The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state.The strategic exercise of will for domination-often associated with the use or threat of legitimate violence-is routinely assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. Strategic power works because people respond to favors and threats (and by extension surveillance), aligning their behaviors to regimes (

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This article looks at the value of genealogical analysis for doing historical research in cultural sociology, using Nietzsche’s definition of genealogy.The point is to resuscitate a method that has often been rejected by sociologists, and demonstrate its value for analyzing forms of culture that have become tacit or unarticulated over time. To make the case for the method, the article follows a historical example: the use of indigenous hydraulics with Roman provenance on the Canal du Midi in 17th-century France. Women labourers brought hydraulics techniques derived from Roman principles to the canal, but their work was not considered classical. Ironically, the Canal du Midi was promoted in propaganda campaigns, defining France as the New Rome, but the peasant women who actually carried Roman culture in their eyes and hands were not socially elevated enough to be New Romans, so they were written out of this story.

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