416 to the development of more complicated and sophisticated administrative routines, English administrative developments were not characterized by any sort of systematization; the old institutions were retained at the same time that a series of new ones were founded. The English historian John H. Plumb, for example, has emphasized that “it is vital to remember that although the executive grew with great rapidity between 1689 and 1725, there was little or no reform: offices were created in abundance; next to none, except at Court, were abolished.” Prerevolutionary Russian historians argued on these very same grounds that Peter could find nothing to borrow from either England or Holland. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii thus wrote that “the state institutions in England and Holland . . . were not very fit for adoption because of their close ties with the forms of government of these two countries and because they lacked the systematization which made it easier for Peter to borrow Sweden’s administrative institutions.” '* It was in the Swedish administrative system that the Russians found a structure which suited their political aims and which, because of its apparently simple and rational organization, it seemed feasible to copy. As the Swedish central and local administrative systems emerged during the seventeenth century, they completely replaced all previous administrative organs. In its closed and unitary character, the Swedish state administratlon was unique in the Europe of the day and contrasted sharply with such administrative systems as that of France, where old feudal institutions continued to function alongside of newly created administrative organs, thus producing constant disputes over jurisdiction and a considerable measure of administrative instability." The Swedish administration, all the way up from the lowest unit of the local administration to the nine central state colleges, presented a unitary pattern and a strictly hierarchical organization with clearly defined areas of responsibility and jurisdiction for each official and each administrative organ. Thus, the Swedish system had the prerequisites for a relatively effective central direction of society as a whole. In addition to this, Peter must have been influenced considerably by the broad integration of military and civil administration which had taken place in Sweden during the reign of Charles XI. The Swedish fiscal administration was designed to create a stable economic base for the maintenance of the standing army during John H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675—1725 (London, 1967), 101. '* N. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, Proekty reform u zapiskakh sovrememiikov Petra Velikogo (Sr. Petersburg, 1897), 29. " See Roger Mett.'vm, ed., Governmeitt and Society in Louis XIV’s France (London, 1977), 84—85, and Sven Ulric Palme, "Parlament und Biirokratie ini 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert," in Karl Bosl, ed., Der moderne Parlamentarismus und seine Grundlagen in der standischen Repräsentationen (Berlin, 1977), 138—139.
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