Does War Make States - Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology (PDFDrive)

Does War Make States?
Arising from renewed engagement with Charles Tilly’s canonical work

on the relationship between war and state formation, this volume
situates Tilly’s work in a broader theoretical landscape, and brings it
into contemporary debates on state formation theory. Starting with
Tilly’s famous dictum “war made the state, and the state made war,”
the book takes his claim further, examining it from a philosophical,
theoretical and conceptual view, and asking whether it is applicable to
non-European regions such as the Middle East, South America and
China. The authors question Tilly’s narrow view of the causal rela-
tionship between warfare and state-making, and use a positive yet
critical approach to suggest alternative ways to explain how the state
is formed. Readers will gain a comprehensive view of the most recent
developments in the literature on state formation, as well as a more
nuanced view of Charles Tilly’s work.
Lars Bo Kaspersen trained as a sociologist and is now a professor in the

Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, where
he teaches history, politics and sociology. His research interests
are in state formation processes, comparative historical sociology, the
transformation of the welfare state, the sociology of war and civil
society. His most recent book is Denmark in the World (2013).
Jeppe Strandsbjerg trained as a political scientist and is currently
Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Politics
at Copenhagen Business School. His research interests are in Arctic
geopolitics and the spatiality of the sovereign territorial state. He
has published articles in several journals, including Geopolitics and the
Journal of Power.
Does War Make States?
Investigations of Charles Tilly’s
Historical Sociology
Edited by
Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

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education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
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© Cambridge University Press 2017
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First published 2017
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaspersen, Lars Bo, 1961– editor. | Strandsbjerg, Jeppe, 1973– editor.
Title: Does war make states? : investigations of Charles Tilly’s historical soci-
ology / edited by Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016011210 | ISBN 9781107141506 (Hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: War and society. | State, The. | Tilly, Charles–Political
and social views.
Classification: LCC HM554 .D64 2016 | DDC 303.6/6–dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011210
ISBN 978-1-107-14150-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in his publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Contributors page vii

Acknowledgements xii
Introduction: State Formation Theory: Status, Problems, and

Prospects 1
lars bo kaspersen, university of copenhagen;
jeppe strandsbjerg, copenhagen business school;
and benno teschke, university of sussex
Part I Lineages 23
1 After the Tilly Thesis: Social Conflict, Differential
State-formation and Geopolitics in the Construction
of the European System of States 25
benno teschke, university of sussex
2 Otto Hintze, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly’s
Theory of European State-building 52
thomas ertman, new york university
Part II Challenges 71
3 War and State Formation: Amending the Bellicist
Theory of State Making 73
hendrik spruyt, northwestern university
4 Beyond the Tilly Thesis: “Family Values” and
State Formation in Latin Christendom 98
philip gorski, yale university and vivek swaroop sharma,
pomona college
v
vi Table of Contents
Part III Omissions 125

5 The Space of State Formation 127
jeppe strandsbjerg, copenhagen
business school
6 The Realm as a European Form of Rule: Unpacking
the Warfare Thesis through the Holy Roman Empire 154
peter haldén, swedish defence university
7 War, Conflict and the State Reconsidered 181
vivek swaroop sharma, pomona college
Part IV Vistas 219

8 War and State in the Middle East:
Reassessing Charles Tilly in a Regional Context 221
dietrich jung, university of southern denmark
9 Beyond Mere War: Authority and Legitimacy
in the Formation of the Latin American States 243
robert h. holden, old dominion university
10 How Tilly’s State Formation Paradigm is
Revolutionizing the Study of Chinese State-Making 268
victoria tin-bor hui, university of notre dame
Bibliography 296
Name Index 325
Subject Index 330
Contributors
Thomas Ertman (b. 1959) is Associate Professor of Sociology and

Director of the College Core Curriculum at New York University.
He received his BA in Philosophy and PhD in Sociology from Harvard
University, where he was also a faculty member in the Department of
Government for ten years. He is author of Birth of the Leviathan:
Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and
editor of Max Weber’s “Economic Ethos of the World Religions”: An
Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Philip Gorski (b. 1963) is Professor of Sociology and Religious
Studies at Yale University. He received his BA from Harvard
(1986) and his PhD from Berkeley (1996). His early work focuses
on the political development of early modern Europe with special
attention to the impact of the Reformation. He recently completed a
book on American civil religion, which is forthcoming from Prince-
ton University Press.
Peter Haldén (b. 1977) completed his undergraduate education in
Berlin and Stockholm, and he received his PhD at the European
University Institute in Florence in 2006. He is currently an Associate
Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University
(SDU) in Stockholm. His research interests include social theory, state
formation, Eurasian history, international politics, and the political use
of armed force. At the SDU he teaches courses in military strategy and
the political use of military force. Haldén’s recent publications include
the monograph Stability without Statehood (Palgrave, 2011); the articles
“Reconceptualising state-formation as collective power” (Journal of
Political Power, 2014), “A non-sovereign modernity. Attempts to
engineer stability in the Balkans 1820–1890” (Review of International
Studies, 2013); and the co-edited volume New Agenda for Statebuilding
(Routledge, 2013).
vii
viii List of Contributors
Robert H. Holden (b. 1947) holds his PhD (history) from the Univer-
sity of Chicago. He has been Professor of Latin American History at
Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) since 1993. Holden’s
research interests include state formation, violence, rule of law and
legitimacy. His publications include Armies without Nations: Public
Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford
University Press, 2004), Contemporary Latin America: 1970 to the
Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and forthcoming essays, “Violence,
the State and Revolution in Latin America” for the Cambridge World
History of Violence (vol. 4) and “Borderlands and Public Violence in a
Shadow Polity: Costa Ricans, Nicaraguans and the Legacy of the
Central American Federation” for Politics and History of Violence and
Crime in Central America, eds. Sebastian Huhn and Hannes Warnecke
(Palgrave Macmillan). Holden’s principal teaching interests include
Spain in America, Latin American independence, political order,
religion and the state, social revolution, democratization and eco-
nomic development.
Victoria Tin-bor Hui (b. 1967) is an associate professor in Political
Science at the University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in
Political Science from Columbia University and her BSSc from the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. Hui’s research examines the cen-
trality of war in the formation and transformation of China through the
whole span of Chinese history. She is the author of War and State
Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2005). She has published the articles “Toward a
Dynamic Theory of International Politics” (International Organiza-
tion), “The Emergence and Demise of Nascent Constitutional Rights”
(Journal of Political Philosophy), “History and Thought in China’s
Traditions” (Journal of Chinese Political Science), “Building Castles in
the Sand” (Chinese Journal of International Politics), and book chapters
“The China Dream: Revival of What Historical Greatness?”, “The
Triumph of Domination in the Ancient Chinese System” and “Prob-
lematizing Sovereignty.” As a native from Hong Kong, Hui also ana-
lyses Hong Kong politics. She maintains a blog on the Umbrella
Movement (https://victoriatbhui.wordpress.com) and has published
the article “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement: The Protest and
Beyond” (Journal of Democracy). Hui teaches courses on the state
and contentious politics.
Dietrich Jung (b. 1959) is a professor and Head of Department at the
Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern
Denmark. He holds an MA in Political Science and Islamic Studies, as
List of Contributors ix
well as a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences,

University of Hamburg, Germany, and has large field experience in the
Muslim world. In different capacities Jung has taught graduate and
undergraduate courses in International Relations, Islamic Studies,
Political Science, Sociology and Middle Eastern Area Studies. He
has published numerous scholarly articles on causes of war, peace
and conflict studies, political Islam, modern Turkey and on conflicts
in the Middle East. His most recent published books are Orientalists,
Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essen-
tialist Image of Islam (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), and The Politics of
Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth and Social Activism in the
Middle East, together with Marie Juul Petersen and Sara Lei Sparre
(New York: Palgrave, 2014).
Lars Bo Kaspersen (b. 1961) holds a BA (Copenhagen), MA (Copen-
hagen), MA (Sussex) and PhD (Aarhus). He teaches history, politics
and sociology and is currently Professor and Head of the Department
of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He has published
widely on social theory and political sociology and is the author of
“Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist,” and “Den-
mark in the World.” Kaspersen’s research areas are state formation
processes in Europe, the transformation of the welfare state, sociology
of war and civil society (including the idea of associative democracy),
social theory, in particular relational theory. Together with Norman
Gabriel, he is working on a book about Norbert Elias’s political soci-
ology. Kaspersen recently received a grant from the Carlsberg Foun-
dation to study “the civil society in the shadow of the state,” focusing
on the role of civil society in the development of the Danish welfare
state and its future.
Vivek Swaroop Sharma (b. 1970) holds a BA from Pitzer College
(History), MA from Claremont Graduate School (History), MA from
New York University (International Relations) and a PhD from Pitzer
College (Comparative Politics). He now teaches at Pomona College in
Claremont, California. His research interests are focused broadly on
problems of social order, conflict and violence with a special focus on
religion and violence, state formation and failure, war and conflict, and
the historical sociology of power and authority in South Asia and
Western Europe. Sharma’s teaching addresses the traditional ques-
tions of political science through a historical institutional frame: his
recent courses include Religion and Violence, Power and Authority in
India, The Social Foundations of Order, Conflict and Violence, Colo-
nialism and Nationalism, Political Authority and State in Europe, War
x List of Contributors
and Society, and State Failure and State Building. His recent publica-
tions include “Give Corruption a Chance,” The National Interest,
vol. 128 November/December 2013; “A Social Theory of War: Clau-
sewitz and War Reconsidered,” Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, 19 August 2014; “Kinship, Property and Authority,” Politics
and Society, 27 February 2015; and “Secularism and Democracy in
India,” The National Interest, forthcoming. He is also the author of
War, Authority and the State: European State Formation Reconsidered,
Cambridge University Press, under review.
Hendrik Spruyt (b. 1956) is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of
International Relations at Northwestern University. He previously
taught at Columbia University and Arizona State University. He has
also been a visiting faculty member of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques
in Paris. He received a Doctorandus from the University of Leiden,
School of Law (The Netherlands) in 1983, and his PhD in Political
Science from the University of California, San Diego, in 1991. He was
Chair of the Department of Political Science at Northwestern from
2005 to 2008, and Director of the Buffett Center for International and
Comparative Studies from 2008 to 2013. Spruyt has also served as co-
editor of The Review of International Political Economy. He has pub-
lished several books, including The Sovereign State and Its Competitors
(Princeton University Press, 1994), which won the Greenstone Prize
for best book in History and Politics; Ending Empire: Contested Sover-
eignty and Territorial Partition (Cornell University Press, 2005), which
was a runner-up for the Greenstone Prize in 2006; Global Horizons
(University of Toronto, 2009); co-author with Alexander Cooley of
Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations (Prince-
ton University Press, 2009), and co-editor with Miriam Elman and
Oded Haklai of Democracy, Religion, and Conflict: The Dilemmas of
Israel’s Peacemaking (Syracuse University Press, 2013).
Among his recent publications are “Empires, Past and Present: The
Relevance of Empire as an Analytic Concept,” in Noel Parker, ed.,
Empire and International Order (2013); “New Institutionalism and
International Relations,” in Ronen Palan, ed., Global Political Economy
(2012); “Indonesia,” in Richard Caplan, ed., Exit Strategies and State
Building (2012).
Jeppe Strandsbjerg (b. 1973) is Associate Professor at the Department
of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. He is an
International Relations scholar with a DPhil in International Relations
(Sussex) and master degrees in Political Science (Copenhagen) and
International Relations (Aberystwyth, Wales). His research is generally
List of Contributors xi
preoccupied with the concept of space in International Relations and

the relationship between space and politics. Previously he has analysed
the role of cartography in the process where territory emerged as a
defining concept for sovereignty in European state formation (Terri-
tory, Globalization and International Relations (2010) Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan). More recently he has been studying the significance
of spatial knowledge technologies in Arctic Geopolitics (“Cartopoli-
tics, Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic” in Geopolitics 17(4)
2012). Strandsbjerg is currently working along two tracks dealing with
Arctic geopolitics: a project on security, sovereignty and natural
resources; and a project investigating the politic impact of sustainabil-
ity discourse. He teaches courses on International Relations, Global-
isation Theory and Political Theory.
Benno Teschke (b. 1967) is currently a Reader in the Department of
International Relations at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom,
and an affiliated Visiting Professor in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Copenhagen. He received his PhD from
the International Relations (IR) Department at the London School of
Economics and Political Science and was subsequently a post-doctoral
fellow at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Teschke is the author of The
Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London/New York: Verso), which was awarded the Isaac
Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004 (translated into German, Japanese,
Russian and Turkish). More recently he published in the New Left
Review, International Theory and the Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt
on Schmitt’s international legal and political thought. Teschke’s
research interests comprise IR Theory, International History, Histor-
ical Sociology and Marxism.
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of two meetings held at Copenhagen Business

School (2–3 October 2009 and 28–9 May 2010) where participants were
asked to critically investigate Tilly’s claim that “war makes states and
states make war” and to review and contribute to the state-formation
theory debate. The meetings were generously funded by the recently
renamed Danish Society for Education and Business (then FUHU). After
the first meeting in 2009, which turned out to be both intellectually
stimulating and enriching, we planned a follow-up meeting the year after
where papers were more specifically geared towards publication. In
addition to the authors included in this volume we were fortunate to
get input during the meetings from Anna Leander, Gorm Harste, Erik
Lind, John Hall and Clemens Hoffmann.
We hope that the selection of contributions to the present volume will
provide further inspiration and reflection for those concerned with his-
torical processes of state formation.
Along the way a number of dedicated people with a flair for organisa-
tion have contributed immensely to the realisation of this collection.
Lonni Nielsen at the former International Center for Business and
Politics was instrumental in organising the meetings. Kathrine Nistrup
Madsen, Cecilie Falch Ovesen and Susanna Dyre-Greensite worked
tirelessly on collecting and editing the different chapters and creating
the index. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the three
anonymous reviewers for providing excellent and challenging comments
on how to improve the collection. At Cambridge University Press, John
Haslam was a pleasure to work with. Finally, we would like to thank each
of the contributors, not only for writing such excellent chapters, but also
for their admirable patience in what ended up being a much longer
journey than we had imagined – or would have believed – when we first
met in Copenhagen six years ago.
xii
Introduction
State Formation Theory: Status, Problems, and Prospects
Lars Bo Kaspersen, Jeppe Strandsbjerg and

Benno Teschke
There is little doubt that warfare has always imposed an immense strain
on any political organisation. When, for example, the Danish king
Frederick II raised an army to field against Sweden in the Northern
Seven Years War in 1563, the cost of the 25.000 hired mercenaries was
40.000 rix-dollar (rigsdaler) per month. The income of the Danish state
was around 200.000 rix-dollar per year.1 Hence, the annual budget could
finance the army for four months. The war lasted seven years. These are
not unusual figures in European history, but still they raise questions of
how states as social and political organisations could sustain such costs.
It is well established in the literature that warfare often constituted a
driver for change. The way in which the cost and preparation for war
forced states towards institutional innovation has been a primary concern
of historians and social scientists for decades. Foremost among these is
the American sociologist Charles Tilly (1929–2008). He famously
phrased the relationship between warfare and state in this simple, luring
and often-quoted fashion: ‘War made the state, and the state made war’.2
The purpose of this volume is to explore and assess Tilly’s enduring
contribution to Historical Sociology. We share a general acceptance of
warfare’s significance for the historical processes of state formation but
also believe that the claim needs to be modified in different ways and for
different purposes. All the contributions in this volume are written by
scholars who specialise in areas speaking either directly to Tilly’s main
claims or to the core methodological and theoretical assumptions in his
work. As such, this volume is not intended to provide an introduction to
state-formation literature but rather to provide an assessment that brings
Tilly’s agenda forward. Many of the contributions are critical, but it is
1
Carsten Due-Nielsen, Ole Feldbæk et al. (eds.), Dansk Udenrigspolitiks Historie, vol. 1
(København, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, 2001), p. 308.
2
Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making.” In: Charles Tilly
(ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton University Press,
1975), p. 42.
1
2 Lars Bo Kaspersen, Jeppe Strandsbjerg and Benno Teschke
through critique that we realise what is tenable and what is not. His
contribution is scrutinised in philosophical, theoretical, conceptual,
empirical and also geographical terms. Although Tilly himself never
generalised the claim to geographical areas other than Western Europe
or to the contemporary world, recent research and policy-making has
taken the claim further and beyond the early modern European context.
In response, this volume provides contributions that examine whether
Tilly’s warfare paradigm is applicable to non-European regions (Middle
East, South America, China).
Tilly’s untimely death spawned a series of symposia and special
issues, which celebrated his extraordinary contribution to the establish-
ment of the sub-discipline of Historical Sociology in American sociology
and beyond.3 According to William Sewell, Tilly’s early work ‘helped
inaugurate a new style of historical social science that has changed both
history and historical sociology’4 and for Georg Steinmetz, ‘Tilly
exerted a quietly revolutionary impact on American historical
sociology.’5 But while these early tributes retained a commemorative
and valedictory tone – often written by former colleagues – no system-
atic and critical appraisal of and engagement with his key contribution to
Historical Sociology, comparable to the companion volumes of his
sociological colleagues Elias, Giddens, Mann or Rokkan,6 has yet
appeared in the scholarly literature. More importantly, none of these
special issues was dedicated to an exploration of his key thesis on the
warfare paradigm in state-formation research. This volume is intended
to close that gap. The remaining parts of this chapter contextualise the
assessment of Tilly’s work by, first, providing our view of the current
3
See, for example, Social Science History, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 2010); The American
Sociologist, vol. 41, no. 4 (2010); Theory & Society, vol. 39, nos. 3–4 (2010); French
Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (2010). See also the various contributions to the
2008 Conference ‘Contentions, Change and Explanation: A Conference in Honour of
Charles Tilly’, organised by the Social Science Research Council at www.ssrc.org/
hirschman/event/2008. For annotated links to Tilly resources see the very useful
website at http://essays.ssrc.org/tilly/resources#conferences.
4
William H. Sewell, “Charles Tilly’s Vendée as a Model for Social History,” French
Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (Spring 2010), pp. 307–15, here at p. 309.
5
George Steinmetz, “Charles Tilly, German Historicism and the Critical Realist
Philosophy of Science,” The American Sociologist, vol. 41, no. 4 (December 2010),
pp. 312–36, here at p. 313.
6
Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary (eds.),
Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4 (London: Routledge, 1997); John
A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder (eds.), An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael
Mann (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Flora, Stein Kuhnle and Peter Urwin
(eds.), State-Formation, Nation-Building and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein
Rokkan (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Introduction 3
state of state theory and state-formation theory. Based on this we situate

Tilly’s work in a broader theoretical landscape before we conclude the
chapter with brief summaries of the subsequent chapters.
Theorising the State

The modern state, it is widely believed, is a uniquely European phe-
nomenon. Its temporal origins and geographical expansion – consoli-
dating over time into a distinct worldwide inter-state system – has
been the subject of sustained fascination and interest across a number
of disciplines, including Historical Sociology, Comparative Politics,
International Law and International Relations (IR). In fact, state
theory and state-formation theory can be regarded as one prominent
intellectual axis across these modern disciplines and national research
cultures, building on the classical Western canon in political theory
and political philosophy. Theoretical controversies around the state
and its historical origins have been as productive and long-lived as the
phenomenon itself, gravitating often around the topos of the
Westphalian Settlement of 1648.7 Sovereign statehood has been
regarded until quite recently as the natural terminus of political devel-
opment, standard political form of self-determination and entry ticket
into the international community of any independently minded polit-
ical association. This seemed to hold until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Thence, the sovereign state as a historical reality and as an object of
inquiry seemed to be in decline. A flourishing literature on post-
sovereignty suggested replacing the state as the key unit of power
and political analysis with an alternative de-territorialising conceptual
terminology on a spectrum from globalisation and global governance,
via an expanding zone of liberal peace consolidating a ‘universal and
homogeneous state’, to empire.8
But this clamorous re-definition of the research agenda disappeared
as quickly as it had emerged. Whereas the concepts of globalisation
and global governance seemed to capture the intellectual Zeitgeist in
7
For a comprehensive critique of this topos, see Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class,
Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003).
8
For early critiques see: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford
University Press, 1990); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New
York: The Free Press, 1992); David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the
Modern State to Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Jürgen
Habermas, The Post-National Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2001 [1998]); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New
York: Penguin Press, 2004).
the 1990s,9 grasping an opportune liberal moment that generated

exaggerated claims for a ‘post-Westphalian’ world threatening to tran-
scend the inter-state nature of world politics, and while the concepts of
empire or imperialism were revitalised around the turn of the new
millennium to grasp the more unilateral nature of American power
projection abroad, the state as the key aggregation of political power,
source of legitimacy, objective of national self-determination move-
ments and unit of analysis – for all the apparent power-differentials
within a hierarchically ordered system of states – refuses to disappear.
In fact, the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall stood for a double
movement: while grand claims on post-territoriality and the imminent
realisation of a liberal spaceless universalism abounded, the research
agenda on state-formation, consolidation, transformation and ‘failure’
gained simultaneously renewed academic traction and policy rele-
vance. Real-time worldwide political developments – state break-ups
(e.g. the USSR, Yugoslavia), state ‘failures’ (Africa), state-building
(Afghanistan, Iraq, ex-Soviet republics, former Eastern Europe), state
consolidation and development (East Asia), regime shifts (Latin
America, Middle East, North Africa), decolonisation processes
(Africa) and secessions (East Timor, South Sudan) – forced the state
research agenda back to the fore.10 The state fails to keep
withering away.
Placing these contemporary developments within a wider historical
perspective has been a common, though not universally adhered to,
tendency in academia. Drawing lessons from the past to understand
the ongoing metamorphoses of one of the social sciences’ most central
objects of investigation and, perhaps, to draw valuable policy advice to
shape these processes, has been a favourite and well-tested option. It
encouraged an inter-disciplinary rapprochement between and, in many
cases, a convergence of the more presentist disciplines of Comparative
Politics, Sociology, IR and International Law towards the terrain of
Historical Sociology and, perhaps, even International Historical Soci-
ology. This ‘historical turn’ keeps raising long-standing questions.
9
Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1996); Peter Hall and David Soskice (eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional
Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford University Press, 2001); Justin
Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory: Polemical Essays (London: Verso, 2003).
10
Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); idem, The Origins of Political Order: From
Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011);
Richard Lachmann, States and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Daron Acemoglu
and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New
York: Random House, 2012).
Introduction 5
How did the modern state develop? What accounts for the growth of
state power? What are the drivers of state-proliferation across the
globe? Casting the net of investigation across a wide diversity of
state-formation cases to draw a summa is a tempting strategy for the
conduct of research and the generation of testable hypothesis. How-
ever, the attempt to draw lessons from history – in modern parlance to
generate data bases for comparative research – to enrich and secure
contemporary policy analysis and advice is an exercise fraught with
difficulties.11 Why should contemporary cases of state-building con-
form to earlier examples, when the former unfold within a geopolitical
and diplomatic environment already pre-configured and shaped by the
latter? Evidently, the historical sequence of state-formations becomes
co-constitutive of contemporary manifestations of state-building. This
needs to enter into our theorisations. To distil a scientific essence of
state-formation under quasi-laboratory conditions – generating digests
and policy manuals for institutional ‘state-building’ – in abstraction
from a concurrently evolving geopolitical environment and the specifi-
cities of prevailing social relations and power struggles on the ground
pursues an anti-historical research procedure for a deeply historical
phenomenon. The social-scientific imagination, to the degree that it
subscribes to the postulate of general model building, confronts the
historiographical counter-postulate of ideography – the emphasis on
the sui generis character and particularities of each trajectory of state-
building. Historia magistra vitae is not equivalent to the maxim that
history repeats itself. What, then, is the meaning of historicisation in
state and state-formation research?
But the turn to history is fraught with a dilemma. For historians and
historical sociologists are as divided in their explanations or understand-
ings of earlier experiences of successful state-formations in early modern
Europe and elsewhere as their interlocutors in Political Science, Soci-
ology, Anthropology and IR are on state-formation in the present. In
fact, even the definition of the state, and a fortiori the modern state, is not
settled among historians. And there are good reasons for this. For the
procedure of ideal-type formation or ‘general abstraction’ as a standard
of concept-formation in the social sciences generates tensions and
aporias when confronted with the task of historical concretisation.
11
For a minor cause célèbre in this regard, see Jeffrey Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,”
International Security, vol. 14, no. 4 (1990), pp. 117–39. Here, the suggestion is that the
absence of state-consolidating warfare in Africa, in contrast to early modern Europe,
explains the persisting problems of strong state-building and nationalism on the
continent.
Whether in classical Weberian12 or Marxist state theory,13 attempts to

define an ‘essence’ of the modern state or the capitalist state in abstraction
from its multiple and diverse historical manifestations run the familiar risk
of reification and a-historicity. Even if we agree that the modern state is
not simply a coercive apparatus – a set of public institutions analytically
detached from ‘civil society’ – but rather a social relation, we are forced to
take the specificity of these social relations and social conflicts around
state power seriously seriatim. Theoretical generalisation faces historical
specification. In fact, there is an inverse relation between abstraction and
concretion. As the conceptual abstraction becomes ever ‘thinner’ to sub-
sume an ever wider repertory of diverse cases, it becomes simultaneously
ever less capable of capturing the very heterogeneity of the multiple cases
that it was intended to grasp. The procedure of ideal-type formation leads
either to the dilution of the general concept of the modern or capitalist
state, or to the demotion of cases to ‘variants’ or ‘exceptions’ – usually, to
both. But how many ‘variants’ or ‘exceptions’ can a theoretical construct
bear before it collapses? Ultimately, the moment of a state’s definitional
ideality ‘never comes’.
Yet the problems of conceptuality in the procedures of ideal-type
formation go even deeper. While Max Weber’s classical definition of
the modern state, as a ‘political community which successfully upholds
a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given
territory’, keeps serving as a common reference point, its ideality has
arguably contributed to the classification of many state experiences as
‘failed’ – and thus worthy of intervention and correction by an Euro-
centric establishment in charge of a superior normative set of social-
scientific categories.14 Such policy implications have served as a
reminder to draw back from ideal-type/impure-type binaries and to
convert the rigour of social-scientific category formation into more
space-time sensitive sui generis concepts for each individual case of polit-
ical community. This connotes another meaning of the task of historici-
sation: the temporalisation of the field of conceptuality.15 Failing that,
12
Christopher Pierson, The Modern State, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011).
13
Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1990).
14
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich (eds.), vols. I and II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
p. 58.
15
This problematique has, of course, been taken up by the Cambridge School and
Begriffsgeschichte (Conceptual History), but remains largely restricted in its focus on
textuality and inter-textuality. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the
History of Ideas,” History and Theory, vol. 8, no. 1 (1969), pp. 3–53; idem, The
Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance, vol. 1 (Cambridge University
Introduction 7
the procedure leads quickly into the classical ‘Orientalism’ trap.16 For if
reality does not comply with Western concepts, then it is perhaps not
reality that is at fault, but maybe the classical sociological standards of
concept formation, whose idealities tend to demote non-ideal experi-
ences to ‘anomalies’ requiring normalisation, as the Neo-Conservative
ideology painfully exemplified.
Consequently, a final problem arises. For the articulation of value-free
and dispassionate social-scientific lessons drawn from a historical reper-
tory of cases militates against the multiple and contested political pur-
poses to which state-building ‘expertise’ is harnessed. Theory
construction is often itself a purposeful exercise designed to intervene
into the shaping – some would say engineering – of social reality. Today,
any self-reflexive approach to theories of state-formation – as social-
scientific ‘truths’, discourses, or ideologies – needs to register their co-
constitutive power for ongoing acts of state-formation, intervention and
destruction, as entire armies of scholars, consultants and experts in think
tanks, governments and international organisations leave their mark on
the present. The link between the past and the present remains fragile.
Mapping State-Formation Theories

The (re-)turn to history in the Political Science, Sociology and IR litera-
tures on states and state-building reconnects, as mentioned, with the
large and long-standing body of state-formation theories in Historical
Sociology. This is in itself a highly diversified and controversial field,
which traditionally builds on Classical Sociology (Marx, Durkheim,
Weber). In the contemporary field of state-formation research in Histor-
ical Sociology, we find a number of competing theories and approaches,
emphasising different explanatory factors, embedded in different phil-
osophies of science and, in some cases, operating with different inde-
pendent or intermediate variables. Some theories reject the language of
causality or multi-causality and independent-dependent variable
altogether and emphasise interpretation, historical semantics, contested
relationality, or the genealogy of epistemic discourses. Some prioritise
particular political processes and political institutions as the key variables
Press, 1978); Reinhard Koselleck, “Einleitung.” In: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and
Reinhard Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-
Sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972), pp. XIII–
XXVII; idem, “Social History and Conceptual History.” In: Reinhard Koselleck (ed.),
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford University
Press, 2002), pp. 20–37.
16
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
to be examined (e.g. war, war combined with the character of local

government and state infrastructure); others focus on economic pro-
cesses (e.g. property relations, exchange relations or class struggle), while
other scholars stress ideational variables such as religion or culture. Most
often, we find attempts to combine these variables, most notably the
political and economic dimensions.
Several attempts have been made to systematise and classify the field of
Historical Sociology and the filiations of state-formation theory within it.
A recent influential survey of the field17 suggested a periodisation of the
sub-discipline’s trajectory following a temporal sequence of three waves.
Against the backdrop of Classical Sociology, which was centrally con-
cerned with the transition from tradition to modernity, the first wave (up
to ca. 1965) revolved largely around the paradigm of a Weber-inspired
modernisation theory and a Parsonian structural-functionalism, formu-
lating abstract stages of development and static taxonomies with little
grounding in actual historical research. The second wave (ca.
1965–1990) was characterised by a Marx/Weber synthesis, which began
to break down during the 1990s and was succeeded by an ongoing post-
Marx/Weber third wave. Substantively, the second wave comprised stud-
ies on large-scale and long-term processes, including the rise of
capitalism, industrialisation, class-formation, revolution, war, state-
making, secularisation, rationalisation, individuation and formal organ-
isations. Theoretically, it embraced versions of comparativism, political
economy, structuralism and determinism, while conceiving of social
change in terms of linear, epochal and progressive transitions (teleology).
Its conception of agency was largely utilitarian and rationalist, as political
action was often derived from economic or social position. The third
wave, in contrast, developed as a reaction to the Marx/Weber synthesis
and comprises five distinct groupings: (1) institutionalism, (2) rational
choice, (3) the cultural turn, (4) feminism and (5) post-colonialism.
‘Rational choice’ apart, it took identity, religion, ethnicity, race, culture,
nation, gender and informal organisations as their central objects of
analyses, while theoretically emphasising case studies, cultural and dis-
course analysis, agency and contingency. It largely conceived of historical
development in terms of moments of non-linear transposition and re-
composition. It also rejected attempts to construct space/time invariant
general theories, relying on the ‘nomological-deductive covering law’
17
Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, “Introduction: Social Theory,
Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology.” In: Julia Adams et al. (eds.),
Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005), pp. 1–72.
Introduction 9
model as defined by Carl Hempel. While the third wave constitutes a

heterogeneous group of scholars, they are united in their aversion to
material structuralism, political economy and essentialism.
Other surveys deny a temporal logic of supersession inherent in the
metaphor of waves and identify several co-existing ‘centres of gravity’
with no specific chronological beginnings or endings.18 Patrick Carroll
objects to an agonistic and inter-generational logic of supersession by
suggesting parallel and competing ‘centres of gravity’, loosely organised
according to thematic and theoretical preferences. This classification
identifies a ‘military-fiscal centre of gravity’, which includes Tilly and
Michael Mann19 and relies primarily on Weber and, to a lesser degree,
on Marx; this competes with an ‘Autonomous State Centre of Gravity’,
which is largely Weberian and best represented by the work of Theda
Skocpol20 and a ‘Culture Centre of Gravity’ represented by Corrigan and
Sayer21 drawing much inspiration from Foucault. Carroll himself seems
to open up a fourth centre, revolving around the impact of the sciences,
notably the natural sciences and technologies, on state-formation. Dylan
Riley, in turn, raises a similar charge against the language of waves
embraced by third-wavers, ‘for periodising the development of historical
sociology in terms of waves of development (. . .) would seem to be a
quintessentially second-wave enterprise. For the language of waves inev-
itably suggests a transition from one stage of development to another’.22
Riley detects more evidence ‘of a field that grows through an operation of
productive return to origins’,23 which is for him a return to political
economy, including Marx and Weber.
This book starts from the assumption that any schematic classification
of state-formation theories – putting scholars into boxes – runs the risk
of typological oversimplification. This applies to the classical sociolo-
gists (see Chapter 2 for Ertman’s comment on Hintze’s shifts of
emphasis) as much as to contemporary scholars. While stylisation is
18
Patrick Carroll, “Articulating Theories of States and State Formation,” Journal of
Historical Sociology, vol. 22, no. 4 (2009), pp. 553–603; Dylan Riley, “Waves of
Historical Sociology,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 47, no. 5
(2006), pp. 379–86.
19
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume I: A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); idem, States, War and
Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); idem, The Sources of
Social Power. Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
20
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia
and China (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
21
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (New York: Blackwell, 1991).
22
Riley, “Waves of Historical Sociology,” p. 380.
23
Idem, “Waves of Historical Sociology,” p. 380.
often hard to evade within the field of state-formation research, this

procedure overlooks and misclassifies important work. These categor-
isations have difficulties coming to terms with, for example, scholars
such as Richard Lachmann,24 Hendrik Spruyt,25 and Perry Anderson26
who escape the clear-cut categories of bello-centrism or econo-centrism –
or even Neo-Hintzeanism and Neo-Marxism. While these writers may
appear at first sight to fall into the econo-centric category, this underesti-
mates the problem that politics and economics appear either as causally
inseparable in their works or, rejecting the language of causality
altogether (the conception of the social world as a priori, separated into
externally interacting domains of causality), as internally related to
each other.
The book agrees with Carroll’s and Riley’s suggestion that the second
wave of state-formation theories in Historical Sociology is neither
exhausted nor supplanted – particularly as culturalist approaches to
state-formation seem to have withdrawn from historicising and theorising
the multi-linear and interactive inter-political relations of state-building
processes, which non-orthodox theories in the field of IR keep problem-
atising27 – while accepting the fruitfulness of new departures associated
with third-wavers. It also finds Riley’s idea of a ‘productive return to
origins’ suggestive as some second-wave theories of state-formation have
neither been sufficiently explored, refuted or developed. If the language
of waves as a periodising device tends to veer towards an instrument of
theoretical boundary maintenance, and if the categories of economistic,
politicist/bellicist and culturalist are not watertight, then we are returned
to accepting Carroll’s suggestion to re-convene the field of state-
formation theories in Historical Sociology and beyond in terms of mul-
tiple and ongoing theoretical centres of gravity. This generates a more
open-ended perspective on the cross-disciplinary plurality of contending
theory families.
24
Richard Lachmann, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflicts and Economic
Transitions in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2000).
25
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change
(Princeton University Press, 1994).
26
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974); idem,
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974).
27
Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds.), Historical Sociology of International
Relations (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Hobson, George Lawson
and Justin Rosenberg, “Historical Sociology.” In: Robert A. Denemark (ed.), The
International Studies Encyclopaedia, vol. VI (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 3357–75; Benno Teschke, “IR Theory, Historical Materialism, and the False
Promise of International Historical Sociology,” Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies
(2014).
Introduction 11
Locating Charles Tilly

It is in this context that the present volume critically examines the work
of Charles Tilly as one of the most influential scholars on state-
formation. While Tilly’s prodigious output defies deft summary, he
moved substantively from studies on early modern contentious politics,
via explorations into the nexus between war, cities, revolutions and
state-formation, to analyses of democracy, the public sphere, citizens
and rights. Methodologically, he shifted from comparative historical
political sociology in his earlier work, premised on quantification,
structuralism and macro-sociology, to the deployment of network
analysis, emphasising relations, processes and agency in his later work.
While Tilly’s long career straddled the ‘bellicist’ and ‘culturalist’ waves,
he made his most significant contribution to Historical Sociology
during his structuralist phase in the 1970s and 1980s. Tilly helped to
establish one of the most robust, intuitively plausible and significant
theories of early modern state-formations in Europe, which we will refer
to as the warfare-paradigm or, alternatively, the bello-centric theory of
state-formation. He formed part of a generation of scholars – among
them Theda Skocpol,28 Michael Mann,29 Anthony Giddens,30 Martin
Shaw,31 Gianfranco Poggi32 and Norbert Elias33 – who revolutionised
Anglo-American sociology through its re-definition as Historical
Sociology.34 Dissatisfied with US Sociology’s presentism, Tilly’s entry
point into history mirrors contemporary attempts to provide historical
depth and perspective to ongoing processes of state-formation and
transformation. For Tilly and his colleagues’ turn to history intended
to test the prevailing attempts within the Political Development
Literature in the fields of Politics and Sociology to formulate universal
28
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.
29
Mann, The Sources; idem, States, War and Capitalism; idem, The Sources, vol. 2.
30
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985).
31
Martin Shaw (ed.), War, State and Society (London: Macmillan, 1984); Martin Shaw
and Colin Creighton, The Sociology of War and Peace (London: Macmillan, 1987);
Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of War and Peace
(London: Pluto Press, 1988).
32
Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction
(Stanford University Press, 1978).
33
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and
Civilization, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]).
34
Norbert Elias’s key work The Civilizing Process was first published in 1939 in German.
The first English edition appeared in 1968. An improved translation was published in
1978. It was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that his work became known to an Anglo-
American audience and that he was recognized for his important contribution to the
relationship between warfare and state-formation processes.
models and generalisations about large-scale political changes. These

were conceptualised as transitions from traditional political orders to
modern rationalised states, best encapsulated within Modernisation
Theory. But the largely a-historical nature of contemporary US Sociology
forced a much more systematic turn to history and yielded the establish-
ment of the new sub-discipline of Historical Sociology. For Tilly, the
analysis of state-formation processes in early modern Europe served three
distinct purposes: (1) to question and unsettle the historical reasoning of a
standard path of political modernisation implicitly or explicitly relied upon
by the Political Development Literature, (2) to generate new working
hypotheses derived from early modern Europe about contemporary pro-
cesses of state-formation and (3) to delimit the applicability of general
theories of development through a historicisation of differences and vari-
ations in spatio-temporally distinct context.35
Tilly’s most seminal research programme was delineated as an inquiry
into two long and linked processes: ‘(1) into large-scale structural change
in Western countries since about 1500 and (2) into changing forms of
conflict and collective action in the same countries over the same time
span. The large-scale changes that receive the most attention (. . .) are
state-making and the development of capitalism. The countries in ques-
tion are most frequently France and England’.36 This research pro-
gramme was first announced in the volume on The Formation of
National States in Western Europe37 and found its most systematic and,
perhaps, popularised expression in Tilly’s monograph Coercion, Capital,
and European States,38 which can be described as the high water mark and
culmination of his macro-sociological and structuralist period. The
implicit theoretical assumptions governing these substantive writings
were secured and rendered explicit by his two volumes on method in
Historical Sociology – As Sociology Meets History and Big Structures, Large
Processes, Huge Comparisons.39 Beyond the extension of the field of analy-
sis to early modern history, Tilly’s Historical Sociology also broke meth-
odologically with Modernisation Theory. He repeatedly identified two
persisting weaknesses in the Political Development Literature: ‘The
treatment of each country as a separate, self-contained, more or less
35
Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton University
Press, 1975), pp. 13–14.
36
Idem, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. x–xii.
37
Idem, The Formation of National States.
38
Idem, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990).
39
Idem, As Sociology Meets History; and idem, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge
Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 1984).
Introduction 13
autonomous case’, which failed to place ‘the experience of specific areas

squarely within the large international process which help create that
experience’,40 and the formulation of ‘schemes involving standard stages,
sequences, or paths of development’.41 Instead of uni-linearity, Tilly
explored interactive multi-linearity; instead of evolutionary stagism, he
explored non-linear temporalities. Tilly conceived of Historical
Sociology as a historically grounded social science, whose emphasis on
spatio-temporal specificity and variation subverted all epistemological
calls for a social-scientific positivism oriented towards the construction
and testing of generalising and universalising social laws. As he con-
cluded later, ‘the search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to
the laws of Newtonian mechanics has . . . utterly failed’.42 This rejection
of the positivist assumptions of Modernisation Theory prompted a re-
problematisation of the question of method in relation to Historical
Sociology, which he introduced as ‘encompassing comparison’, to over-
come the dual strictures of classical sociology: ‘internal logic’ and
‘standard path’.43 Tilly articulated, even if only in nuce, the question of
method for International Historical Sociology.44
Overcoming ‘internalism’ meant positioning each ‘case’ within a wider
international context defined by war and capitalism. Overcoming
‘standard paths’ meant allowing for variations in the trajectories of state-
formation depending on internal social specificities, most decisively the
presence or absence of capitalism. The regionally specific conjunction of
these external and internal dynamics could lead to state growth, state
transformation or state exit. By systematically incorporating the role of
war and geopolitics into their accounts of European state-formations, Tilly
and his colleagues had not only opened up Sociology to Historical Soci-
ology, but had also partly moved beyond Comparative Historical
Sociology to an internationally extended Neo-Weberian Historical
Sociology.45 Tilly captured this theoretical re-orientation in his striking
40
Idem, The Formation of National States, p. 627.
41
Idem, The Formation of National States, p. 604.
42
Idem, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 9.
43
Idem, Big Structures, p. 125.
44
Tilly never fully articulated his method ‘encompassing comparison’ and later abandoned
it altogether. For a critique of the method of ‘encompassing comparison’ see Philip
McMichael, “Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An
Alternative Comparative Method,” American Sociological Review, vol. 55, no. 3 (1990),
pp. 385–97.
45
The label Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology refers, of course, only to one aspect of
Weber’s body of work, most notably to his dispersed (and never fully systematised)
remarks on the primacy of power politics and great power prestige (Realpolitik),
instrumental rationality at the state level in terms of a means-ends calculus, and his
classical definition of the modern state as a public organisation claiming a legitimate
and famous dictum that ‘war makes states and states make war’, the key
conclusion of his edited volume The Formation of National States in Western
Europe.46 The claim that warfare and state-formation were strongly inter-
related was developed in a number of publications from the 1970s to the
early 1990s47 and can be regarded as Tilly’s most influential and enduring
legacy. It contributed to a paradigm shift in the field of state-formation
studies.
The new internationally extended Historical Sociology broke not only
with Modernisation Theory, but also with other dominant Liberal and
Marxist state-formation paradigms, as they allegedly underplayed and
elided the constitutive impact of war, war finance and revenue-
procurement on the growth of centralised state power. Rather than
conceiving of state-formation as a by-product of the gradual extension
of political and civic individual rights, supported by a liberal discourse of
Enlightenment, or as a by-product of revolutionary transitions from
feudalism to capitalism in which united and secular bourgeois classes
replaced traditional monarchical orders, it was war and the costs of war
that drove innovations in the sources of military revenues. This forced the
rationalisation of tax systems and revenue-collecting bureaucracies,
leading to the centralisation and relative autonomy of state power, and
ultimately to the public concentration and monopolisation of the means
of violence – central properties of the modern state – across many
European regions. But since the extraction of financial resources for
military purposes could not rely on domestic coercion alone, states were
forced into bargaining processes with social classes, most notably
capitalists, to generate income streams, resulting in regional variations
in state-building processes. These were captured in ideal-typical fashion
as coercion-intensive, capital-intensive and capitalised coercion-intensive
political regimes. The process of bargaining, where it prevailed, engen-
dered ultimately the ‘civilianisation of government and domestic poli-
tics’.48 The evolution of new institutions and organisations usually
monopoly over the means of violence, administered by a bureaucracy divorced from the
means of administration. Methodologically, Neo-Weberians often rely on the
comparative method, the use of ideal-types, and the insistence on multi-causality
between ontologically pre-constituted spheres of social action. It should be noted that
the more ‘hermeneutic’ Weber rarely features in these Neo-Weberian macro-sociological
and structuralist accounts of state-formation.
46
Tilly, The Formation of National States, p. 42.
47
Idem, The Formation of National States; idem, “War Making and State Making as
Organized Crime.” In: Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol
(eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91;
idem, Coercion.
48
Idem, Coercion, p. 206.
Introduction 15
took place during wartime and for military purposes. After war endings, it
became very difficult to build them back so that war-created institutions
became permanent over time. Military organisations, revenue and
finance, credit and banking and legal institutions must all be seen as a
direct or indirect effect of the war-making activities of the state.
These insights were not radically new. Tilly invoked and revitalised a
long-standing ‘bellicist’ strand in German political and military sociology
and state philosophy, deeply influenced by the German-Prussian nine-
teenth-century experience and exemplified by Leopold von Ranke, Otto
Hintze and Max Weber.49 This tradition revolved around the formative
centrality of war, the primacy of foreign policy and the imperatives of
Realpolitik for constitutional and political development. Shorn of its
triumphalist evaluative connotations and subjected to the modern and
more rigorous demands of (American) comparative social science, Tilly
generalised the leading presupposition of the ‘Borussian Historiography’
across early modern Europe as a whole and found suggestive evidence for
his model in different country-studies. The ‘Germanic’ intellectual
sources of the Tilly Thesis were, of course, no accident. For the combin-
ation of Germany’s ‘fateful’ geographical location between larger neigh-
bours, notably Absolutist France, which kept fragmenting the idea of a
unitary German empire or nation-state from at least the 1648 peace
onwards, and the war-driven establishment of a Prussian-led national
re-unification process, generating the trope of the ‘belated nation’, were
powerfully reflected in nineteenth-century German historiography and
social science. Yet, here World War II had enjoined a collective intellec-
tual taboo on any overt invocation of the warfare paradigm in the schol-
arly literature (although it survived in conservative versions of ‘history
from above’). This was best captured in the Bielefeld School’s – West
Germany’s most influential social-scientific historiography of left-liberal
persuasion – steadfast denial to accord significance to geopolitical influ-
ences on the course of German history.50 In its stead, Bielefeld historians
reduced the analysis of German state-formation to the long-term conse-
quences of the failed ‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1848 and the subsequent
49
Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, Georg Iggers and Konrad von
Moltke (eds.), (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973); Gerhard Oestreich (ed.), Otto
Hintze: Gesammelte Abhandlungen in 3 Bänden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1962–1967); Felix Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975); Weber, Economy and Society (1978).
50
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (London: Bloomsbury Academic
Press, 1997 [1985]); Jürgen Kocka, “Asymmetrical Comparisons: The Case of the
German Sonderweg,” History and Theory, vol. 38, no. 1 (1999), pp. 40–50; see also
Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the
Postmodern Challenge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
particularities of primarily domestic social conflicts.51 It was these

domestic specificities, encapsulated in the notion of the ‘German Son-
derweg’ (special path), which explained, according to Bielefeld historians,
the German divergence from an alleged standard path of Western state-
formation. In an ironic twist, it was now the more ‘liberal’ Western
academic cultures that had to re-convince a new generation of West
German social scientists of the intellectual fertility of their forefathers’
self-evident idea that ‘war was the father of all things’ (Heraclitus) – an
invitation that many in the 1970s and 1980s declined,52 but which some
in the 1990s accepted.53
The re-emergence of bellocentric theories in the mid-1970s in the US
was therefore a reaction to the dominant econocentric consensus in the
postwar period across many Western national research cultures. In
Europe – certainly in Germany – violence and war were not popular
themes among social scientists, so that the academic resumption of
explorations into the darker sides of social life developed, perhaps some-
what paradoxically, in the more settled liberal intellectual climate of the
US.54 When war and violence were brought back onto the agenda in the
1970s, the inspiration came partly from IR theory, which had its own
Germanic connection through the emigration of Weimar intellectuals
during World War II, and partly from the ‘old schools’ of violence which
for years had been discredited for their affiliation with militarism, social-
Darwinism, imperialism, fascism and racism. Historically, we find differ-
ent clusters of theories that involve war and violence as important
dimensions:
The German relational tradition (Hegel, Clausewitz, Schmitt, Elias)
German political realism (e.g. F. List, Oppenheimer, Weber, Hintze,
Schmitt, Morgenthau)
Geopolitical theories (e.g. Haushofer, Mahan, MacKinder, Spykman,
Kjellén)
51
For an early influential critique which remained, however, within an ‘internalist’
perspective, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History:
Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press,
1984).
52
Jürgen Osterhammel, “Gesellschaftsgeschichte und Historische Soziologie.” In: Jürgen
Osterhammel (ed.), Wege der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 81–102.
53
Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine Vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte
von den Anfaengen bis zur Gegenwart (Muenchen: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1999).
54
For a spirited and early critique of the idea that Marx and Neo-Marxists followed an
exclusively society-centred approach, disinterested in state-theory, see Paul Cammack,
“Bringing the State Back In?,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 19, no. 2 (1989),
pp. 261–90.
Introduction 17
The militarist-social Darwinists (e.g. Gumplowitz, Ratzenhofer,

Spencer)
Neo-Realism (Waltz)
These intellectual sources were mobilised to various degrees by the ‘new’
historical ‘state’ sociologists (Tilly, Giddens, Mann, Skocpol, Poggi,
Downing, Brewer, Bonney, Ertman, Glete, Thomson, Porter, van Cre-
veld). This new wave of historical sociologists took the problem of war,
the relations between states, and the state as an autonomous actor
seriously in order to broaden the conception of social change beyond
the ‘internalism’ and ‘economism’ prevalent at the time in Historical
Sociology. By stressing the nexus between warfare and state-building,
these scholars also broke with many ‘classic’ historical sociologists such
as Montesquieu, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Tocqueville, A. Weber,
M. Scheler, K. Mannheim and, to some extent, also Max Weber. Within
a decade, Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology became the new ortho-
doxy in the field of state-formation research, defending a ‘top-down’ and
‘outside-in’ approach against the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘inside-out’ research
strategies associated with the stadial, evolutionary and progressivist Whig
Historiography, Marxist conceptions of history and Modernisation
Theory. In this context, Tilly’s direct or indirect influence on his co-
sociologists and in the cognate disciplines of History, crystallising around
the new concept of the ‘military-fiscal state’,55 has been significant, if not
canonical.
Structure of the Volume

