0 and Ansell (1993), who have drawn attention to the importance of kinship relations in European\u00a0 history. In the Renaissance, for example, the Medici family rose to power in Florence by\u00a0 strategically marrying into other powerful families (Padgett and Ansell 1993). We aim to\u00a0 demonstrate that strategically forged kinship ties predicted the sides individuals took in the\u00a0 subsequent uprising. Our general claim is that family ties create alliances among families and among individuals and thereby mobilize collective action. We analyze the extent to which this\u00a0 claim holds for different types of social relations.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Design: <\/strong>Using genealogical data, we define fifteen kinship relations that extend beyond and\u00a0 connect between core families (spouses and their children). For example, we define the relation\u00a0 between uncles and nephews as ties connecting males to their parents\u2019 brothers, or a persons\u2019\u00a0 parents\u2019 parents as their grandparents. By further distinguishing patrilineal from matrilineal\u00a0 lines, a complex web of distinct kinship relations emerges. Figure 1 shows the ego-graphs of\u00a0 six individuals who played an important role in the 1691er Wesen<\/em>. Aggregated across individual\u00a0 families, this yields a multiplex network in which rebels, neutral individuals and pro-elite are\u00a0 embedded and interconnected through kinship ties.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Setting\/Data: <\/strong>We combine hand-coded data on the actors who were involved in the revolution\u00a0 attempt of 1691 with a comprehensive genealogical dataset that comprises more then 8000\u00a0 individuals, or an estimated 80% of all living Baslerans of that period.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interventions: <\/strong>We analyze how the composition of local kinship configurations affected\u00a0 mobilization status. For example, we quantify the likelihood of an individual being a rebel as\u00a0 opposed to pro-elite given their uncle\u2019s or grandfather\u2019s status. This allows us to quantify the\u00a0 extent to which kinship ties differ in terms of their influence on individual decision making.\u00a0 Granovetter (1973) focused on the importance of weak ties for information transmission and\u00a0 diffusion . Our design allows us to test whether weak and indirect kinship ties diffuse powerful\u00a0 ideas, such as rise against a powerful elite.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main Outcome Measures: <\/strong>For each individual who had an active part in the revolution (actor)\u00a0 we measure the activity status of their proximate kin. This task proves challenging, since some\u00a0 individuals had a very dense family network and were thus connected with both partiesinvolved\u00a0 in the conflict. Also, defining new edges adds important information to the data, but it also\u00a0 significantly increases the network\u2019s complexity. Figure 2 shows an example of such\u00a0complexity by presenting a fraction of the Burckhardt family, one of the most important families of the time. Rebels and elite nodes are present in both strands of the family, while the nodes also have kinship ties with other actors from other families that are not represented in\u00a0 this figure.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Results: <\/strong>Our preliminary findings suggest that kinship ties were crucial for both the rebels\u2019 and\u00a0 the elite\u2019s networks. While for the elite kinship ties were a way to maintain the status of their\u00a0 family, for the rebels it offered the opportunity to organize collective action.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 1: Extended kinship ties for six actors of the revolution of 1691<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 2: Kinship configuration of the Burckhardt family in 1691 <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Literature <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. „The strength of weak ties.“ American journal of sociology <\/em>78 (6): 1360- 1380. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ochs, Peter. 1786. Geschichte der Stadt und Landschaft Basel<\/em>.Geschichte von Basel<\/em>. Berlin: Georg  Jakob Decker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padgett, John F, and Christopher K Ansell. 1993. „Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400- 1434.“ American journal of sociology <\/em>98 (6): 1259-1319. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schweizer, Eduard. 1931. Eine Revolution im alten Basel: Das Einundneunziger Wesen<\/em>. Basel:  Helbing & Lichtenhahn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Niccol\u00f2 Armandola and Malte Doehne Time and Place: Friday, 02.07., 09:20\u201309:40, Room 2Session: Kinship and Geneaology Context: A revolution attempt against a nepotistic government dominated by a small number\u00a0 of influential families took place in 1691 in the city of Basel, Switzerland. The coup failed after\u00a0 a year of political turmoil, known as 1691er Wesen (Ochs 1786; Schweizer 1931). The<\/p>\n

Weiterlesen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":98,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/352"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/352\/revisions\/433"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}