State and Status is an examination of the rise of the centralized state and its effect on the power of the aristocracy during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the British Isles and in France and its eastern periphery.

Arguing that states emerged in Western Europe as powerful political-geographical centres rather than nation-states or national states, Samuel Clark examines and compares the centres and peripheries of these two large regional zones, focusing not only on England and France but also on Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Savoy, and the Southern Low Countries. This wide-ranging and multi-faceted work shows how the state shaped the aristocracy and transformed its political, economic, cultural, and status power.

Theoretically significant and conceptually sophisticated, State and Status is the first book to link the anti-functionalist historical sociology of Western Europe with the functionalist or neo-functionalist tradition. It is also the first sociological analysis in many years of the evolution of status in Western Europe.