The chapters are organised in four parts investigating, respectively, lin-
eages, challenges, omissions and what we have called vistas. The first
chapters investigate the logic and ancestry of Tilly’s work; the following
section sets up challenges meaning contending causal explanations of
state-formation; the omissions look into dimensions of state-formation
that are not captured by Tilly’s work; and finally the last section explores
the promises and pitfalls of applying Tilly’s theses outside the European
context – with different results.
55
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain
from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); Jan Glete, War and the State in Early
Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660
(London: Routledge, 2002); Christopher Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in
Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009).
Part I contains two chapters examining the logic, plausibility and

ancestry of Charles Tilly’s key contribution to Historical Sociology,
encapsulated in the ‘states make war and war makes states thesis’. Pro-
ceeding through a reconstruction and immanent critique of his central
state-formation theorem, Teschke argues that while Tilly was instrumen-
tal in inaugurating a paradigm change in US American Sociology – from
a de-historicised and abstract enterprise, dominated by Modernisation
Theory, to a structuralist and materialist Historical Sociology, he ultim-
ately failed to develop a theoretical framework to overcome its main
defects: ‘standard path’ (linearity) and ‘internalism’ (methodological
nationalism). Predicated on his method of ‘encompassing comparison’,
which posits the inter-state system and capitalism as the two cross-
European encompassing master-processes of modernity in which dis-
similar trajectories of state-formations are inserted, Tilly’s argument
remains circular as these categories presuppose what requires explan-
ation. The twin pressures of the regionally differential conjunctions of
inter-state military competition and capitalism-enabled resource provi-
sions function simultaneously as preconditions and as outcomes of mul-
tiple (capitalist) state-building processes. The question of the rise of the
modern inter-state system in relation to the origins of capitalism disap-
pears therefore from view, as both phenomena are conceptually dissolved
into more abstract and transhistorical antecedent conditions. In order to
secure this move, an initially Marxist conception of capitalism as a
relation of production is turned in Tilly’s intellectual trajectory from
his writings during the mid-1970s to the 1990s into a more generic
Weberian conception of individual capitalist action, whereas the substan-
tive concept of the inter-state system is dissolved into a more generic
Waltzian notion of geopolitical fragmentation. Moreover, Tilly’s attempt
to overcome uni-linearity relapses into an ideal-typical tri-linearity
(rather than multi-linearity) and realigns with a Neo-Realist top-down
and outside-in explanatory model, in which the ‘successful capitalised
coercion state’ (France and Britain) is held to keep crowding out non-
standard alternatives in a competitive geopolitical process of isomorphic
survival and exit. Ultimately, the Tilly Thesis needs to be turned on its
head: it was not states that made war, and war that made (modern) states,
it was rather the internal social property relations of pre-capitalist polities
which drove war as geopolitical accumulation, while the costs of war
‘unmade’ these absolutist states.
In the following chapter, Thomas Ertman reminds us that intellectual
ancestries are always more complex than they are often represented to be.
The German historian Otto Hintze (1861–1940) is commonly described
as a significant source of intellectual inspiration for Charles Tilly’s ideas
Introduction 19
about the formative role of warfare. And indeed in his early years, Hintze
developed an analytical approach centred on geopolitics and war as the
explanatory factors of state-formation. However, from a thorough
engagement with Hintze’s authorship, Ertman argues that Hintze later
advanced his ideas and abandoned the war-centred approach from the
1920s onwards. Through broader comparative studies of European state-
formation, Hintze argued in his later writings that even if war remains an
important part of the equation, the differential impact of the Roman
legacy across Europe materialised in the uneven distribution of post-
Roman cities and existence of representative institutions preceding
state-formation. These played a decisive role for later developments in
different state-building experiences. While Hintze’s early work provides
intellectual inspiration for Tilly, his later work provides the basis for a
richer and more complex analytical framework that can account for
institutional differences within European state-formations. This more
nuanced account is not only missed by Tilly, it also hinders him in
tracing the multiple preconditions of institutional variations of European
state-building trajectories beyond his tri-linear model.
Part II presents two theoretical challenges to Tilly’s work. In Chapter 3,
Hendrik Spruyt suggests that even though warfare has historically been
significant for state-formation, it is neither a necessary condition nor a
sufficient condition for it. That war puts considerable pressure on states
and societies is not enough to explain the political institutions that have
developed in Europe and elsewhere. Instead, he argues, the way in which
war affects state-making depends on how pre-existing social and insti-
tutional arrangements mediate the outside pressure. This, in other
words, is a call to analyse how actors at the micro level respond to
external pressure. The motives of domestic actors to go along with a
stronger state apparatus and militarisation will determine whether or not
state-building actually occurs.
Subsequently, Philip Gorski and Vivek Swaroop Sharma confront a
central theme from the Tilly legacy, namely that warfare led to the
consolidation and bureaucratisation of European states. Addressing the
former thesis, they argue that it was not warfare that caused the territorial
consolidation of European states, but rather, that it was a change in the
inheritance laws in Latin Europe. The Frankish custom of partible inher-
itance caused a crisis with ever decreasing shares of property having to be
distributed among male heirs. In response, the introduction of
primogeniture, which allowed the oldest son to inherit the undivided
wealth of the family, led to ever increasing possessions and simultan-
eously to a diminishing number of ruling dynasties from 1300 till 1600.
Thus, Gorski and Sharma refute war as a cause leading to the rational
bureaucratisation of European states. On the contrary, they trace the

emergence of bureaucracy to the Catholic Church and observe how
bureaucracy gradually became a tool of state governance while, curi-
ously, the military generally remained the last, rather than the first, state
institution to be bureaucratised.
In Part III we turn to issues that were ignored or left unaddressed by
Tilly. In Chapter 5 Jeppe Strandsbjerg suggests that the literature that has
been concerned with the development of the modern state has been
surprisingly quiet with regard to what constituted the spatial conditions
for the territorialisation of state power. The endeavour to uncover causes
of the development of the modern state has ignored questions of condi-
tionality. Historical Sociology in general, and Charles Tilly in particular,
fail to address developments in cartography and spatial technologies
more generally during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that allowed
sovereignty to be defined in spatial terms rather than in an interpersonal
one. Historically, the territorialisation of the state involved an abstraction
of the state from the person of the ruler. Such an abstraction required
a notion of permanence that was to be written into the territory as
embodying the corporeal character of the state. The overall claim of
Strandsbjerg’s chapter is that the transformation of the state was tied
up with a transformation of space itself. Thus, the centralisation and
territorialisation of the state did not take place against a stable spatial
background; and Strandsbjerg shows that cartographic change during
the renaissance redefined space in a way that allowed the state to
become redefined as an abstract spatial entity. Investigating spatial
history through cartographic history in Europe from ca. 1450–1650,
he argues that the development of the modern state depended on and
was conditioned by a shift in cartographic practices which, in effect,
transformed the spatial conditions of statehood.
Targeting omissions in Tilly’s work, Peter Halden argues, in Chapter 6,
that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) ought to take a much more central
place in Historical Sociology and, more generally, that Tilly’s conceptual
framework lacks sensitivity to a larger variation of types of political organ-
isation. The notion of ‘realm’ is introduced to describe a looser type of
political organisation than the state but nevertheless embodying a perman-
ence beyond lineage and clan structures that precedes the state in Tilly’s
account. This is significant because the realms provided a platform for
political community which conditioned the emergence of the European
states. The HRE is a good example of a complex polity structure that is not
given weight in Tilly’s account. Emerging in the tenth century, it remained
a constitutional framework for German principalities for eight-and-a-half
centuries as an electoral monarchy. And, contrary to Tilly’s thesis, it did
Introduction 21
not develop state-like institutions due to warfare. Rather, it was the elect-
oral principalities that developed administrative structures in response to
warfare while still remaining non-sovereign parts of the HRE; also after
1648, which by many – mistakenly – is seen as the birth date of the modern
state. As such, Halden demonstrates a flaw in Tilly’s framework as he had
not been able to account for the role of the HRE.
Vivek Swaroop Sharma returns in Chapter 7 as the sole author ques-
tioning the notion that war and violence are at the root of the European
state-formation process and the political development. Tilly’s approach
to the emergence of the modern state in Europe is embedded in a
particular understanding of the nature and purpose of violent conflict.
The source of inspiration for Tilly’s understanding of war and conflict
came from the realist school of international relations. Thus, any chal-
lenge to Tilly’s emphasis on war and conflict and the linkage between war
and state-formation is also a challenge to the realist school of inter-
national relations. More specifically, the chapter challenges and modifies
the realist model of conflict that provides the basic foundation for Tilly’s
account of European state-formation. Sharma presents an institutionalist
theory of war and conflict and then outlines the implications of this
model for the state-formation literature. His fundamental argument is
that the realist tradition is an insecure foundation upon which to build a
theoretical framework for the state-formation literature, because realism
fundamentally fails to explain the sources, nature and implications of
political conflict and violence in European history.
The last part of the book proceeds along three vistas: the first one takes
us to the Middle East. On a certain level, Dietrich Jung argues, the war
thesis holds. The contemporary political landscape of the Middle East
evolved from violent competition, and historically we can observe a
number of similar processes of protection and extraction as in European
history. The key difference, however, is that while the modern state as an
institutional setting today is a result of violent conflict in the Middle East,
it is not the result of bargaining processes between regional powers and
their populations, but rather conditioned by international powers and the
processes of decolonisation. A reason for the persistent detachment of
the regimes from their populations is that political and economic rent-
seekers have been able to extract wealth from international sources due
to oil. Thus, the European experience of intense bargaining between the
state and the population has not been shared by Middle Eastern states
and their populations. This gives credence to the concept – also taken
from Tilly – of the ‘rentier state’. As an ideal type, then, Tilly’s analytical
framework holds as a heuristic instrument. But it cannot stand alone in
the effort to fully comprehend the consolidation of states and the absence
of democracy in many parts of the world. Here we need to include, Jung

suggests, Max Weber’s category of legitimacy and a sensitivity towards
the interdependence of micro- and macro-sociological developments as
described by Norbert Elias.
Continuing the vistas, Robert H. Holden is, like Jung, concerned with
authority and legitimacy. Reaching a different conclusion to Jung,
Holden argues that there has been plenty of violence but little war in
Latin America and little state-formation; instead, we have witnessed a
prolonged governance crisis since the collapse of the Spanish monarchy
in 1808. Thus, addressing the failure to establish – in the words of the
former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias – reliable institutions, rule of
law and bureaucratic effectiveness, Holden rejects the bellicist theory.
Indeed, following the analytical logic prescribed by Tilly himself, Holden
builds on the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ to signal that the troubled
notion of modernity is expressed in very different ways across the globe.
While Tilly sought to explain the success of certain states in the North
Atlantic world, it cannot explain the inferiority of ‘their Latin American
imitators’. To understand this, we have to emphasise legitimacy and
norms. It was the diversity of rival moral authorities and hence legitimacy
that conditioned the weakness of Latin American states; and hence, the
endless violence and indifference to the rule of law.
Along the last vista, Chapter 10 takes us to China. Victoria Tin-bor
Hui affirms the merits of Tilly’s theoretical contribution. She raises a
methodological point stressing the difference between a theory being
bellicist or bellocentric. While Tilly is often criticised for being the
former, ‘bellicist’ means warlike and is a term that was rejected by Tilly,
who in fact emphasised the dual significance of capital and coercion. The
real merit of Tilly’s bellocentrism lies in its ability to challenge both
Eurocentric and Sinocentric accounts of Chinese state-formation. Going
through the classical, the modern and the imperial period, Hui demon-
strates how warfare played a significant role for Chinese state-formation.
Where previous accounts tended to assume a natural unity of China, it is
clear from this account that at times China was as fragmented as Europe.
In that respect, the question is why China led to unity while Europe
ended in a fragmented state system. Ending on a political note, Hui notes
that while China is viewed as historically shaped by unitary despotism,
there have in fact been sustained periods in Chinese history of plurality
and citizenship.
Part I
Lineages
1 After the Tilly Thesis
Social Conflict, Differential State-formation and
Geopolitics in the Construction of the European System
of States
Benno Teschke
University of Sussex
Historical Sociology, International Relations and

the Tilly Thesis
The broad consensus and widespread unanimity across the disciplines of
History, Historical Sociology and International Relations (IR) on the
significance of the internal nexus between war – or, more broadly,
geopolitical competition – taxation and early modern state-formation
constitutes an exceptional rarity in the field of human enquiry.1
A steady stream of publications reviews and reasserts the centrality of
military rivalry and the attendant pressures of novel forms of revenue-
extraction and humanpower-mobilisation for the construction of the
institutions of the modern state – absolute sovereignty, exclusive terri-
toriality, public military monopoly, modern bureaucracy. This idea of a
self-reinforcing dynamic between war and state-formation constitutes a
long-standing, ongoing and powerful theoretical preoccupation, stretch-
ing back at least as far as Otto Hintze’s comparative studies on inter-
national rivalry, military organisation and constitutional development.2
In History and Historical Sociology, this neo-Hintzean theme is best
encapsulated in the concept of the fiscal-military state.3 Its overall
1
I would like to acknowledge the very helpful comments by Clemens Hoffmann, Lars Bo
Kaspersen, Jeppe Strandsbjerg and Steffan Wyn-Jones on earlier drafts.
2
Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen
Verfassungsgeschichte, Gerhard Oestreich (ed.), 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck,
1970); idem, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in
History and Politics” [1902]. In: Felix Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 159–77.
3
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to
1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain,
the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London: Routledge,
2002); Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Ronald G. Asch, “Kriegsfinanzierung, Staatsbildung und
25
26 Benno Teschke
intellectual thrust – the emphasis on the primacy and (partial) autonomy

of geopolitics – constitutes a direct attack on liberal and Marxist concep-
tions of modern state-formation and state-theory. In fact, it directly
undermines their conceptions of history: the teleological forward march
of either liberty or capitalism. For ‘nothing could be more detrimental to
an understanding of this whole process than the old liberal conception of
European history as the gradual creation and extension of political
rights’.4 Similarly, and reacting against the ‘sociological proclivity to
absorb the state into society’, the charge was that ‘classical Marxism
failed to foresee or adequately explain the autonomous power, for good
and ill, of states as administrative and coercive machineries embedded in
a militarised international states system’.5 Thus positioned beyond
Liberalism and Marxism, the neo-Hintzean research programme consti-
tutes a far-reaching paradigm shift in the disciplines of History and
Historical Sociology, recasting the research agenda in decisive ways.
More recently and over the years, this literature has become highly
diversified, increasingly sophisticated and supplemented by the incorpor-
ation of other spheres of determination into the geopolitical matrix.6
While the exact modalities of causation, timing and regional variations
can diverge, the unifying core premise, grosso modo, is never revoked: war
made states.
This body of literature has perhaps found its most vocal and visible
expression in Tilly’s famous dictum that ‘war made the state, and the
state made war’.7 His core argument is inserted into a wider theoretical
effort to assign historical efficacy to military interstate rivalry, ‘bringing
the state back in’8 as an independent and potentially autonomous agent,
situated between external geopolitical pressures and domestic social
Ständische Ordnung in Westeuropa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift,

no. 268 (1999), pp. 635–71; Christopher Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in
Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009);
Patrick Carroll, “Articulating Theories of States and State Formation,” Journal of Historical
Sociology, vol. 22, no. 4 (2009), pp. 553–603.
4
Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making”, in: Charles Tilly
(ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press 1975), pp. 3–83, here at p. 37.
5
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and
China (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 28, 292.
6
Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and
Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Hendrik
Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States
and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
7
Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” p. 42.
8
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back
In (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
After the Tilly Thesis 27
interests. Tilly’s thesis is positioned in a stylised matrix of extant models

of European state-formation that distinguishes between internalist and
externalist, political and economic accounts, generating four macro-
paradigms – statist (internal-political), mode-of-production (internal-
economic), geopolitical (external-political) and world-system’s (exter-
nal-economic).9 His wider model synthesises the first three, assigning
causal directionality from the geopolitical via the state to the internal-
economic, generating an ‘outside-in’ and ‘top-down’ explanation of
temporal and institutional variations in the trajectories of state-
formations.
Within this general geo-statist framework, rulers responded to the
strategic imperatives of military competition by adopting differential
strategies to supply revenues and humanpower, depending on regionally
differentiated socioeconomic arrangements. Coercion-intensive regions,
defined by the absence of cities and agricultural predominance (states
like Brandenburg and Russia), are distinguished from capital-intensive
regions, defined by cities and commercial predominance, where rulers
entered into temporary coalitions with capitalists (such as the Italian city-
states and the Dutch republic). Both are, in turn, set apart from capital-
ised coercion-intensive regions (like France and England), where rulers
incorporated capitalists into state structures (representative assemblies)
in order to build up standing armies and rationalise bureaucracies,
producing ‘fully fledged national states’ by the seventeenth century.
Instead of uni-linearity (one standard path of state development), we
see multi-linearity – a multi-linearity whose differential lineages eventu-
ally converge, driven by an ongoing process of geopolitical adaptation
and selection, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries on the
successful and universalising capitalised-coercion model: the nation-
state.10
The reception of Tilly’s work in the field of IR occurred during the
discipline’s own historical and sociological turns in the 1990s, drawing in
particular on his main writings on the connections between capitalism,
war, revolution and state-formation. Dissatisfaction with the ahistorical
and de-sociologised abstractions of Realism and Neorealism – and, in
particular, with Neorealism’s structuralist and positivist conception of
social science – prompted a more self-reflexive return within IR to the
major traditions in Historical Sociology. Much of this disciplinary intro-
spection responded to a series of incisive criticisms of Neorealism’s
9
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1992), pp. 6–16.
10
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 31.
28 Benno Teschke
inability to conceptualise systemic change in the form of the medieval-to-

modern transition, and thus to acknowledge the very historicity of the
modern interstate system, premised on multiple and mutually exclusive
sovereign jurisdictions.11 In this context, Neo-Weberian IR Historical
Sociologists built on and increasingly moved beyond the ‘first wave’ of
Weberian Historical Sociology (WHS),12 typified by Skocpol and Tilly,
announcing a ‘second wave’ of Neo-Weberian IR Historical Sociology
informed by structuration theory13 and, later, non-Eurocentric accounts
of the Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.14 The rise of WHS forced
also a resumption of Marxist efforts in IR to rethink the relation between
capitalist development, state-formation and the interstate system, which –
outside Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems perspective – first inte-
grated the neo-Weberian insight of the autonomy of the interstate system
into a Marxist narrative of the origins and expansion of ‘capitalist
modernity’,15 then extrapolated from one case (capitalist Britain) to the
interstate structure of capitalist modernity,16 and later advanced the idea
of ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ as a ‘universal law’ of inter-
national development.17
Both disciplines, Historical Sociology and IR, converged temporarily
towards a common intellectual terrain: the question of theory and
method in International Historical Sociology (IHS).18 Yet, while the
11
Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International
Relations Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (1981),
pp. 126–55; John Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward
a Neorealist Synthesis,” World Politics, vol. 35, no. 2 (1983), pp. 261–85; Richard
K. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” International Organization, vol. 38, no. 2
(1984), pp. 225–61; John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical
Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political
Economy, vol. 1, no. 1 (1994), pp. 53–80.
12
Stephen Hobden, International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down
Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1998); John M. Hobson, The State and International
Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
13
John M. Hobson, “The Two Waves of Weberian Historical Sociology in International
Relations.” In: Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds), Historical Sociology of
International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 63–81.
14
John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (London: Cambridge
15
Fred Halliday, “A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International
Relations.” In: Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994),
pp. 45–63; idem, “For an International Sociology.” In: Hobden and Hobson,
Historical Sociology of International Relations, pp. 244–64.
16
Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of
International Relations (London: Verso, 1994).
17
Idem, “Why Is There No International Historical Sociology?” European Journal of
International Relations, vol. 12, no. 3, (2006), pp. 307–40.
18
The most recent statement on IHS is John M. Hobson, George Lawson and Justin
Rosenberg, “Historical Sociology.” In: Robert A. Denemark (ed.), The International
‘third wave’ in Historical Sociology19 seems to have moved beyond the

problem of how to integrate geopolitics into the field of Historical Soci-
ology (without addressing or resolving it), IR Historical Sociology,
undergoing now its own ‘third wave’, keeps centring this very question
as a key challenge to both disciplines.
This chapter provides a theoretical and empirical exposition and
critical re-examination of the Tilly Thesis on the relation between
the rise of capitalism, geopolitics and state-formation in late medieval
and early modern Europe. It examines the thesis in relation to the
strategic choices that inform Tilly’s methodological premises for an
IHS and against the empirical record. This return to Tilly builds on
Dylan Riley’s objections to Julia Adams’s modelling of the historical
trajectory of the field of Historical Sociology. ‘Periodizing’, Riley
remarks, ‘the development of historical sociology in terms of waves
of development (. . .) would seem to be a quintessentially second
wave enterprise. For the language of waves inevitably suggests a
transition from one stage of development to another’. Rather
than accepting models of before and after, Riley suggests that ‘there
is evidence of a field that grows through an operation of ‘productive
returns to origins’.20 And because the third wave of Historical
Sociology passed over the Tillyan challenge – how to conceptualise
Studies Encyclopedia, vol. VI (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 3357–75; For a

critique of Halliday and Rosenberg see Benno Teschke, “Marxism.” In: Christian
Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 163–87; and idem, “Advances and
Impasses in Fred Halliday’s International Historical Sociology: A Critical Appraisal,”
International Affairs, vol. 87, no. 5 (2011), pp. 1087–106; For a critique of Hobson see
Frederick Guillaume Dufour and Nancy Turgeon, “Dipesh Chakrabarty et John
M. Hobson sur L’Eurocentrisme et la Critique des Relations Internationales,” Etudes
Internationales, vol. 44, no. 1 (2013), pp. 89–107; see also Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial
Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).
19
Julia Adams, Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, “Introduction: Social Theory,
Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology.” In: Julia Adams et al. (eds.),
Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005), pp. 1–72. Julia Adams et al. suggest periodising the field of
Historical Sociology in terms of three waves: Modernisation theory (up to 1965), Marx/
Weber synthesis (1965–1990), post-Marx/Weber (since 1990s). See the Introduction for
more detail. Tellingly, Adams’s volume contains no entry on IHS. Similarly, Delanty
and Isin’s handbook also remains silent on the problematique, Gerard Delanty and
Engin F. Isin (eds), The Handbook of Historical Sociology (London: Sage, 2003).
20
Dylan Riley, “Waves of Historical Sociology,” International Journal of Comparative
Sociology, vol. 47, no. 5 (October 2006), pp. 379–86, here at p. 380. Similarly, Carroll
suggests replacing the over-stylised language of sequential waves with the idea of co-
existing and competing ‘centers of gravity’ in the historical sociology of state-formation –
‘military-fiscal’, ‘state-autonomy’, and ‘culture’. Patrick Carroll, “Articulating Theories
of States and State Formation,” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 22, no. 4 (2009),
pp. 553–603.
30 Benno Teschke
the nexus between capitalism, war and state-formation methodologic-

ally – a productive and critical return to the ‘military-fiscal’ centre of
gravity in Historical Sociology and to Tilly’s original puzzle remains
pressing.
How did Tilly methodologically and substantively overcome the two
strictures – ‘internal logic’ and ‘standard path’ – of classical sociology by
internalising the external geopolitical context into his methodological
premises for purposes of explaining variations in the trajectories of socio-
political development? How well does his substantive empirical explan-
ation stand up to the empirical record? How can we overcome the
theoretical and empirical deficiencies of Tilly’s historical sociology of
the nexus between capitalism, geopolitics and state-formation?
The chapter proceeds in three main steps. The first section locates
Tilly’s work in the wider context of the ‘second wave’ of Historical
Sociology, characterised by a marxified Weberianism, which moved
under the impact of the Weber-Hintze thesis on the nexus between
war and state-formation increasingly beyond Marx. It also provides a
critical interrogation of his method – ‘encompassing comparison’ –
designed to secure his historical analyses. The second section provides
a critique of Tilly’s method and historical narrative and argues that
Tillyan assumptions have led to a dead end in structural WHS. The
final section provides some elementary methodological reflections to
frame diverse processes of European socioeconomic development, war
and state-formation differently. It also cautions against attempts to
develop generalised, transhistorical and formalised theories of IHS,
Weberian or Marxist, whose structuralist and nomological commit-
ments are often unable to capture historical specificity and agency.
The more specific argument is that Tilly’s method – ‘encompassing
comparison’ – fails to historically specify and conceptually secure the
two master processes – capitalism and the interstate system – that were
identified as the systemic drivers of differential state-formation, as
he moved from a classical Marxist productivist to an individual-
methodological Weberian conception of capitalism and, as he posited
the interstate system as an enduring and timeless condition. In the
process, Tilly relapsed into a Weberian typology of preconstituted and
ontologised spheres of social action, while assigning autonomous,
distinct and reifying forms of agency to them. This shift to Weber
disabled Tilly to fully incorporate spatio-temporally differential con-
flictual social and spatial relations into his analytical framework. As a
result, Tilly’s under-socialisation of divergent trajectories of state-
formation failed to fully explain their diverse and relational dynamics,
pressing the multi-linearity of processes of European state-formation
into a stylised tri-linear schemer. The chapter concludes by arguing

that it is insufficient to retain the core of the Tillyan theoretical
framework, while developing and refining it in various ways, as sug-
gested by the currently prevailing neo-Weberian tendency in IHS –
both in IR and HS. Rather, we need to break with Weberian premises
and move the debate towards the terrain of a revised Marxist
approach, referred to as (Geo-)Political Marxism. On this basis, the
chapter sketches a methodological recasting that serves for an alterna-
tive theoretically controlled and historically informed reconstruction of
the divergent and relational trajectories of European polity-formations
within distinct political geographies.
Overcoming ‘Methodological Nationalism’:

Encompassing Comparison
Tilly’s work during the 1970s formed part of the wider sociological
critique of the practice of ‘methodological nationalism’21 – a term origin-
ally suggested by Herminio Martins.22 At the time, a more self-reflexive
interrogation of the core axiomatics of modernisation theory animated
both the rise of Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology and the reformu-
lation of Classical Marxism in World Systems Theory.23 Neo-Weberian
Historical Sociology in particular24 identified and challenged the defi-
ciencies and blind spots of the research-organising premises of ‘meth-
odological nationalism’.
Reinhard Bendix, for example, remarked in 1967 that ‘the specific
historical constellation at the end of the eighteenth century encouraged
explanations of social change, which emphasise the continuity and inter-
connectedness of changes within society, a tendency that was reinforced
when modern nationalism came into its own. As a result, a certain
lawfulness was attributed to the social structure, while the relative
21
Daniel Chernilo, “Methodological Nationalism and the Domestic Analogy: Classical
Resources for their Critique,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 23, no. 1
(March 2010), pp. 87–106, here at p. 88; idem, “Social Theory’s Methodological
Nationalism: Myth and Reality,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 9, no. 1
(2006), pp. 5–22.
22
Herminio Martins, “Time and Theory in Sociology,” in: J. Rex (ed.), Approaches to
Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp 1–25.
23
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System:
Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 16,
no. 4 (1974), pp. 387–415.
24
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions; Theda Skocpol (ed.), Vision and Method in
Historical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
32 Benno Teschke
autonomy of government and the impact of external forces upon every

society were ignored or minimised. Paradoxically, this perspective also
prevailed during a period of absolutist regimes, of European overseas
expansion and of worldwide industrialisation, when societies were
increasingly subject to influences from abroad (. . .)’.25 Similarly,
according to Anthony Giddens
the primary unit of sociological analysis, the sociologist’s ‘society’ – in relation to the
industrialised world at least – has always been, and must continue to be, the
administratively bounded nation-state. But ‘society’ in this sense, has never been
the isolated, the ‘internally developing’ system which has normally been implied in
social theory. One of the most important weaknesses of sociological conceptions of
development, from Marx onwards, has been the persistent tendency to think of
development as the ‘unfolding’ of endogeneous influences within a given society (or,
more often, a ‘type’ of society). ‘External’ factors are treated as an ‘environment’ to
which the society has to ‘adapt’ and therefore merely conditional in the progression
of social change . . . In fact, any adequate understanding of the development of the
advanced societies presupposes the recognition that factors making for
‘endogeneous’ evolution always combine with influences from ‘the outside’ in
determining the transformation to which a society is subject.26
And Theda Skocpol concluded that modernisation approaches ‘have been
called to task for reifying the nation-state as the sole unit of analysis, for
assuming that all countries can potentially follow a single path (or parallel
and converging paths) of evolutionary development from “tradition” to
“modernity,” and, concomitantly, for disregarding the world-historical
development of transnational structures that constrain and prompt
national or local developments along diverse as well as parallel paths’.27
Overall, these criticisms united Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology in
expanding the ‘unit of analysis’ from the national to the international, to
replace uni-linearity with multi-linearity, to complement endogenous
processes with exogenous inter-action, to substitute sequential stages,
epochal transitions and teleology with complexity (failures, exit, diver-
sity), to move from temporal synchronicity to diachronic temporalities,
and to relaxing strict notions of lawfulness with greater historicity and
specificity.28
25
Reinhard Bendix, “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, vol. 9, no. 3 (April 1967), pp. 292–346, here at p. 325.
26
Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson,
1973), p. 265.
27
Theda Skocpol, “Wallerstein’s World-Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical
Critique,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 82, no. 5 (March 1977), pp. 1075–90.
28
In this sense, Tilly’s middle period cannot be so easily placed in the second wave
category. According to Steinmetz, Tilly ‘did not get trapped in a “second wave”
approach to historical sociology, but began criticising teleological and universal models
Within this wider recasting of the field, the methodological reflections

that govern Tilly’s model of state-formation in this period are collected in
two volumes.29 What conception of social science informed his historical
sociology and which distinctive method should it pursue? While his
explorations on the subject remain sprawling and conversational in tone,
taking the form of literature reviews of co-sociologists and co-historians,
but failing, on the whole, to articulate a firmer conception of social
science and a dedicated historical-sociological method, his commitments
are best spelt out for the middle part of his career in the method of
‘encompassing comparison’.30
To overcome the invariant abstractions of modernisation theory,
Tilly reformulated the comparative-historical method to explain the
spatio-temporal specificities of social change, which unsettled any
definition of uniform regularities and causalities – evolutionary or
stadial – of a singular pattern of social development across multiple
historical cases. But the turn towards the comparative method posed
immediately the problem of delineating the adequate unit of analysis,
as any comparison could be constructed between analytically discrete
and formally disconnected units of analysis (traditionally between
two distinct societies) or between two (or more) components within
a wider encompassing unit. Tilly approached the problem by develop-
ing a taxonomy of four strategies of comparison: (1) individualizing –
finding ‘specific instances of a given phenomenon as a means of
grasping the peculiarities of each case’; (2) universalising – finding
‘that every instance of a phenomenon follows essentially the same
rule’; (3) variation-finding – establishing ‘a principle of variation in
the character or intensity of a phenomenon by examining systematic
differences among instances’31 and (4) encompassing comparison –
selecting ‘locations within the structure or process and explain
of social change long before most other historical sociologists’. George Steinmetz,
“Charles Tilly, German Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science,”
American Sociologist, vol. 41, no. 4 (December 2010), pp. 312–36, here at p. 319. This
critique sits however uneasily with his strong commitment to the idea that all state-
variations converge teleologically towards the ‘capitalised-coercion model’: the modern
nation-state.
29
Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981); idem, Big
Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1984).
30
George Steinmetz cautioned recently that ‘Tilly’s philosophy of science seemed to
develop in a somewhat indirect and informal fashion through reading the work of
other historians and social scientists who were more directly engaged in the topic,’
Steinmetz, “Charles Tilly,” p. 318.
31
Tilly, Big Structures, p. 82.
34 Benno Teschke
similarities or differences among those locations as consequences of

their relationship to the whole’.32
Tilly’s choice for ‘encompassing comparisons’ stretches the definition
of the unit of analysis to the explananda-encompassing ‘whole’ – those big
structures and large processes that provide the wider context within
which any particular case had to be located. Spatio-temporal variations
in case-specific trajectories of social change are conceived ‘as conse-
quences of their relationship to the whole’. The substance of this whole –
the single-society transcending systemic determinants of change, which
also double over as spatially delineating the scope conditions of the
relevant unit of analysis – is clearly defined: ‘For our own time, it is hard
to imagine the construction of any valid analysis of long-term structural
change that does not connect particular alterations, direct or indirect, to
the two interdependent master processes of the era: the creation of a
system of national states and the formation of a worldwide capitalist
system’.33 The procedure of comparison between analytically discrete
societies – insulated in space and time from their external contexts – is
replaced by the assumption of establishing variations in relation to wider
systemic properties: capitalism and the interstate system.
Defining Capitalism: From Marx to Weber

This procedure requires both a definition of capitalism and the nation-
state, and an account of the origins of capitalism in relation to the
formation of the modern interstate system.34 In the passage between
his major theoretical writings and Capital, Coercion and Nation-States,
Tilly’s definition of capitalism underwent a major reconceptualisation
from a Marxist relational-productivist to a Weberian methodological-
individualist conception.35 In his earlier critique of Wallerstein’s circu-
lationist concept of capitalism as a world-system revolving around
32
Tilly, Big Structures, p. 125. For a good discussion and critique see Philip McMichael,
“Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative
Comparative Method,” American Sociological Review, vol. 55, no. 3 (1990),
pp. 385–97.
33
Idem, Big Structures, p. 147.
34
It should be noted that Tilly’s account in Coercion, Capital and European States was no
longer explicitly governed by his method of ‘encompassing comparison’, announced –
without being retracted or reformulated – a decade earlier.
35
Max Weber suggested to define capitalism on the basis of ‘economic factors’ alone.
‘Where we find that property is an object of trade and is utilized by individuals for profit-
making enterprise in a market economy, there we have capitalism’ Max Weber, The
Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (London: Verso, 1988), p. 51. This definition
allows Weber to identify capitalism or ‘capitalist action’ as a trans-historical
phenomenon.
production for sale on the world-market in which profits were made in

acts of exchange (trade), Tilly remarked:
In tracing the development of European capitalism I have seized the other horn of
the Marxist dilemma, emphasizing the immediate relations of production as the
defining features of capitalism. That choice produces a narrower, later catalog of
capitalist development. Wallerstein’s broad definition, it seems to me, sacrifices
the sort of insight concerning the logic of capitalist social relations that Marx
unfolded in his analysis of agrarian change in England – especially the insight into
the way in which the capitalist’s pursuit of profit helped transform workers into
proletarians. For those who, like me, want to examine how the development of
capitalism affected the collective action of ordinary people, that insight is
essential, its loss critical.36
Here, Tilly defines capitalism in classical Marxist productivist terms and
identifies its origins in seventeenth-century agrarian England, rather than
in Wallersteinian circulationist terms associated as a pan-European pro-
cess located in the ‘long sixteenth century’. This conception is aban-
doned, without comment, a decade later.
Let us think of capital generously, including any tangible mobile resources, and
enforceable claims on such resources. Capitalists, then, are people who specialize
in the accumulation, purchase, and sale of capital. They occupy the realm of
exploitation, where the relations of production and exchange themselves yield
surpluses, and capitalists capture them. Capitalists have often existed in the
absence of capitalism, the system in which wage-workers produce goods by
means of materials owned by capitalists. Through most of history, indeed,
capitalists have worked chiefly as merchants, entrepreneurs, and financiers,
rather than as the direct organisers of production.37
This distinction between capitalism as a social relation of production
and capitalists as owners of wealth who maximise profit enables Tilly
to desist from investigating the historically specific origins of capital-
ism, while freeing him to detect capitalists across a wide variety of
social and temporal settings. Capitalists preceded capitalism as a
system of production. Through this move towards Weber (who
defined capitalists as individual profit-maximisers driven by the sub-
jective profit motive), Tilly is in a position to conceive of the efficacy of
capitalists on processes of state-formation in purely quantitative, rather
than in qualitative, terms. Capital turns into a material resource and its
social aspects are reduced to intra-elite relations (state-capitalists),
while its class relations (capital-labour) are elided. This frees him to
36
Tilly, As Sociology Meets History, pp. 41–42.
37
Idem, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 17. The ambiguous reference to ‘exploitation’ drops out of
Tilly’s handling of the definition of capitalism in his substantive sections.
36 Benno Teschke
theorise or even acknowledge the transition from feudalism to capital-

ism as an intellectual problem.38 In fact, the analysis of social relations
and class conflict is now explicitly abandoned: ‘In order to concentrate
on mechanisms of state-formation I will repeatedly stereotype or take
for granted the relations among landlords, peasants, agricultural pro-
letarians, and other major rural actors’.39 Tilly’s two ‘encompassing’
master processes of modernity – the development of capitalism and the
rise of the interstate system – are now strategically reduced to one, as
capitalists were always already present in cities, and cities preceded the
rise of capitalism as a social system.
The State and the Exteriority of the Interstate System:

From Weber to Waltz
How does Tilly conceive of the state and the interstate system?
Throughout, Tilly adopts a classical Weberian definition of the
modern state, also equated with the category of the nation-state,
comprising its control over a contiguous territory, its institutional
centralisation and autonomy, and its monopoly over the means of
coercion.40 In the Formation of National States, state-making is only
cursorily inserted into the wider ‘international context’, defined as the
‘changing structure of the European economy as a whole; and the
emergence and evolution of an international system of states’.41 Both
aspects remained underdeveloped background conditions – after-
thoughts to rather than determinants of trajectories of state formation.
In this earlier work, the key finding generated an ‘analytical general-
ization’ of the internal processes in the ‘chain of causation’ driving
state-building:
The formation of standing armies provided the largest single incentive to
extraction and the largest single means of state coercion over the long run of
European state-making. Recurrently we find a chain of causation running from
(1) change or expansion in land armies to (2) new efforts to extract resources
from the subject population to (3) the development of new bureaucracies and
38
‘I will treat the changing organization of production and the resulting class structure only
cursorily’. Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 33.
39
Idem, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 34.
40
Idem, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” pp. 27, 40. It should be
noted that Tilly’s conception of ‘nation’ is never sociological and substantive, but
‘strictly a term of scale and scope, meaning essentially “state-wide”’. Rogers Brubaker,
Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16.
41
Idem, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” p. 44.
administrative innovations to (4) resistance from the subject population to (5)

renewed coercion to (6) durable increases in the bulk or extractiveness of the
state.42,43
Reflecting on his work later, Tilly noted later that ‘we implicitly substi-
tuted a new unilinear story – one running from war to extraction and
repression to state formation – for the old one. We continued, more or
less unthinkingly, to assume that European states followed one main
path, the one marked by Britain, France, and Brandenburg-Prussia,
and that the experiences of other states constituted attenuated or failed
versions of the same process. That was wrong’.44 In its stead, Tilly
suggested that Coercion, Capital and European States:
takes up the problem (. . .) at the point of recognizing decisive variations in the
paths of change followed by states (. . .), by placing the organization of coercion
and preparation for war squarely in the middle of the analysis, arguing in its
rasher moments that state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers’
efforts to acquire the means of war; and second by insisting that relations among
states, especially through war and preparation for war, strongly affected the
entire process of state formation. Thus in this book I derive alternative histories
of state formation from continuously-varying combinations of concentrated
capital, concentrated coercion, preparation for war, and position within the
international system.45
But even though the category of the international system is now pro-
moted to the main ‘encompassing’ condition, it remains, as earlier,
underexplored and underproblematised. In fact, a methodological
sleight of hand underlies Tilly’s conception of the interstate system as
it dissolves into the more generic notion of European geopolitical
fragmentation, which erases the question of the former’s rise and con-
stitution. The logical problem can be recast in terms of how to account
for the transformation of a medieval pre-interstate order – in which
polities were spatially de-territorialised, institutionally de-centralised,
politically non-autonomous, and where the means of violence were
oligopolistically dispersed – into an interstate order, predicated on
multiple nation-states. For any account of plural state-formations that
stresses the efficacy of the international system cannot take the latter for
granted. Rather than placing the story of state-formations within an
42
43
The exact chronology and periodization in Tilly’s model need not concern us here,
though it is instructive that he repeatedly shifts from ‘after 1500’, via the usual marker of
1648, to the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
44
45
38 Benno Teschke
antecedent and more generic notion of geopolitical fragmentation, Tilly

is challenged to explain two processes: first, geographical unit-
differentiation: the territorialisation of state power driving the differen-
tiation between the internal and the external, generating, in turn, the
distinction between the domestic and the international spheres.
Second, the vertical separation within each unit of the political/military
from the economic/social, that generates the distinction between
the public and the private spheres. At stake is therefore not only an
organisational transformation of pre-state polities into states within a
persisting condition of geopolitical fragmentation, but also a spatial
transformation of de-centralised polities into territorial exclusive
and sovereign jurisdictions generating, consequently, a new quality of
interspatial relations, which only then appear as distinctly interstate
relations. Political geography itself requires explanation. Thus reformu-
lated, Tilly encounters a significant complication as the interstate
system doubles over, in his account, as the ‘encompassing’ master
category (the independent variable) into which any one trajectory of
state-formation (the dependent variable) has to be inserted and, simul-
taneously, as that phenomenon which requires explanation (the inde-
pendent variable). But the interstate system cannot function
simultaneously as the explanandum and the explanans – as outcome
and presupposition. It remains therefore unclear how Tilly explains
the rise of the interstate system and where the locus of causality lies.
The formula that ‘war made states, and states made war’ retains there-
fore an inescapably circular and tautological ring, as it suppresses the
historically specific question of how to account for the transformation of
the medieval pre-state world into the modern interstate system.
For the very nature of late medieval and early modern Europe as a
geopolitical pluriverse (that is, a politically de-centralised region not
subject to imperial unification) is taken as given without being theor-
ised. The absence of a continent-wide empire is noted, yet the pres-
ence of geopolitical multiplicity in its specific pre-state and territorially
heterogeneous feudal relations and its bellicose disposition is not
explained. The interstate system features as a necessary precondition
in Tilly’s account, but is itself never theoretically incorporated into the
model as an emergent phenomenon and virtually functions as a reified
independent variable – a timeless structure whose anarchical nature
imposes its agential imperatives on its constituent members. The
content of geopolitical anarchy may change (along with its players),
but its structural logic remains constant, aligning Tilly with Kenneth
Waltz’s Neorealism. Ultimately, as an objectified explanans, geopolit-
ical fragmentation lies outside the model’s theoretical reach and
beyond historical interrogation. In other words, the critique of ‘meth-

odological nationalism’ cannot simply embrace a ‘methodological
internationalism’ before the phenomenon of an interstate system actu-
ally emerges without falling into the trap of conceptual anachronism.
In fact, the dichotomy between ‘externalist’ and ‘internalist’ accounts
of state-formation misses the non-distinction between these two
dimensions in medieval Europe.
What are the implications of Tilly’s account of state-formation for the
question of state-autonomy? Since causal directionality invariably travels
from the state system to its components, Tilly formulates a ‘military-
adaptive’ state theory,46 which confines state autonomy to the domestic
level as states are forced to passively adapt to external pressures. While
this provides leverage to impose state interests on societal interests, it
appears, inversely, that states dispose of no agency to influence or trans-
form the international system – generating a one-sided or bisected con-
cept of state autonomy. Both operations leave the interstate system intact
as a timeless systemic level, immune to any alterations and without any
moorings in the social world.
Tilly’s two ‘encompassing’ and ‘systemic’ master processes of mod-
ernity – capitalism and the interstate system – forfeit historical specificity,
as not only capitalism (in the generic form of urban-based capitalists),
but also the interstate system (in the generic form of geopolitical frag-
mentation) appear now as pre-constituted and aprioristic phenomena.
The specific question of how to account for both – individually and in
their interrelation – disappears from view.
The Absence of a Social Theory of War

Relatedly, a third problematique emerges: Where exactly should we
locate an explanation for war and geopolitical rivalry in this model? What
explains the frequency, intensity and duration of late medieval and early
modern wars? Why do we see the rise of the ‘permanent war-state’ and
the ‘fiscal-military state’? As a rule, the argument for early modern
Europe’s bellicosity oscillates between the ascribed classically Weberian
invariant and independent rationality of state rulers to accumulate the
means of coercion to preserve or extend their power (political action to
maximise power and prestige) and the neorealist theorem of a security-
dilemma in an anarchical situation (si vis pacem para bellum). In the first
case, Tilly resorts to the classical realist idea of a subjective animus
46
Hobson, The State and International Relations, p. 185.
40 Benno Teschke
dominandi of rulers (as power-holders, rulers want to expand by defin-

ition), reiterating the reification of the pursuit of power – the autonomy
of politics as the quintessential quest for power. In the second case, the
interstate system is essentially naturalised as a pre-social ‘state of nature’
in which invariant foreign policy behaviour is a function derived from the
system’s anarchical structure. This claim jumps from the assumption of
the mere fact of co-existing contiguous polities to the analytical conclu-
sion that this explains geopolitical rivalry. As a historical sociology of war
and state-formation, Tilly’s model lacks a social theory of war.
Two Logics of Capital and Coercion and the Reification

of Agency
This theoretical architecture connects Tilly’s fourfold matrix –
geopolitical, statist, economic, world-market – to a Weberian sociology
of different spheres of social action that carries the claim of transhistori-
city and multi-causality, as the directionality of causal arrows can, in
principle, run freely from one pre-constituted sphere of social action to
any other. More concretely, the account is premised on a dualistic and
reificatory conception of the analytically and historically discrete logics of
capital, associated with cities, and coercion, associated with states.47
I will resort to metonymy and reification on page after page. Metonymy, in that
I will repeatedly speak of ‘rulers’, ‘kings’, and ‘sovereigns’ as if they represented a
state’s entire decision-making apparatus, thus reducing to a single point a
complex, contingent set of social relations. Metonymy, in that cities actually
stand for regional networks of production and trade in which the large
settlements are focal points. Reification, in that I will time and again impute a
unitary interest, rationale, capacity, and action to a state, a ruling class, or the
people subject to their joint control.48
For Tilly, capitalists engage in rational economic action to the degree
that their pre-given ends (utility maximisation and capital accumulation)
are realised by means of the peaceful deployment of material resources in
acts of market exchange, notably in urban markets (a neo-utilitarian
move). States engage in political action to the degree that their pre-
given ends (power maximisation to force the submission of other groups
to the state’s will) are realised by means of the rational organisation and
deployment of physical coercion, internally and externally. In terms of
sociological micro-foundations, Tilly reduces Weber’s four types of
social action (instrumental, value-oriented, emotional and habitual) to
47 48
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), pp. 16 ff. Idem, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 34.
but one: instrumental rationality.49 Tilly assigns a transhistorical sub-

stantive instrumental rationality to states, generically separated and
encased as a type of political action from economic action. Equally, he
ascribes a transhistorical instrumental rationality to capitalists, generic-
ally separated and encased as a type of economic action from political
action.50
States emerge when the means of coercion accumulate and concen-
trate; cities emerge when capital accumulates and concentrates. Differ-
ential state formation depends on the absence or presence of the
contingent conjunction of their external interaction. The analytical
positing of two separate logics of capital and coercion, corresponding
to two irreducible and autonomous spheres of social action – ideal –
typically conceived by Weber, but reified by Tilly – secures the wider
argument of transhistoricity, multi-causality and contingency.
Tilly’s substantive explanation is premised on a fundamental research-
organising move that relies on the acceptance of two universalised social-
order-constituting a priori segmentations – the inside/outside and the
economic/political distinctions. This generates the four conceptual
abstractions of the international system, the state, the economy and the
world-market, conceptualised as irreducible and autonomous structures
of social action. In the process, Tilly ontologises and transhistoricises the
very results of plural state formations – the inside/outside and the political/
economic distinction predicated on the bounded territoriality of the
modern state and its monopolisation of the means of violence – while
49
Lapointe and Dufour usefully remind us of this impoverishment of the richer classical
Weberian conception of types of social action in macro-sociological and structural
versions of Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology. They also emphasise how the
Verstehen (understanding) dimension of Weber’s sociology remains systematically
excluded in Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology. Thierry Lapointe and Frédérick
Dufour, “Assessing the Historical Turn in IR: An Anatomy of Second Wave Historical
Sociology,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 25, no. 1 (March 2012),
pp. 97–121.
50
Steve Smith is therefore correct to classify Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology as
epistemologically ‘rationalist’: ‘Both historical sociology and rationalist international
relations accept one model of how to analyse the social world. Both, therefore, are part
of the social science enterprise, in the narrow sense used in the US. Accordingly, both
deem causal analysis as appropriate to the social world. The leading historical sociology
scholars, for example, Hall, Mann, Skocpol, Tilly and Wallerstein, all accept a broadly
explanatory form of social theory, one in which causal, albeit multi-causal, analysis is the
way to study the development of state–society relations, etc. There is little room for active
agents, as distinct from agents reacting to these internal and external causal processes’.
Steve Smith, “Historical Sociology and International Relations Theory,” in: Hobden and
Hobson, Historical Sociology of International Relations, pp. 223–43, here at pp. 232, 233.
Smith points to hermeneutic Weberian, constructivist, post-structuralist, and non-
rationalist Marxist epistemologies as alternatives for the conduct of Historical Sociology.
42 Benno Teschke
re-deploying and retroactivating them as causal categories, each

endowed with their own ‘logic of action’, to explain this very same
process. This leads to explanatory circularity and tautology, as the very
outcomes of this dual differentiation are remobilised and anachronistic-
ally antedated as initially obtaining and temporally constant starting
premises.
Explaining Variations: Tri-linearity and the Bracketing of

the Peasantry
Given the reified conceptualisation of the interstate system and the
‘passive-adaptive’ view of the state, the locus for explaining variations
travels towards the regionally differentiated domestic configuration of
what is conceptualised as socially disembodied pools of available
material resources, rather than as social relations. Where Tilly exam-
ines social forces, the account remains restricted to the analysis of
inter-elite relations (relations between ruling and dominant classes) –
notably, state-capitalist and state-nobility relations.51 Again, Tilly’s
passage between 1975 and 1992 from a minimally class-analytic to a
state-centric position, which renders the agency of the peasantry pas-
sive, is instructive. For in 1975, Tilly conceded that ‘the predomin-
ance of peasants drew state-makers willy-nilly into struggles and
coalitions with the men who controlled the land. The strongest argu-
ment one could make for the peasant base as a cause of the state’s
victory is that the presence of peasants gave power to major landlords,
and the necessity of coalitions with regional groups of landlords (who
had some choice with which authorities to ally themselves) both
limited the scale at which princes could operate and pushed them
towards territorial agglomeration’.52 Later, peasants feature only
descriptively as mere objects, as their ‘fate’ ‘differed dramatically
between coercion-intensive and capital-intensive regions.’53 But any
political-military sociology of state-formation or fiscal sociology of
administration needs, by definition, to incorporate those subjects over
whom power is extended and fiscal extractions are exercised as active
agents (as a category of social analysis), which co-determined the tax
rate, to avoid conceptualising the peasantry as a de-subjectified and
neutral tax base. Given the predominantly agrarian social relations of
51
52
53
Idem, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 152.
late medieval and early modern Europe, the explanation of state

variations requires, therefore, an extension of the field of social forces
to include, at a minimum, the constitutive role of the peasantry in the
differential resolution of class conflicts over the sources and modalities
of extraction, property relations and the power configurations (state
forms) that institutionalised these conflicts.
But how useful is the language of ‘variation’? In his quest to move
away from uni-linear explanations, Tilly fails to embrace the full
diversity of multi-linear and unique regional experiences of state-
formations, restricting his analytical reach to a tri-linear schemer in
which the ‘capitalised-coercion intensive’ model serves as the ultim-
ately successful norm to which all other deviant cases had to adapt.
The production of middle-range generalisations subsumes case-
specific trajectories under one of his three rubrics. This is especially
problematic for Tilly’s collapsing of English and French experiences,
as they do not represent roughly equivalent trajectories, but radically
divergent cases.54 Since Tilly deploys no concept of capitalism (only
capitalist economic action) and excludes the agency of the peasantry,
he disables himself to identify the rise of agrarian capitalism as the
differentia specifica of England’s state development, generating a
capitalist-parliamentarian, monarchical state form, and its absence
in pre-revolutionary France, generating a non-capitalist monarchical
absolutism – the persistence of the Old Regime. While the move from
uni-linearity to tri-linearity usefully introduces complexity, it fails to
provide guidance on the full multi-linearity of all spatio-temporally
specific trajectories of state-formation in Europe. This includes the
need to account for variations within his triple classificatory scheme.
Finally, Tilly’s suggestion that the ultimately successful ‘capitalised-
coercion’ model became generalised by crowding out suboptimal
polities relies on a quasi-biological conception of neo-evolutionary
selection, recalling Neorealism, which fails to explain the longevity,
co-existence and survival of other state-forms (even today). In the
end, Tilly’s objective to overcome ‘standard path’ and ‘stagism’ gen-
erated not multi-linearity, but tri-linearity, which itself relapsed into
uni-linearity, as the ‘successful’ modern nation-state allows appar-
ently for no further variations and specificities. The result is a conver-
gence towards Neorealism’s interstate system, composed of
homogeneous and ‘like-units’.
54
Benno Teschke, “Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the
International,” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, vol. 13, no. 2
(2005), pp. 3–26.
44 Benno Teschke
Reversing the Tilly Thesis: Pre-Capitalist States Made

