Geoffrey Symcox

Professor 

Professor Symcox works in early modern European history, up to and including the French Revolution. His focus of interest has always been the development of the absolutist state, construed in a broad social context. He seeks to examine the fit -- or lack of one -- between social hierarchies and political institutions, between economic structures and fiscal systems, between a particular society and its armed forces. His monograph on Louis XIV's navy, The Crisis of French Sea Power 1688-1697 (1974) showed how the shift in French naval strategy from battle-fleets to privateering during the Nine Years War was directly attributable to the impact of the great famine of 1693-4.

Since then he has moved from the comparatively well-trodden path of French history to the neglected field of early modern Italy, centered on the Savoyard state (consisting of Piedmont, Savoy and Nice, plus Sardinia from 1720). His Victor Amadeus II. Absolutism in the Savoyard State 1675-1730 (1983) examines a critical period in that state's evolution, when internal reform and institutional development were spurred by the pressures of war. This book was in a sense a preliminary study for his current research on the city of Turin, the capital of the Savoyard state, in the later 17th-early 18th centuries. Turin has always been recognised as a classic example of baroque urbanism: Professor Symcox's research explores the linkages between the architectural form of the city, its social structures and the absolutist regime that oversaw every aspect of its planning. His most recent work in this area, apart from several articles, is a series of six chapters on Turin in the later 17th-early 18th centuries, dealing with the court, the city government, problems of public health and provisioning, and the climactic siege of 1706. These form part of a nine volume collaborative history of the city, published under the aegis of the Turin Academy of Sciences by the publishing house of Einaudi.

Professor Symcox also serves as General Editor of the Repertorium Columbianum, coordinating an international team of specialists producing a thirteen volume series of up-to-date editions, with English translation, of the documentary sources for the Columbian voyages, published by Brepols (Turnhout, Belgium)

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