ABSTRACT
Traditionally, western historiography traces the origins of the so-called modern world to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary waves, political and economic, at the end of the eighteenth century. With respect to state policy and administration, the question arises whether the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the interests of a rising middle class helped to shape the actions of rulers and governments before the French Revolution. It is a historiographical cliche that, since the early sixteenth century, centralizing monarchical absolutism was the ascendant political system in Europe, a system whose precursors were to be found in Burgundy, Tudor England, and late Valois France, while its apogee was reached with Louis XIV. Peter I and his successors were following the model offered to them by the police ordinances of the German states.