War and War Unmade These States
Given the radically divergent lineages of Anglo-French state-building
and returning to Tilly’s central thesis on ‘war makes states’, to what
degree did warfare actually make the state in the specifically modern
sense of the term? If, in line with the Neo-Hintzean orthodoxy, we deploy
Max Weber’s standard definition of the modern state – abstract state
power, legitimate and public monopoly in the means of violence, consoli-
dated state-territory, separation of bureaucrats from their means of
administration – which early modern polity (post-1688/1707 United
Kingdom apart) actually complied with these criteria? Where do we see
the classical modern separation between public authority and civil soci-
ety, the economy and the state, private and public power during this
period?
Because absolutism, as revisionist historians have argued for decades,
failed to comply with the Weberian ideal type of the modern bureaucratic
state, the effects of military rivalry had, at least in the French case (though
this can be generalised mutatis mutandis for the Continent), precisely the
opposite result of what the Tilly Thesis asserts.55 Rather than driving an
incremental and linear process of successful modern state-formation,
leading to a rationalised, centralised and de-personalised state-form,
55
For the dominant revisionist interpretation, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, see, for
example, William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State
Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge University Press, 1985);
Philip T. Hoffman, “Early Modern France, 1450–1700,” in: Philip T. Hoffman and
Kathryn Norberg (eds), Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789
(Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 226–52; David Parker, Class and State in Ancien
Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996); Ronald G. Asch and
Heinz Duchhardt (eds), Der Absolutismus – ein Mythos? Strukturwandel Monarchischer
Herrschaft in West- und Mitteleuropa (ca 1550–1700) (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1996); Mark
Potter, “War Finance and Absolutist State Development in Early Modern Europe: An
Examination of French Venality in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Early Modern
History, vol. 7, no. 1–2 (2003), pp. 120–47; Stephen Miller, State and Society in
Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008); Ertman, Birth of
the Leviathan; and Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and
Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) arrive at similar
conclusions regarding the overall trajectory of French state-formation. In a recent
survey, William Beik nuances minor aspects of the dominant revisionist thesis,
particularly with respect to specific French provinces. However, he strongly confirms
the view of absolutism as ‘social collaboration’ between the monarchy, the aristocracy
and local elites (bourgeois and non-bourgeois) in contrast to the outdated Tocquevillian
account of a triumphant monarchy-led project of state modernisation, centralisation and
rationalisation that erased all intermediary bodies, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as
Social Collaboration,” Past & Present, no. 188 (2005), pp. 195–224.
warfare (as noted by Skocpol and Ertman)56 exacerbated the social

conflicts within Old Regime France. It undermined its fiscal-military
health, exhausted its economic performance, and shaped a distinct
process of ‘unsuccessful’, ‘irrational’ (in terms of outcome, not in terms
of interests and strategies pursued by historically situated actors) and
‘involutionary’ state-formation that actually weakened the French state
over time. These processes combined to lead, from the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701-1714) onwards, and especially during and
after the Seven Years’ War, to a permanent state of fiscal crisis and,
finally, to state-collapse under the geopolitical pressure exerted by a
qualitatively distinct and comparatively superior capitalist state/society
complex: post-1688 England. In this respect, the ‘Brewer-Thesis’ on
Britain’s post-1688 ‘fiscal-military state’57 and Richard Bonney’s con-
cluding statement that by 1815 ‘only one state, Britain, had reached the
more advanced stage of a ‘fiscal state’58, and their logical corollary
concerning the reasons Britain’s continental rivals had failed to reach
this stage, requires sustained reconsideration. Reversing the Tilly
Thesis, the proposition is that pre-capitalist states made war and war
unmade these states.
This raises several questions for WHS in general and for Tilly’s work in
particular. How can we account for qualitative transformations of spatio-
temporally diverse geopolitical orders across history and the construction
of the modern interstate system in particular? How do we account for the
bellicose character of late medieval and early modern Europe? What are
the implications for the claim of ‘state-autonomy’ in this context? This
chapter suggests that these questions require a full re-historicisation and
re-socialisation of the changing configurations of political geography
throughout the course of European history as socially constructed phe-
nomena – and not as a timeless inside-outside condition, which could be
captured by a formalised IHS.59
56
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions; Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan.
57 58
Brewer, Sinews of Power. Bonney, The Rise of the Fiscal State, p. 14.
59
These transformations can be traced to the processes of Carolingian imperial
fragmentation around the turn of the millennium and the subsequent consolidation of
multiple feudal polities. While ‘feudal’ territoriality was structurally incapable to
actualise a geopolitical order based on a sharp differentiation between multiple polities
(no ‘-inter’), it configured Europe as an area of multiple centres of power that
transformed itself during the absolutist period into a territorially better delineated
‘inter-dynastic’ order. For a detailed reconstruction of the sociopolitical dynamics that
led to the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire and the subsequent consolidation of a
plurality of feudal kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries see chapter 3 in Benno
Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London: Verso, 2003).
46 Benno Teschke
(Geo-)Political Marxism: Basic Theoretical Premises

The final section suggests an alternative conceptualisation of plural state
formations that is not predicated on the a priori acceptance of the double
differentiation (inside/outside and political/economic) between spatial
and social spheres. It addresses this phenomenon – the rise of the
interstate system and the origins of capitalism – as the outcome of a
process of spatial and social differentiation in a genetic-processual mode
of analysis, whose historical specificities demand a radical historicism
revolving around the spatio-temporally variable resolution of social and
intra-ruling class conflicts. Simultaneously, it seeks to overcome Tilly’s
Weberian analytic, which presupposes a universal segmentation of social
spheres and territorial fragmentation of spatial spheres, each endowed
with their own irreducible and autonomous agential rationalities, tending
to generate reification, multi-causality and categorical ahistoricity.
How, then, can we conceive of economic action as a historical
category? One of the strongest insights of the Marxian tradition – despite
all economism and base-superstructure metaphors (real or ascribed) – is
its insistence that economic action cannot proceed prior to or outside of the
historically specific political and legal institutionalisation of the propri-
etary relations of domination and exploitation between producers and
non-producers.60 This applies to all ‘modes of production’ (including
capitalism), as ‘modes of production’ are not conceived as specific tech-
nologies of production – stripped of all ‘non-economic’ aspects – but as
contested relationships of power. This is immediately apparent for all
pre-capitalist societies as access to surplus is directly conditional upon
the threat or the actual application of sanctions, ultimately enforced by
the means of coercion. The term ‘political accumulation’61 captures the
idea that in all pre-capitalist communities, social interdependence – and
the transfer of surplus from producers to non-producers – relies primarily
on direct relations of personal dependence or, alternatively, social bonds
of obligation. In social systems where producers are in direct possession
of their means of reproduction or subsistence, non-producers need to
exercise a degree of political coercion – legitimate or not – to appropriate
and redistribute surplus. The transfer of surplus is thus directly
60
Ellen Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”
[1981], in: Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 19–48; Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European
Capitalism,” in: T. H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian
Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge University
Press, 1985), pp. 213–327.
61
Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.”
dependent upon non-market relations or what from today’s vantage

point appear as non-economic types of action. This applies as much to
the ‘feudal’ lord-peasant relation (mediated by rents) and the ‘absolutist’
state-peasant relation (mediated by taxes), as it applies to the political
terms of (unequal) trade that characterised the circuits of exchange of
medieval and early modern cities.62 It also applies to the period of colonial
mercantilism, defined by the political and military exclusion of economic
competition and political control of entry to trade for specific commodities
and specific trading routes.63 In pre-capitalist societies, relations of domin-
ation enter directly into the definition of the relations of appropriation;
indeed, they are constitutive of them. The political relations of domination
(titles, rights, privileges, force) constitute simultaneously the economic
powers of exploitation. Any expanded reproduction of rulers is tantamount
to the geographical expansion and accumulation of titles of domination and
rights of exploitation (intra-ruling class conflict), or the intensification of
the terms and rate of surplus-appropriation (class conflict) – usually both.
These elementary ideas grasp the political constitution of economic repro-
duction. In this sense, politics and economics are fused; better, they are
non-differentiated in pre-capitalist societies.
This non-separation has a spatial and geopolitical dimension too, which
directly addresses the question of the sui generis character of territoriality in
medieval Europe and the specificity of medieval geopolitical relations.64 In
nuce, the argument is that in social property regimes where direct produ-
cers are in possession of their means of reproduction, non-producers tend
to reinvest in the means of appropriation/coercion – rather than in the
means of production – to secure the extraction of surplus and to accumu-
late wealth. This led to a disjuncture between the rate of military innov-
ations and the rate of technological innovations in the means of
production. Because accumulation was primarily a political process vis-
à-vis the peasantry, it also internally divided the ruling class in terms of
conflicts over property rights, the terms of appropriation and the
62
Philip Abrams, Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology
(Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 9–23; John Merrington, “Town and
Countryside in the Transition to Capitalism,” in: Paul Sweezy et al. (eds), The
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 170–95;
Parker, Class and State.
63
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982); James Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early
Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); idem, The Political
Economy of Early Modern Empires (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Teschke, The
Myth of 1648, chapter 6.
64
Benno Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and
Theory,” International Organization, vol. 52, no. 2 (1998), pp. 325–358.
48 Benno Teschke
distribution of surplus (the conflict between royal taxes and lordly rents).
As these processes divided elites ‘domestically’, they also drove an inter-
lordly and inter-dynastic conflict over the expansion and control of ‘land
and people’ – territory and labour. Vertical class conflict, including peas-
ant resistance to lordly demands, was thus not dissociated from horizontal
inter-lordly conflict. But as each lord had to apply a modicum of force on
‘his’ lordship (lordships were usually not owned by lords, but held classic-
ally as fiefs or immunities from royal overlords) to control the peasantry,
lords enjoyed arms-bearing status (including, as a rule, ecclesiastic and
monastic lords). The militarisation of the members of the ruling class,
typically organised in scalar chains of lord-overlord relations, implied the
oligopolistic dispersal of the means of violence across the nobility which
composed the ‘feudal state’ – a term that is semantically more accurately
rendered as a Personenverbandstaat (a state of associated persons),65 char-
acterised by ‘parcellised sovereignty’.66
This also meant that the configuration of the medieval ‘state’ was
territorially non-exclusive, non-contiguous, and not bordered, and insti-
tutionally non-centralised, non-rationalised, and non-depersonalised, as
lords could also have multiple royal overlords, and as princes accumu-
lated rights over territories in far-flung and disjointed locations. Further-
more, political accumulation (and dis-accumulation) occurred not only
through wars and conflict, but also through elaborate marriage and
family strategies, further demonstrating the intensely personalised nature
of medieval lordly-patrimonial and early modern dynastic-patrimonial
‘states’. Inter-lordly conflicts over rights of domination appeared there-
fore in the specific legal form of the ‘feud’ – neither civil war nor classical
interstate war – to express the non-distinction between domestic and
international spheres of power.67 The external/internal distinction – and
the attendant vocabulary of ‘the international’ and ‘the domestic’ – was
therefore absent. There was no medieval interstate order.
Any account of differential state-formation in Europe has to locate
variations of different trajectories in these late medieval and early modern
sociopolitical dynamics, which led, over time, to ‘state-exit’, the region-
ally variable construction of politically more centralised polities and,
65
Heinrich Mitteis, The State in the Middle Ages: A Comparative Constitutional History in
Feudal Europe (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1975); Rees Davies, “The Medieval State:
The Tyranny of a Concept?” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 16, no.2 (2003),
pp. 280–300.
66
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974).
67
Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, translated
from the 4th revised edition by Howard Kaminsky and James van Horn Melton
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 [1939]).
ultimately, a recognisable interstate system. I call this process ‘geopolit-

ical accumulation’. Consequently, warfare, extraction and reinvestment
in the means of coercion (pressures towards military innovations) were
not a geopolitical imperative in pre-capitalist early modern Europe and
did not express an innate political rationality of ‘rulers’, but formed
normal ruling-class strategies of expanded reproduction, driven by the
social dynamics of (geo-)political accumulation. In this sense, the early
modern ‘permanent war-state’ institutionalised, where it prevailed, the
social imperatives of political accumulation.
In this context, agency or subjectivity cannot be simply ‘read off’
structural configurations of sociopolitical relations in the sense of
cause and effect, as situated agents – individually and collectively –
draw on and develop repertories of experiences, which do not simply
reproduce and re-enact existing power relations. Rather, agency
should be conceived as an active, rather than reactive, process, modi-
fying, circumventing and ‘escaping’ structural imperatives. In the pro-
cess, innovation is a constant possibility. Social agency is therefore not
something that enters the historical analysis from without – as a static
and reified pre-definition of agential rationality – but something that
requires constant historicisation and specification in relational con-
texts from within. Agents ‘interpret’ structural imperatives in historic-
ally distinct ways.68
How independent, autonomous and self-referential can political or
economic action be in this context? The deployment of the entire ‘mod-
ernist’ conceptual vocabulary (the state, civil society, the economy, the
international) derived and abstracted, after all, from the classical socio-
logical tradition that tried to forge concepts for distinctly modern phenom-
ena in the first place, seems misleading for the analysis of historically
specific configurations of social and spatial relations. But once semantic-
ally neutered and extended over the entire course of human history, these
historical specificities tend to disappear from view. The Weberian analyt-
ical juxtaposition between political and economic action – between (geo-)
politics and economics – each occupying distinctive spheres of social
action, and their attendant elevation to transhistorical categories of analy-
sis ontologises a differentiation specific to capitalist modernity and projects
it back into a differently configured past. The danger of conceptual
anachronisms also applies to attempts to replace the strictures of ‘meth-
odological nationalism’ with a ‘methodological internationalism’ as the
68
My reading of ‘agency’ is therefore somewhat different from Robert Brenner’s original
formulation, as his concept of ‘rules of reproduction’ retains a rational-choice and
structuralist bent. I draw more inspiration from E. P. Thompson’s strong historicism.
50 Benno Teschke
starting assumption and general framework for IHS.69 Equally, a transhis-

toricised typology of structures of social action cannot specify the historical
processes that formed and transformed the institutional parameters that
allowed or disallowed for the differentiation of spheres of social action in
the first place. As Marx’s critique of liberal political economy aimed at
disclosing the political processes – primitive accumulation – constitutive of
capitalist relations of production (not conceptualised as the de-politicised
abstract laws of the economy/market populated by individual utility-
maximisers, but as a contested social relation), he equally disclosed how
the separation of the direct producers from their means of reproduction
generated the ‘real appearance’ of the disjuncture between a free contract-
based market (conceptualised by classical political economy as the de-
politicised realm of pacified and market-mediated economic action) and a
purely political state (the realm of coercion-backed political action). The
state, according to Marx, remained directly active in the ongoing political
constitution of capitalist social property relations and the ongoing political
economy of the dynamics of capitalism.
Thus reconceived, the analytical focus and research strategy shift –
from the contingent interaction between pre-constituted spheres of
action – towards the spatio-temporally specific resolution of the socio-
politically contested institutionalisation and territorialisation of social
property relations and the conflicts over the modalities (the terms and
conditions) of surplus transfer (labour services, dues, rents and taxes).
For these struggles over the configuration between power and property,
and the attendant conflicts over the territorialisation of power over prop-
erty, are at the centre of differential trajectories of state development in
medieval and early modern Europe. And this perspective generates an
alternative historical reconstruction and narrative, which elucidates the
temporally successive double differentiation between the inside from the
outside – associated with the practices of territorialisation driven by
processes of (geo-)political accumulation by dynastic-absolutist rulers –
and between the economic and the political – associated with the region-
ally specific rise of capitalism in England. Both differentiations combine
through the subsequent expansion of capitalism across a territorially pre-
configured Europe and beyond. This research programme aims to
replace contingent multi-causality with specificity and processual rela-
tionality, reification of rationality, interests and action with context-
specific and historically situated agency (or praxis), and universalised
69
Benno Teschke, “Historical Materialism, IR Theory, and the False Promise of
International Historical Sociology,” Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies, vol. 6, no. 1
(2014), pp. 1–66.
categories of analysis with historicised categories. Ultimately, it would

avoid the temptation of developing a formalised, structuralist and nomo-
logical IHS, Weberian or Marxist.70
Conclusion
Charles Tilly’s famous war-made-states thesis is historically untenable
and theoretically flawed. Methodologically, the attempt to escape from
the dual strictures of modernisation theory and comparative history –
standard path and internal logic – led him to embrace the idea of
‘encompassing comparisons’, which posited capitalism and the
interstate system as the two single-unit transcending macro-phenomena
that framed his tri-linear account of European state formations. Switch-
ing from a Marxist to a Weberian conception of capitalism and subsum-
ing the latter under the overriding imperatives of geopolitical rivalry, both
encompassing processes – the interstate system (and its attendant geo-
political pressures) and capitalism (as the source of variation) – remained
unexplained and were effectively universalised as pre-constituted givens
within which processes of variable state formation unfolded. Both phe-
nomena require themselves specification and historicisation and a rever-
sal of their status as explanations to the status of explananda by grounding
their specific origins in the sociopolitical dynamics in the medieval and
early modern periods.
70
For a fuller historical reconstruction see Benno Teschke, “Theorising the Westphalian
System of States: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism,” European
Journal of International Relations, vol. 8, no.1 (2002), pp. 5–48; idem, The Myth of
1648; idem, “Debating The Myth of 1648: State Formation, the Interstate System and
the Emergence of Capitalism in Europe – A Rejoinder,” International Politics, vol. 43,
no. 5 (2006), pp. 531–73.
2 Otto Hintze, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly’s
Theory of European State-building
Thomas Ertman
New York University
Introduction
The year 1975 marked a turning point in the research on state-building
with the publication of The Formation of National States in Western
Europe, edited by Charles Tilly. In his contributions to the volume,
Tilly reoriented work in this field by asking how it was that a particular
form of the state came to dominate in first the West and then across the
globe. Tilly’s answer was path breaking: ‘Preparation for war has been
the great state-building activity’.1 Or, in an even starker formulation:
‘War made the state and the state made war’.2 A decade later, in his
piece ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’ for the
collection Bringing the State Back In, Tilly would reiterate this position:
‘War makes states, I shall claim’.3 In her famous programmatic essay in
the same collection, Theda Skocpol pointed to the intellectual roots of
this new focus on the transnational, geopolitical embeddedness of the
state in the writings of the historian Otto Hintze (1861–1940).4 Aided
by the publication, also in 1975, of a selection of his essays in English
edited by Felix Gilbert,5 the German author’s writings would provide
inspiration not only to Tilly, but also to other state-building theorists
including Anthony Giddens (1985), Michael Mann (1986) and Brian
Downing (1992).6 Indeed, more recently Philip Gorski has applied the
1
Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton
University Press, 1975), p. 74.
2
3
Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in: Peter B. Evans,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge
University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91, here at p. 170.
4
Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,”
in: Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In, pp. 3–38, here at p. 8.
5
Otto Hintze, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, Felix Gilbert (ed.) (New York: Oxford
6
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985);
Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Brian Downing, The
52
Otto Hintze, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly’s Theory 53
term ‘neo-Hintzean’ to a large group of ‘bellicist’ scholars who stress

the causal role of war and preparations for war in the development of
the state in Europe.7
Tilly was soon to move beyond the general formulations on the rela-
tionship between war and state-building found in these pieces from
1975 and 1985, which do in fact show a great affinity with arguments
put forward in Hintze’s early ‘bellicist’ essays such as ‘The Formation of
States and Constitutional Development’8 and ‘Military Organization and
the Organization of the State’,9 both found in the Gilbert volume. In
1990 he published a far more substantial work, the monograph Coercion,
Capital and European States AD 990–1990,10 dedicated to Tilly’s longtime
friend Stein Rokkan and greatly influenced by the Norwegian social
scientist’s ‘conceptual map’ of Europe with its emphasis on the role
played by differential starting conditions in the subsequent state-building
process. In this contribution, I will first examine both Tilly’s earlier and
later, Rokkan-inspired models of state-building. I then will go on to show
that the oft-overlooked post-1918 writings of Hintze provide an equally
rich, though substantially different account of European state-building
based on differential starting conditions that offers an alternative to that
of Tilly and deserves to be better known.
Hintze’s Early Writings

The common link between Tilly and Hintze is, as already noted, war
and preparations for war. Thus in ‘Military Organization and the
Organization of the State’, the latter writes, ‘It is one-sided, exagger-
ated and therefore false to consider class conflict the only driving force
in history. Conflict between nations has been far more important; and
throughout the ages pressure from without has been a determining
Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in

Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 1992).
7
Philip Gorski, “Beyond Marx and Hintze? Third Wave Theories of Early Modern State
Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 43, no. 4 (October 2001),
pp. 851–61, here at p. 851; Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the
Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 3, 174.
8
Otto Hintze, “Staatenbildung und Verfassungsentwicklung” [1902], in: Gerhard Oestreich
(ed.), Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte,
3rd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), pp. 34–61.
9
Otto Hintze, “Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung” [1906], in: Oestreich, Staat und
Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 52–83.
10
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990).
54 Thomas Ertman
influence on internal structures’.11 Hintze goes on in this and other

pre-1918 essays to posit a relationship between state structures and
geopolitical pressures stemming from geographic position.
The starting point for his account is the end of caesaropapism: the
emancipation of the Church from the authority of the Holy Roman
Emperor in the wake of the Investiture crisis of the eleventh century. As
Hintze says,12 ‘It was the division between Emperor and Pope . . . that
made possible the emergence of the European state system’. It was in turn
‘the constant rivalry among the great powers . . . , the always tense political
situation requiring ever new military efforts in order to preserve the inde-
pendence of individual states . . . that created on the continent the founda-
tions of modern Europe: a state system built on international law,
absolutist constitutions, and standing armies’.13 More concretely, Hintze
locates the origins of a distinctly early modern state-building dynamic in
the decades-long conflict between Louis XIII’s France and the House of
Habsburg. Louis’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, seeing his country
threatened by Habsburg possessions in Spain, the southern Netherlands
and the Holy Roman Empire, responded by eliminating provincial par-
ticularism, centralizing administration, and creating a standing army to
boost French military effectiveness. The success of these innovations in
turn forced France’s rivals Spain and Austria, according to Hintze, to
initiate similar reforms, and they were introduced in their most extreme
form in Brandenburg-Prussia. As he explains, ‘This state had to become to
a much greater degree a military state than France because it was sur-
rounded on all sides by enemies and could only establish and assert its
autonomous existence through constant wars’.14
The outlier here was England, protected from foreign land forces by
the Channel and hence able to preserve its Parliament, concentrate on its
fleet and dispense with a standing army. In summary, Hintze asserts that
‘on the continent urgent political necessity held sway that forced the
development of militarism, absolutism and bureaucracy, whereas
England was not subject to such pressure . . . It was above all at that time
the geographic situation that was telling’.15 If one were to extend this
11
Hintze, Historical Essays, p. 183; see also the discussion in Thomas Ertman, Birth of the
Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge
12
Hintze, “Staatenbildung und Verfassungsentwicklung,” p. 42.
13
Hintze, “Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung,” p. 69.
14
Otto Hintze, “Das Verfassungsleben der heutigen Kulturstaaten” [1914], in: Oestreich,
Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte,
pp. 390–423, here at p. 407.
15
Hintze, “Das Verfassungsleben der heutigen Kulturstaaten,” p. 428.
‘geographist’ logic further, one could argue that the great river barriers
and the Alps played a comparable role to that of the English Channel in
diminishing the pressures towards absolutism in, respectively, the Dutch
Republic and the Swiss Confederation, and that their location on the
northern and eastern fringes of Europe similarly preserved non-absolutist
state forms – at least for a time – in Sweden, Poland and Hungary.
How did Hintze come to adopt this truly unadulterated geopolitical
position? To answer this question, we must delve into the sometimes
murky waters of the German theorist’s biography. Otto Hintze was
born in Pomerania in 1861, the son of a local Prussian administrator.
After studying history at the University of Berlin with, among others,
Dilthey und Droysen, and completing his dissertation on a medieval
topic (the German king Wilhelm of Holland), he received a position in
1888 working on the massive eighteenth-century Prussian document
collection, the Acta Borussica, which occupied him down to 1910.
During this time he was also editor of the leading journal of Prussian
history, the Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preußischen
Geschichte, and after 1899 held an extraordinary, then an ordinary
professorship at Berlin University. Given this academic profile, it is
hardly surprising that of Hintze’s 263 (!) publications down to 1918,
170 – including three substantial monographs – were devoted exclu-
sively to Prussia.16
At the same time, however, Hintze’s professorship was in ‘eco-
nomic, constitutional and administrative history and politics’ and
despite his heavy editorial obligations he found time to take on broad
comparative topics as well, as exemplified by the three essays cited
above. In these pieces, as we have seen, Hintze argues for the primacy
of external, that is, geopolitical, conditions in determining the course
of state-building trajectories. In so doing, he was reasserting, as Wolf-
gang Neugebauer has pointed out,17 an older approach associated with
the work of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886)
vis-à-vis three other positions current in Hintze’s day: those associated
with Marxism and its stress on class conflict; with the German Histor-
ical School and its stage theory of political development; and with
16
Thomas Ertman, “Otto Hintze und der preußische Staat des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in:
Eckhart Hellmuth, Immo Meenken and Michael Trauth (eds), Zeitwende? Preußen um
1800 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999), pp. 21–41, here at pp. 23–24, 31.
17
Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Otto Hintze und seine Konzeption der Allgemeine
Verfassungsgeschichte der neueren Staaten,” in Giuseppe Di Costanzo, Michael Erbe and
Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds), Allgemeine Verfassungs – und Verwaltungsgeschichte der
Neueren Staaten, Fragmente, Bd. I (Naples: Palomar Athenaeum, 1998), pp. 35–83,
here at pp. 40–3.
56 Thomas Ertman
nationalist theories linking state forms to essentialist features of a given

people. It was the combination of the comparative method and the
clear stress on the ‘transnational context’ found in these essays that
earned Hintze a mention in the programmatic Bringing the State Back
In volume that also featured Tilly’s ‘War Making and State Making as
Organized Crime’.18
Tilly’s Two State-building Models

In this seminal essay, first published in 1985, Tilly goes beyond general
statements such as ‘War made the state and the state made war’ in order to
explain variations in European state-building. Here he is interested, as was
Hintze, in the ‘organizational residue’ of war making, meaning the size or
‘bulkiness’ of state apparatuses. Yet his explanatory variable is not simply
geographic position. Rather, Tilly identifies a number of factors that will
lead to the buildup of a sizeable permanent bureaucracy: the recruiting
and maintenance of large standing armies; a reliance on difficult to extract
land taxes as opposed to taxes on commerce to finance such armies; and ‘a
territory populated by great landlords or by distinct religious groups’ as
opposed to religiously homogeneous peasant-proprietors.19
For Tilly, Brandenburg-Prussia and England embody the contrast-
ing effects of these first two factors: ‘Brandenburg-Prussia was the
classic case of high cost for available resources. The Prussian effort
to build an army matching those of its large Continental neighbors
created an immense structure; it militarized and bureaucratized much
of German social life . . . England [possessed] a large and commercial-
ized pool of resources drawn on by a relatively small fiscal apparatus’.
Likewise ‘fragmented [i.e. in terms of landholding] and homogeneous
Sweden with its small and effective apparatus of control’ illustrates the
consequences of this third factor.20 In the end, then, Tilly’s categor-
ization of state-building outcomes, with peripheral states like England
and Sweden remaining non-bureaucratic (and constitutionalist) while
continental polities such as Brandenburg-Prussia (and France)
develop in the opposite direction, is very close to that of the early
Hintze, though the explanatory scheme is more complex, moving as it
does away from a simple reliance on military pressure emanating from
geographic position towards an explanation based on the ease of
18
Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” p. 8.
19
Tilly, “War Making and State Making,” pp. 181–2.
20
Idem, “War Making and State Making,” p. 182.
extraction of available resources in order to account for the kind of

state constructed over many centuries.21
Tilly was clearly not satisfied with the broad propositions on state-
building put forward in ‘War Making and State Making as Organized
Crime’. Five years later he published his monograph Coercion, Capital
and European States, AD 900–1990, which can be considered his final
word on the subject. As Philip Gorski has remarked, in Coercion, Capital
Tilly seeks to incorporate socioeconomic factors found in the neo-
Marxist literature into his war-centred analysis.22 The mechanism
through which he does this is through the concept of differential starting
conditions, seemingly inspired by the work of Stein Rokkan. In an essay
written in 1981 for the Norwegian edition of Rokkan’s works, Tilly
produced an insightful summary and analysis of Rokkan’s ‘conceptual
map of Europe’ and foreshadows the analytic approach he himself would
later take in Coercion, Capital.23
Rokkan had published one version of his ‘conceptual map’ in Tilly’s
The Formation of National States of 197524 and was working on a further
version at the time of his death in July 1979. In both versions, Rokkan
underlines the significance of a ‘north-south’ and ‘west-east’ dimension
of European development, both related to differences across the contin-
ent following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. The north-south
dimension is related to distance from Rome, the cultural centre of
medieval Europe as headquarters of the Church. West-east refers to
geographic position in relation to a dense central band of mainly Roman
cities stretching from northern Italy through Switzerland and southern
and Rhineland Germany to the Low Countries. The territories on the
seaward (western) side of this band also tend to have more cities than
those on the eastward side. After defending his recently deceased friend’s
enterprise from the ‘too harsh’ judgment of the French social scientist
Bertrand Badie, Tilly nonetheless offers two significant criticisms of the
‘conceptual map’. First, the scheme ‘presents the various national experi-
ences as individual “cases” displaying the results of being subjected to
different combinations of “variables” . . . [It] tends to reduce the known
facts of international power to effects of similar positions within an
21
For a further critical discussion of this early state-building model of Tilly, see Ertman,
Birth of the Leviathan, pp. 13–16.
22
Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution, p. 5.
23
Charles Tilly, Stein Rokkan’s Conceptual Map of Europe, working paper no. 229 (Center
for Research on Social Organizations, University of Michigan, February 1981).
24
Stein Rokkan, “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible
Paradigm for Variations within Europe,” in Tilly, The Formation of National States,
pp. 562–600.
58 Thomas Ertman
abstract grid’.25 In addition to this neglect of the impact of the inter-

national system, Rokkan also does not pay enough attention to what
rulers really do: ‘Yet the state structures that actually took shape grew
largely as unintended by-products of other activities. Which activities?
The question helps us become more specific about elements missing
from Rokkan’s scheme. The interactions of warmaking, taxation, and
capital accumulation profoundly shaped European statemaking’.26 It is
this focus on the interplay among war-making, taxation and capital
accumulation in Coercion, Capital that represents Tilly’s attempt to
incorporate the insights of the neo-Marxist literature into his state-
building model. Yet he does so in combination with a new emphasis on
differential endowments or starting conditions derived from Rokkan’s
‘conceptual map’, specifically by embedding his analysis of the inter-
actions among sovereigns, administrators and capitalists within the
‘west-east dimension’ with its three distinct zones – central city belt,
more urban western seaward territories and more rural eastern areas –
where over many centuries rulers would work to build state structures.
Hence, right at the start of his book, Tilly points to the presence at the
beginning of the European state-building process (for him c. 990 AD) of
a ‘centralized urban band’ made up of a ‘system of cities, towns, roads
and rivers’27 bequeathed by the Roman Empire and extending from
northern Italy, Switzerland and the Rhine basin to Flanders. This band
is so significant for Tilly because ‘[b]ehind the changing geography of
cities . . . operated the dynamics of capital (whose preferred sphere was
cities) . . .’28 For Tilly, then, it is this initial uneven distribution of capital,
when combined with a pattern of fragmented sovereignty in the wake of
Roman and Carolingian collapse and the resulting endemic conflict
among neighbours (war), which together explain the unique dynamic
of European state formation and consolidation. Thus within the central
band, high concentrations of cities and of capital led to the emergence of
city-states such as Venice and urban federations like the Dutch Republic
that could compensate for their small size and limited populations by
purchasing military services with abundant and (according to Tilly)
easily collectible revenues derived from tolls and taxes on commercial
activity.
In eastern and northern Europe (Brandenburg-Prussia, Poland,
Hungary, Russia, Scandinavian kingdoms) by contrast, the relative pau-
city of cities/capital forced rulers to use coercive means to exploit their
25
Tilly, Stein Rokkan’s Conceptual Map, pp. 13, 16.
26 27
Idem, Stein Rokkan’s Conceptual Map, p. 19. Idem, Coercion, pp. 13, 38.
28
Idem, Coercion, p. 5.
more limited resources – land and the peasants farming it – for military
purposes. Between these capital-intensive and coercive-intensive pat-
terns of state-building lay what Tilly calls the capital-coercive path char-
acteristic of polities like France and England grouped to the west of the
central band, which benefited from both a fair concentration of cities and
large, well-populated areas of increasingly commercialized agriculture.
They thus possessed substantial reserves of both money and men within
their areas of sovereignty and hence proved to be, over the long run, the
most effective military machines. Beginning in the seventeenth century,
the success of this model on the battlefield forced other competitor
states, such as Brandenburg-Prussia, to adopt it. Failure or inability to
do so meant either a loss in great-power status (the Dutch Republic) or
total disappearance (Poland, Venice).
Hintze’s Later Writings: An Alternative to Rokkan

and Tilly
Stein Rokkan’s ‘conceptual map’ with its emphasis on differential
starting conditions for post-Roman state-building in Europe thus pro-
vided an important impetus for the further development of Tilly’s
insights on the relationship between war-making and state-making. What
has often been overlooked, however, is that Otto Hintze, like Tilly, also
deepened his thinking on state-building beyond the positions articulated
in his early writing. Furthermore, also like Tilly, he did so by introducing
a new emphasis on differential starting conditions into his work. The
model he puts forward in his later essays from the 1920s and early 1930s
differs substantially, however, from that of Rokkan and Tilly and
deserves to be taken seriously as an alternative to the well-known frame-
work associated with the American social scientist.
As German research has now made clear, Hintze’s views on a whole
range of subjects seem to have changed significantly following Germany’s
defeat in World War I and the establishment of the democratic Weimar
Republic in 1918/1919. Three factors seem to have influenced this
change. First, in 1912 Hintze had married a much younger student,
Hedwig Guggenheimer, whose area of expertise was ancient régime
France rather than Prussia and whose political views were much more
liberal than those of her husband.29 Second, as a result of the collapse of
29
On Hintze’s wife Hedwig and her influence on his work, see Brigitta Oestreich, “Hedwig
und Otto Hintze: Eine biographische Skizze,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 11 (1985),
pp. 397–419; and idem, “Otto Hintze,” in Michael Erbe (ed.), Berlinische Lebensbilder:
Geisteswissenschaftler (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1989), pp. 287–309, here at pp. 295–7.
60 Thomas Ertman
the Kaiserreich and its replacement with the democratic Weimar Repub-
lic, Hintze could finally, in the words of Brigitta Oestreich, ‘liberate
himself from the [requirement to] represent the monarchical principle’.30
Finally, in the wake of a serious eye operation in March 1918 Hintze was
no longer able to meet his teaching obligations at the University of Berlin
and as a consequence he was forced to take early retirement in 1921.
Freed from his university obligations and increasingly also from those
connected with the editorship of the Acta Borussica, Hintze was now in a
position to explore in greater depth and breadth the comparative-
historical questions thrown up by the European cataclysm of
1914–1918 and the advent of democracy to Germany. This he did with
the help of contemporary social science writings by Sombart, Troeltsch
and Max Weber, which Hintze studied extensively during this period.
The fruit of his new thinking appeared in a series of papers presented to
the Prussian Academy of Sciences and articles published in the Histor-
ische Zeitschrift. These pieces, seven in number31 and ranging in length
from five to forty-six pages, were collected along with other, earlier
articles by Hintze’s student Fritz Hartung in the volume Staat und
Verfassung, first published in the very unpropitious year 1941. Gerhard
Oestreich saved the collection from obscurity by bringing out a second
edition in 1962 and a third, expanded edition in 1970. Felix Gilbert
included only one of these late essays32 in the selections in English of
Hintze’s writings, which he published in 1975.33
How do Hintze’s Weimar-era views on European state-building differ
from those he held before World War I? As mentioned, in his last prewar
comparative article ‘Das Verfassungsleben der heutigen Kulturstaaten’
30
Oestreich, “Otto Hintze,” p. 298.
31
Otto Hintze, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung in den Ländern des nordöstlichen
Deutschland” [1923], in Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen
zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 186–215; idem, “Staatenbildung und
Kommunalverwaltung” [1924], in: Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte
Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 216–41; idem, “Wesen und
Verbreitung des Feudalismus” [1929], in Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte
Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 84–119; idem, “Typologie der
ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes” [1930], in: Oestreich, Staat und
Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte,
pp. 120–39; idem, “Weltgeschichtliche Bedingungen der Repräsentativverfassung”
[1931a] in: Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen
Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 140–85; idem, “Wesen und Wandlung des modernen Staats”
[1931b], in: Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen
Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 470–96; idem, “Die Entstehung des modernen Staatslebens”
[1932], in: Oestreich, Staat und Verfassung – Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Allgemeinen
Verfassungsgeschichte, pp. 497–502.
32
Idem, “Weltgeschichtliche Bedingungen der Repräsentativverfassung.”
33
Idem, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze.
(‘The Constitutional Life of Today’s Western States’ – Hintze 1914) –

originally published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Truppenführung und Heeres-
kunde (‘Troop Command and Military Science Quarterly’) – the German
historian contends that the origins of absolutism lay in a vigorous state-
transforming response on the part of Richelieu to France’s beleaguered
external position, one that was then imitated by competitors Spain, Austria
and eventually also Brandenburg-Prussia. In his 1930 article ‘Typologie
der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes’ (‘Typology of the Repre-
sentative Regimes of the West’), however, he argues that in the areas where
these states emerged ‘a certain tendency towards the emergence of monar-
chical absolutism was present right from the start’.34 These areas
were principally France, northeastern Spain (Aragon and Catalonia),
northern Italy, and western and southern Germany and Austria. All had
belonged to the Carolingian Empire which, like all post-Roman European
polities of the early and central Middle Ages, had been characterized by
the participation of free fighting men in local government within
circumscribed territorial units (in this case the counties). With the decline
of central Carolingian power under the successors of Charlemagne,
nobles who had been granted regalian rights over justice, revenue collec-
tion and defence as fiefs appropriated these rights and carved out from the
counties areas of personal jurisdiction and immunity. Or, put synoptically,
Hintze argues that over the long run the political feudalism of the Carolin-
gians led to the breaking up (Zersetzung) of the counties, and even of small
territorial units such as the hundreds below them, into areas of private
jurisdiction controlled by local nobles.35
Hintze then distinguishes two different state-building trajectories for
those post-Carolingian regions that had suffered from a collapse of central
authority and the expropriation of sovereign rights by local lords between
the tenth and twelfth centuries. In northern Italy, parts of southern
Germany and Switzerland, and in the Low Countries – in fact along Tilly
and Rokkan’s ‘city belt’ – municipalities seized upon this power vacuum to
win substantial autonomy for themselves and often extend their authority
over the surrounding countryside. In the late essays, Hintze mentions
these areas only in brief asides.36 However, some further light on the case
of the Netherlands was cast with the recent appearance of six chapters,
including one on this region, from Hintze’s reference work Allgemeine
34
Hintze, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” p. 138.
35
Idem, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” pp. 213–14; idem, “Staatenbildung und
Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 223, 225, 226–7; idem, “Wesen und Verbreitung des
Feudalismus,” pp. 93–4, 101; idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des
Abendlandes,” pp. 131, 135.
36
Idem, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 217, 219.
62 Thomas Ertman
Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte der Neueren Staaten (Universal Consti-

tutional and Administrative History of the Newer States).37
This monograph, begun by the German historian around 1906 and
still being revised by him in the early 1930s, could not be published for
political reasons after 1933 and was thought lost in the chaos of World
War II following Hintze’s death in 1940. In fact, the historian’s brother
had deposited the draft manuscript minus its sections on England,
France and Germany (removed by Hintze, Wolfgang Neugebauer has
speculated, for use in his teaching and destroyed with other lecture
materials) with the Prussian Secret State Archive in 1942 where it sur-
vived the war. In 1998 Neugebauer brought out chapters on medieval
Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and the Netherlands
from this manuscript. While the first five of these were all written before
1914, that on the Netherlands at least contains some revisions from the
post-1918 period, although it is unclear when the body of the text was
composed.38 While this chapter is frustrating for its lack of analytic bite,
Hintze does make the suggestive point that each of the seventeen prov-
inces of the Netherlands was able to preserve a political autonomy, which
neither the Burgundians nor the Habsburgs could overcome. Even after
the successful revolt and independence of the seven provinces of the
north, which he attributes above all to the influence of Calvinism, and
despite the tremendous military pressure from Spain, the Dutch Repub-
lic remained, just like Switzerland, a confederation of sovereign polities
rather than a unified territorial state.39 Why this was so remains unex-
plained. At this point, barring surprises in the still-unpublished chapters
on northern Italy and Switzerland, it is fair to say that Hintze does not
have a developed theory of state-building within post-Carolingian Eur-
ope’s ‘city belt’.
He does, however, have considerably more to say about the dynamic of
state development found within the other post-Carolingian regions. In
this ‘core’ area of the continent, as Hintze calls it, rulers attempted to
recentralize appropriated powers of rulership beginning in the twelfth
century by building bureaucratic administrative structures with the help
of which they could reassert their rights vis-à-vis local lords. Once in
place, such structures further strengthened the hand of monarchs,
already armed with principles of Roman law, in their struggle against
37
Otto Hintze, Allgemeine Verfassungs – und Verwaltungsgeschichte der Neueren Staaten,
Fragmente, Bd. 1 (Naples: Palomar Athenaeum, 1998).
38
Neugebauer, “Otto Hintze und seine Konzeption,” pp. 37–8, 50–1, 55–6; Hintze,
Allgemeine Verfassungs – und Verwaltungsgeschichte, pp. 89, 137, 165, 205, 241, 269.
39
Hintze, Allgemeine Verfassungs – und Verwaltungsgeschichte, pp. 271, 291–3; idem,
“Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” p. 219.
the recalcitrant nobility.40 Furthermore, this ‘core’ also represented the

‘storm center of European politics’ where ‘the Carolingian successor
states . . . were forced to make the greatest military and financial exer-
tions’.41 When provincial and central Estates were called together in the
later Middle Ages, often in connection with such exertions, the nobility
appeared as a corporate group, unconnected to any areas of local self-
rule.42 All of these long-standing factors favouring absolutism were then
only given the final ‘push’ (Vorschub) by the great wars of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries when monarchs armed with an independent
bureaucratic staff, a Roman law-inspired ideology of strong rulership and
the justification of national defence finally swept aside Estates weakened
by corporate divisions and rivalries among the nobles, clergy and bur-
ghers grouped in separate chambers within them.43
If in his earlier essays Hintze simply distinguished between state-
building on the continent (absolutist due to the more intense geopolitical
threat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and England
(parliamentary because of a lesser direct land threat), he now contrasts
two different patterns found in the Carolingian ‘core’ (centralized abso-
lutist states and city-states/city-dominated confederations) with a much
more broadly defined parliamentary pattern that, in turn, can be divided
into four related subtypes represented by England; Hungary, Bohemia,
Poland and east-Elbian German states such as Saxony and Mecklenburg;
Brandenburg-Prussia; and the Scandinavian kingdoms respectively.
Common to all of these cases is the continuing presence, at least during
the initial period of state formation, of those local territories broken apart
in the post-Carolingian core by political feudalism. Hintze further claims
that when a numerous stratum of middling or lesser nobles (as opposed
to magnates on the one hand and farmers on the other) held lands in
such territories the latter could emerge as vigorous units of local self-
government.44
A paradigmatic example of this was England, where the shires/counties
established themselves during the Middle Ages as the cornerstones of
local, participatory administration. Here noble landowners and gentry, in
cooperation with burghers in the shire towns and yeoman and tenant
farmers active in the vestries, dispensed justice, oversaw tax collection
40
Hintze, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” p. 214; idem, “Staatenbildung und
Kommunalverwaltung,” p. 223; Hintze, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des
Abendlandes,” pp. 231–2, 236–7.
41
Idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” p. 138.
42
Idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” p. 131–3, 138.
43
Idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” p. 138.
44
Idem, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 230–1.
64 Thomas Ertman
and organized the militia in collaboration with royal officials sent from
the centre. For in England strong counties went hand-in-hand with a
tradition of strong rulership predating 1066 and then taken even further
by Norman monarchs such as Henry II with the help of the feudal
principles of overlordship and fealty. Hintze argues, however, that
Norman feudalism, unlike the Carolingian variety, was mainly military
and economic rather than political in character and thus left the shires
intact. The longer-term result of this configuration of strong localities/
strong centre was by the eighteenth century a form of co-rule between the
monarch and a resilient two-chambered Parliament with the high clergy
and nobility sitting in the upper house and the lower house rooted in
local territorial units of self-government (counties and towns).45
For Hintze, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland exhibit fascinating paral-
lels with and divergences from the English case. As in England, all three
kingdoms were built on the foundation of county-like territorial units in
which members of the nobility carried out basic administrative functions.
From such units local nobles chose envoys for the second chamber of
national assemblies who met separately from magnates and higher
churchmen grouped into a first chamber. That first chamber (Table of
Magnates in Hungary, Senate in Poland) had emerged, like the House of
Lords, from the king’s extended council. Yet despite these striking insti-
tutional similarities, the result – in Hintze’s view – of a common avoid-
ance of the destructive consequences of political feudalism, the eventual
state-building trajectory of these three east-central European states
diverged substantially from that of England. The basic reason for this
was the fundamental weakness in all three cases of the monarchical side
in its struggle with the nobility for the upper hand within these polities.
Deprived of a strong ideology of rulership rooted either in Roman or
feudal law, hampered by their frequently foreign origins, lacking strong
potential allies either among the towns or the peasantry, and perhaps
subject to less intense geopolitical pressure (especially in the case of
Poland during the crucial sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the kings
of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland were unable to stand up effectively to
the power of the nobility institutionalized in the counties/districts/woj-
wodships and in national parliaments. The nobility employed its domin-
ance, in turn, both to exploit its subject peasantry to the maximum and to
block any attempts by the centre to construct an independent royal
bureaucracy. The consequence in all three instances was military defeat
45
Hintze, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 220, 232–4; idem, “Wesen
und Verbreitung des Feudalismus,” pp. 103–4; idem, “Typologie der ständischen
Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” pp. 128, 135–6, 138–9.
at the hands of more powerful neighbours.46 This short summary can do

little justice to Hintze’s subtle analysis across several late essays of espe-
cially the Hungarian and Polish cases, complemented by the detailed
narrative sprinkled with comparative insights found in three chapters of
the Allgemeine Verfassungsgeschichte.47
In a 1923 essay, Hintze pointed out that German territories founded
during the central Middle Ages on ‘colonial’ (i.e. former Slavic) lands
such as Mecklenburg, Magdeburg, Brandenburg, electoral Saxony and
East Prussia exhibit parallels with their neighbours Poland, Bohemia and
Hungary. These states also were built around local units of noble self-
government, the Kreise (circles) that had their origins in defensive dis-
tricts erected during the period of conquest, though Hintze also suggests
that imitation of Polish or Bohemian models may have played a role in
the solidification of the Kreis as a basic unit of local participatory adminis-
tration.48 It is also no coincidence, Hintze claims, that it is only in this
part of Germany that representative bodies appeared with lower houses
consisting of deputies from the Kreise or their equivalents, with once
again Poland serving as a possible model.49 As in Hungary, Bohemia
and Poland, nobles in northeastern Germany used their institutional
power to expand the manorial economy and tie their peasants to the soil
as well as – with the major exception of Brandenburg-Prussia – to prevent
absolutism. Yet these eastern nobles never achieved the position of
complete dominance vis-à-vis their princes characteristic of Poland and
Hungary.50 The reason for this, according to Hintze, was ‘the greater
strength of patrimonial rulership, a legacy of German history not known
in those eastern kingdoms’.51
How then can the extraordinary case of Brandenburg-Prussia be
explained? As a state composed until the Napoleonic period almost
entirely from territories within ‘colonial’ Germany located outside of
the Carolingian ‘core,’ all of which possessed variants of the participatory
Kreise at their base, the last outcome one would expect on the basis of
Hintze’s theory would be a particularly harsh form of absolutism, yet this
is exactly what emerged between 1640 and 1740. In his later essays,
46
Hintze, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 220–3, 227–9, 234–340;
idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” pp. 126–8; idem,
Staat und Verfassung, pp. 517, 520, 560–2; idem, Allgemeine Verfassungs- und
Verwaltungsgeschichte, pp. 251, 266–7.
47
Hintze, Allgemeine Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte, pp. 205–67; idem, Staat und
Verfassung, pp. 511–62.
48
Idem, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” pp. 204–8, 211.
49
Idem, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” pp. 193, 197, 201–2.
50
Idem, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” pp. 201, 208–9, 212.
51
Idem, “Die Wurzeln der Kreisverfassung,” p. 212.
66 Thomas Ertman
Hintze has surprisingly little to say about a case that had occupied so much
of his scholarly attention before 1918. In one brief passage he implies that
this outcome might have something to do with the composite nature of
the Hohenzollern possessions, which never possessed a central represen-
tative body or Estates for the entire realm. This fact, combined with the
ubiquity of the participatory Kreise, allowed successive rulers to do away
with the Estates of the individual Hohenzollern territories while mollifying
the local nobility by leaving the Kreise and the privileged noble position
within them untouched.52 In one of his last published pieces, the 1931 art-
icle ‘Kalvinismus und Staatsräson in Brandenburg zu Beginn des 17.
Jahrhunderts’ (‘Calvinism and Reason of State in Brandenburg at the
Beginning of the Seventeenth Century’)53 Hintze finally does provide a
more far-reaching, though controversial explanation for the exceptional-
ism of his native land: that it was the influence of Calvinism, to which the
Hohenzollerns had converted in 1613, that set them apart from their
fellow princes, whether Lutheran or Catholic, in the rest of Germany.
Though space constraints prevent me from discussing this fascinating
piece in greater detail here,54 suffice it to say that Hintze believed that
the approach to foreign policy (‘raison d’état’), statebuilding methods and
methodical personal work habits of great Calvinist leaders like the princes
of Orange and Henri IV of France served as models for the Great Elector
and, in a more complicated and indirect way, for Frederick William I and
Frederick the Great. What is striking here is that it is a worldview and set of
ideal interests that gave several Prussian rulers an advantage vis-à-vis both
their domestic (noble) and foreign rivals and permitted them to establish
absolutism when their neighbors in Saxony and the Mecklenburgs
were unable to do so.
The final set of outcomes that Hintze identifies within the European
‘periphery’ are those represented by Denmark and Sweden. As with
the Netherlands, it is difficult to reconstruct his theoretical position on
these two cases because there are relatively few references to them in
the later essays. What requires explanation here is why Denmark was
suddenly transformed from an aristocratic to a particularly radical
absolute monarchy in 1660–1665, and why Sweden alternated
between episodes of (milder) absolutism and more balanced, though
noble-dominated, parliamentarism between 1680 and 1809. Hintze’s
52
Idem, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” p. 241.
53
Idem, “Kalvinismus und Staatsräson in Brandenburg zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts”
[1931], in: Gerhard Oestreich (ed.), Regierung und Verwaltung - Gesammelte
Abhandlungen zur Staats- Rechts- und Sozialgeschichte Preussens. 2nd ed. (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967).
54
See Ertman, “Otto Hintze,” for a more extended analysis.
argument here seems to be that while both countries, like their neigh-
bors on the periphery, possessed territorial divisions with a participa-
tory element (the provinces), these did not develop into the quite
strong units of local (elite) self-government like the English and Hun-
garian counties or even the eastern German Kreise because they were
dominated not by a broad, numerous segment of the lower nobility
but in Denmark by a small, narrow group of higher nobles and in
Sweden by higher nobles (too self-centered) together with free farmers
(too parochial).55 Thus in Denmark the true institutional power of the
aristocracy lay not in the provinces and their assemblies but in the
rigsråd, which Frederik III could sweep away by calling a meeting of all
Estates and allying with the burghers against the much-resented higher
nobility. In Sweden the Estates that began to meet regularly after
1560 initially brought royal proposals before the provincial assemblies
for a decision before themselves voting, but this practice was forbidden
in 1660 and took place for the last time in 1679. It seems more than
coincidental that it was after the severing of this link between the
Estates and participatory local government that the first of several
royal attempts to establish a more absolutist regime (1680) took
place.56
Conclusion
The Hintze of the later essays is, then, quite a different theorist from the
‘bellicist’ of the pre-1914 period. While war and preparations for war
continue to act as a force pushing statebuilding forward, the German
historian has now added two new analytic dimensions to his model. First,
like Charles Tilly (and Perry Anderson), Hintze points out that geo-
political competition in Europe did not begin with a level playing field.
For Tilly, as noted above, the key differential starting condition was the
uneven distribution of Roman and hence post-Roman cities across the
continent. With Stein Rokkan, Tilly contended that such cities, and
the capital accumulated within them, were concentrated in a band
stretching from northern Italy through Switzerland and southern
Germany to the Low Countries, and that the existence of this ‘central
band’ conditioned the emergence of three patterns of statebuilding under
the pressures of war: the capital intensive, coercive intensive, and the
55
Hintze, “Staatenbildung und Kommunalverwaltung,” pp. 229–231.
56
Idem, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” pp. 129–130; idem,
Allgemeine Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte, pp. 166–168, 182–183.
68 Thomas Ertman
capitalized-coercive. As I have pointed out elsewhere57 one of the most

problematic aspects of Tilly’s schema is that it ascribes similar statebuild-
ing paths to states with often opposite early modern political orders.
Thus parliamentary England and absolutist France and Prussia are all
placed in the capitalized-coercive category whereas both autocratic
Russia and the Poland of the liberum veto are said to exemplify a
coercive-intensive statebuilding trajectory.
Hintze, however, stresses a different set of starting conditions. He
argues in the late essays that the differential legacy of Roman rule did
not come down to Europe directly, but was rather mediated by the
experiences of Carolingian state formation and collapse which left large
areas of medieval western Europe with fragmented local political land-
scapes; nobles, clergy and burghers organized into legally-defined cor-
porate groups; and rulers who drew upon principles of Roman law in
attempting to rebuild their authority. In the European periphery, outside
of the Carolingian core, new polities were built around participatory
units of local government and the position of the monarch rested to a
far greater extent on consent. Perry Anderson, in his Passages from
Antiquity to Feudalism58 and Lineages of the Absolutist State59, seems to
have been thinking along similar lines when he pointed to the ‘uneven
development of Europe’60 that bequeathed by the eleventh century a
legacy of feudalism, parcelized sovereignty, autonomous towns and
serf-based agriculture to formerly Roman and Carolingian regions, in
contrast to areas of new settlement outside this core where this legacy was
largely absent.61
Despite its far richer concept of differential starting conditions, Ander-
son’s work shares with that of Tilly a problematic set of political out-
comes. Thus the same factors employed to account for the emergence of
a harsher, more militarized variant of absolutism in Austria and Prussia–
an underdeveloped, serf-based economy and an acute threat from mili-
tary superior neighbors–were also present in the cases of Poland and
Hungary and yet led to the opposite kind of political regime.62 This
is where a second analytic innovation of the late Hintze produces more
satisfactory results, for Hintze links the differential legacies of ‘core’
(i.e. post-Carolingian) versus peripheral state formation with a focus on
57
Thomas Ertman, “Review of Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD
990-1990,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 4 (Winter 1991–1992), pp. 743–745,
here at p. 745.
58
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974a).
59
Ibid, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974b).
60 61
Ibid, Passages, p. 213. Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, p. 17.
62
Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, p. 18.
differences in the strength of representative institutions. Thus he argues

that, other things being equal, it was more difficult to eliminate two-
chamber assemblies rooted in units of participatory local government in
the face of geo-political competition than it was tricurial assemblies
representing the nobility, clergy and privileged towns as corporate
groups.63
This step permits the late Hintze to explain in a more satisfactory way
the institutional similarities between such culturally diverse cases as
England, Poland and Hungary and between the western German states,
France, Spain and Portugal. Admittedly, he has greater difficulty
accounting in a parsimonious way for the trajectory followed by
Brandenburg-Prussia and Denmark and Sweden, but here he is not
alone. Despite this shortcoming, his statebuilding model is as sophisti-
cated as those of Tilly and of Anderson and should help stimulate further
research in two areas: the long-term impact of dark age and early medi-
eval state formation and the internal structure and dynamics of represen-
tative institutions. Ertman’s Birth of the Leviathan64 can be seen as one
attempt to do this. Hopefully there will be many more.
63
Hintze, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” p. 139.
64
Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan.
Part II
Challenges
3 War and State Formation
Amending the Bellicist Theory of State Making
Hendrik Spruyt
Northwestern University
Introduction
While historians and social scientists have long noted the connection
between war making and state making in Europe, social scientists have
extended this insight by claiming that this relation holds more generally.
Charles Tilly, as no other, has demonstrated the implications of this
insight to students of society and politics, and claimed in a famous
aphorism that “war made the state and the state made war.”1 Although
Tilly referred particularly to Europe, his insight has influenced a large
body of scholarship that can be denoted as the bellicist theory of state
making. In the bellicist account higher levels of warfare create more
centralized, higher-capacity states. Such states in turn are prone to war.
“The central claim of this approach [the bellicist approach to state
building] is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power
and building institutional capacity.”2
There can be little doubt that the bellicist theory of state formation
contains considerable insights. However, in order to be of greater
analytic value, particularly for understanding state building today, it
needs to be amended. First, the particular account of state formation in
Europe derives from a unique systemic environment. Because the social
science literature has largely focused on the creation of state capacity
(the internal capability of states), rather than on state creation as the
1
Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton
University Press, 1975), p. 42; See also Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European
States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Tilly is by no means alone; see,
for example, Youssef Cohen et al., “The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The
Violent Creation of Order,” American Political Science Review, vol. 75, no. 4 (1981),
pp. 901–10; Karen Rasler and William Thompson, “War Making and State Making:
Governmental Expenditures, Tax Revenues and Global War,” American Political Science
Review, vol. 79, no. 2 (1985), pp. 491–507; and Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State
(New York: The Free Press, 1994).
2
Cameron Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building in Latin America,” American Journal of
Political Science, vol. 49, no. 3 (2005), pp. 451–65, here at p. 451.
73
74 Hendrik Spruyt
emergence of sovereign, territorial authority, it has neglected the

unique systemic environment that existed in Europe since the failure
of the imperial project. Indeed, the connection between warfare and the
creation of high-capacity states depended on the prior emergence of
distinct territorial entities in competition with one another. The failure
of empire and theocracy opened up the space for territorial rulers that
engaged in frequent wars with one another. This in turn led over several
centuries to high-capacity authority structures. Without the emergence
of nascent sovereign, territorial states, warfare would have been less
intense and less frequent, with the result that governments would have
developed with less capacity. That is, neither the presence of states nor
the frequent occurrence of warfare can be taken as exogenous condi-
tions. Both require explanations of their own. As David Kang shows in
his recent work, the East Asian system operated in a hierarchical tribu-
tary mode, thus diminishing the anarchical nature of the system and
diminishing the occurrence of violent conflict.3 This was not the case in
the European setting.
Second, the bellicist theory of state formation requires greater specifi-
cation of the micro-level processes that allow would-be state builders to
overcome rivals. This requires analysis of the specific incentive structures
facing the key social and political actors. Which advantages (material or
ideological) might a specific actor enjoy, that give her an advantage
against rivals who stand to lose if central authority emerges? What
incentives do rival lords have (feudal or contemporary warlords), to side
with or oppose such an aspiring state builder? In other words, bellicist
accounts need to provide the causal mechanisms through which any
would-be state builder can aggregate power to create a central govern-
ment. Clarification of such micro-level causal mechanisms reveals that
war making will only lead to state making under specific circumstances,
such as when there is some nascent national identity that can aggregate
individual preferences or when one of the rival lords holds distinct
advantages over the others. Short of such conditions warfare might well
lead to stalemate and failed states. Contrary to the view that warfare
provides a necessary and indeed sufficient explanation for the creation of
a state that possesses the monopoly of force and is endowed with signifi-
cant capacity, I will argue that warfare is neither a necessary condition,
nor does warfare provide a sufficient condition for state formation.
This essay sketches the “state of play” regarding the bellicist theory of
state making. Does the claim that “war made the state and the state made
3
David Kang, East Asia before the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
pp. 8–9.
War and State Formation 75
war” accurately describe the European experience of state formation?

And perhaps more importantly, does it provide a generalizable propos-
ition regarding the relation of state formation and warfare, which might
thus apply to non-European state formation today?
I start by discussing the connections between warfare and state forma-
tion based on the empirical evidence in Europe. I subsequently turn to a
discussion of contemporary research in the social sciences that has
extrapolated from the European insight to state formation to non-
European areas and contemporary state building. Underlying the belli-
cist theory of state formation is a strong-form selection perspective,
which neglects to account for why such a competitive environment
existed in the first place, and which neglects to take account of agency.
Actors, at the micro-level, can respond to external pressure in a myriad of
ways, at times leading to centralized high-capacity states, at other times
achieving the very opposite.
The Military Revolution and State Development

in Europe
The Empirical Record

The historical record provides considerable credence to the argument
that warfare and state formation in Europe went hand in hand. As the
Carolingian empire started to disintegrate, much of Europe was simul-
taneously beset by marauders such as the Vikings, Maygars and Moors.4
The coterminous disintegration of central administration and the need
for localized defense gave an advantage to regional strongmen. In some
instances, fortified towns, the burhs (some of the later boroughs), pro-
vided defense, but in much of Europe nobles of any rank became the de
facto and de iure rulers. These aristocrats started to build strongholds,
often not much more than a raised hill, a keep and a wooden palisade – as
the Norman motte and bailey castle of which the Normans erected
hundreds after they conquered England. Soon, however, stone castles
appeared that provided increased protection. This defensive capability
was paired with a new mode of warfare based on heavy cavalry, made
possible by the development of the stirrup and pommel saddle.5 Both
mounted warfare and strongholds required considerable expense. The
4
The locus classicus on European feudalism remains Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2 vols.
(University Press Chicago, 1961).
5
Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978).
76 Hendrik Spruyt
construction of larger stone castles could require as many as 3,000

workers or more. Consequently, those who possessed this decentralized
military strength simultaneously developed as wealthy landowners.
Around the fortifications, economy became localized, with barter trade
and exchange in services. Feudalism thus combined fragmented rule,
reciprocal in-kind social and economic ties, and decentralized means of
violence.
From the fourteenth century on, a series of changes in military
technology and logistics further ripped the social and political fabric
of feudalism apart.6 Even in the early parts of the century, the English
longbow, the cross-bow and grouped infantry started to inflict heavy
casualties on the dominant force of the battlefield: the mounted knight.
By the end of the fourteenth century, an even greater challenge arose
with the advent of gunpowder. For more than a century and a half its
use was largely restricted to artillery, as handheld firearms did not
become a factor till the middle of the sixteenth century. However,
artillery alone already constituted a military revolution. The old medi-
eval fortifications proved no match for artillery, and only those fortifi-
cations, which adopted the expensive Italian style – the trace Italienne –
were able to withstand organized sieges.7 On the offensive side, sieges
required engineers and larger standing forces that could stand in the
field beyond the forty days common in feudal service. The required
changes in castle design, size of armed forces, the standing nature of
such forces and need for technical proficiency propelled aspiring rulers
to seek ever more revenue. “Pas d’argent, pas de Suisse.” Or, as the
advisor to Louis XII noted, three things were required for war, “money,
more money, and still more money.”8
The empirical data are quite clear. If feudal armies rarely numbered
more than a few thousand, the largest European armies by the end of the
sixteenth century counted tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of
men.9 This required efficient administration and an ability to raise rev-
enue in order to be successful in war. Much of the state’s budget was
devoted to this sole purpose. Even England, less bellicose in this period
6
Richard Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State,” Journal of Economic History,
vol. 33, no. 1 (1973), pp. 203–21; William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (University of
Chicago Press, 1982); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge
7
Parker, The Military Revolution.
8
John R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 232.
9
Geoffrey Parker, “Warfare” in: Peter Burke (ed.), New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 13
(Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 205. The Spanish Empire might have had as
many as 200,000 men under arms, dwarfing all others.
than some of its continental counterparts, at times allocated two thirds of

its budget to war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.10 In this
sense, one might argue that “war made the state.” Warfare in Europe
became ubiquitous and frequent, with states as Russia being at war every
year for a two-century period, closely followed by Spain and France.
States sought to capitalize on their power by dominating or even
absorbing lesser powers. In this sense, “the state made war.”
The Foundational Work of Charles Tilly

While historians have noted the co-terminous development of modes of
warfare and state building in thick descriptions that often focus on
individual cases, social scientists have examined whether this co-
terminous development indicates a generalizable proposition. Does war-
fare lead to higher state capacity? Does state building lead to more war?
Charles Tilly’s work must be regarded as iconic in this regard. To be
clear the question is not whether Tilly’s work stands the test of time, but
rather whether and when the general proposition holds that warfare and
state formation are positively correlated.
Starting with his “Formation of National States in Western Europe,”
Tilly drew attention to the role of warfare in creating the machinery of
modern statehood. The volume contains essays on the role of the mili-
tary; the administrative machinery required for taxation and thus funding
for the military apparatus; policing of society; and so on. Ten years later,
maintaining his focus on the actors possessing the means of violence,
Tilly concluded that governments constituted extortion rackets. “War
makes states, I shall claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing,
and war making all belong on the same continuum.”11
Two features of that essay are worth emphasizing. First, as indicated
by the quote, no political actor had a particular advantage over another.
We must thus accept that kings or dukes had no particular standing that
differentiated them from other rivals. All that mattered in the struggle
for survival was the ability to wield force better than others. But note
that in his earlier work he had actually suggested that some actors had
an inside track.
10
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1788 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 40.
11
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91, here at p. 170.
78 Hendrik Spruyt
One feature of the earlier political structure greatly favored the enterprise [of state
building] . . .The Europeans of 1500 had a tradition of kingship which stretched
back to Roman times . . . They [kings] commanded a measure of submission on
quite traditional grounds.12
This earlier insight disappears from Tilly’s later work. Therein, all
actors compete on equal footing. Leaders of organized crime syndicates
or divine kings are no different from one another. The mechanism of
state formation resides solely in the selection process of the weaker actor.
As I will discuss at greater length, the lack of an agent-driven account
diminishes from Tilly’s otherwise powerful insights.
Second, throughout his work, Tilly cautions others from drawing
conclusions from the European experience. Nevertheless, while he notes
that the “Third World of the twentieth century does not greatly resemble
Europe of the sixteenth of seventeenth century,” he virtually invites
application of his insights to non-European areas by noting the prepon-
derant power yielded by military organization in the developing world.13
It behooves us then to examine how much of the European experience
can be captured by a simple aphorism that suggests a simple dialectical
relation between war and state making.
The Impact of the Bellicist Argument on Contemporary Social

Science Scholarship
The argument that warfare was conducive to state formation has had
significant effects on subsequent and contemporary scholarship. Some
scholars have started to examine historical processes of state formation
outside of Europe. For example, Victoria Hui has taken the argument as
a template against which to evaluate developments in China during the
Warring States period.14 Accepting the bellicist theory that places pri-
macy in the role of warfare in state building she argues that warfare
during the Warring States period culminated in empire rather than a
state system due to a logic of domination and ruthless political elites.
The bellicist theory has also been used to clarify why developing
countries today lack strong states. Jeffrey Herbst suggests that one of
the reasons for the weakness of African states derives from the absence
of international conflict in that region. “It is important to ask if
12
13
Tilly, “War Making and State Making”, pp. 169, 186.
14
Victoria Hui, “Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics: Insights from
Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe,” International Organization,
vol. 58, no. 1 (2004), pp. 175–205.
developing countries can accomplish in times of peace what war-

enabled European countries can do. I conclude that they probably
cannot because fundamental changes in economic structures and soci-
etal beliefs are difficult, if not impossible to bring about when coun-
tries are not being disrupted or under severe external threat”.15
Joel Migdal similarly argues that the weakness of states in the develop-
ing world is partially due to the lack of external threats.16 While not
squarely addressing the Tilly thesis, Robert Jackson notes that African
states have obtained their sovereignty de iure, but lack de facto control
over their territories.17
Quantitative studies have also explored whether the bellicist theory
holds in other regions, and whether this can account for the historical
and contemporary weakness of some states. Some of this literature has
taken on a broader understanding of conflict to also include interstate
rivalry and suggests that the bellicist theory holds up relatively well.18
In addition to providing explanations for sustained weakness in
developing countries today, the war makes states argument has a bearing
on how one evaluates the long-term effects of internal conflict in weak or
failed states. According to one perspective, if one assumes that contem-
porary weak states are going through an analogous process of state
development as the European ones, then the present level of violence
in some of the developing countries is the necessary precursor to a more
effective and high-capacity government. Over time a centralized govern-
ment will emerge as one elite brings its rivals to submission. From this
perspective, violence in war-torn African countries is no different from
that in late medieval France when the monarchy brought the lesser
aristocracy to heel. In the long run, “failed states” are destined to become
more effective, higher-capacity states.19
In conclusion, the bellicist theory of state building contends that
while warfare imposes incontestable burdens in terms of human
suffering and economic expenditure, the long-term effect is beneficial,
as warfare signals the birth pangs of the high-capacity state. War thus
15
Jeffrey Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,” International Security, vol. 14, no. 4 (1990),
pp. 117–39, here at p. 118. Also see Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton
16
Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 273.
17
Robert Jackson, “Quasi States, Dual Regimes, and Neo-Classical Theory: International
Jurisprudence and the Third World,” International Organization, vol. 41, no. 4 (1987),
pp. 519–49.
18
Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building.”
19
Cohen et al., “The Paradoxical Nature of State Making.”
80 Hendrik Spruyt
constitutes a necessary and indeed a sufficient condition for state

building.20 I will argue in the following that neither is true.21
Specifying the Connections between War and

State Making
As the above-mentioned scholarship indicates there is considerable
insight to be gained from studying the connections between war making
and state development. However, how exactly are they connected? Does
warfare automatically translate into stronger, high-capacity states? Con-
versely, it seems equally plausible to suggest that war bleeds states dry,
culminating in regime collapse, as Louis XIV and his successors dis-
covered. As Tilly himself explicitly recognized, “most of the European
efforts to build states failed.”22
Similarly, war might fragment rather than unify multi-ethnic and
multi-national polities. Grand strategies and high military expenditure
might also depress overall economic growth and lead to the relative
decline of such states compared to states that spend less on the armed
forces.23 Warfare, in these perspectives, produces virtually the opposite
effects ascribed to it by the bellicist theory.
In order to see how war makes or breaks states I argue that we need to
more precisely specify the mechanisms through which war and state
making interact, sometimes aiding state building and in other instances
achieving the very opposite. In order to do this the condition of frequent
inter-polity conflict must itself be explained. Warfare does not present an
exogenous condition but is in turn shaped by other factors. The Roman
peace, the Pax Romana of the empire, arguably led to less conflict in the
area controlled by the empire than existed in the period prior to that.
European history, and that of other regions, shows episodes of peace
as well as of conflict. As David Kang suggests, formal empire or informal
hierarchy (as historically in East Asia) will temper conflict and
competition.24
20
Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, p. 273.
21
Other research has examined the validity of the theory for state formation in Latin
America, and found bellicist theory largely inapplicable to that region. See Miguel
Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 2002); and Marcus Kurtz, “The Social Foundations
of Institutional Order: Reconsidering War and the ‘Resource Curse’ in the Third World
State Building,” Politics and Society, vol. 37, no. 4 (2009): 479–520.
22
23
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Decline of Great Powers (New York: Random House: 1987).
24
Kang, East Asia before the West.
Furthermore, we need a fuller specification regarding the micro-

level dynamics that affect the relations between system, the level of
warfare, and the effects on state building. Under which conditions
does warfare lead to fragmentation of units rather than consolidation?
Problematizing Warfare and State Building

Aside from the confusion surrounding the conceptualization of the state that
diverse scholars employ, there is considerable variation in how one oper-
ationalizes variables as “warfare” and “state building.” Inevitably this leads
to a multiplicity of understandings of what bellicist theory exactly entails.
Logically the effects of warfare will vary depending on what one
understands as the key feature of warfare that imposes certain outcomes.
One line or argument from military history focuses on the growth in army
size and the increased frequency of warfare.25 Conversely, economic
historians emphasize the increased costs of warfare, which required
financial mobilization and efficiencies of scale.26
Consequently, depending on which military breakthroughs one sees
as critical, accounts will vary in the timing of the military revolution
and the subsequent development towards high-capacity states. Were
the infantry victories at Stirling Bridge and Courtrai the beginning, in
which case the growth of state capacity must be dated to the early
1300s? Or was it the emergence of the standing army, making the mid
fifteenth century the benchmark? Conversely, if fortification and
siege warfare were critical catalysts this would suggest the sixteenth
century. Tilly thus goes to some lengths to criticize Joseph Strayer’s
argument that state creation starts around 1300, and to challenge
Richard Bean’s views that state making between 1400 and 1600 was
critical.27 He himself places the critical period after 1500 and indeed
particularly after 1600.28 Yet others would contend that truly national
states only emerged in the nineteenth century with the mass army and
universal draft.29
Recent quantitative work recasts the thesis even more broadly and
operationalizes the causal variable as interstate rivalry, which might or
25
Parker, The Military Revolution.
26
Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State.”
27
Tilly, The Formation of National States, pp. 25–6; Tilly, “War Making and State Making,”
p. 177.
28
Tilly, “War Making and State Making,” p. 170.
29
Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914
(Stanford University Press, 1979); Barry Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and
Military Power,” International Security, vol. 18, no. 2 (1993), pp. 80–124.
82 Hendrik Spruyt
might not involve the actual outbreak of hostilities.30 Thus, scholars

disagree not only on the timing when high-capacity states emerged
but also on the key forces that underlay the shift in government
capacity.
Likewise, scholars also differ on how to measure state formation. In
the Weberian understanding the creation of a legitimate monopoly of
violence is the key factor. Hence, one might code high-capacity states
as those that have a centralized control over the means of violence,
while states that lack such a monopoly have weak capacity and con-
stitute failed states. Others have instead looked at the differential
abilities of states to raise fiscal resources from their populations.
The particular type of taxes (income taxes vs tariffs as source of
income), tax incidence, the availability to raise capital on inter-
national markets (at differential interest rates) might all be used to
suggest which states have higher capacity than others.31 Yet another
approach emphasizes the ability to mobilize personnel and instill a
sense of national identification. Closer identification with the aims of
the state reveals high capacity.32 Finally, one might focus on the
specific nature of administration, the rationalization of procedures
and personnel selection.33
These differences are nontrivial. The various ways in which warfare
and state formation have been operationalized have led to inconclusive
evidence regarding the validity of the theory. This is the case even with
scholars focusing on the same region. Thus, Miguel Centeno con-
cludes that the bellicist theory holds little relevance for Latin America,
whereas Cameron Thies suggests the opposite.34 Simply put, the
literature on warfare’s connection to state making shows considerable
variation in what the underlying causal dynamics are purported to be,
as well as variation in the timing of state emergence.
30
Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building.”
31
See, for example, Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State”; Margaret Levi, Of Rule
and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Carolyn Webber and
Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1986).
32
Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea, “Tilly Tally: War Making and State Making in the
Contemporary Third World,” International Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (2008),
pp. 27–56.
33
Claus Wittich (eds.), vols. I and II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);
Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
34
Centeno, Blood and Debt; Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building.”
State Capacity or Territorial Sovereign Authority?

Another source of confusion arises from different conceptualizations
of the state. In one understanding, a state simply means any form of
organized polity that has a formalized hierarchy, some form of govern-
ment administration and judicial capacity. In this sense one can appro-
priately refer to, for example, Greek city states as “archaic states.”35
More commonly, however, in Weberian terms the state is that organ-
ization, which possesses a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. In
addition, Weber draws attention to particular features of the modern
state: the rationalization of administration and governance, its ability to
raise revenue, and the routinization of procedures.36
At face value it seems uncontroversial to argue that war making and
state making are interrelated. Any polity must have the means to defend
itself. Archaic states and modern states are no different in this respect. It
would thus be logical to suggest that states (in the generic sense) had to
wage war to survive, and that the particular mode of warfare would likely
influence the nature of state organization.
The bellicist theory, however, makes a narrower claim. It suggests that
the nature and frequency of European warfare led to the specific features
of the modern state that Weber mentions. It provides a materialist
explanation for fundamental changes not only in the conduct of war,
but in state-societal relations, collective mentalities, and economic
affairs.
But this equates state creation simply with increased state capacity.
Conversely, others such as John Ruggie and Hendrik Spruyt have largely
focused on the emergence of the principle of sovereign, territorially
demarcated authority structures.37
From a historical perspective both phenomena were coincident in
Europe. The coincident development of spatially defined authority and
high state capacity in that area of the world, however, does not imply that
the two always coincide. And indeed each feature of modern statehood
entails a different formative process.
Territorial sovereignty implies that authority is based on the control of
a given area and that all citizens that reside in that territory are subject to
35
W. G. Runciman, “Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History, vol. 24 (1982), pp. 351–77.
36
Weber, Economy and Society.
37
(Princeton University Press, 1994); John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond:
Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization,
vol. 47, no. 1 (1993), pp. 139–74.
84 Hendrik Spruyt
the rule of the sovereign government. The sovereign claims no authority

beyond spatial parameters and, conversely, recognizes no external
authority within that defined space.
This is a conceptual development as much as a question of material state
capacity. No doubt the kings who claimed such sovereignty tried to bolster
their claim by building up their material capabilities and thus enhance state
capacity. However, the two are analytically distinct as the conferral of
juridical sovereignty on many developing countries today clearly demon-
strates. Polities that lack de facto material capabilities can well have juridical
sovereignty.38 Similarly, imperial systems might possess significant capacity
and a monopoly of violence but not recognize others as juridical equals,
which is a key element of the current system of sovereign, territorial states.
Empirically we might thus have sovereign territorial states with weak
capacity, while conversely one could have high-capacity states that did
not adhere to the principle of territorial sovereignty. The European
empires of the nineteenth century had modern state features in the core
while only adhering to the principle of sovereignty when dealing with, by
their definition, “advanced countries.”39
Again the consequences of these different conceptualizations are not
trivial. The confounding of these two conceptualizations leads to a mis-
specification of the underlying causal mechanisms and raises a serious
endogeneity problem – as the very formulation of the “war makes states –
states make war” thesis virtually suggests. No doubt warfare and state
building were intertwined in a dialectical process, but simply suggesting
that the two are intertwined leaves unspecified what sparked this process,
and why this process was so unique to Europe. Disentangling the notion
of state formation as a territorially circumscribed authority from the
notion of state capacity can resolve these issues because it draws atten-
tion to the systemic context in which this process operated.
For much of history universal empires have dominated the scene, without
the development of a state system as gradually occurred in Europe from the
late Middle Ages on. Such Universalist empires tended to be capstone
governments, which ranged wide in territorial scope but had little impact
on their societies.40 Universal empires in essence established political hier-
archy in economic and military interactions. Empires were world systems.41
38
Jackson, “Quasi States, Dual Regimes.”
39
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
40
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
41
Roberto Unger, Plasticity into Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vols. 1–2 (Orlando: Academic Press,
1978).
But in so doing these empires also diminished the frequency of war in

the zones they controlled. It was the very fragmentation of Europe that
precipitated the conflicts between different political authorities. This
suggests a different causal account, one that requires distinguishing the
state as a juridical entity from its governing capacity. In the Late Middle
Ages, the contest between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire led
both to claim ultimate final jurisdiction and supreme sovereignty over the
other. But in this contest they opened up the space for kings to claim the
same justification for their rule. With the failure of both papacy and
emperor to make good on their claims, kings could claim ultimate
sovereignty within their own domains. “Regnus est imperator in regno
suo” (The king is emperor in his own realm). Although they lacked the
governing capacity of later periods, they managed to forestall imperial
hierarchy as well as papal theocracy in Europe.42
At the same time kings acquired cultural power versus their rival lords.
Kings were not mere leaders of organized bandits but laid claim to ancient
dynastic and even divine rights to rule. They possessed ideological
weapons that others could not easily deploy or acquire. Subsequently,
these states competed with each other economically and militarily. This
in turn led to the emergence of high-capacity governments.
Schematically one might represent the logic as follows.
Failure of empire and theocracy Territorial entities: Kingdoms and principalities
Frequent warfare Selection, mimicry, learning
High-capacity states
Rather than treating warfare as an exogenous variable, it was the

emergence of a state system, which led to frequent warfare. The fre-
quency and innovation in European war depended on the absence of a
Universalist empire. Interstate competition led to multiple states
engaging in innovation, mimicry and learning.
42
John Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (University of Toronto Press, 1980).
86 Hendrik Spruyt
Strong Form Selection and Optimal State Organization

The bellicist theory of state formation erroneously applies an evolution-
ary functionalist logic. Indeed, it misapplies a strong-form selection
argument.43 It suggests that, given environmental changes, polities had
to meet certain prerequisites or fail altogether. Notably they had to
develop significant administrative capacity, an ability to raise revenue,
and the skill to deploy large armies. Those political entities that did not
develop such capabilities fell by the wayside. This argument thus pro-
vides us with a retrospective. By looking at the contemporary “winners”
we can allegedly deduce the reasons for their success. Agent choices thus
do not really matter. Those political entities that did not create the right
set of institutions to wage war were simply weeded out and a dominant
form – the modern, high-capacity state – emerged out of the cauldron of
ever-present warfare.
The evolutionary selection account that underlies bellicist theory pre-
sents several problems.44 Methodologically, without explicit comparison
between successful states and forms of organization that did not survive,
we can suggest that failures lacked the attributes of those that survived,
but we do not know for sure. It is the “post-hoc ergo propter-hoc” fallacy. It
is equally plausible to argue that shifts in artistic mentality, belief systems
or economic changes caused the emergence of the state.45
Furthermore, there are various ways to respond to competitive pres-
sures. Actors can choose to meet an external threat by developing one’s
own state capacity (internal balancing). Threats might also be con-
fronted by finding allies or stronger patrons (external balancing), or
by binding together in larger organizations, as the United Nations today
(collective security systems). Actors might also ride the coattails of a
stronger power, rather than oppose that power (bandwagoning); or
states can opt to free ride on the efforts of others (buckpassing). As an
example of the latter, one only needs to reflect on the fact that NATO
43
More popular in the social sciences than the biological sciences, strong-form selection
presupposes that only one optimal solution exists to external pressures. For a critique of
strong-form selection, see Hendrik Spruyt, “Diversity or Uniformity in the Modern
World? Answers from Evolutionary Theory, Learning, and Social Adaptation,” in:
William Thompson (ed.), Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
44
Spruyt, The Sovereign State.
45
See, for example, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (New York:
Blackwell, 1991); Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World
(Cambridge University Press, 1973); and Douglas North, “A Framework for Analyzing
the State in Economic History,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 16 (1979),
pp. 249–59.
members could spend far less on their armed forces than the United
States in meeting the Warsaw Pact threat.
Internal balancing would lead to state development, the raising of
revenue and the mobilization of larger forces, and would thus conform
with the bellicist argument. But this is not the case for the other
responses. The other means of meeting external threats would provide
defense on the “cheap.” In these alternative forms of balancing,
buckpassing and bandwagoning behavior, polities would circumvent
the need for developing their indigenous capacity.
Consequently, given the multiple ways of responding to external pres-
sure, the link between warfare and high state capacity becomes tenuous.
As Brian Downing shows, historically some states could forego building
up substantial armies because of geographic advantages.46 Switzerland,
the Dutch republic, and England all had certain geographical advantages
that diminished their need for large standing militaries. Moreover, some
polities managed to forego internal mobilization because they could
garner external support through allies, colonies, and subsidies.
Miguel Centeno’s work on war and state building in Latin America
suggests that this logic played out in that region in the nineteenth cen-
tury.47 The availability of external capital caused Latin America to have
weak states (with the exception of Chile and Costa Rica). When warfare
occurred, states did not need to mobilize their own fiscal resources but
could rely on international capital.
The strong-form selection argument also raises several empirical ques-
tions that cast doubt on how strong the selection process actually was.
First, many smaller entities survived in the European theater, even to this
day, such as San Marino, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. Likewise, inde-
pendent cities and small principalities and bishoprics, such as the
German states prior to unification, survived well into the nineteenth
century.
Second, while it is sometimes argued that the hundreds of European
states were reduced to no more than a several dozen by the late nine-
teenth century, the contours of many European states were largely in
place by the seventeenth century. The vast reduction of states came
primarily from the decreasing variation in Germany and the unifications
of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century. In other words, selection
dynamics were probably less severe than sometimes intimated. More-
over, it is not apparent that this reduction came primarily by military
46
Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and
Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 1992).
47
Centeno, Blood and Debt.
88 Hendrik Spruyt
means rather than dynastic linkages or other dynamics. (e.g., the attempt
to unify through the Zollverein was largely driven by economic
considerations.)
Third, Tilly argues in Coercion, Capital and European States that
selection effects were so strong as to propel all Western states in
the direction of a mixture of coercion and accommodation in state
building. Britain provides an exemplar of this form of state building.
Distinguishing between states that raised revenue by coercive means
(Prussia) and those that raised revenue by capital-intensive, accom-
modationist means (the United Provinces), Tilly concluded that
either form was inferior to those states that combined both methods
(Britain).
Here again the selection effects are overstated. The consequences of
the post-hoc ergo propter-hoc fallacy become clear. Because Britain
ended up as a dominant power, its characteristics must be taken as
prerequisites for success. The account becomes plausible because it
extrapolates back into history from the end result.
But was coercion truly less effective and efficient than the more
accommodationist strategies? Despite deploying coercive strategies,
Prussia and later Germany were highly successful in military compe-
tition, as was the USSR.48 Only the late twentieth century might have
given democracies the edge, although this is by no means certain.
Making matters even more complicated, many European states
seemed to have developed high-capacity states after they abandoned
military competition. Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden evolved as
high-capacity states, yet they had not engaged in great power compe-
tition since the late seventeenth century. Switzerland largely managed
to stay out of great power competition altogether.
To conclude, the bellicist argument overstates selection effects.
Selection did not weed out all the small or odd types, which is what
one would expect in the Darwinian account of bellicist theory.
Agents had various means to respond to external pressures, of which
internal balancing and the building of state capacity was only one.
Indeed, some states pulled out of the military competitive “game”
altogether, and suffered no deleterious consequences. In sum, even if
one concedes that warfare can lead to state development, it does not
appear to be a necessary condition, nor a sufficient condition for
state making.
48
Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army (New York: Oxford University Press,
1964).
Amending the Bellicist Theory of War: Accounting for

Systemic Context and Agency
There is no doubt that state making and warfare are interconnected. In
that sense examining how they are interrelated can provide a useful
starting point of inquiry. However, the bellicist theory of state building
needs to more accurately specify the micro-level decisions and agent
choices that form the basis of state development as well as the systemic
context in which actors make specific choices. It requires a deeper
account of the interaction of micro-level decisions and macro-level
environment.
Clarification of Domestic Coalitions

Given the implied evolutionary selection bias in bellicist theory the
choices of micro-level actors are largely irrelevant. For example, whether
domestic groups consent to increasing state capacity (as in the capital-
mode) or whether they are forced to contribute (as in the coercive mode
of revenue generation) is not important. In the end, the result remains
the same, competitive dynamics will force states to centralize and develop
effective administrative machineries or they will be selected out. Those
states that mixed coercive and capital-intensive modes survived; the
others did not.
But this is only true if strong form selection holds. If a state has
multiple means of meeting security requirements, as I have argued
above, then the internal politics of the polity are critical. The motives
of domestic actors to go along with a stronger state apparatus and
militarization will determine whether or not state building actually
occurs. External pressure will be mediated by domestic actors.
Centralization of authority logically entails that rival actors will see
their power diminish. Consequently, they will resist such developments.
To argue that state building occurred because the central state, the king,
proved a superior provider of protection simply begs the question. That
is, it assumes the centralizing actor had the means to bring rivals to heel.
But if so, there is nothing to explain. The aspiring king already was the
dominant power. In other words, we need additional variables to explain
the willingness of rival actors to comply with centralization when power is
distributed among various rivals.
Even in cases that Tilly codes as coercive systems the specific political
bargain that was struck was critical for subsequent development. The
coalition that created the Second Serfdom in Prussia in the mid seven-
teenth century assured the nobility that townspeople and the peasantry
90 Hendrik Spruyt
would bear the brunt of the tax burden. By contrast, the Elector granted
the Junkers tax exemption, autonomy over their landed estates, and
privileged positions in the administration.49 Their stake in the political
system and military administration guaranteed royal credible commit-
ment, while their control over the military meant the armed forces could
be used for internal repression. Without such a deal the landed gentry
might well fear the consequences of militarization, and they might have
stymied the Great Elector’s ambitions. External threats alone did not
propel Prussia on the course to a high-capacity state. It required a
political compromise between key elites.50
Similarly, as Marcus Kurtz argues, external threats did not suffice to
induce state making in parts of Latin America.51 In Chile external
security dilemmas indeed led to state making. In Peru, however, despite
being in the same structural position and despite possessing similar
resources as its southern neighbor, state making did not occur. Its landed
elites feared that a militarized population might rise against the agrarian
elites. More broadly, Kurtz convincingly shows that the social relations
that govern economic relations and the pattern of intra-elite compromise
mediate how the external environment affects institution building.
In other words, how war affects state making depends on how preex-
isting social and institutional arrangements mediate the outside pres-
sure.52 Prior institutional types influence the level of bureaucratic and
democratic tendencies. Preexisting social bargains determine whether or
not a strong state will develop. Indeed, where institutional arrangements
precluded the emergence of a centralized, more homogeneous state, as in
eighteenth-century Poland, the advent of war led to its demise and
partition rather than create a stronger state.
Recent scholarship by Sinisa Malesevic on the Balkan wars of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries lends further support for this view.53
The Balkans are a particularly useful case for comparative study given
that many other applications of the bellicist argument have focused on
contrasts with the non-European world. However, these regions evinced
49
Hans Rosenberg, “The Rise of Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1410–1653,” American
Historical Review, vol. 49, no. 1 (part I) and no. 2 (part II) (1943–44), pp. 1–22; 228–42.
50
The agreement between the monarch and the nobility cast a long shadow on German
history. As late as 1913 more than half of the higher officer corps above the rank of
colonel still consisted of aristocrats. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918
(Leamington: Berg Publishers, 1985), p. 159.
51
Kurtz, “The Social Foundations of Institutional Order.”
52
See also Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan.
53
Sinisa Malesevic, “Did Wars Make Nation-States in the Balkans: Nationalisms, Wars
and States in the 19th and early 20th Century South East Europe,” Journal of Historical
Sociology, vol. 25 (2012), pp. 299–330.
quite different types of warfare and varied greatly on many other possible
causal factors. The Balkans provide the means of comparing the West
European development with a proximately similar set of background
variables.
At face value the relatively limited frequency of war for most of South
East European history would seem to validate Tilly’s argument that
infrequent warfare will lead to weak states. However, when the frequency
of warfare increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this did
not lead to greater centralization or state capacity. Instead, due to the
lack of a strong nationalist sentiment – itself the result of low levels of
literacy and public education – state formation was stymied. As
Malesevic suggests, state building and nation formation were symbiotic-
ally linked. Without a modicum of preexisting political organization and
national identity, states instead resembled patrimonial rather than legal-
rational administrations.54
Specification of the Mechanism of Aggregation

If we were to follow Tilly’s account then we should regard states simply
as organized protection rackets.55 The strongest actor will be the best
provider of protection. He or she can thus force individuals to support
him or her, or individuals will voluntarily seek this lord’s protection.
Thus, we can attribute the centralization of France to the fact that the
monarchy proved the strongest protection racket and managed to dis-
place lesser lords. At the same time, the monarchy proved to be the best
provider of protection against, what we with hindsight would call, exter-
nal actors. Centralization thus worked in a two-pronged process: internal
consolidation of monarchical power against rivals who also possessed
means of violence, and the buildup of state power against external
threats.
But such an account leaves us with several quandaries. Why did not
this process of aggregation proceed further? The reduction of feudal
authorities halted at the point of having produced several dozen largely
dynastic states. Given competitive pressures that advantaged size, higher
revenue bases and larger armies, there is no reason why this process
should have halted. Or, to put it differently, why did we end up with a
relatively static equilibrium of several dozen states in Europe rather than
even larger units?
54
Malesevic, “Did Wars Make Nation-States,” p. 314.
55
Tilly, “War Making and State Making”.
92 Hendrik Spruyt
One might counter that perhaps there were declining efficiencies of

scale. While theoretically this would constitute a logical answer, there is
no evidence to support the argument, and indeed, as noted earlier, most
other regions were consolidated into hierarchical empires. In Europe,
instead, imperial tendencies by Philip II of Spain, Napoleon and others
were checked by the deliberate balancing coalitions of other states. In
some instances, such as the Congress of Vienna, states came to explicit
agreements about the maintenance of the status quo. And, as Paul
Schroeder has suggested, there are instances of such arrangements much
earlier than the nineteenth century.56 States were thus maintained by the
deliberate choices of other states. Some polities were dismantled; others,
as Belgium, were created by great power fiat. Yet others, as the
Netherlands and Portugal, were maintained by Great Power guarantees.
To suggest another aphorism: “States made other states.”
Counterfactually, this logic of countervailing pressures against central-
ization at the interstate, European-wide level could very well have oper-
ated at the pre-national level. Feudal lords could have allied against any
centralizing actor. In a similar fashion, contemporary Somali warlords
prevent any would-be centralizing warlord by creating an offsetting bal-
ance. The fact that such an offsetting coalition of lords against the center
did not arise against royal dynasts thus requires an analysis of the micro-
level calculations of these lords. What was in it for them? What gave royal
dynasts the advantage?
The bellicist argument appears to have considerable validity because it
implicitly relies on two assumptions. It assumes that what counts as
internal and what counts as external is obvious to the actors involved.
Consequently, a threat identified as “external” will lead to greater soli-
darity among the group demarcated as “internal.” It also assumes that
competition over time will yield one winner, with no competitor having a
particular advantage at the outset. Selection over time provides the
result. Both these assumptions should be challenged.
The protection racket model takes as a given that individuals are
indifferent about who provides protection. And yet it concludes that
kings were the most efficient providers of protection since, empirically,
monarchies were the surviving form. The two statements are contradic-
tory. The first suggests that any actor with sufficient means of force
could create a state. The second clearly acknowledges that those who
had the ability to claim greater loyalty and legitimacy could more readily
demand extraction or service from lesser lords and the population, and
56
Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994).
they had the means at their disposal (cultural and material) to differen-
tiate their realms from “the outside.”
The failure of the imperial project and the failure of a theocratic
alternative provided the space for kings to claim sovereign privileges
against their lesser lords and against imperial and papal authority.57
Pizzorno insightfully suggests that royal claims for ultimate devotion
and sacrifice supplanted those of the church.58 Kings were not similar
to other lesser lords in the ability to wield political, military, and
cultural power.
Most importantly, monarchs could offer incentives to those excluded
outside the extant feudal order. Whether these were townspeople or
peasants are less relevant than the realization that the very logic of
feudalism precluded a lordly alliance with any of the latter two. Kings,
in other words, could offer the emerging new groups new material and
ideational benefits, an alternative legal structure, and increased standing
and privilege.59
In order to understand how centralization might take place we thus
need to understand how state consolidation manages to assuage oppon-
ents to such consolidation. Simultaneously, it requires analysis of why
some actors might gain an advantage over others in creating a winning
coalition against their rivals. How does any centralizing ruler gain the
support of “winners,” while diminishing the opposition of “losers” in the
process of state building?
Conclusion
I have argued in this essay that the specific relations between war and
state making are complex and not necessarily positively correlated.
Sometimes frequent warfare will lead to stronger states, and other times
the relation will be negative: war might weaken or even dissolve states.
Any examination of the relation requires an analysis of the interaction of
system and micro-level agent choices. There are a variety of ways in how
systemic changes might affect such choices.
First, particular modes of warfare might have differential effects on
state organization.60 Nuclear deterrence thus allowed the United States
to maintain a much lower standing army than the Soviet Union in the
57
See, for example, Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times.
58
Alessandro Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” in: Charles Maier (ed.), Changing Boundaries
of the Political (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
59
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974); Spruyt, The
Sovereign State.
60
I thank conference participant Peter Haldén for this insight.
94 Hendrik Spruyt
1950s. The United States avoided becoming a garrison state.61 Similarly

one might ask whether other dynamics as asymmetric warfare and the
widespread dissemination of light arms as the AK-47 (thus providing
cheap means of exercising violence) have altered the particular modal-
ities of how warfare translates into state making. Indeed, the widespread
availability of such weapons in weak states today might make centraliza-
tion very difficult.
Second, with a more benign security environment, other modes of
state making will likely become more important. There is broad agree-
ment that overall the past half century has been relatively peaceful,
certainly among the major powers. Whether due to nuclear weapons,
increased opportunities for surveillance, or deliberate management of the
superpower balance, the era for some observers constituted the period of
the Long Peace.62 This relative absence of interstate war has to consider-
able extent been due to the emergence of a robust norm against territorial
acquisition by force.63 Since the end of World War II extant states have
not disappeared due to the actions of other states.64
Rather than selection and a reduction in the number of states, as
occurred in Europe, the number of states has multiplied fourfold since
1945.65 It is clear that where new states emerged it was not due to their
war-making prowess as many of these states lack sizeable populations or
highly developed economies.
Conversely, another trend has emerged in Europe side by side with
state fragmentation: the surrender of sovereign prerogatives to the Euro-
pean Union. This amalgamation cannot be attributed to security con-
cerns, as realists might contend. No doubt the original founding of the
European Economic Community had a considerable security aspect to it,
but today the desire for economic growth and efficiencies of scale have
become more important. In this sense the international economic
61
Aaron Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the U.S. Become a Garrison State?” International
Security, vol. 16, no. 2 (1992), pp. 109–42.
62
John Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International
System,” in: Sean Lynn-Jones and Steven Miller (eds.), The Cold War and After
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
63
Mark Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of
Force,” International Organization, vol. 55, no. 2 (2001), pp. 215–50.
64
Tanisha Fazal, State Death (Princeton University Press, 2007).
65
The first wave of new states resulted from decolonization. For the second wave, which
followed from the partitioning of states in Eastern Europe and the USSR, see Philip
Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From (Princeton University Press, 2007); Valerie
Bunce, Subversive Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Steven Solnick, “The Breakdown of Hierarchies in the Soviet Union and China:
A Neoinstitutional Perspective,” World Politics, vol. 48, no. 2 (1996), pp. 209–38.
context and political elite responses to that environment have become the
key catalysts of creating a new political entity.66
Pursuing the connection between the altered international environ-
ment and agent-level responses also suggests alternative trajectories to
state building. The infrequency of external war has led some observers to
conclude that the developing countries are condemned to have weak
state capacity.67 However, other external factors besides military conflict
might induce state building. Gerschenkron’s late industrialization thesis
suggests state development is linked to the particular timing of modern-
ization rather than warfare.68 Top-down economic development might
thus provide an alternative trajectory to state building, short of war.69
Finally, we might ask how external war affects multiethnic polities. In
the bellicist argument, external threat leads to greater state capacity and
feelings of national identity. Decades ago, group aggression theory sug-
gested that external threats are conducive to internal cohesion. Similarly,
George Simmel argued that internal cohesion requires the recognition of
“the other” as foe.70 History is replete with instances in which external
threats were deliberately used by political elites to foster incipient nation-
alist sentiments. The Dutch and English defined their distinctness in
opposition to Spain, the French had the Germans and the Spanish, and
the Poles saw the Russians as their age-old foe.71 Simultaneously, with
greater internal cohesion and an increased sense of nationalism, states
became more aggressive.
However, it seems equally plausible to suggest that distinct groups
within a composite polity might avail themselves of the opportunity to
gain greater concessions from the central government or dominant
ethnic group. Conflict can also lead to disunity as even Simmel himself
noted.72 While this becomes particularly salient for multi-ethnic empires
66
On security imperatives in the early EEC, see Edelgard Mahant, Birthmarks of Europe:
The Origins of the European Community Reconsidered (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For the
calculations by political and business elites, see Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman,
“1992: Recasting the European Bargain,” World Politics, vol. 42, no. 1 (1989),
pp. 95–128.
67
Herbst, States and Power in Africa; Michael Desch, “War and Strong States, Peace and
Weak States?” International Organization, vol. 50, no. 2 (1996), pp. 237–68.
68
Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1962).
69
For a discussion on how state-led economic growth has operated in East Asia, see Alice
Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York: Oxford
70
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations (London: Macmillan,
1964).
71
Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
72
Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations, p. 92.
96 Hendrik Spruyt
or federations, one should keep in mind that virtually all nation-states

contain distinct ethnic groups, distinct language communities or other
social networks through which collective action can be mobilized.73
Anthony Smith thus submits that conflict does not lead to cohesion in
multi-ethnic polities.74 Instead, it tends to magnify ethnic imbalances.
Centrifugal tendencies will be particularly strong in multi-ethnic polities
that have an asymmetric distribution of power in favor of a dominant
core group.
Some recent work supports Smith’s claim. Despite decades of conflict
Afghanistan has not witnessed the creation of a more centralized state
with greater capacity. To the contrary, it seems to have further
entrenched long-standing ethnic conflict and differences. By contrast,
ethnically homogenous entities, as Vietnam, did witness the growth of
state capacity in its conflicts with the French, United States, Cambodia,
and China.75 In short, external warfare might only lead to state develop-
ment in polities that are already reasonably centralized and which face
few societal cleavages.
More work needs to be done, as the historical evidence here is incon-
clusive. Many composite polities proved remarkably resilient even when
the core center seemed on the verge of collapse. Although tens of thou-
sands of Ukrainians fought with the German army in World War II, most
of the Soviet army showed few nationalist outbreaks. Even the Austrian-
Hungarian military performed reasonably well for most of the First
World War despite nationalist and secessionist demands going into the
war. By late 1917, “not a single enemy soldier stood on Habsburg
territory. On the contrary, Austro-Hungarian armies were everywhere
deep inside enemy territory.”76 Why distinct nationalities remained
faithful to the politically contested center at the time of its greatest
weakness requires further study.
To conclude, the preceding discussion is not an attempt to dispel the
considerable insights of the bellicist theory that warfare is critical for state
building. But examining the strengths and weaknesses of the theory is
important given the conflicts today in weak or failed states. Moreover,
given the altered international environment, and given that agents always
have a diversity of choices at their disposal in any environment, we must
73
As Gellner notes in Nations and Nationalism, the number of nations is potentially much
larger than the number of states.
74
Anthony Smith, “War and Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 4, no. 4 (1981),
pp. 375–97.
75
Taylor and Botea, “Tilly Tally.”
76
Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 192.
ask ourselves how state building today might operate. Hence teasing out
how, why, and when war and state building correlate is critical.
Many regions dominated by warlords in Africa and many failed states
are not on the road to creating high-capacity polities. They do not raise
extractive capacity, develop rationalized administration, or provide
public goods. Instead they gain revenue by illicit activities, their rule
remains patrimonial and nepotist, and they pursue private gains rather
than public goods provision. Warlords are not state builders.77
If one accepts that the incorporation of rival warlords in the state, or
their elimination, constitutes a sine qua non for further state development,
then greater attention needs to be paid to the mechanism of aggregation
of distinct armed units. This requires further study of the mechanisms for
establishing some settlement that brings previous warlords to amalgam-
ate and transfer their armed forces into a national military. Drawing
analogies with medieval Europe, Kim Marten suggests one possible
logic.78 Actors with preferences for centralized force might form a polit-
ical coalition in opposition to those who prefer to keep force decentral-
ized. Whether her account of Somalia is empirically feasible is less
important than the suggestion that some actors have advantages in
acquiring popular support for their efforts at centralization than their
rivals. Not all leaders of protection rackets are necessarily equally
endowed.
77
A key study of warlord behavior is provided by William Reno, Warlord Politics and African
States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
78
Kimberly Marten, “Warlordism in Comparative Perspective,” International Security,
vol. 31, no. 3 (2006/2007), pp. 41–73.
4 Beyond the Tilly Thesis
“Family Values” and State Formation in Latin
Christendom
Philip Gorski
Yale University
Vivek Swaroop Sharma
Pomona College
Introduction
“Why did the total number of sovereign states in Western Europe decline
so radically between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era?”1
This is one of the questions that Charles Tilly posed in Coercion, Capital
and European States and in other works. It has since become one of the
central questions in the broader literature on European state formation.
And as arcane as the question may seem, figuring out the answer is of
more than academic interest, because that answer has important impli-
cations for the study of international relations and economic develop-
ment and, through them, for the formulation of international security
and aid policies.
So what is the answer, then? At present, the dominant orthodoxy can
be fairly described as neo-Darwinian.2 On this account, the laws of state
formation are the laws of the jungle writ large. Sovereign states compete
for survival in a lawless world governed by force alone. As strong states
prey on and swallow up weaker ones, the total number of survivor states
gradually declines. Natural selection on military capacity is the funda-
mental law of state formation.
This neo-Darwinian model is part of a larger, bellicist paradigm that
makes war the underlying mechanism driving virtually all aspects of state
formation. In particular, it is frequently claimed that geopolitical pres-
sures led to the weakening of representative assemblies and other
1
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992).
2
Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to speak of a “quasi-Darwinian” approach,
because the bellicist paradigm is not explicitly derived from Darwinian theory in the same
way as, say, evolutionary psychology. However, for stylistic reasons, we will refer to it as
“neo-Darwinian.”
98
Beyond the Tilly Thesis 99
constitutional restraints on monarchical power, the expansion of royal

taxes, the centralization of political rule and the bureaucratization of
princely administration. While many of these claims have since been
challenged or qualified within the specialist literature, the bellicist story
has become the standard narrative of state formation within the social
sciences and is frequently invoked by policy advocates working outside
the academy.
While the principal focus of this chapter is on the neo-Darwinian
account of state consolidation, we also reconsider the bellicist account
of bureaucratization. The chapter is in four parts. In the first, we argue
that the neo-Darwinian model is historically anachronistic insofar as it
(mis)conceptualizes the dynamics of premodern geopolitics in terms of
sovereign states, predatory rulers and total wars. We argue that the
dynamics of premodern geopolitics within the core areas of Latin Chris-
tendom are better understood in terms of dynastic states, patrimonial
rulers and limited wars. This is not to deny that predatory conquest was a
common means of state expansion on the frontiers of the Latin world,
where Catholicism butted up against Paganism or Islam. Our claim is
rather that it was not the principal means of state consolidation within the
heartlands of the Latin Christian world and so was not a defining charac-
teristic of the “international system” of Latin Christendom.
In the second part, we argue that the neo-Darwinian model of state
consolidation generates a number of very serious anomalies. First, it
cannot explain variations in the form of conflict. The neo-Darwinian
model predicts that predation will be completely opportunistic and that
it will be prosecuted with maximum force. Thus, it cannot explain why
military conflicts within Christendom normally took the form of limited
wars, while those on its frontiers were typically prosecuted as total wars.
Second, it cannot easily account for the overall timing of state consolidation.
It is generally agreed that state consolidation begins sometime around
CE 1000. Tilly therefore begins his narrative in CE 990. But he provides
no theoretical justification for doing so. Nor could he, as there were no
major shifts in European geopolitics or military technology at this time.
However, there was a very major shift in European kinship relations: the
introduction of a new family regime under the aegis of the Catholic
Church. Its key components were monogamy, primogeniture and female
inheritance. We argue that this new family regime led to a fundamental
shift in the logic of dynastic competition, and that this was the real
catalyst for the period of state consolidation that began around the first
millennium.
A third anomaly concerns variations in the timing of state consolidation
in the Western and Eastern halves of Carolingia (i.e. “France” and
100 Philip Gorski and Vivek Swaroop Sharma
“Germany”). Defenders of the neo-Darwinian thesis might point to the

Viking invasions as the real catalyst for medieval state formation. But this
prediction generates further anomalies. Eastern Carolingia was the
region most affected by these incursions. But state consolidation began
in the West. This variation is readily explained in terms of family regimes,
however. The new norms were accepted much earlier there than the
East, with the predicted results for state consolidation.
One might characterize our argument as neo-Malthusian in the sense
that it focuses on births, marriages and deaths, particularly amongst the
aristocracy, on the social and religious conventions and institutions that
govern family and household, and on the consequences, which these
arrangements had for the values and strategies of noble lineages and
princely dynasties. Our thesis, in plain, is that the chief mechanism of
state consolidation in the heartlands of Latin Christendom was dynastic
consolidation rather than military conquest.
In the third part of the chapter, we take on the bellicist account of state
bureaucratization, with attention to both civil administration and military
command. If by “bureaucratization” we mean “the separation of person
and office,” “meritocratic selection and promotion” and so on, if, in
short, we define bureaucracy along Weberian lines, then many early
modern states were clearly not bureaucratic. In most of Europe, civil
administration remained distinctly patrimonial in character throughout
the early modern era. Political offices were simply another form of
dynastic property, governed by established rules of succession. Where
bureaucratization did make significant progress in these years was along
the northern arc stretching from the British Isles across Scandinavia into
Germany. While bellicist scholars such as Brian Downing and Thomas
Ertman have labored hard to account for this pattern in terms of the
bellicist orthodoxy, they have failed to consider a much simpler explan-
ation: religion.3 Specifically, they have failed to notice that the patrimo-
nial/bureaucratic divide closely correlates with the Catholic/Protestant
divide. We argue that there is causation behind this correlation. Specif-
ically, we argue that the Renaissance Papacy was the prime purveyor of
patrimonial office-holding practices, and that the Protestant Reformers
became the chief carriers of a bureaucratic alternative.
However, the most troublesome anomaly of all for the bellicist account
lies elsewhere, in the fact that geopolitical pressure did not lead to
3
Tom Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Brian Downing, The Military
Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern
Europe (Princeton University Press, 1992).
significant bureaucratization in the very institution where a bellicist

would most strongly expect it: the officers’ corps. Even in the most highly
bureaucratized states of Protestant Europe (e.g. Prussian and Sweden),
the officers’ corps and military recruitment more generally remained
highly patrimonial in form. As we shall show, combing the neo-Malthu-
sian and neo-Weberian strands of our argument enables us to account for
this outcome as well.
Having demonstrated that our neo-Malthusian and neo-Weberian
accounts are better able to explain European patterns of state consoli-
dation and bureaucratization, in the conclusion, we briefly turn our
sights to a few non-European cases. Before the new family regime,
Europe oscillated between feudal fragmentation and imperial consoli-
dation. We suggest that this same pattern can be observed outside of
Europe as well, where and to the degree that aristocratic family regimes
were characterized by polygamous marriage, partible inheritance and a
ban on female property.
The Neo-Darwinian Approach to State Consolidation:

Summary and Critique
The central claim of the neo-Darwinians theory of state consolidation is
that predatory conquest was the main mechanism of state building in
premodern Europe. In Tilly’s summary: “Most of the European efforts
to build states failed. The enormous majority of states that were around
to bid for autonomy and strength in 1500 disappeared over the new few
centuries, smashed and absorbed by other states-in-the-making” (our
emphasis). In this version of the story, 1500, rather than 1000, is the
hinge point of the consolidation process. Why? The introduction of
gunpowder and the concomitant expansion of the infantry – what some
historians have dubbed “the military revolution” – upset the established
balance-of-power and unleashed a process of predatory competition that
rapidly winnowed the number of states.
At first glance, the story seems compelling enough. On closer inspec-
tion, however, it proves deeply flawed in a number of regards. There are
indeed some examples of one political unit being “smashed and
absorbed” by another during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
One thinks, for instance, of Ireland. But there are many more examples
of one political unit being inherited and absorbed by another. The princi-
pal source of Prussia’s growth during these years was dynastic succes-
sion, not military conquest. Similarly, the Habsburg Empire, the largest
political unit of the post-Carolingian era, was assembled mainly through
dynastic means. And the independent variable in this model – a
technologically driven military revolution – is just as dubious as the

dependent variable. As numerous critics have since pointed out, gun-
powder had been readily available for well over a century. If the early
modern era was driven by violent conflict, this had much more to do with
the collapse of Latin Christendom and the emergence of confessional
rivalry between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Finally, the process
of state consolidation did not begin in or around 1500. It was already well
underway by this time. England and France already had something like
their contemporary borders. The European land empires controlled by
Spain and Poland were already nearing their acmes.
Of course, the fact that this particular variant of the neo-Darwinian
model is found wanting does not necessarily mean that the approach as a
whole is defective. To determine whether the model can be recon-
structed, we need to examine the adequacy of its underlying assump-
tions. Let us decompose the model. Its basic components are predatory
rulers, military forces, state institutions, subject populations, material
resources, and competitor states. The theory presumes that these elem-
ents are related in the following way: Predatory rulers are assumed to be
self-interested maximizers of a materialistic bent. They attempt to amass
as much glory, booty, and territory as possible. To this end, they use state
institutions (or agents) to extract material resources from subject popu-
lations and build up military forces, which can be used to conquer
competitor states. There are no rules or institutions governing relations
between competing rulers and/or states. They exist in a state of anarchy,
where the only rule is the rule of the strongest. All war is therefore total
war, a war to the death and a zero-sum game, in which one side is
eliminated and the other collects the payout. Let us call this the predation
game. Its unintended consequence is state consolidation. An equilibrium
is achieved only if, when, and as long as some balance of power obtains
between individual states or allied groups of states, such that the costs of
predation are equal to the benefits of conquest for all participants. This
model is presumed to obtain for all times and places. To sum up,
predatory rulers are “selfish genes,” sovereign states are their “host
organisms,” and total wars are the “selection mechanism.”
Let us consider each of these points in turn. In our view, premodern
rulers were more like patriarchs than predators. That is, they were
“family men” who were primarily interested in aggrandizing their lin-
eages and households. This is not to say that they were uninterested in
glory, riches and territory, only that these were primarily means, rather
than ends. Conquered territory could be made into fiefs for offspring and
dependents. Riches could be used to expand the size of the oikos. And all
of this enhanced their relative status vis-à-vis their trans-European peers.
As sociologist Julia Adams has convincingly argued, premodern states

were family states more than they were sovereign states.4 The genes that
rulers were most interested in were their own.
Talk of “state consolidation” is also anachronistic. The accumulation
of disparate and often far-flung territories under the rule of a common
prince did not make the “states” of Europe larger. It expanded the
dynasties of certain families. When they occurred, wars of succession
and clashes over dynastic rights simply determined which of a small circle
of closely related individuals would succeed. The kings of Latin Europe,
ultimately, pursued strategies that were no different from those of any
other great magnate or, for that matter, of ambitious peasants, and for
exactly the same reasons. Of course, territorial consolidation is not the
same as administrative strength. But that is a separate issue, which we
address later in the paper.
As should be clear by now, we are also highly skeptical of the
assumption that premodern polities are best conceptualized as “sover-
eign states.” This is not to deny that something like a “system of
sovereign states” was in place by the dawning of the modern era –
1800 in round numbers. Rather, it is to deny that such a system was
already in place by the middle of the early modern era, as “the myth of
1648”5 has it, and as contemporary scholars of international relations
routinely claim. What exactly is meant by a “sovereign state”? Daniel
Philpott’s definition is as good as any. It has two components: sover-
eignty and territoriality.6 Thus, a sovereign state exists if and to the
extent that there is a single, supreme authority that corresponds to a
particular territory. By extension, a system of sovereign states is one in
which there is a one-to-one correspondence between sovereignty and
territory, such that each sovereign has a unique territory and each
territory has a unique sovereign. Was this the case in 1648? Hardly.
Not even in France or England, the poster children for the myth of
1648 and home to the two most important theorists of sovereignty:
Bodin and Hobbes. Bodin and Hobbes, it should be remembered, were
both royal propagandists, seeking to shore up monarchical authority
during periods of acute conflict and crisis. They were not simply articu-
lating the received wisdom of the day, namely, that sovereignty is best
divided amongst various bodies in a system of “mixed government” or
4
Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern
Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
5
Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern
International Relations (London: Verso, 2003).
6
Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2001).
condominat, but rather articulating a radical new vision of a single,

unitary sovereign, a view that won them the contempt of most of their
countrymen. That there was considerable disagreement concerning the
nature and locus of sovereignty in France and England is evidenced by
the revolts of the parliamentarians in both countries, namely, the
Fronde (1648–51) and the Glorious Revolution (1688–89). Elsewhere
in Europe, in Spain, the Netherlands, and even in Sweden and Prussia,
one cannot seriously speak of a unitary sovereign in 1648. There, too,
monarchs shared authority with representative assemblies and judicial
bodies to varying degrees.
Neither, of course, can one speak of a system of spatially or adminis-
tratively unitary territories at this point. Many European rulers pos-
sessed widely dispersed holdings. Frederick the Great’s territories
were scattered across Northern Europe, from the Baltics to the
Rhine. And if Britain and France were territorially coherent by this
time, they were still an administrative patchwork. The dynastic union
of England and Scotland in 1603 did not bring into being a “united”
kingdom; there was a union of “crowns” but not a union of parlia-
ments as was to occur in 1707 with the Act of Union. A dynastic war
asserted the right of a prince to be lawful heir to another principality,
but this in no way implied the aggrandizement of a “state.” When the
now United Kingdom entered into yet another dynastic union with the
house of Hanover in 1714 there was no question of a deeper union
between the electorate and the kingdom which remained, as was the
norm, separate entities.7 Peter Sahlins aptly describes the French
situation in a passage that is worth quoting at length:
[T]he early modern French state was not yet, strictly speaking, territorial in
nature. Its governing idiom was that of jurisdictions, including “appurtenances,
dependencies and annexes,” to use contemporary terms. Jurisdictional
sovereignty in early modern France meant that the crown accumulated rights
to specific domains – fiefs, bailiwicks, bishoprics, seigneuries, boroughs, and
even villages. Alongside and overlapping these “feudal” forms of dominion were
administrative circumscriptions created by the crown. As seen from the
periphery, the lesson was clear: the kingdom was not a coherent territorial
entity consistently “bounded” in a linear sense. It is true many of the
medieval French crown’s frontiers were boundaries, well-defined limits
marked by boundary stones, rivers, trees, and sometimes trenches. But,
despite the presence of delimited sectors of the boundary, most of France’s
7
On the dynastic union of Hanover and Great Britain see Mitchell D. Allen, The Anglo-
Hanoverian Connection: 1727–1760, PhD Dissertation (Boston University, 2000). See also
Uriel Dann, Hanover and Great Britain 1740–1760 (Leicester University Press, 1991).
borderlands in the early modern period were riddled with incoherent

“provinces” made up of overlapping and frequently disputed jurisdictions. An
eighteenth-century description of Lorraine typifies the confused state of affairs
throughout the early modern period. The province was “mixed, crossed, and
filled with foreign territories and enclaves belonging with full sovereignty to the
princes of the Empire.8
The “sovereign state” of France was the work, not of Louis XIV, but
of Napoleon. In 1648, then, there was not a system of sovereign states,
nor, arguably, even a single sovereign state deserving of the name. As
yet, unitary sovereignty existed only in the writings of a few heretical
philosophers and the dreams of a few absolutizing kings.9
To summarize: the bellicist model assumes an international system in
which independent units are eliminated through conquest. Conquest is
fundamental to the model in two ways: (1) successful conquest is the
principal mechanism of territorial consolidation and (2) rulers’ fear of
conquest provides the chief incentive for bureaucratization of state
structures. In effect, the bellicist model applies a “realist” understand-
ing of international relations to medieval and early modern Europe.
This realist model, drawn from the discipline of international relations,
assumes that the international system is a Darwinian world driven by a
logic of “survival of the fittest.” In the first section we have sought to
show how and why this understanding of medieval and early modern
international relations is problematic. While it is true that conquest and
elimination were features of the frontiers of Latin Christendom, intern-
ally we find a much more complex situation. And while it is also true
that total war and elimination were features of “social wars,” that is,
conflicts fought against heretics and rebels, this was not the case with
“normal” strife over rank and status or even over claims to titles (as in
wars of succession). This type of conflict was governed by chivalric
norms and subject to a range of conflict-resolution mechanisms that
stopped far short of physical or political elimination. However, the
bellicist model is certainly correct that over time the number of units
in Europe did decline over time. So Tilly’s question remains an import-
ant one, even if his answer has proven inadequate. In the next section
we provide the alternative mechanism – dynastic consolidation – and an
alternative engine – a new family regime.
8
Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth
Century,” The American Historical Review, vol. 95, no. 5, (December 1990), pp. 1423–51,
here at pp. 1427–8.
9
See Vivek Swaroop Sharma’s chapter “War, Conflict and the State Reconsidered” in this
volume for the specifically military dimensions of this period.
The Neo-Malthusian Approach: Specifications

and Adjudications
To appreciate the significance of the new family regime, it is helpful to
understand what preceded it. Families in early medieval Europe were
loose kinship groupings.10 Personal property mattered less than family
property. And family property was transmitted through a loose form of
partible inheritance – the practice by which an estate is divided among
all heirs – though the rules were loose and even ad hoc. Because the
governing classes of early medieval society did not discriminate
between legitimate and illegitimate sons, or rank their sons in order of
birth, and because there were few hard and fast rules, inheritance was
an uncertain affair with no set outcome, and within the extended
kinship grouping all males (legitimate and illegitimate) could press
claims and generally did so. Further complicating matters, plural mar-
riage was not uncommon, adding a further layer of allegiance and
rivalry amongst the various heirs.
Early medieval inheritance practices had at least two significant pol-
itical consequences.11 First, they created enormous uncertainty and
rivalry amongst a large number of potential claimants. Consequently,
violent successional conflict was the norm. Inasmuch as all male kin
(through both the male and female lines) were potentially legitimate
claimants, and there was rarely a single, dominant claimant, coalitions
played an important role in determining outcomes. However, because
the composition, ambition nor the stability of these coalitions were all
uncertain, the potential for misperception, mistrust, and violence was
further heightened.12 Second, partible inheritance inexorably led to a
progressive fragmentation of family holdings from one generation to the
next. In societies in which one of the fundamental currencies of power
is land, the results of partible inheritance are the dissipation of political
power and a further invitation to struggle. The result was chronic
political instability. The paradigmatic illustrations of these dynamics
are the well-known histories of the Merovingian and Carolingian
10
See Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 101. See also Leopold Genicot, “Recent Research on the
Medieval Nobility,” in: Timothy Reuter (ed.), The Medieval Nobility: Studies on the
Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century (Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1979), p. 27.
11
This section is based on Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Kinship, Property and Authority:
European Territorial Consolidation Reconsidered,” Politics and Society, February 27,
2015: DOI:10.1177/0032329215571279.
12
R. I. Moore, First European Revolution c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000),
p. 69.
empires, which survived for only two or three generations, due to

internecine squabbling amongst heirs.
Historians of medieval Europe routinely speak of the crisis of the ninth
and tenth centuries. Indeed, “Europe” as we know it seemed on the
verge of disintegration and conquest. The deeper cause of this crisis was
the early medieval family regime. The more proximate causes were
barbarian invasions, which increased in tempo and intensity beginning
around the middle of the ninth century. Latin Europe, after expanding
under Charlemagne to encompass the Germanic tribes settled between
the Rhine and the Elbe, suffered devastating attacks at the hands of the
Vikings from the north, the Magyars from the east and the Saracens from
the south. Royal authority, already partitioned by the descendants of
Charlemagne, disintegrated further.
Centralized political authority started to collapse. The disintegration
process began at the highest levels of royal administration but gradually
rippled down the hierarchy. Prior to the mid-ninth century the provincial
administration of the Frankish kingdom(s) had been in the hands of
officials appointed by the crown. The highest of these officials bore the
Roman military titles of count or duke. The crown maintained control
over the realm by ensuring that loyal officials, serving at the pleasure of
the court and dependent upon royal favor, occupied these offices. The
Merovingian and Carolingian aristocracies did not, therefore, possess
hereditary rights to the high offices of the realm. This began to change
in the mid-ninth century as counts and dukes began to occupy their
offices for life and then gained the right to transmit them to their off-
spring. Over time the same process occurred among the subordinates of
the counts and dukes. By the eleventh century this process of “feudaliza-
tion” had reached down to the level of the castellans. Political authority
had become hereditary property and in becoming so gave rise to a new
form of political organization best understood as dynastic lordship. Inso-
far as the consolidation of this system was a response to the barbarian
threat, the bellicist model must be given its due. However, the new family
regime was not the intellectual invention of predatory rulers but of
patriarchal dynasts – in alliance with reforming clerics.
We now turn to the various elements of the new family regime.
Primogeniture
The feudalization process further exacerbated the crisis of central
authority sparked by the system of partible inheritance. Now, political
offices were transmitted and partitioned along with real property. Soon,
castles, villages and fields were held in fractions. But how does one
exercise ownership of, say, one-sixteenth of a castle? Latin European

civilization was on the brink of collapse.
Primogeniture emerged within this context. It has been such an artifact
of the ancien régime that its true novelty can be difficult for moderns to
appreciate. Primogeniture restricted the paternal inheritance to the
oldest surviving son; younger brothers were simply disinherited. The
objective was to concentrate the familial resources in the interests of
maintaining and enhancing the wealth and social standing of the entire
family, which still remained the basic unit of political life in this world.
Irrational as this may seem from an individual perspective, it was highly
rational from a dynastic one.
That the Latin European aristocracy was morally and practically able
to disinherit its younger sons in good conscience had a great deal to do
with the ethics and institutions of the Medieval Church. The Roman
Catholic Church had, for reasons beyond the scope of this chapter,
evolved new rules governing family life would profoundly reshape Euro-
pean society – that constituted the ancien regime.
The Church contributed to the implementation and stabilization of
dynasticism in at least two significant ways:
1. By the tenth century the Church had begun to successfully impose

upon society a particular definition of marriage. This definition of
marriage had three important aspects: (a) marriage had to be sancti-
fied in a Church ceremony conducted by a priest, (b) these unions
had to be monogamous in the legal (if not sexual) sense, and (c) the
Church imposed a particularly strict definition of incest by prohibiting
marriage between people related within the seventh degree. The new
marriage regime created two potential problems of its own, however:
first, it greatly decreased the probability that a given ruler would
produce a legitimate, adult heir, due to the vagaries of fertility and
mortality; second, it confronted the “successful” father with “n – 1”
disinherited sons. The Church provided one solution to the latter
problem.
2. Because of its autonomous wealth and vast patronage power, the
Roman Church became an attractive and honorable career for the
younger sons of the nobility in a way that, say, the Orthodox Church
never did. In fact, noble families vigorously competed to place their
cadets in higher Church benefices where they could utilize the
immense prestige and wealth of the Church to enhance the social
standing and wealth of their families. The rule of clerical celibacy did
not effectively prevent these men from siring children, at least not at
this point in the history of the Church. Nor did it prevent such men
from participating in dynastic politics. But – and this is key – it did

prevent their sons from making legitimate claims to dynastic
property.13
So, the Church provided one solution to the problem of “excess” sons.
What about the problem of “insufficient” sons? It is against this back-
ground that we must understand the second major innovation in prop-
erty rights: the institutions of female inheritance.
Female Inheritance and Dynastic Unions

The Salic Law, the sixth-century legal code of the Franks, had barred
females from the inheritance. However, this exclusion of women did not
extend to their male offspring who were potentially legitimate heirs. The
Salic Law was updated on numerous occasions until the time of Charle-
magne and then fell into abeyance in the ninth century.14 In the tenth
and eleventh centuries the laws of dynastic inheritance were refined and
clarified to cover the scenario of the absence of legitimate sons. In
essence, the question was, were daughters and their offspring to be
privileged over more distant male relatives? Initially, two different
answers were provided to the question. In matters of “private” property
(i.e. excluding land to which political power was attached), daughters
came to be privileged over more distant male relatives, but in the case of
fiefs, daughters continued to be excluded. Over time, however, the
customs governing the devolution of “private” property came to be
applied to fiefs and principalities as well.
The ability of women to inherit and transmit “public” rights and
offices in addition to strictly “private” property constituted the second
key component of dynasticism.15 This second aspect of dynastic inherit-
ance practice when coupled with primogeniture also set the stage for a
new kind of polity that was unique to Latin Europe: dynastic unions.
13
Primogeniture applied only to the patrimonial lands, that is, those lands that a lord had
inherited from his parents (both the father and the mother). If a lord married an heiress
and had more than one son to be provided for he could choose to leave the younger son
his mother’s inheritance or could transmit both to his eldest son. Note that it took only
one inheritance for land to become patrimonial. A collateral inheritance could also be
obtained if a more distant relative died without direct heirs (males or females).
14
See Nancy F. Drew, “Another Look at the Origins of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment
of the Role of the Germanic Kingdoms,” Speculum, vol. 62, no. 4 (October 1987),
pp. 803–12.
15
See Georges Duby, “Women and Power,” in: Thomas Bisson (ed.), Cultures of Power:
Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995).
Dynastic unions were polities comprised of two or more separate political

entities united in the person of a common ruler who had inherited them
through legitimate succession. In other words, they were conglomer-
ations of territories (or empires) united as a consequence of the laws of
succession. The effect of female inheritance more generally was to
strengthen the tendency towards state consolidation. For the conse-
quence of female inheritance under conditions of feudal lordship was
that when nobles married heiresses they “took both her and her lands.”
“The twelfth century is a ‘century of heiresses’.”16 It is surely no accident
that one of the dominant themes of medieval romance literature is the
knight errant in pursuit (often violently) of heiresses!
From an institutional standpoint, female inheritance made possible the
peaceful consolidation of property that could only have been united
through conquest in earlier times. Predictably, actors quickly adapted
themselves to the incentive effects provided by this new transaction-cost-
saving strategy. Marriage choices attained a new significance and the
acquisition of an heiress became as much of an imperative for ambitious
dynasts as the launching of military campaigns aimed at territorial con-
quest. “To an ambitious politician capturing heiresses came to be at least
as important as capturing castles.”17 Under this political system there
was, over time, a general tendency for the concentration of more and
more estates, principalities and wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer
families.18
The Fragility of the Dynastic Family

The bellicist model implies that dynasties were eliminated on the
battlefield. In truth, most died in bed – the marriage bed or the sick
bed. The laws of fertility and mortality had a much greater impact on
dynasties than any putative laws of geopolitics. E. Perroy has estimated
that the average noble family lasted for just three to six generations in
the male line.19 This meant that at each succession there was only a
16
John F. Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth
Century (London: Hambledon & London, 2003), p. 248.
17
Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion, p. 12.
18
May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century 1307–1399 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1959), p. 260.
19
Edouard Perroy, “Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle
Ages,” Past and Present, no. 21 (April 1962), pp. 25–38, here at p. 31. Compare this to
the rate of senatorial family failure in the Roman world. See Frank Gilliard, “The
Senators of Sixth-Century Gaul,” Speculum, vol. 54, no. 4 (October 1979),
pp. 685–97, here at p. 695.
fifty percent chance of an adult male succession in the direct line.20

Jonathan Dewald gives us the bird’s-eye view:
Among the lesser nobility of fifteenth century France, about one-fifth of the
family names disappeared with each generation; in the course of a century,
most of the group had been replaced by new families. More or less the same
thing happened in Germany. In lower Saxony, just over half of the noble families
disappeared between 1430 and 1550; in two regions of the Rhineland, fewer than
one-fifth of the fifteenth century noble families survived in 1550. In Spain, only
six of the noble families prominent in 1300 survived among the fifty-five titled
nobles of 1520. And the same process had been seen in England. Of 136 peerage
families in 1300, fewer than half survived in the male line by 1400, and only
sixteen survived in 1500.21
Dynasticism and Territorial Consolidation

The collective impact of the replacement of partible inheritance by
primogeniture, the innovation of female inheritance, and the fragility of
families brought about by the vagaries of medieval life had a dramatic
consolidating effect. Table 4.1 shows the decline in the number of ruling
dynasties that took place in Latin Europe over the 310-year period from
1300–1610.
The number of dynasties ruling the sixteen kingdoms of Latin Europe
shrank from twelve in 1300 to five in 1610. The trend is clearly towards
increasing concentration of territory in fewer and fewer hands. Equally
important is the fact that this trend was not a consequence of conquest.
The kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united as a consequence of the
marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile; the kingdoms of
England and Scotland were united as a consequence of James Stewart,
king of Scotland, succeeding Elizabeth Tudor as her legitimate heir; the
“empire” of Charles V was a consequence of his being legitimate heir to
the house of Castile-Aragon (itself a dynastic union) and the house of
Burgundy-Austria (also a dynastic union); and so on and so forth. The
institution of dynastic succession, driven by the contingency of birth,
marriage and death in the leading princely families of Europe, deter-
mined the distribution of power in Europe.
20
Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern History
(London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 19.
21
Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility 1400–1800: New Approaches to European History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17. See also Sigismund Peller,
“Births and Deaths among Europe’s Ruling Families Since 1500,” in: D. V. Glass and
D. E. C. Eversley (eds), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London:
Edward Arnold, 1965); and Genicot, “Recent Research on the Medieval Nobility,”
pp. 18–20.
Table 4.1 The Number of Ruling Dynasties in Latin Europe, 1300–161022
Year 1300 1350 1400 1450 1500 1610
Number of dynasties 12 9 9 8 8 5
The Bureaucratization of State Administration:

A Neo-Weberian Account
Until fairly recently, scholars of state formation frequently conflated
absolutism and bureaucratization. Consequently, they tended to code
Louis XIV’s France as “highly bureaucratic” and post-Revolutionary
England as “highly patrimonial.” Revisionist research by scholars such
as John Brewer and Daniel Dessert has not only upset the received
coding but also reversed it altogether.23 Should we therefore conclude
that absolutism had an affinity with patrimonialism, while constitu-
tionalism went hand-in-hand with bureaucracy? If so, what should we
make of Poland, which was constitutionalist but patrimonial? Or of
Sweden, an erstwhile absolutist regime with strongly bureaucratic
features? One solution, first suggested by Thomas Ertman, is to con-
ceptually distinguish between “regime” and “infrastructure,” that is,
between the way in which power is distributed (the constitution), on
the one hand, and the way in which it is implemented (administra-
tion), on the other.24
But like most solutions, this one creates new problems – at least
for the bellicist model. Following the classical statements of Hintze
and Weber, second-generation accounts of European state formation
typically drew a strong connection between military competition and
administrative rationalization. In essence, it was argued that early
modern rulers faced a simple choice: bureaucratize or die. The
poster child for this argument was, and is, a partitioned Poland.
But what about the states that did neither, such as Spain or
France? It might be argued that they were protected by their size or
22
Taken from Armin Wolf, “The Family of Dynasties in Medieval Europe: Dynasties,
Kingdoms and Tochterstämme,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, vol. 22
(1991), pp. 183–260, here at p. 192.
23
John Brewer, The Sinews of War: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle
(Paris: Fayard, 1984).
24
Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
their wealth. This, in fact, is more or less the solution proposed by

Tilly: resource-rich states could afford to be inefficient. But why,
then, did some large and powerful states such as England and
Prussia bureaucratize then? Here, too, the bellicist model is con-
fronted with a difficult puzzle.
What is the solution? The remarkable congruity between confes-
sional allegiance and administrative form provides an important clue,
but not a definitive solution, because the congruity is partial. Some
Protestant states display relatively low levels of bureaucratization.
There was heavy trafficking in political offices in the Dutch Republic,
for instance. Meanwhile, some Catholic states exhibit rather high
levels of bureaucratization. One thinks, for instance, of Bavaria. Nor
should it be forgotten that the Papal Curia was a bureaucratic pioneer
of sorts. In short, striking as it is, the relationship between confes-
sional allegiance and administrative form was neither necessary nor
complete.
But a relationship there was. Its story can be told in three chap-
ters.25 The opening chapter takes place during the Papal Schism
(1378–1417). Bereft of their Italian patrimony, the French Popes
were in desperate need of funds, and they soon found a profitable
expedient: the sale of offices. It was so profitable, in fact, that it was
continued and expanded by the Renaissance pontiffs. On the eve of
the Reformation, even bishops’ caps were for sale. Beginning in the
mid-fifteenth century, the practice was appropriated by secular rulers
as well, particularly by France, Spain and other princes with close ties
to the Papacy. The terms of sale and even the language of the con-
tracts employed were virtually identical to those used by the Papal
Curia. Thus, there can be little doubt about the provenance of the
practice.
The second chapter of our story takes place during the Protestant
Reformation (ca. 1517–88). The expansion of proprietary office hold-
ing and the traffic in clerical offices were arousing considerable criti-
cism from within the Roman Church as early as the mid-fifteenth
century, and these cries only became louder as time went on.
“Simony” was one of the chief grievances of the reformers, and a
new, more bureaucratic system of clerical office holding would be
one of their principal accomplishments. Over the next century, the
Protestant clergy of Northern Europe took on many of the features
25
For reasons of space, we can only present the “SparkNotes” version in this context. For a
fuller discussion, see Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of
the State in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
that we now associate with “modern” bureaucracy, including the

separation of person and office, formal educational requirements,
fixed money salaries and even public pensions. The Reformation,
therefore, had two important effects: it delegitimized proprietary office
holding, and it formulated a more bureaucratic alternative.
The third and final chapter begins around the middle of the seven-
teenth century. It witnessed the emergence of bureaucratizing alliances
in some states, most notably in England, Sweden and Prussia. The
Protestant Reformation had effectively halted the diffusion of patrimo-
nialism to Northern Europe and cemented a bureaucratic system of
office holding within the church – but not yet within the secular arm of
the state. While state offices were not private property that could be
openly bought and sold, upper-level positions continued to be domin-
ated by the scions of the landed nobility, even as lower-level positions
were increasingly filled by educated commoners, particularly pastors’
sons who did not wish to follow their fathers into the ministry. Not
surprisingly, the social tensions between these two strata could be
considerable. The noblemen derided the commoners as “ink-spitters”
(Tintenkleckser), while the commoners denounced courtiers for their
“decadent” and “Frenchifying” ways. In some cases, however, a
reformist coalition succeeded in breaking the noble monopoly and
instituting a more bureaucratic system. Typically, these coalitions
consisted of three groups: upwardly mobile commoners, a reform-
minded prince and courtly fellow-travelers, all held together by a
shared commitment to some form of “world-transforming” Protest-
antism (e.g. “Puritanism” or “Pietism”). These proto-bureaucratic
palace revolutions resulted in more efficient and responsive adminis-
trative systems which gave reformist states a long-run competitive
advantage and played no small role in the rapid rise of English and
especially Prussian power during the eighteenth century as well as in
Sweden’s continued role in power politics during this period.
If the bellicist perspective has great difficulty accounting for patterns
of early modern bureaucratization, it has still greater problems
explaining the persistence of patrimonialism in the military. The
underlying assumption of the bellicist model, in all its variants, is that
total war is a harsh schoolmaster that quickly imparts the virtues of
bureaucratic rationality to all who will listen and ruthlessly punishes
those who will not. War, to adopt a favorite bellicist metaphor, is a
crucible that burns away irrational impurities and hardens the bureau-
cratic mind-set. If so, we would expect that military organization
would be the pacesetter of the bureaucratization process. Alas, such
expectations run counter to the facts.
Patrimonialism and Military Organization in Early

Modern Europe26
The bellicist argument is fundamentally dependent upon a particular
interpretation of a series of changes in the nature of military organization
and warfare that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
These changes have collectively been labeled “the military revolution.”
The “military revolution” had three interrelated elements that scholars
have identified as being central. In the first place, there was a supplanting
of heavily armored cavalry by infantry as the principal component of field
armies. Secondly, there was the introduction of gunpowder weapons,
especially siege artillery, which briefly transformed siege warfare.
“Briefly” because while the introduction of siege artillery increased the
importance of set-piece battles, new style fortifications (the so-called
trace italienne) reestablished the primacy of defensive fortifications in
war and hence of siege warfare with a corresponding decrease in the
importance of set-piece battles. The third element was the increase in the
size of armies. The first two elements have generally been pointed to as
the causes of the third.27
The most observable variable in the military transformation of early
modern Europe was the increase in the size of armies. When in 1494,
Charles VIII, king of France, invaded Italy, his army, estimated at 18,000
men, was a formidable force – and contemporaries were duly impressed.
Yet armies of this size were not appreciably larger than those that had
been occasionally mobilized in the central Middles Ages and could still
be mobilized by minor sixteenth-century actors – as would be demon-
strated time and time again in the French Wars of Religion, for example,
when the great magnates of the realm consistently fielded armies com-
parable to those raised by the crown.28 Whether raised by the crown, by
magnates or by corporate bodies, the armies of the fifteenth and sixteenth
26
This section is more fully developed in Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Bureaucracy,
Administration and Authority: European State Formation Reconsidered” in The
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming.
27
For a good summary of the “military revolution” debate and a critique of it, see Clifford
Rogers (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of
Early Modern Europe (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). The transformation of military
organization in early modern Europe is also usefully seen from the perspective of late
medieval Europe. See Andrew Ayton and J. L. Price (eds), The Medieval Military
Revolution: State, Society and Military Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
28
See the excellent study by James Wood, The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers, and Society
during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
centuries were all basically composite forces that were generally led by
nobles and included infantry raised contractually on the international
market. A century and a half later we find much the same situation as had
pertained in the Renaissance with the significant exception of their size.
The Thirty Years’ War, of course, was famous for its great condottieri,
demonstrating that the armies of the early seventeenth century were in
some very fundamental respects not so very different, except in their
scale, from their forebears in Renaissance Italy and beyond. As Colin
Jones writes of the French army of the Thirty Years’ War: “there was
little that the Italian Renaissance condottieri or his overseas equivalent, the
Portuguese or Spanish conquistador, had not devised before the French
line regiment of the Thirty Years’ War. What was new, however, was the
scale of the impact which the sprawling and decentralized new armies
could make on civilians.”29
Armies in early modern Europe were not just getting larger, they were
also becoming more permanent and changing in internal structure. Lynn
argues: “Beyond the simple question of size . . . [armies] changed in
character over time, and it could be argued that this difference in char-
acter mattered as much or more than did numbers.”30 While mercenar-
ies continued to be used into the eighteenth century, after the Thirty
Years’ War they served in a different kind of military organization than
did those of the preceding generations – a military organization in which
the employer exercised a degree of control over them unimaginable in the
Thirty Years’ War. And while “standing armies” had existed in some
form or the other since Charles VII, king of France, experimented with
them in the mid-fifteenth century, they were not the predominant form
of military organization that they would become in the latter half of the
seventeenth century when they came into their own and displaced the
independent condottieri for good.
This “new model army” evolved in Europe in a process largely
completed by the 1720s. These “new model armies” were standing
forces, with increasingly formal and permanent internal organization,
which were subjected to a host of regulations “fixing recruitment,
29
Colin Jones, “The Military Revolution and the Professionalization of the French Army
under the Ancien Regime,” in: Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the
Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, p. 154. On the Renaissance condottieri
see the excellent study by M. E. Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in
Renaissance Italy (Totowa: Rowan and Littlefield, 1974). On warfare during the Thirty
Years’ War see Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Thirty Years’ War, 2nd edn (New York:
Routledge, 1987).
30
John A. Lynn, “Recalculating French Army Growth During the Grand Siecle,
1610–1715,” in: Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military
Transformation of Early Modern Europe, pp. 117–47, here at p. 134.
conditions of service, clothing, billeting and discharge.”31 Above all

they were subject to the direct control of the crown. The sine qua non
of this control was the assumption by the crown of the responsibility to
maintain these forces permanently (i.e. intensive training, regular pay
and the supply of provisions and equipment necessary for sustenance
and combat). In return, the state got disciplined forces, which, relative
to the period preceding it, were more pliable instruments of the
“state.” These disciplined and increasingly permanent professional
forces were immensely expensive, and large permanent military estab-
lishments became the definition of first tier powers by the eighteenth
century.
However, and crucially for the argument being forwarded here, the
formation of increasingly professional standing armies did not lead to
the undermining of the patrimonial nature of office holding in the civil
and military organizations of early modern Europe. The precise insti-
tutional forms that tied rulers to their military organizations expanded
between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, but in essence these
different forms of institutional ties were simply variants along a spec-
trum of patron–client relationships. Even in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries the relationship of military service in exchange for land (the
“fief”) was merely the most highly valued form of the patron–client
relationship. There was never enough land in medieval Europe to be the
sole (or even primary) basis of military recruitment. From the earliest
period of “feudal” Europe, therefore, other forms of the patron–client
relationships were necessary for lords to obtain military service. Mer-
cenaries, money-fiefs, ties of kinship and other forms of retainership
were fundamental parts of the basket of institutional forms that lords
availed themselves of in order to recruit armies. As armies grew larger
and became more dependent on infantry the relative weight of the
different forms of patron–client institutions shifted – and these shifts
are important – but unlike modern armies, they remained based on
patrimonial office holding and ties of dependency that can only be
labeled “feudal.” This was as true in the realm of military organization
as it was in the civil sphere. As Guy Rowlands explains, “Those who
worked closely with the crown, as provincial governors, intendants,
urban councilors, financial officials, judges and lawyers in the royal
courts, and army officers, were part of an institutional elite who, like
other members of the propertied elites, sought to strengthen their own
31
Peter H. Wilson, “Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789,” in: Jeremy Black (ed.),
European Warfare 1453–1815 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 69–95, here at
p. 74.
position on the basis of family interests.”32 In a society permeated with

exemptions, liberties and privileges of all kinds, the fact that the “bur-
eaucracy” was composed of individuals pursuing “dynastic strategies”
made it extremely difficult for the crown to order its “servants” to carry
out policies they did not approve of. As Herbert Rowen writes:
It soon became evident that government officials who held their posts as property
that could be taken away from them only if they were proved guilty of malfeasance
or treason in formal court trials, or if the office were repurchased by the crown (an
unlikely prospect with an ever-impecunious royal treasury), were effectively
independent of the royal authority; if they could not always do what they
wanted, they were able to refuse to do the crown’s will and only very
infrequently suffer for it. This was a development of the greatest importance,
because it put brakes on the creation of royal absolutism . . . The powers that the
crown gained in thinning out the feudal system beneath it . . . were now given
away again, not to vassals but to officeholders.33
The extravagant claims of early modern theorists of royal absolutism

(most importantly, Jean Bodin) are separated from early modern political
reality by a vast chasm.34 Royal authority could only be exercised with
the cooperation of administrators and officers who had interests and
priorities of their own. As Bonney notes “this system could not produce
[an] impartial and non-political civil [or military] service” under the
hierarchical control of the crown.35
Patronage networks, therefore, formed the basis of political power in
early modern Europe in both the civil and military spheres. The bur-
eaucracy was permeated by “unofficial” factions, revolving around
patronage networks. Koenigsberger explains, “Patronage was the fuel
which kept the wheels of . . . [early modern] political society turning. It
was the civilian form of an earlier, feudal-military relationship.”36 This
32
Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 15. He says elsewhere, “The private financial interests of the
commissaries, the periodic manipulation of the civilian offices and the interaction of
multiple client-patron relationships all combined to stunt the development of solid
hierarchical principles within the military administration.” p. 88.
33
Herbert Rowen, The King’s State: Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 55–56.
34
See, for example, Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (eds), “Introduction,”
in: R. Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (eds), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in
Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
35
Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1494–1660 (Oxford University Press,
1991), p. 331.
36
Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions: Essays in Early Modern European
History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 166. See also Ronald G. Asch
and Adolf Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991); and Sharon Kettering, “Patronage in Early Modern France,” French
Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 839–62. On the related institution
fact has profound implications for the nature of authority in the early
modern world. As David Parrott explains:
The establishment of networks of patronage created a disincentive to weaken the
power of existing institutions, since it was through offering rewards to individuals
or groups within these structures that the ministers would hope to obtain
reciprocal support and assistance. Moreover, underpinning particular clientage
relationships was a general awareness of broader networks of established
influence extending through society which ought to be respected if government
based heavily upon the deployment of personalized relationships was to work to
the benefit of the center.37
The crown’s power was utterly dependent upon proper control of pat-
ronage; failure to do so led to revolt and civil war. These institutions of
patronage and clientage could have been and were utilized by the crown
to achieve its goals and to enhance its powers, but they implied restric-
tions and limitations upon its authority. As Donna Bohanan writes, “By
its reliance on personal relationships, brokers, clients, and vertical ties,
the crown revealed the limits of its institutional authority. Specifically it
revealed the personal nature of monarchical power.”38
The offices of the eighteenth-century army, even in Britain, were held
as the property of the officer – property for which there was an active
market. Regiments were commissioned by the crown but then recruited
by the proprietor-colonels who then used their own financial resources
(i.e. as an “investment”) to recruit soldiers and officers (who purchased
their commissions).39 The crown undertook to pay for these regiments
but even under the best of circumstances found itself under arrears to its
officer corps and therefore remained utterly dependent upon the nobility
to finance its military ambitions. In effect, the military organization of
early modern Europe was financed by the aristocratic officer corps who
expected to be rewarded for its services both financially, but perhaps even
more importantly, by being elevated in rank and status (titles were just as
coveted in the eighteenth century as they were in the eleventh). In a
society in which primogeniture prevailed, the officer corps (especially in
Protestant countries where clergy had lower social standing and auton-
omy than in the Catholic lands) was the primary outlet for younger sons.
Proprietor-colonels recruited soldiers and officers on the basis of
of brokerage see Sharon Kettering, “Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV,” Historical
Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 69–87.
37
David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 10.
38
Donna Bohanan, Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France (New York: Palgrave
McMillan, 2001), p. 151.
39
In Britain this was the case until 1870.
preexisting networks of dependency – just as their “feudal” forbearers

had. What had changed over time is that the crown regulated and
standardized unit size, uniforms, equipment, drill and the like. But the
crown could not simply dismiss incompetent officers or force them to
take orders from their social inferiors. What all of this amounted to, then,
was a system of military organization that was still a considerable distance
from that which we associate with modern states.
In summary, while there had been considerable changes in the nature
of military organization in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth
centuries, these did not amount to the emergence of a bureaucratic
officers’ corps, much less of a modern army. The basic nature of military
recruitment remained based on contractual forms heavily infused with
notions of property. In this sense, the armies of the eighteenth century
were still fundamentally like their forbearers of the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries. To be sure, the armies of the eighteenth century were
more professional and more disciplined than those of earlier times. But
the crown was still quite dependent upon the aristocracy for military
recruitment and finance in many states. The military bureaucracy, like
its civilian counterpart, remained based on patron–client relations in a
society in which political power continued to be held and transmitted as
property. It was only in the course of and as a consequence of the French
Revolutionary wars that modern army emerged.
Conclusion: “Family Values” and the “Rise of the West”

At least since Weber, the “rise of the West” has been a perennial question
in the social sciences. Over the last century, many different answers have
been given to it.40 Amongst the most provocative – and pernicious – is
what might be called geopolitical Darwinism, the claim that the strong,
stable and democratic states of the modern West are an unintended by-
product of a millennium-long struggle for existence on the European
subcontinent. In this vein, some addle-headed commentators have gone
so far as to suggest that the best solution to chronic political instability on
the African continent is for the US, the EU and the UN to stop meddling
and “give war a chance.”41 This suggestion is not only morally execrable
but historically unfounded as well, and for at least two reasons.
40
For a representative sampling, see Douglas North, Institutions, Institutional Performance
and Economic Change (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Eric L. Jones, The European
Miracle (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence
41
Edward Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 78, no. 4 (July–August
1999), pp. 36–44.
The first is that war alone can hardly explain the emergence of the
European system of strong and stable states. As we have seen, state
consolidation in premodern Europe was neither solely nor even primarily
the result of predatory conquest. Moreover, military conflict within Latin
Christendom was in fact governed by various written and unwritten
rules, which distinguished limited and total war and delineated the
preconditions appropriate to each. These rules, finally, were encoded
and adjudicated by an “international institution”: the Roman Catholic
Church. This is not to deny that there were, in fact, some predatory
rulers who flouted international conventions, then as now. Rather, it is to
insist that they were not the driving force behind state consolidation.
That role fell to the family men – the ambitious dynasts who used marital
strategies and limited wars to enlarge their princely patrimonies over
successive generations. Thus, we concur with Michael Mann’s conclu-
sion that the distinctive feature of premodern geopolitics on the Euro-
pean subcontinent was “relative pacification” under Roman auspices,
rather than unbridled conflict under conditions of “anarchy.”42
The empirical shortcomings of the neo-Darwinian model and explana-
tory power of the neo-Malthusian alternative become even clearer when
we compare Latin Christendom to other major civilizations. Up until the
late tenth century, the European political order was whipped to and fro
between the extremes of feudalism and empire. The introduction of the
new family regime moderated these tendencies and in two ways: first, by
establishing clear rules about dynastic succession, it greatly decreased
fratricidal strife within the ruling houses; second, by declaring that legit-
imate succession was limited to the male offspring of monogamous
marriages, it instituted a demographic lottery that would gradually
winnow the ranks of the great dynasties. In other words, it created a
system in which there was an inherent propensity towards state consoli-
dation by non-violent means. Tendencies towards empire, meanwhile,
were moderated (if not eliminated) by high levels of dynastic intermar-
riage and by the rules of war that obtained between social peers within
Latin Christendom. Such empires as there were in post-Carolingian
Europe were therefore the product of clever marriage strategies, demo-
graphic good fortune and external conquests, first on the non-Christian
frontiers and then in non-European lands.
Ironically, territorial conquest was the main mechanism of empire
building everywhere in Eurasia with the exception of Latin Europe. The
Roman, Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal empires (to name but a few) are
42
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1: A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
all classic examples of conquest territorial states. The Ottoman Empire,

which is very much like all other Near Eastern polities, provides a good
example of how conquest, and only conquest, is the mechanism under-
lying territorial consolidation. In the thirteenth century the Ottomans were
one of dozens of minor principalities that emerged out of the ruins of the
Anatolian Rum Seljuk Empire. Between 1281 and 1362, under the lead-
ership of Osman I and his son Orhan, the Ottoman principality expanded
from being an insignificant nomadic Turkish principality on the Byzantine
frontier to being a major marcher sultanate. It expanded, by conquest, into
the remnants of Byzantine Anatolia by attracting to its standards Turkic
nomads and Islamic adventurers of varying stripes in search of booty
(including slaves) and holy war.
If war as such is insufficient to explain state consolidation in premo-
dern Europe, it is equally insufficient to explain state bureaucratization.
In the bellicist model, bureaucratic forms of office holding are seen as an
instrumentally rational response of strategically minded rulers to
mounting geo-political pressures. On this account, we would expect that
bureaucratization would begin in the military itself, spread to other parts
of the state, and then diffuse throughout society as a whole. In empirical
fact, this is not at all what we observe; indeed, it is very nearly the
opposite of what actually occurred. As we have seen, bureaucratic office
holding first arises within the church, spreads to the secular branches of
the state, and then, finally, to the military command structure itself.
The error in the bellicist account is not simply an empirical one,
however; it is a theoretical one as well, concerning the mechanisms that
most commonly underlie institutional innovation. When confronted with
a problem of some sort, even the most instrumentally rational actors do
not choose from an infinite set of potential solutions; rather, they work
with a limited stock of tools specific to their particular domain. “Bureau-
cracy” was simply not in the standard tool kit of the sixteenth-century
prince. So how did it wind up there by the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries? Most immediately, through a process of borrowing from
another institutional domain: the church. How then did it find its way
into the ecclesiastical repertoire? Obviously, we cannot provide any
definitive answer to that question in this chapter, and we will not try to
do so. But the fact that it first arose within the Roman Church is probably
not accidental. After all, the bureaucratic ideal is deeply intertwined with
the priestly ideal in ways that Nietzsche would have well appreciated. For
example, both involve celibacy: while the priest renounces biological
reproduction, the bureaucrat renounces political reproduction; the bur-
eaucrat is legally gelded and, in some instances, physically gelded as well.
Similarly, both entail a reverence for rules, ritual rules in the case of the
sacramental priest, and procedural rules in the case of the state bureau-
crat, with the ethical rules of the Protestant pastor serving as a conceptual
as well as historical intermediary. Nor is this connection historically new
or specifically Western. Priestly and administrative functions were closely
related in Ancient Greece and Rome, of course, and not only there.
Consider the case of the Confucian “literati,” the class of priest/scholar/
administrators from which most Imperial officials were drawn. These
examples could easily be multiplied.
Christian conservatives often claim that “family values” are the cul-
tural foundation of Western civilization. As it turns out, they are not
entirely wrong. The “rise of the West” turns out to have a good deal to do
with family regimes and religious values. Not that this should be surpris-
ing of course. Kinship and religion are arguably the most elementary
building blocks of social life, without which, what we know as “social
life” simply would not have emerged. Only someone who imagines that
social life is a Darwinian struggle between predatory monads could make
such a mistake. While the Darwinians may have a better understanding
of the origins of biological life, the Christian right may actually be closer
to the mark on the origins of social life.
Part III
Omissions
5 The Space of State Formation
Jeppe Strandsbjerg
Copenhagen Business School
Introduction1
The territorial definition of sovereignty appears as a defining characteristic
of the modern state. In Historical Sociology (HS) it is often the territorial
characteristic that distinguishes the state from other types of political
organisation, and in the International Relations (IR) discipline it is the
formal territorial demarcation of sovereignty that is conventionally set as
a defining moment for the occurrence of modern politics. The transition
towards a territorial organisation of rule implied a change in the relation-
ship between space and politics. This meant that territory acquired a
defining role for the extension of sovereignty and that the defining
character of the borders gained increasing importance vis-à-vis the urban
and courtly centres of power. The problem, however, is that the literature
that has been concerned with the development of the modern state has
been surprisingly quiet with regard to what constituted the spatial condi-
tions for the territorialisation of state power. In response, I argue that the
development of the modern state depended on and was conditioned by a
shift in cartographic practices, which, in effect, transformed the spatial
conditions of statehood.
The literature that has been concerned with the relative autonomy of
the state vis-à-vis the economy, following a Weberian intellectual legacy,
has emphasised territory as a central element of the definition of the state.
Yet, at the same time, this literature has emphasised practices of compe-
tition, warfare, and bureaucratisation – just to mention a few – but has
paid very little attention to the spatiality of the state.2 This is the case with
1
I would like to thank my young son Elmer for his offer to write this chapter for me. One day
during writing I absentmindedly complained that it was difficult to write that day. To which
he replied: “I can write it for you!” It is beyond me to say whether it would have improved the
quality had I taken up the offer. In addition to Elmer, I would like to thank the participants at
the two workshops leading to this volume as well as my younger colleagues who commented
on a previous draft during a department seminar in Paris 2010.
2
See the Introduction of this volume for an overview of the different intellectual traditions.
127
128 Jeppe Strandsbjerg
Charles Tilly’s celebrated study of state formation, where he dedicated

a good half chapter discussing the ‘available answers’ within a matrix
of internal/external origins of structure and the relation of the state to the
economy.3 Such debates over social causality tend to neglect, however,
the relationship to the physical environment, and how it became possible
for rulers and merchants to extend their range of action in space. Gener-
ally, the literature has considered space as a historical constant; a flat
surface on which social practice unfolds. It is important, here, to stress
that I distinguish between space and territory as several studies empha-
sise the changing nature and role of territory. Thus, I suggest that
the avoidance of space in the literature leads to a neglect of the
changing spatial conditions that allowed the development of sovereign
territorial state.
What I seek to do in this chapter is to disturb the conception of space
as a natural container for social action. In order to do this, and bring
space back into the study of state formation, space should be considered
a historical social construct, yet at the same time, kept analytically
separate from the state. In doing this, I draw on Bruno Latour4 who
provides a theoretical framework for analysing different ‘cartographic
technologies’ as practices that establish historical specific spatial realities,
as well as a group of scholars who have been concerned with how
different ‘cartographic technologies’ have transformed the spatial condi-
tions for the emergence of the modern state.5
Hence, the overall claim of this chapter is that the transformation of
the state was tied up with a transformation of space itself. I show that
cartographic change during the renaissance redefined space in a way that
allowed the state to become redefined as an abstract spatial entity.
Historically the territorialisation of the state involved an abstraction of
3
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), pp. 4–16.
4
Mostly on two main works: Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and
Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987); and Bruno
Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard
5
Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European
State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no. 2 (1999),
pp. 374–405; Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles
(Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Brian Harley and Paul Laxton, The New
Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001); David Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence
of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992); Jordan Branch, “Mapping the Sovereign State: Technology,
Authority, and Systemic Change,” International Organization, vol. 65, no. 1 (2011),
pp. 1–36.
The Space of State Formation 129
the state from the person of the ruler. Such an abstraction required a
notion of permanence that was to be written into the territory as embody-
ing the corporeal character of the state. At the same time, the spatial
definition of the state’s reach required that space was abstracted from
social relations more broadly. As implied by Michel Foucault, the con-
cept of society emerged within a sovereign territorial nexus.6 And such a
territorial definition of society requires an abstraction of space from the
understanding of social relations. Without abstraction, space could not
define social relations.
The argument put forward here invokes a complex relationship
between power and space which entails that political organisation is
always mediated by a particular configuration of space specific to its
particular historical context, while at the same time, space can be used
as a medium of power to reconfigure societal relations. In making this
argument, this chapter includes concerns that have been raised by
authors, such as Chandra Mukerji, Neil Brenner et al., and Paul Hirst.7
What these studies share is a concern with how the historical change of
space itself has influenced the possible configuration of the political, and
thus, the state. The implication of this argument is not so much to
challenge prevailing views of social forces behind state formation but to
point out that there are processes which, historically, have been crucial
for state formation that are not necessarily captured by analysing prop-
erty relations, capital accumulation or preparation for warfare. This
broadens the view of what should be included in the historical socio-
logical analysis of state formation.
The Theoretical Problem of Space and State Formation

This chapter, then, is concerned with how it became possible to define
sovereignty in territorial terms. As noted by Gianfranco Poggi, in “the
course of the development of the modern state, that relationship ceases to
be thought of as one of ownership: as an Italian jurist suggests, the state
does not have a territory, it is a territory”.8 This is another way of saying
that the relationship between state and territory changes from a state (or
lord) owning territory to the state being defined in terms of its territory:
6
Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
College de France, 1977–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
7
Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, p. 35; Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop et al. (eds), State/Space:
A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); and Paul Hirst, Space and Power: Politics, War and
Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
8
Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Oxford: Polity, 1990),
p. 22.
“Whereas medieval and early modern political theorists thought of states

as mainly social entities that possessed a territorial expression, Poggi
maintains that the state of high modernity increasingly became viewed
as a territorial entity in and of itself”.9 This also reflects the difference
described by the geographer Edward W. Soja between the modern state,
where society is defined by a territorial space, and most traditional
societies, where it is the extent of the social network that has defined
the space of such a society. The latter he calls a “social definition of
territory rather than a territorial definition of society”.10 In its most
abstract formulation this distinction signals a concern with the extent
to which a predefined territory defines social relations, for example,
whether inclusion is defined in territorial terms.
The Territorial State

The concept of territory is central for most definitions of the so-called
modern state. To repeat Max Weber’s famous definition, the “state is
that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly
of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this ‘territory’
being another of the defining characteristics of the state”.11 However,
as I will show, few sociological theories defining the state in territorial
terms take the spatiality of territory into account: what kind of space is
territory; what are the spatial assumptions preceding territory? By his-
toricising the constitution of political orders, HS has problematised,
conceptually elucidated, and empirically investigated the sovereign
territorial state. However, as Jens Bartelson has argued, macro-
sociology struggles to unveil adequately the historical politicization of
space and spatialisation of politics.12 It is as if territory has become yet
another institutional feature of the state while ignoring its essential link
to the environment13 as a spatial concept. Territory is often talked
9
Rhys Jones, People/States/Territories: The Political Geographies of British State
Transformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 26.
10
Edward W. Soja, “The Political Organization of Space,” Commission on College
Geography, resource paper no. 8 (Washington DC: Association of American
Geographers, 1971), p. 13.
11
Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in: Peter Lassman and Ronald
Speirs (eds), Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 310–11.
12
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 40.
13
I use this term to refer to the material environment even though it is probably impossible
to make this reference without the historically coded values and dispositions that mediate
this relationship. I use the terms environment and landscape interchangeably despite the
specific values associated with the term landscape as an early modern way of seeing
the world. See Kenneth Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s
about as a bounded or demarcated part of the terrestrial surface. Yet,

territory can never in and of itself be a natural space because it is always
tied with a notion of power and a characterisation of the social; and
second, this social power relationship is conditioned by the way in
which space is constructed as real. In order to capture this relationship
between power and the landscape, I argue, sociology has to incorporate
a spatial dimension in the analysis of territory.
Territory plays a central role in Tilly’s study of state formation in
Europe. First, he defines states as “coercion-wielding organizations
that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise
clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within
substantial territories”.14 Second, territory is also part of the struggle
out of which states emerge: “states always grow out of competition for
control over territory and population”, and hence they invariably
appear in clusters, and form systems.15 Tilly describes the process by
which state rulers established coercive means, and deprived the civil
population of the same, fortified boundaries and thus made clearer
divisions between internal and external politics, and he suggests that
Weber’s notion of the state started to make sense up through the
seventeenth century; or that we start to recognize this image of the
state.16 However, the processes Tilly describes are taking place on a
smooth surface of space – a surface, which can be bounded and
controlled, but he remains silent on the processes of ‘planning this
surface’. Territory is considered a generic thing containing the same
meaning over time.
There is a stronger spatial presence in the theories of Michael Mann
and Anthony Giddens even if they still do not explore the particular
spatial condition of statehood. Mann conceptualises society as a socio-
spatial network of power17 and political power is necessarily centralised
and territorial, and it revolves around a dual spatiality. Domestically,
political organisation is territorially centralised and bounded, whereas
externally, political organisation is geopolitically organised in a system
dominated by such features as empire, or a multi-state civilisation.18
Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison; London: University of Wisconsin Press,

2002); and Denis Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape
Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 10, no. 1 (1985), pp. 45–62
for excellent examples of the emergence and effect of the idea of landscape in early
modern Britain.
14
Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), p. 1. 15
Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), p. 4.
16
17
Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 1.
18
Mann, The Sources, pp. 11, 27.
Mann provisionally defines the state (modifying Weber) as: “a differen-

tiated set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality, in the
sense that political relations radiate outward to cover a territorially
demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and
permanent rule making, backed up by physical violence” (italics
removed).19 There are clear spatial connotations in Mann’s differenti-
ated conceptualisation of power,20 and Mann rightly emphasises that
different state forms require different territorialities. For example,
he argues that the ständestaat requires a more ‘solid’ and universal
territorial space compared to the feudal state because it depends on
the territorial coordination of autonomous actors.21
Like Mann, Giddens’ writings on the state are concerned with an
inherent spatiality, yet he abstains from discussing how political power
interrelates with space. What remains is this predominant notion that
space is a stable playing field for social practice. He defines the state as
“a political organization whose rule is territorially ordered and which is
able to mobilize the means of violence to sustain that rule”22; and he
identifies the changing notion of political boundaries as being a crucial
feature of the transition from traditional (or feudal) states to the
modern state. It was the transition from frontiers to boundaries that
were crucial for the development of the modern state. The territorial
form of the state is accentuated through the internal consolidation
of the state, “and it is during the period of absolutism that Europe
become altered in respect of states’ boundaries”.23 For medieval
rulers, territories were not necessarily continuous but scattered:
“[t]he centralization of political power associated with absolutism
was not a simple process of the expansion of effective control over
areas already nominally subject to the authority of the ruler. It
demanded substantial alteration in the external and internal frontiers
of states”.24 Now, it is exactly because there are so obvious spatial
dimensions in these writings on state formation that it appears all the
more striking that the concept of space is not engaged in a more
explicit manner. The processes of boundary making were important,
but they are presented as if they take place on a ‘flat surface’. Political
space is not only a question of drawing boundaries; to cite Stuart
19
Mann, The Sources, p. 37.
20
Felix Driver, “Political Geography and State Formation: Disputed Territory,” Progress in
Human Geography, vol. 15, no. 3 (1991), pp. 268–80, p. 273.
21
Mann, The Sources, p. 445.
22
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 20.
23
Giddens, The Nation-State, p. 85. 24
Giddens, The Nation-State, p. 89.
Elden, “it is the understanding of political space that is fundamental

and the idea of boundaries a secondary aspect, dependent on the
first”.25 And there is a profound lack of attention given to how space
itself is transformed over time, and how this spatial transformation
played a significant role in state formation.26
In a sense, Hendrik Spruyt’s new classic The Sovereign State and Its
Competitors27 is representative of the absence of space within HS. It is
concerned with structural change and competition between different
kinds of political organisation. Spruyt emphasises the transition from
non-territorial to territorial modes of rule; yet, he quite explicitly
leaves out what he would call cultural explanations28 in the explan-
ation. Even though territory is defining for the transition, he neverthe-
less remains quiet about what constitutes the conditions for
establishing a spatially structured (territorial) organisation of rule. As
such he follows in the footsteps of the work of historical sociologists
from the 1970s and 1980s where, as discussed above, there – qua the
concern with the autonomy of the state was a move towards a more
territorial conception of state power. However, “cultural analysis was
early deemed unnecessary or superfluous to this brand of political
history, [and] there was little incentive to pursue questions of land
and identity”.29
25
Stuart Elden, “Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of
the World,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 30, no. 1 (2005),
pp. 8–19, here at p. 11.
26
This is the case despite Giddens being widely credited for placing time and space at the
heart of social theory. In his writings on time-space distanciation it is emphasised how
different constellations of space and time characterises different kinds of society.
Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction
in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979); The Nation-State; and Anthony Giddens,
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Volume 1: Power, Property and the State
(London: Macmillan, 1981). See also Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); and John Urry,
“Time and Space in Giddens’ Social Theory,” in: C. G. A. Bryant and D. Jary (eds),
Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation (London: Routledge, 1991),
pp. 160–75. As poignantly commented by John Urry: “Giddens’ own formulations are
highly frustrating, in the sense that they index some important issues but do not provide
the basis for developing a really worked out position.” The general problem, according to
Urry and Derek Gregory, is that Giddens emphasises time over space and that he
generally fails to engage with how space, and not least different spaces, are produced.
Derek Gregory, “Presences and Absences: Time-Space Relations and Structuration
Theory,” in: D. Held and J. B. Thompson (eds), Social Theory of Modern Societies:
Anthony Giddens and His Critics (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 185–214.
27
28
This was stressed by Spruyt in private email exchange November 2011.
29
Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, p. 314.
The Nature of Space

The problem is that space as anything other than an abstract container
matrix in which social relations unfold, expand or stretch is considered to
lie beyond historical sociological theory. For two reasons I would sug-
gest. Either space is considered the stuff of geographers and, given its
material nature, not something that can be adequately theorised within
social theory. Or, in an attempt to bypass the materiality of space, space is
treated in terms of perceptions or different cultures of space. Yet, even
in this guise it has attracted little attention. Within Weberian HS,
cultural explanation has traditionally been downplayed. Heather Rae,
for example, pointed this out in her account of how violent homogeniza-
tion of populations has been an integral feature of European state forma-
tion.30 Though even in contributions prioritising cultural dimensions, no
one seems to set space as a central category for understanding modern
state formation. Philip Gorski ascribes a central role to Calvinism and the
reformation for the study of disciplining bodies31 and Daniel Nexon’s
The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe32 emphasises the particular
role of religion and ideas in the transformation occurring during the early
modern period.
In contrast, I will emphasise Chandra Mukerji’s point that we cannot
grasp the political significance of land without a conceptual language for
grasping the tie to the land.33 This is to say that we need a conceptual
language for articulating the relationship between what are usually con-
sidered social and natural sides of geography. Maintaining such a cul-
ture/nature divide would ascribe either too little or too much causality to
space. Seen as an outcome of social – in the sense of human – relations,
space would tend to be socially over-determined and thereby lose its
material qualities in the analysis. This often happens in arguments about
social space where the concept of space simply takes up the role of a
concept describing a set of social relations. While this is not without
merits, such a conceptualisation misses the material quality of land. If
space is seen as a natural geography, on the other hand, it would tend to
lead to a natural determinism, which would be equally – if not more –
problematic for understanding territory. Equally, relating this discussion
30
Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
31
Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early
Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
32
Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict,
Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton; Woodstock: Princeton
33
to a common social science lingo of variables, space would sit uneasily

within a theory of state formation. As an independent variable space
would tend to turn into natural determinism; as a dependent variable
space would tend to be the outcome of the process that we seek to
explain. In sum, we need to explore possibilities for analysing the spati-
ality of territory in a manner that goes beyond the social science world of
variables as well as a prevalent culture-nature divide that is ever present
in sociological theory.
At this point, I would like to briefly stray into the philosophy of science
just to show how deeply ingrained this culture/nature divide is in the
social science tradition where there is a fundamental divide when it
comes to whether the reality of space is a priori or a posteriori to social
action. In the positivist tradition, to the extent that it is a meaningful
category, space is a given natural presence. In the European tradition,
knowledge of space has been tied up within a ‘cartographic reason’,34
which emphasised the geometrical and rational nature of space. The
classical self-understanding of cartographic practice was to provide
increasingly accurate representations of the surface of the Earth.35 The
representation of the world that results from such a process is one only
made up of space; the physical features of the landscape depicted
according to a conventional iconography. In this view space is seen as
something with three dimensions, and something that is a container of a
social action. All actions take place in space and space precedes social
action by virtue of being a natural given.
The naturalised view of space has been heavily criticized from
Phenomenological, Marxist and Constructivist positions. In its ori-
ginal articulation phenomenology represented an attempt to create
new foundations for scientific knowledge through investigating the
conditions for experience. Criticizing the Kantian notion of time and
space as a priori categories, and the Cartesian divide between mind
and reality, phenomenology focused on the mind, meaning-structures
and the body. In Merleau-Ponty’s articulation, the body precedes
consciousness, and hence reason; and space can then no longer be
seen as absolute. In his words, space “is not the setting (real or logical)
in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of
things becomes possible [. . . and then . . .] we must think of it as the
34
John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World
(London: Routledge, 2004).
35
See, for example, R. A. Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries.
A Revised Edition of ‘Old Decorative Maps and Charts’ by A. L. Humphreys (London:
Spring Books, 1965), p. 1.
universal power enabling them to be connected”.36 In Merleau-

Ponty’s phenomenology, then, space is not a prior container to things
but is rather a relational phenomenon and something that exists due to
the objects and subjects that are connected.
Whereas phenomenology aimed to find foundations for scientific
knowledge, it was the marriage between rational planning, state reason,
and the particular abstract and absolute understanding of space that was
the target of critical, though phenomenologically inspired, writings on
space in the post-war years. The aim was generally to break the idea that
the concept of absolute and abstract space was the only true one to
inform socio-political scholarship and politics. In the historical material-
ist writings of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, space is rendered a
social product; an outcome of general social constellations. In Harvey’s
account space changes with modes of production. Space is then linked
up with a broader theory of the economy and society. Ultimately it is
class relations and production that decide what space is. As he argues,
“each social formation constructs objective conceptions of space and
time sufficient unto its own needs and purposes of material and social
reproduction and organizes its material practices in accordance with
those conceptions”.37 In parallel to the developments of discourse theory
from the Marxist tradition, increasing emphasis has been given to space
as a discourse emphasising meaning constructions of space. Rather than
material (re-)production, language and representational practices are
prioritised as spatial constructors.
As argued above, HS has generally ignored the concept of space.
The rationalist/positivist conception of space as absolute and separate
from the social realm has been dominating; and even though notions
of boundaries and the creation of social spaces have found a role in,
for example, Giddens’ and Mann’s writings, these authors still present
processes of state formation as taking place against a stable geograph-
ical backdrop. In contrast to this, the writings discussed in this section
were all critical of positivism’s container perception of space, and they
strived to move away from a perception of space as “an immobile
closed system” and instead understand space as “an open ongoing
production”.38 Categorised somewhat crudely, we can say that the
temporal transformation of space is conceptually linked to (1) the
36
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Classics,
2002), p. 284.
37
David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical
Imagination,” in: S. Daniels and R. Lee (eds), Exploring Human Geography: A Reader
(London: Arnold, 1996), p. 444.
38
Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005), p. 55.
body and structures of experience (phenomenology), (2) modes of -

production/forms of, and (3) discursive power/meaning creations. In
practice, though, these approaches have worked to solidify the nature/
culture divide; either space is seen as ‘nature’ (and thus beyond social
theory), or it is seen as ‘culture’ (and thus derived from social prac-
tice). And this is particularly problematic when we investigate modern
spatiality. While positivists generally maintain the geometric and
abstract conception of real space, the critics, on the other hand, have
been keen to show the social constructedness of an abstract spatiality.
Yet they tend to do that by making space a derived category of other
social practices, and hereby it becomes analytically difficult to main-
tain space as a conditioning phenomenon.
The key to my argument here is that if we assume that the social
transformation of space over time is a result of changing practices of
accumulation or warfare then we easily ignore the extent to which the
very transition of space allowed the former changes to take place. For
example, it is often argued that the spreading of a European capitalist
system to the entire globe had the effect to unify the globe as an
abstract unified space open for capitalist practices. Such an argument,
however, ignores how space has to be turned into an abstract and
autonomous sphere before such capitalist relations of exchange could
be established,39 and it is, then, exactly the specific production of
space as an abstract, yet real, category that should be the object of
investigation. This is a crucial point because the organisation of global
capital, and the international system of sovereign states may all rely
on, and support, a notion of space abstracted from everyday percep-
tions, but this is not a sufficient explanation of how space itself has
been rendered abstract.
This, in other words, is an argument for the necessity of maintaining
space as an analytically autonomous concept while simultaneously
treating space as a social construction. As I will demonstrate later, for
the state to be identified as an abstract spatial entity it requires that
space is rendered autonomous. Yet, at the same time, as I will show,
space is also a historical concept that changes over time, and therefore,
should be theorized as being socially constructed. This is the reason
that I posit cartography as a technology that serves to establish historic-
ally particular spatial realities. Cartography is obviously a social practice
in the sense that it is an expression of how a particular society makes
spatial representations, but it is also ‘social’ in a wider sense that breaks
39
Latour, Pandora’s Hope, p. 28.
the dichotomy between culture and nature; as a technology, cartog-

raphy represents the encounter between human perception and the
landscape. Cartographic imagery not only represents ‘ideas’ about
space, it also represents a meeting with the landscape, and in that sense,
the landscape – the physical geography – also determines this imagery.
And in that respect we can read the history of cartography as a history
of space.
Cartography and Spatial History

In Territorial Ambitions, Mukerji states her aim to unearth “fundamental
cultural dimensions of material relations whose consequences are not
so much mediated through thought or language as located in an
ordering of the material world itself”.40 Getting much inspiration from
Bruno Latour and his science studies/Actor-Network Theory (ANT),
Mukerji investigates how technologies of space; of measuring,
moulding, building, and representing, are involved with a new culture
of land. In this sense, the theoretical problem of space and state forma-
tion can be addressed through technology. Not in a narrow sense
focusing only on instruments and how they work but rather more
broadly emphasising technology as social practice covering both instru-
ments, ideas, agency, and social networks. This suggests an ANT-
inspired approach to space and state formation. From such an
approach, it follows that the power of mapping could be seen as the
ability to create particular spatial realities. Crucially this is not about
maps representing or misrepresenting reality or about how maps can be
used for propaganda purposes. There is a more subtle power of maps
which is expressed by the mundane fact that maps create spatial realities
while at the same time, of course, being social constructions.
Following the writings of historical cartographer Brian Harley, we
can distinguish between two kinds of power when reading cartographic
history: First, epistemic power determines what kind of space is produced
through cartographic practice. It is a form of discursive power that
decides what is considered to be the proper way of mapping, what is a
map, how it is made and so forth. These principles prescribe the rules
for cartographers’ interaction with the landscape. Second, the power of
authorship describes who is in a position to make maps and who is
excluded from this process. Furthermore, with inspiration from
Latour, I read the history of cartography as a field-laboratory practice
40
in which networks of cartographers, instruments, and sites in the land-

scape gradually are assembled into a new spatial reality. This means
that the field represents the landscape – that non-human element
of spatial assemblage that is surveyed and connected to the laboratory
in which calculations and the drawing of spatial representations
take place.
A Cartographic Transition
The period from 1450 to 1650 witnessed what has been dubbed a
‘cartographic revolution’ in Europe changing the ways in which space
was represented and conceived. The argument that I will pursue subse-
quently is that the new mode of modern, or more precisely, geometric
cartography41 altered the reality of space, and hereby altered the condi-
tions and possibilities for political organisation. The shift in cartography
played out in the European context and became an essential part of
European expansion and conquest of the rest of the world. I will seek
to demonstrate how this transition facilitated new ways of controlling
territory, but also how the epistemic power of the European map pro-
duced space in a way that played a significant role for developing forms of
political organisation in Europe. The new cartography was characterised
by an emphasis on geometry and the ordering of space according to a
graticule of longitude and latitude. Space in this system was measured
based on the relative positioning of earthly and celestial objects as well as
the measurement of time difference for longitudinal distance. Such
ordering principles implied an abstraction of space from social and
symbolic significance that had previously determined the representation
of space.
41
The notion of modern cartography is misleading and can be subject to various criticisms
regarding the notion of modernity. The terms scientific, geometrical or mathematical are
more precise descriptions of what is known as modern cartography, and I will use these
terms interchangeably. I maintain this even though historians of cartography are likely to
disagree; Lloyd Arnold Brown in The Story of Maps (New York: Dover Publications,
1979), for example, states that “[s]cientific cartography was born in France in the reign
of Louis XIV (1638–1715),” and thus after the period I describe. Yet, I emphasise the
commencement of a move towards a cartographic theory and practice based on
astronomy and mathematics even if it took centuries before these technologies were
implemented and made systematic enough to be recognised as scientific in a
contemporary understanding. Along similar lines, Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin
Schmidt equate Ptolemaic with ‘scientific’. “Maps and the Early Modern State:
Official Cartography,” in: David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European
Renaissance, The History of Cartography, vol. 3 (University of Chicago Press, 2007),
p. 663.
The transition towards geometric cartography was a gradual one

that slowly replaced previous mapping regimes. Prior to 1400 there
was no single way of making maps in Europe but instead there were
different ways for different purposes. Most famous are the mappae-
mundi and the portolan traditions. Mappaemundi, such as the Hereford
Cathedral map and the Ebstorf map, comprised a representation of the
three known continents, narratives about different populations and the
most important urban centres, but they also represented biblical nar-
ratives, located Eden, and centred the map on Jerusalem positioned as
the navel of the Earth; which coincided with this world map being
imposed on a bodily figure of Jesus. The portolans were more practical
devices developing from around 1300 around the Mediterranean.42
They were navigational aids helping sailors to navigate and plan
routes. They would normally accompany written accounts with sailing
instructions and as such they depicted coastlines, cities and compass
bearings. There were many other ways of making spatial representa-
tions, but crucially spatial measures and representations were generally
linked to a notion of functionality (as with the portolans) or social
symbolic significance (as with the Mappaemundi). Thus, there was no
unified measure for, or standard for representing ‘space’ as a coherent
and uniform phenomenon.
These various traditions coincided with a functional mode of meas-
uring space in everyday practices. Larger distances were often meas-
ured in travel times.43 In a parallel fashion agricultural land was
measured in terms of labour time or the seeds that were necessary to
grow crops; tønde (barrel) indicated the area that could be sown with
the seeds of one barrel and plovland (carrucate) denoted the area that
could be ploughed in one day.44 When more uniform measurements
of land were needed, for example, in order to share out land between
peasants, this would usually be measured out with ropes, sticks and
chains.45 Finally, urban addresses were identified linguistically rather
than graphically, and no universal cartographic template existed for
locating people’s urban property.46
42
John H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance 1450–1650 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2000), p. 101.
43
Jacques Revel, “Knowledge of the Territory,” Science in Context, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring
1991), pp. 133–62, here at p. 148.
44
Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton; Guildford: Princeton University Press,
1986), pp. 29–42.
45
Svend Balslev and Hans E. Jensen, Landmåling og landmålere: Danmarks økonomiske
opmåling (København: Den danske Landinspektørforening, 1975), p. 16.
46
Daniel L. Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval
Marseille (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Knowing the Territory

In parallel fashion, knowledge of state territory was based on descriptions
of special characteristics of the landscape, and generally contained in a
textual form. From England, the Domesday Book represents a good
example of this, and in the Danish context we find the earliest known
record of the territory in Kong Valdemars Jordebog (King Valdemar’s
Cadastre) from 1231. It contains a very specific description of the tax
obligations of each shire and the købstæder (market towns) and, further-
more, lists the size of cultivated land in each shire as well as a description
of the king’s demesne.47 This indicates, of course, that there was a fairly
clear account of the territory in the thirteenth century but the question
is – referring back to Tilly’s definition of the state above – whether this
notion of territory is comparable in terms of how it relates to the state as a
defining characteristic. The cadastre provided a comprehensive descrip-
tion of the territory available to all literate people, but the listing of
islands, for example, would not give much of an idea about their location,
shape, and size unless one knew them already. Neither were there a
uniform template for representing the landscape and there were, as such
no unity to the territory. The description of the territory was as disparate
as the way in which it was constituted.
There was, as a rule, no legal or administrative unity to the various
geographical areas that made up the territory of a particular sovereign.48
John H. Elliot49 describes the state system in sixteenth century Europe as
made up by ‘composite monarchies’; a term that signals how state
territories are made up by disparate pieces of land in different legal
constellations. These territories were brought under the legal authority
of the state in various ways: marriage, conquest, negotiation, heritage and
so forth. What is significant is how these composite territories were
generally constituted through networked relations between sovereigns
and the nobility, family ties, urban councils and more. Gustafsson
describes how a potential king around 1500 in Scandinavia would have
to be elected by the council (the noble and ecclesiastical elite), accepted
by the estates (stænderforsamlingerne), and control the castles in order to
47
Svend Aakjær, Kong Valdemars Jordebog, udgivet af Samfundet til Udgivelse af Gammel
Nordisk Litteratur (København: Akademisk forlag, 1980); Erik Ulsig and Axel
K. Sørensen, “Studier i Kong Valdemars Jordebog - Plovtalsliste og Møntskat,”
Historisk Tidsskrift, vol. 81 (1981), pp. 1–25; Ole Fenger, “Kongelev og krongods,”
Historisk Tidsskrift, vol. 100, no. 2 (2000), pp. 257–84.
48
It can be problematic to use the term “territory” because medieval and Renaissance
writers very rarely used the term. Stuart Elden, “Thinking Territory Politically,” Political
Geography, vol. 29, no. 4 (2010), pp. 238–41.
49
John H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
be successful.50 It was the castles and urban centres that were key
positions to maintain territorial control and extract resources. Tilly notes
how cities provided an opportunity to collect revenues through customs
and taxes.51 All this indicates that the territory was constituted through
networks of people and sites. The surrounding landscape was less sig-
nificant; and it presented a barrier to social relations rather than a
connecting homogenous and unified space.
All the examples discussed above indicate that space, in general, was
derived from a social functionality. As a new geometric cartographic
reality of space, as will be discussed subsequently, gradually replaced
the plethora of spatial measurements of medieval Europe, measures
were standardised and defined in abstraction rather than through use.
And in this process space became established as an autonomous
category. This means that, in principle, space could be perceived with-
out reference to functional time or the immediate experience of the
environment. Instead of referring to social usage, defining space
became a matter of the relationship between celestial features and the
Earth; distances were calculated by degrees, triangles and the use of
geometry. And instead of locations being constitutive of space, they
became locations in space. Space came to be seen as a framework within
which to locate places and social relations. On an abstract level, then,
the mode of knowing space changed from functionality, literacy and
tradition to one of mathematics, observation and visual representation.
This way of representing space enabled a uniform visualisation of
territory which, so to speak, rendered it coherent and tangible in its
own right as knowledge of the territory changed from one based on
textual description to one based on visualisation. And hence, what
surveyors did was to transform the territory and turn it into another
kind of space than what existed before.
The effect this had on territory was profound. This abstraction of
space from its social use involved a conception of space as being
homogenous and infinite only disrupted by neat lines demarcating
property, the territory or the surface of the Earth conceptualised as a
geometric form. By implication of all space being within this boundary
being of the same kind, it became possible to think of territory as a
homogenous space. But cartography was not only about creating visions
of space but rather it represents a technological shift that allowed rulers
to control and exploit the countryside in a way that had not been
50
Harald Gustafsson, Gamla riken, nya stater statsbildning, politisk kultur och identiteter under
Kalmarunionens upplösningsskede 1512–1541 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2000).
51
possible before. It became possible to render the unknown space

between the populated areas into a known space subject to the same
administrative control from the capital as the traditional centres.52 New
technologies of capturing the landscape in form of spatial data in
accordance with the Ptolemaic rules of mapping were developed during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The ensuing spatial transform-
ation meant that territory was no longer constituted through a network
of regional centres in the guise of castles, towns and so forth but was
constituted at the boundaries referring to a single sovereign authority in
the capital. As such, territory became defined via borders and the
capital rather than locations within the territory.
Cartographic Territory
The cartographic revolution of the renaissance is frequently linked with
the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography into Latin during the first decade
of the fifteenth century.53 As Patrick G. Dalché has argued, however, the
initial interest in Ptolemy’s writings was motivated by a desire to under-
stand the time and lands of the ancient writers rather than an interest in
new representational practices.54 Only later were the technical prescrip-
tions for the projection of the terrestrial surface onto a sheet of paper
included in the translations. As such the translation of Ptolemy fed into
existing debates about the nature of space and how to represent it
adequately. Initially there was little direct state interest involved in those
discussions apart from the general patronage of scholars and scientists at
the various noble and royal courts. Generally it was during the sixteenth
century that European sovereigns started to pay serious attention to
cartographic projects in the quest to obtain new and better maps of their
territories.55 The question raised in the following is: who mapped the
Danish territory when? In other words, this is a question of the agency of
mapmaking.
52
Jeppe Strandsbjerg, “Surveying the Field of State Territory,” in: K. H. Nielsen,
M. Harbsmeier and C. J. Ries (eds), Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the
History of Fieldwork and Expeditions (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012), pp. 51–76.
53
Many studies follow as a standard reference Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance
Rediscovery (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
54
Patrick G. Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography. Cartography in the
European Renaissance,” in: D. Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, vol. 3
(University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 285–364.
55
For the most comprehensive description, see Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps;
David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance, The History of
Cartography, vol. 3 (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Mapping Denmark
It is not documented when exactly the Danish rulers turned their atten-
tion towards cartography. It has been suggested that it was a request by
the Danish king Erik af Pommern which led the Danish cartographer
Claudius Claussøn Swart to produce his Scandinavian addition to the
Ptolemy atlas in the fifteenth century.56 It was through this that Nordic
locations and place names first found their way into the standard publi-
cations on geography. Swart represents the novel episteme of mapmaking
by explicitly writing himself into a tradition where he, as an eyewitness,
possessed knowledge unknown by ‘the authorities’. In one of the key
texts, he states that “I, the Dane Claudius Claussøn Swart, [. . .] have by
meticulous drawing as well as written records aimed to give to the world
a true picture of said countries known to me by personal experience, yet
unknown to Ptolemy, Hipparch and Marinus”.57 Whether he acted on
behalf of the king, the outlet of his production came in the generally
scholarly circles of the renaissance. In the 1550s, however, it is known
that King Christian III asked professor in mathematics Marcus Jordan to
map all the kingdom’s provinces, islands, towns, castles, and so forth.58
In that, the Danish sovereign followed a general European trend where
states generally turned their attention to national – or territorial – map-
ping projects during the sixteenth century.59 Where previously, cartog-
raphy had a more ambiguous relationship to the courts and appeared to
operate in a more universal European scientific network as the example
of Swart above, the fifteenth century saw the establishment of specialized
offices charged with cartographic production.60 In the Danish case, the
cartographic efforts, however, seemingly remained more ad hoc as there
was no dedicated office to this endeavour. The first map to be published
in Denmark was made by Marcus Jordan in 1552. This map was to a
large degree based on previous sea charts.61 Taking its place in the
56
Axel A. Bjørnbo and Carl S. Petersen, Fyenboen Claudius Claussøn Swart “Claudius
Clavus”, Nordens ældste Kartograf (København: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes
Selskab, Høst & Søn 1904), p. 8.
57
My translation from “Jeg Danskeren Claudius Claussøn Swart [. . .] har ved omhyggelig
Tegning saa vel som ved skriftlig optegnelse søgt at give Efterverdenen et tro billede af de
mig ved Selvsyn nøje bekendte nedennævnte Lande, som var Ptolemæus, Hipparch og
Marinus ukendte” (quoted from Niels E. Nørlund, Danmarks Kortlægning (København:
Geodætisk Institut, 1943), p. 13. For more on Swart’s different sources see Bjørnbo and
Petersen, Fyenboen Claudius.
58
Bo Bramsen, Gamle danmarkskort en historisk oversigt med bibliografiske noter for perioden
1570–1770 (København: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1975), p. 52.
59
Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps.
60
Kagan and Schmidt, “Maps and the Early Modern State,” p. 662.
61
Nørlund, Danmarkts Kortlægning, p. 26.
European cartographic network, Jordan’s map provided the basis for the
map of Denmark in Ortelius’ famous Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Subse-
quently, in 1588, a map by Jordan – possible based on the surveying he
did following the king’s request mentioned above – appeared in Braun
and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum. It was printed in the fourth
volume of this first city atlas mirroring the title of Ortelius’ famous atlas.
However, it was not through the royal court but through Heinrich
Rantzau, who occupied a leading position within the nobility as head of
the Danish king’s administration in the Duchies Schleswig and Holstein,
and who provided the link between the publishers and Jordan. And
further, Danish territory was represented as part of a universal enterprise
to map the world, and thus not in a fashion controllable by the
monarch.62
Towards the end of the sixteenth century the state intensified its
engagement with cartography. Around 1580, a new project was
launched, involving the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, who was
supposed to provide a new and improved map of Denmark as part of
writing a new history of the country.63 This was supported by King
Frederik II, who ordered that Brahe should have access to all the maps
held in the King’s library. Surrounded by a group of people that became
prominent in the mapping of all the Scandinavian and North Atlantic
countries,64 Brahe was the first to utilise the method of triangulation,
which later became standard for scientific map making. The only direct
result of this, however, was a very precise map of the island Hven where
Brahe had built his workshop and castle Uraniborg.65 And after the
accession of Christian IV in 1588 to the throne, tensions grew between
Brahe and the king, and the disputes eventually made Brahe leave his
island fief.
Despite the meagre result in terms of published maps, Brahe’s work
greatly influenced cartography both in Europe and in Denmark. Sub-
sequent Danish cartographers working to map the territory would
draw on the work of Brahe who also influenced the famous Blaeu
62
Rather, as has been argued by Kenneth Olwig, the process was as much driven by the
ambitions of the powerful Rantzau family in their quest to unify and centralise Jutland.
Kenneth Olwig, “Skabte Henrik Rantzau Jyllands identitet?” in: Inge Adriansen and
Palle O. Christiansen (eds), Forskellige mennesker? Regionale forskelle og kulturelle særtræk
(Ebeltoft: Skippershoved, 2003).
63
H. Kragh, Dansk naturvidenskabs historie (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2005),
p. 285.
64
William R. Mead, “Scandinavian Renaissance Cartography,” in: David Woodward
(ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance, The History of Cartography, vol. 3
(University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 1790.
65
Nørlund, Danmarks Kortlægning, pp. 45–6.
cartographers who came to dominate Dutch cartography during the

seventeenth century. By 1623, Hans Lauremberg was employed as
professor at Sorø Akademi where he taught geometry, surveying and
the art of fortification. He was simultaneously appointed to map the
Danish realm.66 Lauremberg was granted access to all areas of the
kingdom and received a regular payment from the state. The king
followed the process closely and, in 1639, the head of the financial
administration, Corfitz Ulfeldt, received an order to make sure that
Lauremberg’s maps were engraved and published.67 Although the
actual destiny of Lauremberg’s body of work remains unknown, it is
likely that they have provided much of the cartographic information
that came to inform the first general map of Denmark produced by the
cartographer, mathematician and surveyor Johannes Mejer. In 1647,
he had been given the task, with a small crew, to provide a new general
map of Denmark.
Mejer based his work on the cartographic technology of Tycho
Brahe, Longomontanus and Lauremberg,68 and, as such, part of the
network of cartographic knowledge circulating between the courts.
Following royal orders Mejer was issued with a pass that requested
all official personnel to provide horses, carts, people and anything else
he needed to complete his map.69 Previously, Lauremberg had been
issued with passes that granted access to church towers and similar
highpoints that would enable the survey, and later, another surveyor,
Jens Sørensen, received a pass stating that all subjects of the king were
obliged to provide place names and necessary information to Sørensen
so that he could complete his cartographic endeavour.70 These passes
were significant and illustrate how knowledge of the territory was
mediated through local people. The king could not control the coun-
tryside directly, but he could control his subjects in the sense that he
could command them to provide knowledge and help the king’s rep-
resentative to get access to the sites needed to produce spatial data.
While the royal passes granted access to all areas of the territory and
obliged the locals to help the royal cartographer with access and local
knowledge, it was the role of the cartographer to use local knowledge
66
Peter Lauridsen, Kartografen Johannes Mejer: et Bidrag til ældre dansk Kaarthistorie
(Kjøbenhavn: Bianco Lunos Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri, 1888), pp. 56–7.
67
Nørlund, Danmarks Kortlægning, pp. 48–50.
68
Lauridsen, Kartografen Johannes Mejer, p. 6.
69
Lauridsen, Kartografen Johannes Mejer, p. 24.
70
Johannes Knudsen, Søkortdirektør Jens Sørensen “den danske Hydrografis Fader”
1646–1723: et Bidrag til det danske Søkortsvæsens Historie (København: Det Kongelige
Danske Søkort-Arkiv, 1918), pp. 46–9.
to bring the particular places back to the courts and their workshops in
order to provide a uniform territory in terms of spatial knowledge.
Curiously, Mejer’s map was submitted to the court exactly ten years
prior to the introduction of absolutism in Denmark. As such, the unifi-
cation of the territory was completed prior to the insertion of a universal
sovereign within a bounded territorial space. The timing might, of
course, be mere coincident but Mejer’s map provided the state with a
novel guide to the territory;71 it transformed the spatiality of the territory.
Mejer’s map completed the transition from a literary mode of knowing
the territory to a uniform cartographic one, which could abstract from
local knowledge and combine – assemble – these into a coherent frame-
work at the centre. This contributed to a centralisation of knowledge of
the territory, and hence, unifying authorship power and the state.72 The
transition from a literary to a cartographic mode of recording the territory
transformed the way in which space played a role in defining sovereignty.
Where previously sovereignty was a relationship between the ruler and
people, sovereignty came to describe the relationship to a particular
territory. Through the geometrically based mapping of the territory it
came to be assembled as a unified space abstracted from the social
functions and differentiation that had previously defined the territory
in, for example, Kong Valdemars Jordebog.
Cartography and Territorial Sovereignty

Few would dispute that the developments in cartographic technology
and representation affected the territorialisation of the state. The ques-
tion is, of course, how to capture this theoretically. Both in terms of how
we consider the relationship between cartography and territory, and also
in relation to the usual accounts of state formation. To begin with the
71
It should be noted, of course, that this was not a map of the entire territory of the Danish
state. In that case it should have included Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroese
Islands, various islands in the Baltic Sea, such as Gotland, as well as the small trading
colony Trankebar in India. While this fact has been somewhat ignored by the traditional
historiography of the mapping of Denmark, I have maintained this focus in order to keep a
more stringent narrative about the process of establishing a cartographic territory. It should
be mentioned, however, that mapping projects took place in the other parts of the realm as
well; sometimes by other cartographers, and sometimes by the same. Johannes Mejer, for
example, had an ambition to complete a Scandinavian atlas and undertook surveys in
Norway and published new maps of Iceland and the Faroese Islands. Mead,
“Scandinavian Renaissance Cartography”; Niels E. Nørlund, Færøernes Kortlægning: en
historisk fremstilling (København: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1944), p. 18; Niels E. Nørlund,
Islands Kortlægning: en historisk fremstilling (København: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1944), p. 33.
72
David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of
Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Newark: Harwood Academic, 2000), pp. 116–17.
former issue, the primary significance that I propose is that cartography

transformed the physical environment in a manner that was conditional
for the development of a territorialised notion of sovereignty. Scientific
cartography tied the various places of the realm together into a coherent a
unified space. Not only in terms of how it was perceived but, signifi-
cantly, through the surveying, recording and assembling the territory
according to a single scientific template. Through these cartographic
practices, surveyors interacted with the environment in a manner that
made it possible to perceive of geographical space as a united and
abstracted category. The abstraction of space is significant because it
allowed for territory to be perceived independently from the population
occupying it. In that sense the territory became the primary relationship
of sovereignty.
Peter Sahlins’ distinction between jurisdictional and territorial concep-
tions of sovereignty emphasise an important dimension of this. Jurisdic-
tional sovereignty, characteristic of medieval politics in Europe signifies a
relation between ruler and subjects, where jurisdiction took precedence
over territory, and where princes and rulers acquired rights to scattered
domains such as bishoprics, towns, fiefs and so on.73 As such, sover-
eignty was attached to subject and places rather than a territory. This
resonates with Elliot’s notion of ‘composite monarchies’ discussed
above. In all these examples, the spatiality dimension of sovereignty
followed as a product of social ties. Geographical space as an autono-
mous, natural referent of sovereignty did not exist as an independent
entity. It was only through the cartographic practices including
surveying, calculation and representation of the land that the terrain or
the landscape came to be seen as a unitary and natural referent of
sovereignty and an essential constitutive dimension of the state. Prior
to the advent of scientific cartography there was no technological appar-
atus that could assemble the geographical environment in a way that
made it possible to tie sovereignty to space.
In a recent article, Jordan Branch has argued that cartography was
crucial along three dimensions in the transition from medieval to modern
system of rule: (1) the homogenization of territorial authority; (2) the
linearization of political boundaries and (3) the elimination of nonterri-
torial forms of organization.74 He argues that ‘ideas matter’ and that the
new representational practices influenced how polities, sovereignty and
the land were thought about. Yet, there is a much more substantial point
73
Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley;
Oxford: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 28–9.
74
Branch, “Mapping the Sovereign State.”
to be made on the role of cartography and state formation if we make an

attempt to avoid the subject/object distinction as being defining for what
we can say about space in social theory. If we follow the convention that
geographical nature is a given then, of course, we can only analyse how
different ideas impact on how we interact with the environment. How-
ever, if we accept a conceptualisation of space in which both object and
human practices create a particular spatial reality; that is, both material
and ideational in common social science parlance, then the spatial trans-
formation that occurred during the Renaissance was not only a question
of mentality or ideas but was also a question of how the spatial conditions
for socio-political organisation – in the sense of how the environment
enable and constrain particular forms and modes of organisation –
changed.
Returning to the Danish case, the new mapping of the territory pro-
vided not only a comprehensive and total image of the extent of the realm
that could be comprehended and consumed in an instant as opposed to
the lengthy textual descriptions. The new cartographic technologies also
transformed the nature and the role, played by the countryside. From
being inaccessible land, the countryside was turned into a space that
could be measured, calculated and assessed from the capital or the
court.75 Following Den Skånske Krig 1675–9, a large-scale war where
Denmark sought to reclaim the areas they had lost to Sweden in 1658/
1660, the need to improve the state’s finances was acute.76 The newly
absolutist state sold off large proportions of its land to a new class of ‘new
nobility’ in order to raise cash, and importantly, it transformed the tax
system towards a direct tax based on landholding. In order to do this the
state launched a comprehensive standardized survey of the countryside
in order to improve its taxability.77 The result of this was Christian V’s
Land Register and it transformed the state’s ability to govern, and the
role, played by the countryside. Where previously, toll on travel or trade
routes had been much easier to carry out, the transformation of the tax
system boosted the state’s income massively. With this, geometric car-
tography changed the possible tax base of the country.
75
This notion bears on Latour’s idea of ‘Action at Distance’ developed in Latour, Science in
Action. I have used this elsewhere to discuss the Danish case. Jeppe Strandsbjerg,
Territory, Globalisation and International Relations: The Cartographic Reality of Space
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).
76
Carsten Due-Nielsen, Ole Feldbæk et al. (eds), Dansk Udenrigspolitiks Historie, vol. 1
(København: Danmarks Nationalleksikon, 2001), p. 404–16.
77
H. T. Heering, “Knud Thott og Forhistorien til Kristian V’s Matrikul,” Tidsskrift for
Opmaalings- og Matrikulsvæsen, vol. 13, no. 1 (1932), p. 14.
The effect of this increased ability to act at a distance not only concerned
the immediate taxability of the land, it also contributed to a change of the
extension of the state’s authority. Where previously the state was depend-
ent on intermediaries to govern distant spaces it became possible to do this
from the capital with a new centralizing administrative apparatus. Around
the same time when Johannes Mejer, as discussed above, was working on
his general map over Denmark, he became involved in a project with a
Caspar Danckwerth to write a chorography and genealogy over the
Duchies illustrated with Mejer’s maps. This became a politically contro-
versial enterprise. Danckwerth’s text spoke against the standpoint of the
king with regard to jurisdiction and sovereignty disputes over municipal-
ities, which Danckwerth described as being part of Schleswig. Frederik II
was furious and subjected the book to censorship, and Mejer engaged in a
rewriting of this history to save his relationship to the court.78 This
example illustrates how the new cartography became part of settlements
of authority between the king and the nobility often working in the king’s
favour to establish a uniform and transparent territory with more clearly
settled demarcations of authority and jurisdiction than had previously been
known. In these processes the inside/outside of the state’s authority grad-
ually came to coincide with the territorial boundaries of the state rather
than the particular places, towns, fortresses and so forth that had previ-
ously been the focal points of royal authority.
The general thrust of this argument is concerned with how a spatial
transition conditioned the territorialisation of sovereignty in early
modern Europe. Now, as I took issue with the war-thesis in HS more
generally in the opening of this chapter, it could still be possible to make
the argument that the processes described above were indeed driven by
either an economic or military, or geopolitical, rationale; and as such, the
transformation of space would still be caused by one of these variables.
This would, however, exaggerate a singular dimension of causal explan-
ation. First of all, there is a question of timing. The cartographic transi-
tion occurring in Europe from 1400 onwards was not initially
orchestrated by the state. European states generally became involved in
larger cartographic projects during the sixteenth century. Richard L.
Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt, for example, argue that there is close
connection between what they call ‘official cartography’ and the concept
of territorial sovereignty. They suggest that “[m]aps played a role in
marking territorial boundaries, in managing land usage, in rationalizing
fiscal instruments, and in preparing for military engagement”.79 But they
78
Lauridsen, Kartografen Johannes Mejer, pp. 67–81.
79
also confirm that “[t]he office of mapmaker, whether for the state or an
overseas company, indicates that cartography was becoming institution-
alized by the latter half of the sixteenth century, at the latest”.80 As such,
European states generally adopted and developed a technology that was
already in the making. And as seen from the Danish case, cartographic
projects were, for a long period, private-public engagements with varying
success seen from the state’s point of view.
Furthermore, the rationale for engaging in map making varied between
countries. Where French cartography is known to be state driven and
concerned with geopolitics, British cartography tells a different story
where great landholders played an active role in mapping their own
estates, but the state was somewhat less concerned with national surveys.
In comparison, Dutch cartography was fuelled less by war than by trade –
and comparably less centralized; whereas again, in Italy, defensive pur-
poses seem to have been a main motivation.81 In the Danish case it has
not been documented what motivated the cartographic enterprises in the
period discussed. And while there can be no doubt that cartography,
calculation of land and a new perception of geography was intrinsically
linked to military concerns,82 there are plenty of arguments suggesting
that the transition in the theory and practice of cartography was part of a
wider cultural spatial transition. John Hale points to a new way of seeing
and representing space in visual arts as an expression of a new approach
by Europeans to the world more generally.83 The emergence of a linear
perspective in this period entails a dramatic change in the representation
of space with regard, for example, to visual arts, fortification, and
cartography.84
This points to a general cultural change, and I believe it is somewhat
futile to identify a single cause for this wider transformation. And while
the discussion of causality bears fruit in terms of understanding the
dynamics behind social change, this will not shed light on how significant
this spatial transition was. Hence, I advocate a more autonomous view of
cartography for analytical purposes in order to understand how a par-
ticular spatial transformation altered the conditions for tying sovereignty
to the land. It was cartography specifically that established and
80
81
Kagan and Schmidt, “Maps and the Early Modern State,” pp. 664–8.
82
Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions.
83
See John R. Hale, Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 (London: Collins Sons & Co Ltd.,
1971), p. 51.
84
Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1600 (Oxford University Press, 1968); Max
Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969); Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery.
transformed the material environment in a way that made overseas

planning and coordination of space possible in a way it had not been
before. It was cartography that rendered space autonomous and made
possible a territorial definition of society that had not existed before. As
such, it was not technologies of communication, production or warfare
that provided the spatial underpinnings of a territorially organised state
system within a unified global space, as it is often claimed, but rather a
specific knowledge technology of space. Cartography did not invent
territory, but it changed the ways of producing territory, and in that
respect cartography conditioned and facilitated the formation of states,
empires and a global space during the early modern era. Although it was
not cartography that initiated or completed these changes, it is impos-
sible to understand how the reality of space was transformed in these
processes without the focus on cartographic theory and practice.
Conclusion
When sovereigns in Europe orchestrated large-scale mapping projects of
their territory during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they
adopted a set of new cartographic technologies that were already being
developed outside state institutions. As states became gradually more
involved in mapping projects they were, in effect, struggling to monopol-
ise the power of authorship in the processes of establishing a new spatial
reality. This spatial reality was characterised by a strict geometrical
calculation abstracted from social functionality and practices. Through
cartographic practice the landscape was mediated through this abstract
notion of space and, in effect, produced an abstract and autonomous
spatial reality. This meant that ‘real space’ could be thought of as an
autonomous and natural phenomenon that transformed the role space
played in relation to politics. As space was rendered autonomous it
became possible to demarcate sovereignty in spatial terms; the territory
became a fusion between sovereignty representing an abstract state
power and a novel understanding of the landscape. In this process other
relationships became subordinated to this sovereignty-space amalgam-
ation, and as such, it became possible to define the state, and other social
relations, within an over-arching spatial architecture of sovereign
territoriality.
While Tilly, and others writing within a Weberian sociological trad-
ition, have emphasised the role played by warfare in creating a pressure
on social organisations and eliminating organisations that could not
compete within a system characterised by geopolitical struggle, they have
largely ignored the relationship to the land and how new cultural
practices of space transformed the relationship between the state and

space. This begs the question about the relationship between cartography
and warfare. If war was the main cause behind cartographic develop-
ments, it could still be argued that warfare was the most significant cause
of state formation in early modern Europe. However, even though the
new cartography was utilized and developed in war and in preparation for
war, the new spatial technologies were not invented by military engineers
or generals. Warfare, as a structural process, put certain demands to
socio-political organisation but cannot in itself explain the spatial shift
that made the abstract spatialization of political organisation possible.
Rather, I have argued, to understand the historical trajectory of the
particular territorial power of the state, it is necessary to broaden the
view of what should be included in the sociological analysis of the state. It
is, I suggest, merely impossible to understand the spatiality of the
modern state without engaging in a theoretical discussion about the
relationship between geographical space and political organisation.
Having said that, there is still a theoretical and empirical need to study
further the relationship between cartography and war. Most existing
accounts are macro-studies with little focus on the agency and practices
transforming space, or they are specific historical cartographic studies
that lack the connection to sociological concerns with state formation.
There is seemingly a strong link between a new architecture of fortifica-
tions, a new territorial planning of fortifications, the use of geometry to
calculate the trajectories of cannon missiles and the use of geometry for
cartography. And as Mukerji has argued,85 there is a particular signifi-
cance of military practices moulding space for fortifications, capturing
and coding space for conquest, and reorganising the territory for defen-
sive and taxation purposes. But equally we find connections with a new
use of geometry in new urban planning, where streets become the organ-
ising grid as well as the means of locating subjects on street addresses; the
demarcation of property; navigation and so forth. I have argued for why it
is analytically beneficial to maintain the transformation of space through
knowledge technologies as an autonomous practice in order to investi-
gate the territorial definition of the state. While it is untenable to see
spatial transformation in the renaissance as being caused by warfare, it
remains, however, for further research to explain what particular role
warfare plays within this larger transformation of space.
85
Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions.
6 The Realm as a European Form of Rule
Unpacking the Warfare Thesis through the
Holy Roman Empire
Peter Haldén
Swedish Defence University
Introduction
Charles Tilly’s thesis that warfare was a crucial factor in the formation of
the sovereign state and its rise to pre-eminence in Europe – “the warfare
thesis” – is one of the most influential theories in historical sociology.
Nevertheless, it is crippled by several empirical and theoretical gaps. This
chapter argues that the warfare thesis conflates a number of distinct
questions, thereby obscuring key stages in and central elements of Euro-
pean state-formation. First, Tilly lacks a distinction between medieval
realms and states. Second, the dimension of political community and its
importance to state-formation is missing. Tilly’s definition of the state
encompasses a wide range of political forms, from early medieval realms
to postmodern welfare states which conflates the question of how polit-
ical organization above and beyond “lineage systems” were created and
the question of how modern state structures were created. Since the
nineteenth century the term “lineage system” has denoted a society that
lacks political institutions. Instead society is structured according to a
number of egalitarian (segmentary) groups whose cohesion and raison
d’être is based on real or fictitious kinship and common descent.1 The
term is problematic since it constructs the image of a very rudimentary,
undifferentiated and apolitical society. Not only does it carry undertones
of colonial exoticism, it also reduces societies to a single form of differ-
entiation. It is furthermore difficult to find empirical examples of such
societies. Consequently, I will consider it as a theoretical construct that
has served as an almost mythical boundary category of the state. If we
want to understand the historical process of state-formation as well as the
ideational and social preconditions of the specifically modern form of
1
For a critique of “lineage systems” see: Adam Kuper, “Lineage Theory: A Critical
Retrospect,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 11 (1982), pp. 71–95.
154
The Realm as a European Form of Rule 155
rule that we call the “state” we need to move beyond a theory that only
posits a dichotomy between “lineage systems” and states.
A medieval realm was a kind of political organization and, conceptu-
ally, it signified a political community above and beyond the individuals
and groups. The incorporation of the study of “realms” (i.e., Latin
regna, Swedish riken¸ German, Reiche, Danish rigen) fills two gaps in
the warfare thesis: it introduces a more nuanced understanding of the
stages in the formation of political organization in Europe, and it
focuses on the element of political community which is central to any
form of rule.2 The omission of both factors in the widely influential
warfare thesis creates problems for understanding the context and
preconditions of historical as well as contemporary state-formation.
My argument is based on an analysis of different stages in the history
of an entity that is largely ignored in Tilly’s works – the Holy Roman
Empire (HRE) of the German Nation.
Since significant aspects of the character and development of the HRE
cannot be explained by the warfare thesis its validity becomes doubtful.
However, the HRE can be used as a heuristic tool to identify theoretical
gaps in the warfare thesis and to refine it further. At no time did the HRE
correspond to a model of a unified state and neither did its component
parts, the principalities. Despite being involved in numerous wars,
mostly defensive and internal ones, it did not proceed down the path of
state-formation outlined in the warfare thesis. This omission is not only
an empirical gap in Tilly’s history of European state-formation; it also
produces theoretical gaps. By omitting the medieval HRE and neglecting
the Middle Ages, countries such as England and France are stripped of
an important contrasting comparison. The three were structurally similar
in the high Middle Ages, but later England and France developed states
while the HRE retained a polycentric form of rule. This process is
historically as well as theoretically important as it points to the distinction
between realm and state.
As noted, the concept “realm” is significant for two reasons: A realistic
understanding of the European history requires an intermediate stage
between pure (and thus apolitical) lineage systems and states. It is
necessary not just to establish that medieval polities were not states but
to conceptualize them in a way that enables comparative study. The
study of realms forms a part of an extended stage theory of the formation
of political organization. But the more fundamental reason is that we
have to understand the foundations of a public sphere in which politics
2
Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction
(Stanford University Press, 1978).
156 Peter Haldén
can be pursued. The concept “realm” highlights aspects of political

organization that are not covered by an institutional or functional defin-
ition of statehood. The realm was a political community, above and
beyond its individual members and a conception that bound them in a
framework of loyalty and legitimacy. The permanent community is dis-
tinct from organizational capabilities such as taxation, capturing capital,
coercing and warfare. Such functions, often described in a cybernetic
supply-and-demand fashion, can be organized in different ways and are
crucial in any form of political organization but they do not amount to an
exhaustive understanding of any form of rule. These capabilities were
deficient, absent or unjustly exercised during long periods of history.
Despite these weaknesses countries held together, and this cohesion was
due to the political community and the common trans-local and trans-
generational framework that diverse elite groups had internalized as a
part of their world view. In medieval Europe, this framework was formu-
lated as the realm. This entity formed the basis of mobilizing both loyalty
and dissent. It formed a referent which enabled nobility as well as
peasants to react to injustices and adversity with “voice”, in essence an
expression of “loyalty” rather than “exit”.3
European countries continued to understand and describe themselves
as realms long into the early modern age, that is, the golden age of state-
formation.4 The capacity to exercise the capabilities mentioned above
was built up within the community of the realm. This community and its
imagined, but nonetheless real, lifespan kept disparate organizations
together while central and local capacities of governance were created.
Creating capabilities put substantial pressure on the concord of these
organizations, and their concord cannot be explained by reference to
capabilities that were not yet in place.
No countries today understand and describe themselves as “realms”,
but the idea of a public sphere demanding loyalty and responsibility and
bestowing legitimacy is strong in most developed countries. The public
sphere and its political community has become connected to other
concepts, like the nation or the state itself – strictly speaking the organs
that perform certain routinized actions. If we want to be able to trace the
origins of today’s political organization and to track European (and
other!) countries through time we need a more detailed historical
3
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970); Robert Egnell and Peter Haldén, “Laudable, Ahistorical and Overambitious:
Security Sector Reform Meets State Formation Theory,” Conflict, Security and
Development, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 2009), pp. 27–54.
4
See, for example, Iver B. Neumann, “When Did Norway and Denmark Get Distinctively
Foreign Policies?” Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 42, no. 1 (2007), pp. 53–72.
description and conceptual apparatus capable of distinguishing between

the components in human societies. Only thereby can we create theories
of how they interconnect. Tilly’s conceptual apparatus and theory con-
flates different historical processes as well as different concepts and
functions. This leads to a logically difficult portrayal of the processes he
wants to describe.
The chapter is structured in the following way: Section 2 reviews the
warfare thesis and its treatment of the HRE. Section 3 deals with the
HRE during the early modern era (ca. 1500–1800) and demonstrates its
resilience and shows that neither the Empire as a whole nor its compon-
ent principalities were states. Section 4 shows that England, France and
HRE were realms with political communities before they acquired state
structures. Thereby the distinction between the question of realm-
formation and state-formation is demonstrated. Section 5 outlines in
greater theoretical detail the historical as well as contemporary problems
posed by Tilly’s concept of the state. In this section I propose a more
generic framework for analysing political orders as “forms of rule”.
Section 6 concludes the chapter.
Before moving on, a note on method is required. Because the argu-
ment covers a lot of historical ground in the short space of a single
chapter the empirical accounts will not be as detailed as the large subject
matter warrants. While this may strike specialists in the eras dealt with in
the chapter as much too brief, the long periods of time are necessary for
the theoretical argument.
The Warfare Thesis and the Absence of the Holy

Roman Empire
Tilly’s main research problem is “what accounts for the great variation
over time and space in the kinds of state that have prevailed in Europe
since AD 990, and why did European states eventually converge on
different variants of the national state?”5 Tilly’s answer is that Europe
as a continent was characterized by intense military competition. Prepar-
ation and organization for war required capacities for extraction and for
organization of the extracted resources. Over time, organizing bred
organization and states evolved and expanded as they involved them-
selves with the owners of the means of war and production.6
5
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), p. 32.
6
158 Peter Haldén
The focal points of Tilly’s work, states, are defined as coercion-wielding

authorities distinct from households and lineage groups that “exercise
clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substan-
tial territories”.7 Another more succinct definition reads “a distinct organ-
ization that controls the principal concentrated means of coercion within a
well-defined territory, and in some respects exercises priority over all other
organizations operating within the same territory”.8 According to Tilly,
between 990 and 1992 Europe was characterized by three different kinds
of state: tribute-taking empires, systems of fragmented sovereignty (such
as city-states and urban federations) and national states.9 The last
category, whose rise to preponderance is the central puzzle of the book,
is understood as a state that governs several contiguous areas through
centralized, differentiated and autonomous structures.10
Tilly admits that attempting such a grand sweep of history will inevit-
ably result in errors and omissions. However, the major point is whether
such omissions impact on the theory that is being advanced. As noted
above, this chapter contends that this is the case with respect to the HRE
of the German Nation. The HRE is not absent in Coercion, Capital and
European States; in fact, it is mentioned on several occasions, but always
in passing as a peripheral phenomenon whose structure and development
does not warrant lengthy explanation.
The major reference to the HRE is in connection with the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. In line with the standard view in International
Relations (IRs), Tilly sees the peace settlement as “the death-knell of
the Habsburg-dominated Holy Roman Empire” – and indeed of any
potential empire in Europe.11 The significance of the peace is seen, once
again in line with much thinking in IR, as laying in the consolidation of
the European system of national states. The main reason being that “after
the peace settlement’s precedent, individual German states carried on
diplomacy for themselves, instead of accepting the emperor as their
spokesman”.12 Behind this interpretation lies article VIII:2 of the Osnab-
rück treaty, something that we have reason to return to below.13
7 8
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 1. Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), pp. 130–1.
9 10
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 21. Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 2.
11
12
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 167. This statement is plainly wrong since the German estates
actually accepted the Emperor as spokesman and negotiator in several early modern
peace treaties, like Nijmegen 1679; Heinz Duchhardt, Gleichgewicht der Kräfte,
Convenance, Europäisches Konzert Friedenskongresse und Friedenschlüsse vom Zeitalter
Ludwigs XIV. bis zum Wiener Kongreß (Darmstadt, 1976), p. 36.
13
Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense (Treaty of Westphalia) German Translation 1984 by
Arno Buschmann Acta Pacis Westphalicae Supplementa electronica 2004 Treaty of
Only mentioned at times of its supposed irrelevance or even demise,

the HRE is not integrated in Tilly’s model. But what replaces this
silence? In his description of the players in the European system of states
only two of the actors contained in the HRE are included: “Austria”,
which is made to designate the possessions of the Austrian Habsburgs,
and Brandenburg/Prussia. Granted, of the actors in the HRE they were
the most significant powers militarily as well as diplomatically in the
European theatre. However, singling out the two powers that can
be made out to resemble national states of all the principalities of
the Empire while ignoring the continued existence of the Empire itself
creates an image of a Europe of national states (however defined) earlier
than what was in fact the case. It also carries undertones of an anachron-
istic projection of post 1871 Germany and post 1867 Austria-Hungary
backwards into history. The next section demonstrates both the
Habsburg possessions and Brandenburg were embedded within the
HRE until 1806. Constructing them as disassociated and autonomous
powers obscures the continued existence of a form of rule that does not
fit into any of the categories employed by Tilly.
Perhaps inevitable in such a rich work, far-reaching and teeming with
detail, Tilly’s treatment of the HRE is not consistent. Earlier in the work,
when outlining his main research questions as well as providing tentative
answers to them, Tilly discusses why nation-states won out against
tribute-taking actors and systems. His answer is that organizational and
technical innovations in warfare gave states with access to large resources
of manpower and wealth gained the upper hand. This combination
allowed them to defeat tribute-taking entities or to integrate them into
state structures.14 Nevertheless and crucially for the purposes of this
chapter, Tilly notes that:
If this analysis is correct, it creates its own puzzles: why, for example, the
fragmented Holy Roman Empire lasted so long in the midst of consolidating
bellicose monarchies. Why didn’t it disappear into the maws of large, powerful
states?15
Intriguingly, the problem that the HRE raises is not followed up. None-
theless it provides the starting point for the next section of this chapter,
which outlines not only why the HRE lasted so long but also what it was
that lasted. Certainly it was not a tribute-taking empire, not a subset of
the European system of sovereign states, a failed universal monarchy or a
Westphalia Latin original 1648 Acta Pacis Westphalicae Supplementa electronica

2004 VIII:2.
14 15
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 65. Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 65.
160 Peter Haldén
form of rule that could be captured by the label “fragmented sovereignty”

(for, as we shall see, sovereignty was not a property of the HRE). Instead,
it was a unique form of rule that destabilizes Tilly’s categories and
through that destabilization reveals the need for other ones in order for
the warfare thesis to realize its full analytic potential. The final section
elaborates what these concepts and their alignment might look like.
The Early Modern Holy Roman Empire as a Resilient

Non-State Polity
The HRE of the German Nation (Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher
Nation) was one of the most long-lived polities in European history. It
existed for almost nine hundred years between 962 and 1806 and at
various points in its history covered today’s Germany, Western France,
Western Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Northern Italy and
Slovenia. Yet it remains largely unknown in contemporary sociology,
political science and International Relations. The most crucial aspect
for the concerns of this chapter is that at no point in its history did the
HRE as a whole correspond to any of the meanings of the concept
“state”. The same also goes for the many principalities, small and large,
that made up the HRE.
The HRE remains under-theorized as well as unknown due to the
fundamental role that the Peace of Westphalia has played in the con-
struction of the history of International Relations. Routinely it has been
seen as the starting point of the modern international system based on
sovereign states.16 Much like the first reference made to it by Tilly
above, the HRE mostly figures in IR knowledge as a prehistory to the
modern states system. The myth of the Peace of Westphalia as the
starting point of a modern system of states has the myth of the de facto,
if not de jure demise of the HRE in 1648 as its precondition. This view
can be traced to the reception and re-telling of the argument in an article
by Gross from 1948.17 Through it the idea that the peace of Westphalia
16
Heinz Duchhardt, “‘Westphalian system’: Zur Problematik einer Denkfigur.” Historische
Zeitschrift, vol. 269, no. 2 (1999), pp. 305–15; Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty,
International Relations and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization, vol. 55
(Spring 2001), pp. 251–88; Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the
Making of Modern International Relations. (London: Verso, 2003); Stéphane Beaulac, The
Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and
Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004);
Peter Haldén, “Modell, metafor eller myt? Den westfaliska freden och studiet av
internationell politik,” in: Peter Haldén (ed.), Den Westfaliska Freden 1648: Kontext,
arv och konsekvenser (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2009), pp. 119–43.
17
Osiander, “Sovereignty.”
terminated a medieval configuration of joint Papal-Imperial rule over all

of Europe entered international thought. True, the Pope condemned the
Peace and the Thirty Years’ War was a setback for the centralizing
ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor.18 Although the German Kings
who held the title of Holy Roman Emperor were formally regarded as
the foremost of European monarchs, they only ruled the German lands
and, tenuously, parts of northern Italy (Osiander 2001). European
monarchs like the English, French, Hungarian, Spanish and Swedish
had always been de facto autonomous from the Emperor. In fact,
contemporaries thought that the claims of medieval German kings to
an imperial status in the Roman tradition after their conquest of Italy
were provocative and somewhat ridiculous.19 The rule of the medieval
Emperors concerned the German realm and before the Danes, Swedes
and French intervened, the Thirty Years’ War was a German affair.
Consequently, the Peace of Westphalia principally pertained to German
issues and only secondarily to European ones.
In the crucial but often misunderstood paragraph VIII:2, the Peace
restored and formally regulated the rights of the German princes to ally
with actors inside and outside the empire to safeguard their security.
This right must not, however, prejudice their oaths of allegiance to the
Emperor and the Empire, nor could alliances contracted for this pur-
poses be directed against the Emperor and the Empire. It did not
extend to the rulers of other European realms, but only to princes of
the Empire. Hence it did not free all European rulers from bonds to the
Emperor, grant them sovereignty and create a European-wide system of
sovereign and independent states. Similar misunderstandings surround
paragraph VIII:3. In order to avoid further constitutional conflicts, all
Electors, Princes and Estates of the Empire were confirmed in “their
old rights, prerogatives, liberties and privileges and the unimpeded
exercise of Landeshoheit in spiritual as well as worldly matters”.20 The
first thing to note is that the paragraph is explicitly restorative. The
second concerns the concept Landeshoheit which is central to under-
standing the HRE. The Latin translation in the Peace of Westphalia is
18
Günter Barudio, Der teutsche Krieg: 1618–1648, 1. Aufl. (Berlin: Siedler, 1998); Ronald
G. Asch, The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–1648 (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty
Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
19
Joachim Ehlers, “John of Salisbury letter 124,” in: Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches,
(München: R. Oldenbourg, 1994), p. 25.
20
Instrumentum, VIII:3; Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland.
Bd 1, Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft: 1600–1800 (München: Beck, 1988),
p. 225.
162 Peter Haldén
“ius territorialis”, which captures the German meaning of “supremacy

over the land”. However, modern translations into English often render
Landeshoheit as “territorial sovereignty” or even directly as sovereignty,
which equates the powers and position of the German princes with
modern states.21 Unlike sovereignty, Landeshoheit did not encompass
the whole range of political rights to rule over a certain territory. Also, it
was not unconditional but predicated on the adherence to Imperial
constitutional law.22
What to modern observers may appear as the traits of sovereign states
were conditioned on a set of relations that would have been impossible
to combine with modern sovereignty – a point recognized by contem-
porary observers.23 The principalities of the Empire were tied to the
Emperor, which by the seventeenth century had become more of a
political institution than an actor with formal powers of command.
They were also tied to each other through the Imperial constitution,
which could contravene their rule internally as well as their actions
abroad. Much of Central Europe was populated by a system that
resembled a set of autonomous powers in some ways but a single polity
in others. Consequently, this region did not follow the path of state-
formation.
The difference between a state and the HRE is illustrated by the ius
pacis ac bellum, the right to make peace and war, which all estates
possessed. Some even possessed substantial armies. However, in par-
allel, the HRE had a system for assembling a joint Imperial army. For
the purposes of military organization, the HRE was divided into ten
districts known as Imperial Circles into which all principalities were
integrated. These circles were responsible for raising, organizing and
fielding forces under the command of a Circle Colonel. The contribu-
tions of each principality were based on size and wealth and corres-
ponded to an estimate of the cost of fielding troops of cavalry and
infantry. The Imperial Circles did not field standing armies but rather
took the form of levies called up when the entire Empire was at war.24
To the extent that state structures are administrative institutions/bur-
eaucracies, the circles were state structures. They were, however, not
part of a hierarchical, vertically integrated state. Rather they corres-
pond better to Martin Shaw’s conception of layers of state.25 So what
21 22
Osiander, Sovereignty. Stolleis, Geschichte, p. 225.
23
Stolleis, Geschichte, pp. 174–86.
24
Gerhard Papke, Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte 1648–1939 Von der Miliz zum
stehenden Heer. Wehrwesen im Absolutismus (Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1979), p. 241.
25
Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge
we are dealing with in relation to the Circles is closer to ideas of

“stateness” or rule, as in Weberian Herrschaft but not state.26
Since the Middle Ages, administrative capacities had developed in
the individual principalities and to a far greater extent than on the
Imperial level. However, it is not realistic to see these principalities as
states. This is because they were not closed and self-contained legal
spaces – as they were subject to the Imperial constitution and bound
by the laws passed by the imperial Diet. As regards the organizational
side of their stateness, they cannot be regarded as states because rule
was in many cases shared by several politically distinct units. For
example, the minting of coins and regulation of trade was carried out
on an Imperial level while several other administrative functions were
carried out by some, but not all, Imperial Circles. Common stateness
was not only found in the institutions for warfare but also in the
common political institutions, like the Imperial Diet and the Imperial
Courts. It was only the Josephine reforms of the eighteenth century
that the administration of the Habsburg lands became separate from
Imperial institutions.27
Stateness was unevenly developed in the territorial principalities and
shared and interwoven to different degrees (e.g., in the ecclesiastical
lands). In sum, stateness existed in the HRE, but not states. To some
extent a similar mechanism is at work in today’s European Union,
whose members are neither de facto nor de jure self-contained legal
and administrative entities. It goes beyond the remit of this chapter to
discuss whether they are still to be regarded as states in the classical
European sense and the extent of their similarities with the estates of the
HRE. A crucial difference is, however, that the member states of the EU
have decided that the competence to devolve or take back competencies
(the so-called Kompetenz-Kompetenz) still resides with the member
states and not with the Union.28 In contrast, the estates never possessed
Kompetenz-Kompetenz.
Why did the HRE survive for as long as it did, despite the military
competition in Europe? Firstly, its stabilizing functions for the entire
European states-system were widely recognized until the advent of
26
For the former see J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics,
vol. 20, no. 4 (1968), pp. 559–92; for the latter see Gianfranco Poggi, Weber: A Short
Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 91.
27
Karl Otmar Fh. von Aretin, Das Altes Reich 1648–1806 Bd. 3 Das Reich und der
österreichisch-preußische Dualismus (1745–1806) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997) p. 109.
28
Paul Craig and Gráinne De Búrca, EU Law: Text, Cases and Materials, 4th ed. (Oxford
164 Peter Haldén
Napoleon.29 Secondly, in contrast to the Darwinian struggle envisioned

by realists there existed an inhibition against eradicating realms with
crowned monarchs in ancien regime Europe.30 The partitions of Poland
were the main exceptions to this rule and were seen as aberrations by
many contemporary observers. It is only after the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic wars that the inhibitions against wholesale destruction of
polities loosen up. Within the HRE this process took the form of
“secularization” of Church properties, which were then annexed by the
larger principalities.31 In Europe as a whole, Napoleon’s conquests broke
with time-honoured traditions by their readiness to dissolve old polities
and create new ones, including kingdoms.
With exemplary methodological honesty, Tilly outlined ways in which
his theory could be falsified. Two of them are significant to the following
enterprise: (1) The degree to which “major moments in the growth and
transformation of particular states . . .” did not correspond to war and
preparation for war and (2) “efforts to amass the means of armed force
did not produce durable features of state structure”.32 This section has
shown that these propositions applied to the HRE during the early
modern period. If the warfare thesis was correct, why did not the
state-enhancing effects occur in the HRE or even in the Habsburg
domains, which remained largely of a composite character up to
1918?33 Or why did not the wars against the Turks in 1663 and 1683
lead to the creation of more state institutions (e.g., chancelleries, tax
collections, standing armies) either on an HRE level or even between
the Habsburg provinces? In fact, it seems that in the HRE external war
actually reinforced its decentralized political structure. In 1660 the
Ottomans threatened to launch a major invasion of the Habsburg-
controlled eastern parts of the Empire. The Imperial estates saw the
threat as an occasion to negotiate more freedoms for themselves and
procrastinated negotiations over assembling an Imperial Army. When
the estates and the Emperor finally agreed on the conditions for the
participation of the estates, the treaty was filled with anti-centralizing
safeguards. The treaty stipulated that although the Emperor equipped
the troops (Articles 1663 §§3, 4), authority and control over them strictly
belonged to the estates (Articles 1663 §§6, 10). These were contractual
29
Karl Otmar Fh. von Aretin, Das Altes Reich 1648–1806 Bd. 1 Föderalistische oder
hierarchische Ordnung (1648–1684) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), p. 25.
30
Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to
the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2007).
31
Karl Otmar Fh. von Aretin, Vom Deutschen Reich zum Deutschen Bund (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), pp. 88–93.
32 33
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 35. See Elliot, Europe Divided.
stipulations that the centralization was temporary, the control over the
means of violence remained with the estates and a series of trust-
building measures like pledges of information-sharing (Articles 1663
§10), religious freedom (Articles 1663 §6) and equality of troops and
commanders (Articles 1663 §§8, 2).34 Thus in the case of the HRE, a
particular political culture led to the opposite of what Tilly’s theory
predicts. Of course, one could object to my argument by saying that
the HRE was not a state and hence falls outside the purview of the
theory. As I have argued above, the HRE possessed significant traits of
“stateness” including legal Kompetenz-Kompetenz and hence such a
counter-argument would not be tenable. In sum, this section has shown
that the early modern HRE was an important exception to Tilly’s theory.
However, if we go further back in history the HRE can further unpack
and improve the warfare thesis.
When the Holy Roman Empire Was Not an Anomaly

The warfare thesis comprises a long time span, from the year 990 to
1992. Certainly, a work of such an extent has to be limited in many ways
in order to be manageable. One of the implicit ways in which Tilly
limited himself was that the emphasis of the work lies on the latter part
of the period (1500–2000). However, this means that the preceding five
hundred years are treated more summarily.35 This temporal lacuna in
combination with the general disregard of the HRE in Tilly’s history of
the European state-formation entails that an important aspect of high to
late medieval state-formation is overlooked: England, France and the
HRE were structurally similar in the high Middle Ages but then diverged.
England and France created centralized states in the Early Modern era,
but the HRE developed into the polycentric polity described above. The
works of Hendrick Spruyt and, more recently, John Watts, demonstrate
that a sophisticated understanding of European state-formation demands
that we analyse medieval developments more in-depth.36 A more explicit
34
Articles and Conditions agreed between the Archbishop of Salzburg (as Principal
Commissioner of the Emperor) and the Electors and Princes of the Empire, signed at
Ratisbon [Regensburg], 11 July 1663, vol. 7, 1661–1663. Reprinted in: Consolidated
Treaty Series, Clive Parry (ed. and annotator) (Dobbs Ferry, NY: LL.D. Oceana
Publications, 1969), pp. 462–71. See also Peter Haldén, Stability without Statehood:
Lessons from Europe’s History before the Sovereign State (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
35
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), pp. 38–67, 224.
36
(Princeton University Press, 1994); John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe,
1300–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
166 Peter Haldén
theoretization of the politics of the high Middle Ages demonstrates the

following: (1) Realms was a stage between societies organized as pure
lineage systems and states. European countries did not go directly from
being pure lineage systems to being states. In the high Middle Ages, they
were no longer loose collections of lineages that would collapse at the
demise of the monarchs, but even though they had acquired a greater
degree of permanence and capacity to produce cohesion among power
elites, they did not fit the definition of states. (2) Conceptually, “realm”
expressed the innovation of a political community that explains why
these entities did not collapse when direct power was weakened. During
this period England, France and the HRE developed into political com-
munities, in the shape of realms, which produced legitimacy, durability
and loyalty above and beyond specific power-holders. Without the con-
tinuity produced by the political community the countries would have
disintegrated once the erstwhile conqueror or his kin had died out. (3)
The way that political community was constructed provides an under-
standing of early modern trajectories. It accounts for the divergence
between England, France and the HRE – in other words, answers the
question why did England and France not become more like the HRE?
The study of medieval polities before they became states alerts us to a
wider theoretical lacuna in Tilly’s theory: The concept of state is too
wide, which means that it becomes difficult to explain its origins. The
concept of state as well as the story of how it emerged is crippled by these
lacunae, which explains why it is so difficult to use the model as a
blueprint for state-building today.
The Similarity and Later Divergence of England, “France” and

the HRE
In Early Modern European history, the HRE stands out as an anomaly.
When we look back in time to the high Middle Ages, the HRE was not an
anomaly but, until at least the 1300s it was much closer to a European
norm.37 Around the year 1000 conditions in what would later become
England, France and Germany were largely similar: local notables
retained executive power while concentration of power at the kingdom
level was constantly weak and subject to centrifugal forces. Given the
initial similarity any macro-theory of state-formation must be able to
account for why England coalesced around 1000 and France around
1200, but Germany retained its decentralised structure and later
37
Ehlers, Die Entstehung, p. 2.
developed from that basis. Ignoring this period and, in particular, the
HRE means that the coalescence and subsequent growth of England and
France lacks an important comparative and contrasting object. The
comparison yields two results: One, all three entities suffered from the
problem common to all of Europe, creating and maintaining centraliza-
tion. They were originally similar on this account but later diverged –
despite the fact that the international system had similar effect on both
cases. Two, they were something before they were states.
As suggested in the section above it is somewhat misleading and
inaccurate to see the medieval HRE as quantitatively different from other
realms in terms of formal power. The view that it, being an empire,
belongs to another class of units has inhibited comparisons with other
countries. The main differences between the HRE and France con-
cerned how the political community was constructed. When monopol-
istic state-structures began to be erected during the Early Modern era,
the differences in the political construction of the realm goes a long way
in accounting for the divergence between our three examples. Thus,
placing the HRE at the centre rather than at the margins of the historical
narrative makes a number of research questions visible.
Medieval Polities Did Not Conform to Modern Definitions

of Statehood
Tilly defines his concept of the state as organizations other than lineage
systems and clans. The fit of the label “lineage system”, for example,
coalitions of clans, families and tribes, to describe the dominant mode of
social formation in Europe is certainly more valid the further back one
goes into history, for example, into the late antiquity in Gaul and Ger-
mania. These coalitions were transitory and impermanent. It is not
possible to discuss in full here how early kingdoms like the
Merovingian one (c. 500–751) or the seventh-century Visigothic king-
doms in Spain distinguished themselves from lineage systems.38 How-
ever, for a long time the character of loose groupings of clans remained a
salient feature alongside more permanent structures.
Tilly begins his inquiry around 900 and the disintegration of the
Carolingian Empire, which had achieved a territorial extent and a modi-
cum of permanence and organizational density remarkable for its time.
When formal structures of power disintegrated, the Empire did not
disintegrate into any kind of primaeval “lineage system”. Instead, it
38
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London:
Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 111–29.
168 Peter Haldén
became a form of rule that was polycentric but nonetheless held together.
The Empire first split into the East and West Frankish kingdoms, which
centuries later became Germany and France. This was the result of a
long process throughout the ninth century and was only formally com-
pleted with the death of Louis IV.39 Although formally distinct they were
nevertheless politically intertwined through the connections of the ruling
dynasties.40 Stripped of the networks of power that constituted the
Carolingian realm, the successor polities had to create not only infra-
structure but also ways of conceptualising the polities and their rule that
would give them legitimacy. The Eastern Frankish realm was originally a
collection of noble lineages of the five parts: Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony,
Swabia and Lothringen/Lorraine). Even though Henry I was recognized
as an East Frankish King (rex Francorum orientalum) it proved very
difficult to integrate the realm that remained a coalition of the nobles of
the respective parts. Despite the different trajectories to territorial frag-
mentation, the situation in France and Germany were quite similar
around the year 1000.
How poorly medieval realms conformed to any modern definition of
statehood and how far fragmentation of direct power could go can be
illustrated by the struggles over the castle of Montlhéry that occupied a
great deal of the reign of Louis VI (r. 1108–1137). The holdings of the
house of Montlhéry blocked communications between the two main
centres of power of the Capetian royal dynasty, Paris and Orléans. In
1015 Robert II (Capet) gave away the castle as a fief and in the next
generation it had slipped out of royal control into complete autonomy
even though it was situated a mere 24 kilometres from Paris. A full
hundred years later, it took the French king substantial military cam-
paigns to conquer the territory.41 This was only one of many struggles of
the French kings to gain control over lands lost due to feudalization. For
a long while the Kings of France had difficulties reigning over their
vassals within the core lands, the duchy of Francia. But the fragmentation
of rule also affected other great lords as well, such as the Counts of
neighbouring Anjou who had similar problems controlling their
vassals.42 It took until the reign of Philip Augustus (r. 1179–1223) for
the major territories of France to coalesce internally to engage each other
in military competition. Until the death of Philip Augustus of France in
39 40
Ehlers, Die Entstehung, p. 16. Ehlers, Die Entstehung, pp. 57–8.
41
Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilization: soziogenetische und psychogenetische
Untersuchungen. 2, Wandlungen der Gesellschaft: Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Zivilisation
Bern (Francke Verlag, 1969), pp. 125–6.
42
Elias, Über den Prozess, p. 166.
1223 the French Kings were engaged in wholesale warfare with rivals
within the realm, including the Dukes of Normandy and Anjou. After the
reign of Philip Augustus, the French polity was considerably more stable,
but it was not yet a state; even the period when the Kings ruled with the
aid of the Estates-General (1302–1614) is difficult to square with Tilly’s
definition of a national state.
Even though formal power, command power or direct “despotic
power” could sink to a level that to us seems minimal, after a certain
point in time, realms do not disintegrate. In cases where creation of
larger units only took place through military conquest, rule tends to be
impermanent and collapse at the physical death of the rulers or the
extirpation of their main lineage.43 During the Middle Ages the central
power in many realms did indeed suffer setbacks and retraction of their
spatial sway at the death of strong rulers or ending of a dynasty. Despite
these setbacks after a certain point in time we no longer witness entropy
of the extension of rule, even during times when the physical power of the
nominal ruling house was low. In the German realm, England and what
we know as France – the influence of the central power – could sink
substantially but the structures of rule do not deteriorate. Instead, other
groups and players step in and fill the vacuum. Jean Dunbabin argues
that it was during the tenth century, the low point of royal power, that the
west Frankish kingdom became firmly established as a political entity.
Power was certainly decentralized to duchies and marquisates whose
lords often blocked royal power. However, in retrospect it seems that
the increased power of the magnates did not lead them to pursue seces-
sionist policies. Instead, it led them to assume more responsibility for the
realm and directly engage with its politics.44 In the words of Albert
Hirschman, the experiment in decentralized government led to a greater
degree of “voice” as well as “loyalty” and not to “exit”.45 Michael Mann
distinguishes between “despotic” and “infrastructural” power.46 To
paraphrase Mann, we need to understand that in the high Middle Ages
43
Examples include the Central Asian steppe empires. See Nikolay N. Kradin,
“Nomadism, Evolution and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of
Historical Development,” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 2002),
pp. 368–88.
44
Jean Dunbabin, “West Francia: The Kingdom,” in: Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New
Cambridge Medieval History Volume III c.900–c.1024 (Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 372–97; Janet L. Nelson, “Rulers and Government,” in: Reuter, The New
Cambridge Medieval History Volume III c.900–c.1024, pp. 95–129.
45
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press.,
2004 [1970].
46
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-
States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
170 Peter Haldén
a durable infrastructure had been developed not of power, but for power.
In order to understand why realms did not disintegrate even during
extreme low points of the capacity of central organs of government to
enforce commands and edicts we need to turn to another aspect of social
life that Tilly’s theory neglects: social and political ideas.
Realm as a Form of Rule Distinct from States and Lineage Systems

A form of political community that transcended pure lineage groups and
clans were created, or in any case visible, during the high Middle Ages.
This was the idea of the realm represented by kings and aristocratic
power-holders. During this period we do not see the advent of the
impersonal state. The realm was the idea of a political sphere that
enabled the later construction of the state, even though personal rule
remained an important factor in European politics until at least the
twentieth century.
This community was the result of several interacting and mutually
supporting developments. The first one we shall look into was the trans-
formation of kingship around the year 1000. Kings had existed since the
Germanic peoples overran the Roman Empire in the fifth century, but
their primary attributes were those of military leaders. As such, a king’s
powers depended on his ability to attract and command a following. Late
in the first millennium we see the emergence of the idea that kings were
the Lord’s anointed and because of this kingship began to take on the
form of an institution rather than that of a personal quality.47 The sacral
dimension of kingship was conferred by and most evidently manifested in
the unction, administered by the pope or archbishop. The legitimacy that
this idea conferred gave kings a boost in symbolic power vis-à-vis other
great lords. It started the process whereby the realm was constructed as a
separate entity. Because a king was holy, the kingdom that he ruled, de
jure more often than de facto, took on a particular quality above those of
other forms of political organization. However, a king was like all men in
the fact that he was physically mortal. So, a major problem was to con-
struct a notion of kingship that had greater longevity than individual kings.
By elaboration on ideas that supported this notion the realm was “raise[d]
beyond its purely physical existence and . . . transcendentalize[d]”.48 From
the doctrine that the Church could never die, never cease to be, the idea of
47
Osiander, Before the State, pp. 369–71.
48
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology
(Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 208.
eternity was attributed to the Roman Empire.49 From there it followed

that the Roman people were eternal.50 Although the Romans were seen
as the prototype of the perpetuity of a people, this attribute was not
theirs alone. The idea that perpetual existence applied to every realm
and to every people was found in legal writings of all European coun-
tries.51 From this basis, the formulation that a realm had an existence
separate from those of its kings was made by Baldus in the fourteenth
century.52 The metaphor of a corpus, a body politic, was important in
relation to the realm and to the transformation of kingship. The corpus-
metaphor also played a significant role in another of the main pillars of
the creation of a polity above and beyond lineages.
Corporate bodies such as estates were important in the creation of
realms. Assemblies of the powerful are likely to have featured in most
societies but their mere existence does not constitute a polity. The
Icelandic Thing-assemblies of which we find descriptions in the Saga-
literature are examples of such assemblies. Institutionalized assemblies
like estates are associated with the formal granting of liberties and rights
through charters such as the Magna Carta 1215 or the Golden Bull of
Hungary of 1222. The idea of perpetual life of juristic persons boosted
the shift from assemblies of chieftains to bodies that had an existence of
their own. Crucial in this regard is the idea that estates represented
something else than the present chieftains or clans: at various times they
were seen as representing or embodying the realm.53
In the HRE, the difference between an earlier form of rule which was
leaning more heavily toward a system of lineages and a later, more
political, form of rule is seen in the development in how the king was
elected. Like many other kingdoms in Central, Eastern and Northern
Europe, the German kingship was not hereditary but elective. In the
earliest times, Kings had been elected by acclamation by his martial
followers. As the Ottonian monarchy over the Bavarians, Franks, Lotha-
ningians, Saxons and Suabians became more robust, the number of
electors dwindled to that of the main princes of the respective lands. In
an initial phase the king to be struck deals with individual princes. Later
on, the conditions for election, the so-called electoral capitulations, were
49
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 291–2.
50
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 294.
51
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 295, 298, 301, 304, 311; Jens Bartelson,
A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 97–100.
52
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 299.
53
This is investigated in the case of Sweden in Biörn Tjällén, Church and Nation: The
Discourse on Authority in Ericus Olai’s Chronica regni Gothorum., PhD dissertation
(Department of History, University of Stockholm, 2007).
172 Peter Haldén
circulated to all of the princes who had a right to elect the King.54 Their
election had then more the character of joint action. The former case is
indicative of the personal style of rule and the atomized kind of configur-
ation, whereas the latter indicates the formation of a polity (albeit with a
very limited number of members).55 For example, in 1348 the election
was preceded by an agreement between the Emperor and the Electoral
Princes (Kurfürsten). The document clearly demonstrates that a corpor-
ate identity had developed among the Princes as actors that were bound
to the Realm and obliged to assume responsibility for its affairs.56 To
once more speak in Hirschmann’s terms, a strategy of “voice” was related
to “loyalty”, not with the King but with the Realm. As such it was the
opposite of “exit”.
The processes of building realms in Europe during the high Middle
Ages and their importance bear similarities to the processes in classical
Athens around the year 462/1.57 During that time descriptions in dramas
appear that portray the development of a creation of a polis that stood
above particularistic identities, clans and authorities.58 The Greek tran-
scendence of the social organization based on lineages and feuds was
mirrored by mythological changes.59 In Thucydides description of the
Peloponnesian War we see the transcendence of clan identities into a
common Athenian identity as the dead are given funeral orations as
Athenian citizens, not as members of clans, which had previously been
common practice.60 The formation of a community that was more than
the sum of its parts in Greece has been seen as an innovation of world-
historical importance. The idea of a community above and beyond the
accidental and particular carriers of power, the kinship groups, is a
54
Ernst Schubert, “Königswahl und Königtum im Spätmittelalterlichen Reich,” in:
Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, vol. 4 (1977), pp. 257–338; Barbara Stollberg-
Rilinger, Das Heiliger Römischer Reich Deutscher Nation vom Ende des Mittelalters bis
1806 (München: C. H. Beck, 2007), pp. 26–7; Elisabeth Fehrenbach, “Reich,” in:
Otto Brunner (ed.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen
Sprache in Deutschland. Bd 5, Pro-Soz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), pp. 423–508, here
at pp. 451–2.
55
I deal with these developments more in full in Peter Haldén, “Reconceptualizing State
Formation as Collective Power: Representation in Electoral Monarchies,” Journal of
Political Power, vol. 7, no. 1 (2014), pp. 127–47.
56
Haldén, “Reconceptualizing State Formation as Collective Power,” p. 136.
57
Egnell and Haldén, “Laudable,” p. 37.
58
Christian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen, 1. Aufl. (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 162.
59
Meier, Die Entstehung, p. 166.
60
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton,
1910), vol. 2, pp. 35–46; Per Jansson, “Identity-Defining Practices in Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 3,
no. 2 (1997), pp. 147–65.
precondition of and an essential part of politics. It is also the necessary

framework for legitimacy that breeds loyalty. There were important
differences between antiquity and the Middle Ages, which prohibit us
from claiming that these processes were identical rather that analogous.
I will now turn to the differences in how the main European realms
constructed their political communities; differences that would prove
consequential for their development.
Accounting in full for why England, France and the HRE emerged
from a situation characterized by common problems of creating cohesion
and later centralized stateness is hardly possible here. A variety of insti-
tutional, personal, military and political factors have to be taken into
account, as well as a large role played by contingency. I will, however,
briefly recount the way the realm was constructed. The divergence
between France and Germany, with the former becoming a cohesive
polity and the latter remaining a polycentric one cannot only be
explained by differences in capacities to wage war and organize capital.
Rather, differences in how the realm was constructed were constitutive of
different paths of development.
The great size of the East Frankish Kingdom posed a problem for
integration.61 Even more troubling was that its ruling dynasties could not
draw on legitimacy as the Carolingian successor as the West Frankish
kingdom already laid claim to it. To make matters more difficult, the five
parts of the realm, the Bavarians, Franks, Lotharingians, Suabians and
Saxons already had quite distinct identities. Integrating the Bavarians
and Suabians were particularly problematic to the ruling dynasties of
Saxon descent because they lived far from the Saxon centres of power
and had strong transalpine political and economic connections. So, the
problem was to find a conception of political community that could
encompass the different peoples and power centres. Despite their mili-
tary strength, constructing a realm based on a Saxon identity was out of
the question, because it would drive the Bavarians and Suabians away.
Constructing the realm as a (or the) Roman Empire and making the
“German” King an Emperor offered a viable solution.62 The fact that
one already existed in Byzantium forced the German Emperors into an
array of symbolic and military strategies too complex to relate here.
Hence the solution to the problem of an encompassing political commu-
nity north of the Alps led to a lengthy engagement in Italian affairs. The
political community based on an Imperial conception that engaged Italy
and Rome thus stabilized the realm.63 The negative side-effects of this in
61
Elias, Über den Prozess. 62
Fehrenbach, “Reich,” pp. 436–41.
63
Ehlers, Die Entstehung, p. 59.
174 Peter Haldén
terms of overstretch and a polycentric trans-alpine policy was visible to

contemporaries, but they accepted it as the best or indeed only available
solution to create cohesion in the heartland. The extensive construction
of political community constituted the Empire as a polycentric realm and
this construction hindered the attempts of the Staufen dynasty to create a
centralized polity.64
State-formation, in the sense of erecting the organizational structure
claiming a monopoly to the business of rule – and in particular to the
means and authority of coercion – was not a peaceful process. Rather, it
was a driver of conflict. The rich literature on resistance and rebellion, to
which Tilly made substantial contributions demonstrates that all social
groups were at times ready and willing to use force to resist the state.65
What was not a target of violent resistance was, however, the realm itself.
Instead, the fact that many rebellions rallied around a defence of ancient
rights and customs rather testifies to a support of the polity that granted
these privileges.
To summarize this section, Tilly’s diachronic analysis of state-
formation misses a temporal step and an analytical dimension.
Expressed taxonomically, other forms of rule than those that figure in
Tilly’s categorization reviewed in Section 2 played a role in European
history. Conceptually, the realm played a role in the formation of states
as a context within which the diverse set of practices and reforms that
retrospectively amount to state-formation took place. Giving substantial
proof thereof is reasonably beyond the scope of a single chapter, but
I believe that the above has made a good case for further investigation of
the matter. The forces driving the creation of the national state
were different than claimed by Tilly, but a deeper problem is his
conceptualization of units (state, empire, etc.). I stress that other units,
other concepts, made up the context that leads to the creation of the
national state over time. They are, so to speak, the diachronic system
that explains the state. I will now discuss the implications of this section
for Tilly’s warfare thesis.
Tilly’s Concept of the State Revisited

To analyse the implications of the sections above for the warfare thesis, let
us revisit Tilly’s definition of the state: “a distinct organization that con-
trols the principal concentrated means of coercion within a well-defined
64
Hagen Schultze, Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (München: C. H. Beck,
2004), p. 41.
65
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
territory, and in some respects exercises priority over all other organiza-
tions operating within the same territory”.66 We have seen that this does
not describe medieval realms. Tilly’s narrative, which builds on this con-
cept, suffers not only from empirical problems but also from logical ones
that become visible when subjugated to diachronic analysis. The generic
concept is divided into three sub-categories: national state, empire and
fragmented sovereignty (e.g., city states). Unless these concepts are time-
less, they must have predecessors.67
We saw above that lineage systems did not hold this position. Although
Tilly suggests that this is the case, the generic concept of the state cannot
be the predecessor of the national state. Although synchronically “state”
is the superordinate concept and national state the subordinate, dia-
chronically this would be illogical. This conundrum stems from the fact
that the national state is defined in a way that lies to close to the generic
concept of “state”. Tilly’s account of England’s development between
the twelfth and twentieth centuries illustrates these problems of classifi-
cation and diachronic analysis.68 Although substantial changes are
described and acknowledged, “England” does not switch between differ-
ent forms of rule, but retains its identity as a national state throughout the
narrative remains. A category that encompasses, and conflates, a wide
range of polities from Anglo-Norman England to twentieth century is too
wide for classificatory purposes and, as we have seen in this section,
conflates two specific historical questions: (1) Why did realms develop
out of lineage system? and (2) why did unitary states with a single centre
of legitimate violence form in the Early Modern era?69
A way in which the warfare thesis could be refined would be to unpack
the concept of the state and include many more sub-categories.70
Examples could include realm, composite state, early modern sover-
eignty, absolutist state, modern welfare state. In a previous work I have
proposed a generic framework for comparing different kinds of political
order as “forms of rule”.71 That framework does not use the state as a
generic concept of political order. Instead, it is only one of many possible
forms of rule. In short, the framework casts all forms of rule as configur-
ations of rules and institutions that regulate (1) the nature of its
members, (2) the relations of these members to each other, (3) the
members’ relations to an eventual centre and (4) the members’ relations
66 67
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), pp. 130–1. Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), p. 21.
68
Tilly, Coercion (2nd ed.), pp. 154–60.
69
Elias, Über den Prozess, pp. 121–6, 138–52.
70
For example, similar to those used by Poggi, The Development of the Modern State; or
Elliot, Europe Divided.
71
Haldén, Stability without Statehood.
176 Peter Haldén
to external actors and systems of action. In this optic, the state can be
analysed alongside other possible manifestations of political order, and
rapid, revolutionary changes as well as slow, gradual shifts could be more
adequately observed. The mechanisms outlined by the warfare thesis
could then be tested at junctions where the transition between two forms
occurred.
Tilly’s account deals with how national states won out over city-states
and empires. The theory has a substantial gap since it does not deal with
the evolution of the national state within realms. In none of our
examples did the national state compete with city-states, or with a
tribute-taking empire. None of the units studied in this chapter was
born out of a direct competition between these forms on their own
territories. It is telling that the major political formulations of the
sovereign state, for example, the works of Jean Bodin and Thomas
Hobbes, were not written as philosophical attacks on city-states or
empires but against the older form of rule, a realm characterised by
high degrees of aristocratic co-rule.72 Bodin’s Six Books of the Common-
wealth, which set out modern sovereignty in a proto-form, was written
in opposition to what he saw as the entrapment of French royal power
by the estates and other mediating bodies.73 Cardinal Richelieu,
another key figure in the shaping of modern French sovereignty, simi-
larly sought to curtail the intermediary bodies.74
In sum, the main problem historically, logically and conceptually is
that the warfare thesis puts the national state too far back in time and
does not account for varieties in its evolution. A refined version of the
warfare thesis or any other macro-account of state-formation could start
out with the question: Why did states (however defined) emerge, evolve
or develop within the context of European realms?
The Realm-State Distinction Suggests a Missing Element in

Contemporary State-Building
Tilly ended his major exposé of the warfare thesis with a discussion of
states and state-formation in the Third World in 1992. The main
problem for him was to explain why states in the developing world
72
Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from “The Six Books of the Commonwealth”
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 19–24; Stolleis, Geschichte, p. 173.
73
Osiander, Before the State, p. 433.
74
Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge University
Press, 1989) p. 56, citing Cardinal Richelieu Testament Politique pt 1, chap. 4, sec.
2:243–47.
had not entered upon the path to civilian control of the military and
democratization. His model accounts for the persistence of military rule
or at least its strong influence in the non-European world by pointing to
the different configuration of coercion and capital. In 1992, when
Coercion, Capital and European States was written state failure and state
collapse had not yet become the political and academic problem that it
is today in 2010.75 The major policy task is no longer only why many
states fail to become democracies (which remains a substantive prob-
lem), but why some states have ceased to function. These problems
have been addressed in a number of works. In recent years, scholars of
contemporary security studies have scrutinized the warfare thesis.
Many of these have argued that, unlike in Early Modern Europe,
warfare does not lead to the creation of state structures in the contem-
porary “Third World”. Warfare, it is argued, has rather led to the
dismantling of state-structures in countries such as Afghanistan, the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia and many more.76
While this seems prima facie indisputable, the argument suffers from
two weaknesses. One, that the warfare thesis ignores important precon-
ditions of the state in its analysis of Europe. Two, that the preconditions
for state-building, chief of which is a political community that joins
individual power-groups, is absent in several of the cases that contem-
porary parlance dubs “failed states”. Even before the debates on “failed
states” began in earnest, Robert H. Jackson argued that several states in
the developing world, most notably Africa, were ever states at all.
Instead of being states with deep roots and broad purviews, they are
best seen as “quasi-states” whose sovereignty was negative and con-
ferred by outside powers, rather than positive and having endogenous
roots and reach.77
In the wake of the debates on “failed states”, a literature and a policy
field have developed on “state-building”, the externally assisted con-
struction of state structures. Many scholarly works and policy-oriented
reports resemble the trajectory sketched in the warfare thesis in how
they view the solution to the lack of state structures in, say, Afghanistan.
Several works express that the remedy to a lack of state structures is,
75
Peter Haldén, “Systems-Building before State-Building: On the Systemic Preconditions
of State-Building,” Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 10, no. 4 (September 2010),
pp. 519–45, here at pp. 520–1.
76
Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea, “Tilly Tally: War Making and State Making in the
Contemporary Third World,” International Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (2008),
pp. 27–56.
77
Robert Jackson, Quasi States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World
(Cambridge University Press, 1996).
178 Peter Haldén
unsurprisingly and unhelpfully, to build state-structures.78 This repli-

cates the implication of Tilly’s theory of state-formation; that institu-
tions can support themselves when they are being built. Concomitantly,
there is little debate on the necessary political context of state-
formation. The fundamental problem facing countries such as
Afghanistan, the DRC and Somalia may not be a lack of state, but the
lack of a political community that could support and sustain state-
formation projects.
Conclusions and Future Directions

This chapter demonstrated that the HRE of the German Nation of the
early modern era does not fit with the description of European state-
formation set out in the warfare thesis. It was not a state, nor was it a
system of individual states. The mechanisms outlined by Tilly were in
place, but in this case they did not produce a state or even states. One of
the reasons was that the shape of the political community of the HRE
and its political purpose worked against centralization of the capacities
and authority over coercion.
The warfare thesis also neglects the HRE during the Middle Ages. In
fact, the medieval part of the period covered by the book (c. 900–1500) is
hastily covered and socio-political relations during this period are not
analysed and integrated with the warfare thesis. By including the HRE in
an explicit analysis of medieval polities we saw that these were neither
lineage systems nor states. During the high Middle Ages, they became
political communities that transcended particular powers. These com-
munities, realms, were understood to have a permanence that extended
above and beyond wielders of power. Realms commanded loyalty and
legitimacy from their members. The idea of a political community sus-
tained the polities during the period of early modern state-building and
ensured that the polities did not disintegrate and provided the context
without which state-formation would have probably been difficult. In
sum, realms are a category that does not feature in Tilly’s warfare thesis
and they were a precondition for the later formation of national states.
The analysis of this chapter has demonstrated problems with Tilly’s
concepts “state” and “national state”. First, they are too close to each
78
James Dobbins et al., The UN’s Role in Nation-Building. From the Congo to Iraq (Santa
Monica: RAND Corporation, 2005); Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and
World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ashraf Ghani
and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World
(Oxford University Press, 2008).
other. Second, “national state” is too inclusive and undifferentiated,

which creates problems in a diachronic analysis. Third, because of the
inclusiveness of the concept and the paucity of other forms of rule
within the model with which it can be contrasted creates problems
for the explanation of the development of the state. The warfare thesis
tells us little of the predecessors or counter-projects to the national
state. More problematic, we know little of the context and precondi-
tions of its evolution. I briefly outlined that this view of historical
state-building spills over into blind spots regarding contemporary
state-building.
I formulated two brief suggestions for a refinement of the warfare
thesis: The first is to include more forms of rule such as realm, com-
posite state, absolutist state, constitutional state under a generic
descriptive umbrella – the “forms of rule” framework – and apply the
mechanisms of capital and coercion to the shifts between the two types.
The second is to engage explicitly with the formation and reformation
of political community throughout history. This chapter has demon-
strated that the construction of the political community played an
important role in shaping medieval and early modern polities. It also
pointed toward its role in contemporary Afghanistan. Political factors of
importance include the construction of communities, action-oriented
values and normative dimensions and political aims of warfare. Includ-
ing politics throughout the ages does not detract from the immense
importance of organizing for war and waging for human large-scale
organization. In fact, the two sides should be integrated in an analysis
of values, organization and warfare.
Because this chapter argues that Tilly in fact investigates the wrong
things, what remains of the famous formula “states made war and war
made states”? If one wants formulas, the ones I can provide are “realms
fought wars which made some of them into states” or “realms fought
wars and realms produced states”. Beyond the exercise of formulating
formulas, the important point is that it was not the wars in themselves
that produced states if we by states mean a combination of actions,
organizations and political community. The required attributes for
success in war led, sometimes slowly sometimes rapidly, to a profusion
of organizations and institutions. But they do not, as argued in the
introduction, exhaust the meanings of the concept “state”. These insti-
tutions did not create or sustain themselves, which the circularity of
Tilly’s formula would have us believe. The state as a form of political
organization was not created ex nihilo out of the protean mire of lineage
systems that Tilly’s compressed history might lead us to believe. These
institutions do support themselves – this would not have been possible
180 Peter Haldén
during Europe’s tumultuous and crisis-ridden history. Nor is it possible

for institutions providing supply services to the demands of a society to
sustain themselves during contemporary “state-building” operations.
The state rests on historically variable forms of political community. In
Europe of the Middle Ages and far in to early modern times this
community was called the realm. Tomorrow in Afghanistan and
Somalia it has to be called something else that people there understand
and feel for.
7 War, Conflict and the State Reconsidered
Vivek Swaroop Sharma

Pomona College
It is a truth barely worth laboring that an army will reflect closely the
nature of the society that produces it. The writer of military history,
therefore, is not concerned with some discrete and separate corner of
history which can be written about on its own, but must consider the
whole political, social and economic developments of the age in order to
understand the nature of war and the changes that occurred in it.1
We might, therefore, be well advised to approach the concept of

conquest circumspectly. Equally, we should not allow the military sole
prerogative of telling it as it was. The reality and brutality of conquest, of
course, are not in doubt; but conquest in the sense of a military act is
only one of the routes to the domination of a society by another and not
necessarily the most attractive, rewarding or important of such routes.
As a strictly military enterprise a conquest can no doubt be described
exclusively on its own terms; but as a part of a process of domination it
needs surely to be placed in a wider context.2
The notion that war and violence are at the root of European political
development has been widely accepted in both the state formation litera-
ture and by those who have sought to apply its lessons to contemporary
problems of development. The most influential exponent of this
approach has been Charles Tilly whose approach to the emergence of
the modern state in Europe is grounded in a particular understanding of
the nature and purpose of violent conflict in European history. Funda-
mentally, the widespread acceptance of Tilly’s fundamental causal story
is based on its intuitive resonance: few, if any, critics of Tilly have
challenged his portrait of European war and political violence and have
instead focused on other component parts of his model. Tilly derived his
understanding of war and conflict from the realist school of international
relations and so any challenge to Tilly’s account of war and its causal
1
John France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000–1300 (Ithaca: Cornell
2
R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales
1100–1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3.
181
182 Vivek Swaroop Sharma
relationship to political development is, by definition, also a challenge to

the realist understanding of international relations in the period covered
by state formation literature: that is, from roughly the year 1000 to
roughly the end of the eighteenth century.
The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the question of what the
nature, structure and purpose of political violence in Europe during the
medieval and early modern periods was. More specifically, the purpose
of this chapter is to challenge and modify the model of conflict that
provides the basic foundation for Tilly’s account of European state
formation. The understanding of the purpose and nature of European
political conflict is based on a model that suggests that much of the
political competition in medieval and early modern Europe was about
conquest and the expansion of the territorial extent of polities. In this
Darwinian world the states that survived the intense competition for
survival did so largely because of their capacities to successfully wage
wars of this type. I argue that the basic problem of this model is that it
provides an undifferentiated picture of political competition in medieval
and early modern Europe.
In this chapter I present an institutionalist ontology of war and conflict
and then outline the implications of this model for the state formation
literature. My fundamental argument is that the nature and purpose of
violent conflict in medieval and early modern Europe has been misun-
derstood by scholars working on the problem of European political
development. In opposition to the model of international conflict that
underpins much of the state formation I propose a model grounded in a
more sociological understanding of the origins, types and purposes of
political violence. I argue that there are two fundamental types of war –
limited and total – and that these types of war can be understood in
institutional terms. This typology is then used to explain what the kinds
of outcomes violent competition could produce. I demonstrate that wars
of conquest in the realist sense of the term could only occur against
‘outsiders’ on the frontiers of Latin Christendom. Much of what consti-
tuted war within Latin Christendom were not conflicts that fit the realist
model of international competition and were, instead, non-territorial in
nature. I conclude by considering the implication of this state of affairs
on the state formation literature.
This chapter is roughly divided into three sections. Section 1 lays out
the account of war in the state formation literature. Section 2 develops
and presents a typology of war that is then applied to the historical
experience of political conflict and violence in premodern Europe. The
concluding section then considers the implications of this model of
European conflict for the state formation literature.
War, Conflict and the State Reconsidered 183
War and the State

The warfare model is a dominant paradigm of state formation in the
West.3 Fundamentally, all of the competing models offered by warfare
school theorists (above all Tilly, Mann, Downing, Finer and Ertman)
extend the important insights developed by Otto Hintze in the early
twentieth century. They differ somewhat in their details and in their
empirical underpinnings (and are certainly a great deal more sophisti-
cated than those proposed by Hintze a century ago), but in their broad
outlines they are all essentially in general agreement on the basic causal
story behind the formation of modern nation-states. At its simplest this
boils down to the emergence of infantry, gunpowder and fortifications
and, as a direct consequence, the development of larger, more efficient
centralizing monarchies that were expanding their authority over trad-
itional corporatist elements in European society (e.g. estates, guilds,
cities and the like). Warfare, therefore, becomes the driving engine of
European political development.4
Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries was a highly fragmented
political world in which political authority (best understood as lordship)
was diffuse. This highly fractured world was transformed into the
modern state system by the eighteenth century though a process driven
by warfare.5 The effect of warfare on the emergence of the modern
3
(e.g. Tilly 1975, 1981, 1984, 1990; Hintze 1975; Mann 1986, 1988; Zollberg 1986;
Ertman 1997; Downing 1988, 1992; Spruyt 1994). S. E. Finer, “State- and Nation-
Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in: Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of
National States in Europe (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 84–163; idem., The
History of Government, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Even the
exceptionally clear and critical review of this question by Francis Fukuyama takes the
warfare model for granted. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Note also that the political economy approach to
the emergence of the modern state (e.g. North and Weingast) takes the consolidation of
territory by conquest as a given because if they did not they would have the burden of
showing how the territorially fragmented world of the Middle Ages changed.
4
Cameron Thies sums up the consensus that has emerged in the literatures. “It appears
that social scientists operating within the predatory approach share a common
understanding of how the state developed in Europe. Rulers faced external and internal
competitors. These threats required rulers to extract resources from the ruled in order to
wage war against external competitors and pacify internal competition.” “State Building,
Interstate and Intrastate Rivalry: A Study of Post-Colonial Developing Country
Extractive Efforts, 1975–2000,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 48 (2004),
pp. 53–72, here at pp. 55–56.
5
Tilly makes this point well. He notes that of the 500 or so independent political entities in
Europe circa 1500, only 25 remained by 1900 (all of them national states). “Reflections
on the History of European State-Making,” in: Tilly, The Formation of National States in
Western Europe, pp. 3–83, here at p. 15.
territorial state, according to warfare theorists, was twofold: (1) on the

size of the units and (2) on the nature of political authority within
the units.
The international system, according to this model, was a highly com-
petitive Darwinian world in which the logic of international relations was
survival of the fittest. Actors were engaged in a struggle for survival in a
world in which survival was a function of military prowess. To survive,
actors had to create efficient military systems that, by the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, meant permanent standing militaries (generally
armies, but in some cases navies). Those actors that failed to create
competitive military systems were eliminated by conquest. In other
words, according to the warfare model, ‘failed states’ and militarily
‘inefficient’ states were eliminated by their more competitive and acquisi-
tive neighbors. The overall effect of conquest was therefore threefold: (1)
the competitive actors grew increasingly larger as a consequence of
conquest, (2) failed states were incorporated into more efficient adminis-
trative political systems and (3) the fear of elimination through conquest
acted as a systemic-level incentive structure to create state capacity.
Permanent military establishments and the waging war were expensive
endeavors and over time, as a consequence of arms races, the cost of war
and military organization kept rising. To conduct these activities and to
stay competitive, actors were required to extract ever larger quantities of
resources from their populations. This was done in two ways, both of
which led to the creation of increasing state capacity: (1) new and
increasingly ‘modern’ bureaucratic institutions were created to extract
these resources and (2) when interests within society resisted the
encroachment of the centralizing state on their rights and privileges,
these formerly autonomous entities were eliminated through the newly
available coercive instruments. The end result, by the eighteenth century,
was a consolidated state system in which the basic unit of international
politics was the centralized bureaucratic state.6
In summary, the argument of the warfare model is that war forced
‘states’ into existence by creating an environment in which survival
depended upon the formation of standing permanent armies which in
turn required institutions for the collection of revenue plus permanent
bureaucratic structures to maintain and control these new military
6
My critique of the administrative and bureaucratic consequences of military competition
in European state formation is in Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Bureaucracy, Administration
and Authority: European State Formation Reconsidered” in Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, forthcoming. This chapter deals only with the issue of the purposes
and consequence of violent political competition.
organizations. The states that failed to do this were eliminated by

conquest; the progressive consolidation of European territory from
literally hundreds of political units in the medieval period to roughly
two dozen by the nineteenth century is held to be a testament to the
critical role that warfare played in eliminating polities that failed to
create modern military institutions and the bureaucratic structures
that underpinned them. The classic summation of the argument is
Tilly’s:
Most of the European efforts to build states failed. The enormous majority of
the political units which were around to bid for autonomy and strength in
1500 disappeared in the next few centuries, smashed and absorbed by other
states-in-the making. The substantial majority of the units which got so far as to
acquire a recognizable existence as states during those centuries still
disappeared. And of the handful which survived or emerged into the
nineteenth century as autonomous states, only a few operated effectively –
regardless of the criterion of effectiveness we employ. The disproportionate
distribution of success and failures puts us in the unpleasant situation of
dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only
the positive cases are documented.7
The requirements of warfare necessitated the creation of increasingly

larger, more complex and thus expensive, military organizations. These
increasingly permanent standing armies had to be underpinned by an
extractive bureaucratic apparatus and provided, for the first time, a
plausible basis for the assertion of territorial control in its modern sense
(i.e. a monopoly on the use of legitimate force in society over a defined
and delimited territorial space).
The creation of this extractive bureaucratic apparatus led to the con-
frontation of state-builders (generally the crown and its agents) with
societies that naturally did not want to see enhanced centralized control
at the expense of traditional liberties and corporate autonomy. The
coercive element was vastly enhanced by the increasing permanence
7
Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” pp. 38–9. Another version
of this argument is stated by Michael Mann, “A state that wished to survive had to
increase its extractive capacity to pay for professional armies and/or navies. Those that
did not would be crushed on the battlefield and absorbed into others . . . No European
states were continuously at peace. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that a peaceful
state would have ceased to exist even more speedily than the militarily inefficient actually
did.” Mann, States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988), p. 109. What I am denying in this chapter is the claim that the process by which
territorial consolidation took place in Europe was primarily driven by conquest and
violent absorption. While there was indeed a lot of war in the late medieval and early
modern periods, it is not the case that the number of units was shrinking because of a
logic approximating “survival of the fittest”.
and size of armies; and the increasing resources of the crown enabled it to
co-opt the more significant constituencies within society (usually the
nobility). The resulting state formation was a consequence of bargaining,
cooptation and sheer coercion. Over the long run, in the confrontation
between state and society it was society that was on the losing end of the
equation, with formerly autonomous political institutions either being
brought under direct control of the state or being eliminated outright.
Territorial consolidation caused by conquest is, therefore, central to the
logic of the warfare model.
Over the course of the rest of this chapter I will seek to undermine
this argument by showing that this model fundamentally misunder-
stands the nature and purpose of political violence in the medieval and
early modern periods. While there was indeed a lot of violence, it is
critical to understand it within its proper empirical and theoretical
context. I therefore start with an examination of the kinds of war in
this period and then provide a model of war and society in this period.
I then apply this model to the realist account that provides foundation
of state formation theory.
What Is War?8
War, as Clausewitz correctly observed, is a political process. It is the
intensification of political violence undertaken to achieve some goal.
War, as a concept, captures a limited (but critical) subset of interactions
that involves the addition of organized violence to the normal tools of
political competition. War can be defined, therefore, as a social relation-
ship in which violence is a mechanism used to adjudicate outcomes. But
the key point is that the concept of war captures an intensification of
interactions but does not, in any way, constitute a negation of the social
relationship in question. An implication of this is that to understand war
is by definition to understand the underlying social relationships that are
being contested. Violence is a language used as a part of a negotiation
between groups to determine some aspect of the relationship between the
groups and therefore to understand violence requires understanding the
relationships that provide and define its context without which nothing
else makes sense.
8
This section is a schematic summary of a theoretical model fully fleshed out in Vivek
Swaroop Sharma, “A Social Theory of War: Clausewitz and War Reconsidered,”
Cambridge Review of International Affairs (August 19, 2014): doi:10.1080/
09557571.2013.872600.
War as Politics
Wars occur when one or more actors in a political relationship seek to
change the status quo in some way. The operative word here is change.
Wars occur when attempts to change the status quo meet resistance
and one or more actors seek to deploy violence as an additional means
in a political negotiation. This raises the question of what precisely, in
theoretical language, can be changed in a political relationship. The
argument here is that political conflicts can be either about the relative
rank and status of the actors under stable institutional configurations
or about the rules that govern the establishment and maintenance of
rank and status (i.e. institutions). My fundamental contention is that
political competition over rank and status generates limited levels of
violence (or ‘limited’ war) and that political competition over insti-
tutional configurations generates higher levels of violence (understood
on a spectrum of ‘total’ war). Furthermore, as we will see below, this
distinction was well understood by the political actors of premodern
Europe and incorporated into the laws and customs of European
warfare.
Rank, Status and Violence

Conflicts about rank and status are a normal function of the change
generated by the life cycle in all group animals. All social animals that
live in groups rank their members relative to the other members of the
group. The problem is that this internal ranking system is subject to
constant change as a natural and organic consequence of the life cycle:
as individuals are born, age and die, the internal ranking system con-
stantly has to be adjusted, and these adjustments in relative rank generate
social friction and conflict. Violence is a (but not necessarily the) mech-
anism by which these conflicts are adjudicated. Social systems that use
violence as a mechanism to determine relative rank and status will
generate violence that is frequent but limited in scale and scope. Fre-
quent, because if the exercise of violence is essential for the establishment
of rank and status then the demand for violence will be high because of
the constant need for individuals within the system to use violence to
affirm their status. But the violence under these conditions will not just
be frequent; it will also be of lower intensity. Why this should be the case
has to do with the nature of domination. Dominators want the maximum
gains for the minimum of expenditure of precious resources. If actors can
achieve dominance without the risks and expenditures associated with
violence, then they will do so: violence only becomes a necessity if there
is some dispute over the ranking system and violence is accepted as a

legitimate mechanism to resolve disputes of this nature.
It is worth emphasizing that the violence expended will be limited by
the logic inherent in the ranking systems themselves: the point is to
dominate the maximum number of individuals in a group for the
minimal expenditure of scarce resources, and so the violence in such
competitions is highly ritualized and restrained by rules designed to
contain the levels of violence and by implication its collateral impact
on other members of the group. The point of the exercise is to gain
recognition of one’s status by both the individuals involved in the
conflict as well as by the other members of the group. The amount
of violence that this requires is generally very limited because there are
no incentives to escalate to higher levels because the stakes of the
conflict are low and are of intense immediate interest only to a small
subset of the population. The point of the violence is to force an
acceptance of an individual’s status (and therefore access to the actual
benefits that flow to those with high status) under the existing rules of
the society, and once that goal has been achieved the continuation of
violence becomes counter-productive. Empirically this type of violent
competition has very wide resonance and can be viewed in a wide
range of settings from primates to wolves to human societies and
therefore constitutes the most ancient and ubiquitous form of political
violence. As we shall see below, much of the political violence in
premodern Europe was about relative rank and status. Disputes over
property and title were a normal part of the social system, and violence
was an accepted mechanism to resolve these disputes. But, as we shall
also see below, this form of political conflict was highly constrained by
rules, norms and customs and understanding these rules, norms and
customs is essential to making sense of the phenomenon in question.
It is worth emphasizing that this kind of conflict requires, by
definition, the basic acceptance of the rules of the game by the
individuals engaged in the conflict. Therefore, these kinds of conflicts
can occur only between individuals (or groups) that are fundamen-
tally equals. This basic equality implies a level of trust that the players
will accept the outcomes of violent competition as legitimate and will
not seek to use non-legitimate forms of competition to advance their
interests because to do so would make the benefits of victory and the
consequences of defeat uncertain and insecure. Put in slightly differ-
ent language, this kind of conflict can occur only under stable insti-
tutional conditions where all concerned share limited goals and
agree that a particular form of violence is a legitimate mechanism
for conflict resolution.
Institutions and Violence

What differentiates human societies from those of other group animals is
that the basic rules governing rank and status are institutionalized and are
not merely a reflection of some biological imperative. Unlike our chim-
panzee cousins, the rules governing our status systems are subject to
constant negotiation and change. Institutions can be understood as
legitimate power configurations in society: they affect human behavior
by providing individuals within the system with templates of behavior to
be followed and by constraining and channeling behavior through the
existence of enforcement mechanisms. The power of institutions lies in
their ability to order individual behavior and the outcomes associated
with that behavior. Changing institutional configurations requires over-
coming the resistance of those who have vested interests in particular
configurations of institutional rules. A conflict over some aspect of the
rules of a society is more than a conflict involving the specific individuals
within a ranking system: it is about the nature of the ranking system itself.
These conflicts are about some aspect relating to the very nature of social
order and therefore can, in some sense, be understood as ‘constitutional’
in nature.
Conflicts that involve some attempt to change some aspect of the
institutional structure of society will generate greater levels of resistance
for the simple fact that what is at stake in these conflicts involves more
vested interests than is the case with conflicts that are merely about
the internal ranking of individuals within a group. Why this should be
the case has, again, to do with the nature of institutions, aspects of which
have already been discussed. Institutions, as defined above, can be
understood as legitimate configurations of power. Furthermore, insti-
tutions do not exist in isolation from one another, but instead exist in an
entangling web with other institutions in society.9 Changing or over-
throwing particular power configurations can vary in magnitude and
the degree of collateral impact on other nodal points of power and
authority within a society. When challenges to it are sufficiently
threatening the stakes are raised, as are the levels of mobilizations and
its consequent expression in resistance and violence. This implies that
unlike limited conflict over rank and status, conflicts that involve some
9
Take property, for example. In Latin Christendom property was bound to the structures
of kinship and in some sense religion. Attempts to change property rights regimes had
implications for family structure among other institutional networks, and so anything
other than a minor change in the property rights regime would by definition have
implications for other forms of power and hierarchy.
aspect of the institutional structure of society by definition involves actors

who do not accept the fundamental equality of their opponents.
Conflicts over institutional arrangements can vary in intensity
depending upon their capacity to mobilize resistance to changes in these
power configurations. For this reason, unlike limited conflict over rank
and status, these conflicts can be arranged on a spectrum defined by how
fundamental the challenge to the existing social order is. Conflicts about
religion tended to the more intense end of the spectrum; those involving
estates and rulers more toward the middle; and those involving the
precise configuration of inheritance rights more toward the lower end.
What all of the conflicts have in common is that they tended to be more
difficult to resolve, resulted in greater degrees of mobilization and were
characterized by greater levels of symbolic and physical violence.
The Types of War in Premodern Europe

There were two kinds of war recognized by Latin Europeans: (1) bellum
romanum (also called guerre mortelle) or total war10 and (2) bellum
hostile or limited war. What determined which of these categories a
conflict fell into was the identity of the contestants. Total war was
conducted against three categories of actors: (1) heretics, (2) rebels and
(3) infidels. Limited war was reserved for ‘internal’ conflicts, that is,
between opponents who recognized each other as equals.
Bellum Romanum was fought without restraint or expectation of
mercy. Prisoners could be slaughtered and enemy populations could be
enslaved or simply massacred outright. Only under certain conditions
was this kind of war fought between Latin Christians, usually because of
heresy or under circumstances when the opposing armies were com-
prised of different social orders (like the Swiss peasant militias that
fought the chivalries of Burgundy and Austria in a series of terrible battles
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). The other circumstance in
which Latin Christians fought under conditions approximating total
war was in sieges. If a besieged town refused, under the customs and
laws of war, to surrender within a certain period, it was subject to sack if
successfully taken. Towns that surrendered when called upon to do so
preserved the life and property of its citizens. The targets of total war,
10
The term ‘total war’ has been used in a variety of contexts, especially by historians to
describe various modern conflicts such as the First and Second World Wars. I use the
term ‘total’ to mean conflicts that generate a greater level of mobilization and higher
levels of symbolic and physical violence. By this standard, total war is a category meant to
capture all conflicts that are not ‘limited’ and so the category has to be understood as
existing on a continuum.
therefore, were ‘outsiders’ and, only under certain restricted circum-

stances, against ‘insiders’. Note that these distinctions cross the trad-
itional political science categories of ‘civil’ and ‘international’. Total war
was fought against (Pagan and Islamic) foreign powers as well as internal
enemies; limited wars were fought between external (dynastic) powers as
well as ‘internal’ conflicts (e.g. wars involving contestants who were
bound by ties of lordship and vassalage).
Bellum hostile, on the other hand, was fought under the laws, norms
and customs regulating legitimate violence between actors who recog-
nized the fundamental equality of their opponents. Chivalric warfare was
governed by a code of conduct that had the force of law in this society. As
Robert Stacey explains:
As an enforceable body of defined military custom, the laws of war . . . emerged
out of the interplay of knightly custom with Roman law as this was studied and
applied in court from the twelfth century on. By the fourteenth century this
combination of knightly practice and legal theory had given rise to a formal
system of military law, jus militare, the law of the milites, the Latin word for
knights. The enforceability of this law . . . needs to be stressed. Charges brought
under the laws of arms were assigned to special military or royal courts – the
Court of Chivalry in England, the Parlement of Paris in France – where lawyers
clarified its precepts in formal pleadings. Knights and, of course, heralds
remained experts in the laws of arms. Their testimony was sought both in
defining the law and in applying it to specific cases, a reflection of jus militare
as a body of international custom . . . the real history of the laws of war in the Age
of Chivalry is buried in hundreds of court cases brought under it and in the scores
of chroniclers’ accounts of the conduct of actual war.11
The laws of medieval warfare were grounded in two important principles:
(1) the knights of Europe fought as individuals and ‘rights were acquired
by and against him personally and not against the side for which he
fought’; and12 (2) warfare was fundamentally contractual especially with
regards to the recruitment of forces and the division of spoils (above all
ransoms).13 Medieval warfare, therefore, was infused by property law in
two important respects: (1) the conflicts were caused by conflicting
assertions of dynastic property rights and (2) the soldiers that fought
them participated on a contractual basis with rights grounded in property
11
Robert C. Stacey, “Age of Chivalry,” in: Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and
Mark R. Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War (Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 27–39, here
at p. 31.
12
Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1965), p. 65.
13
Stacey writes, “The precise customs governing the division of spoils varied from country
to country, but everywhere this distribution created a legally recognized, heritable, and
assignable right of property in the captured objects.” “The Age of Chivalry,” p. 34.
law enforceable in courts of chivalry. The chivalry of Europe fought as

individuals for their honor and reputations and the just rewards that
flowed from the upholding of these virtues. Both of these aspects contrib-
uted to the ‘limited’ nature of warfare.
War within Latin Europe can, therefore, be divided into two distinct
categories: (1) what can be understood as ‘social wars’, that is, conflicts
that pitted disparate elements of society against each other or the crown.
Included in this category are the peasant revolts and the wars of religion
(including medieval suppressions of heresy) and (2) conflicts that can be
understood as dynastic in nature. These included ‘internal’ conflicts
such as disputes over regencies during minorities as well as the famous
wars of succession like the Italian Wars and the War of the Spanish
Succession. These are best understood as disputes over property because
political power in this society was generally held and transmitted by the
laws governing property. Conflicts over property occurred at all levels of
society and often led to violence; what concerns us here are those
disputes over property big and official enough to be classified as wars of
succession. It is important to emphasize that property was never
restricted to simply ‘real property’, but also included the rights and
privileges of lordship and office.14
Before proceeding with a more detailed analysis of the two kinds of war
in late medieval and early modern Europe it is important to note that
these categories are archetypes. In reality the boundaries of all the con-
flicts of the late medieval and early modern periods (including those
involving Islam) are much more blurry than these dichotomies would
suggest. These categories are meant to be a useful way with which to
organize the problem, but no more than that. Wars of religion turn out to
contain surprisingly high amounts of dynastic strife as well as other types
of elite competition. While it is not for nothing that the word ‘protestant’
is derived from the ‘protest’ of segments of the princes of the Empire
against imperial edicts banning Luther and his followers, it is important
to remember that these princes acted against a background of shifting
14
Take this description of the royal domain in medieval France: “Within the territories we
speak of as the royal ‘domain’, the kings possessed this village but not the neighboring
one; had in a village all rights of justice or only rights of justice over major crimes;
exercised a monopoly over fishing rights above a town but not below it; held this castle
but not the next one; held minting rights in this city but shared them with the bishop in
the next. Nor was the distribution of the kings’ rights isomorphic throughout the
domain.” Geoffrey Koziol, “Political Culture,” in: Marcus Bull (ed.), France in the
Central Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 43–76, here at
p. 56. This condition of fractured and varied rights and obligations (all held as property)
defined Latin European society until the very end of Old Europe and in the early modern
period was bundled under the category of “feudal” rights.
and often contradictory motivations and goals. In a complex society it

could not be expected to have been any other way.
War and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

In part 3 of this chapter I turn to a more detailed examination of the two
types of wars in premodern Europe. This section is focused on the
question of to what extent and exactly how and under what circum-
stances war and violence were mechanisms used by European elites
specifically with regards to the question of territorial consolidation. The
purpose of this section is to apply the typology presented in Section 2 to
the period 1000 to roughly the end of the eighteenth century in order to
demonstrate that the state formation literature is operating with a faulty
model of political conflict in this period. Instead of a Darwinian model of
territorial conquest much of the war in this period involved either prop-
erty disputes or the constitutional relationships of various groups within
the larger society. Territorial conquest, in the realist sense, only occurred
when Latin Europeans encountered non-Latin European societies.
Limited War
In order to understand limited war in medieval and early modern
Europe, it is first necessary to have some understanding of the social
organization of this society. The society that emerged by the eleventh
century was organized for the benefit of property holders and above all
property in the form of land. In all premodern agrarian societies land
and authority over the people who work the land is the most important
source of social power. The exact ways in which land is held, exploited
and transmitted differ from society to society (and the precise ways in
which these functions are carried out are profoundly important to the
overall power structure of the society), but in all cases elaborate insti-
tutional frameworks designed to categorize and differentiate landhold-
ing emerge as a part of the status system. What all property holders want
across time and space is security of tenure in the form of stable and
predictable property rights regimes. What is distinct about medieval
Europe is the emergence of a particular formalized system of political
power that was held as property and transmitted by the same laws,
norms and customs governing the transmission of ‘private’ property.
To be a landlord in this system meant, by definition, to share to varying
degrees in aspects of public authority. Medieval Europe created an
amazingly elaborate system of property rights in which both land-
holding and public authority were divisible and transmittable. Over
time the exact forms of property rights evolved, and the relative import-
ance of certain institutional forms of property rights declined or
increased depending upon local conditions and circumstances, but
from roughly the year 1000 to roughly the French Revolution, one of
the fundamental logics of political competition in European society at
all levels was driven by the politics of property (especially land).
An implication of this state of affairs is that the laws governing the
devolution of property were by definition laws governing ‘public’ power
relationships. Disputes over property are probably the most frequent
form of conflict in most societies and so it was in premodern Europe.
What is different about premodern Europe from other landed agrarian
societies was the degree to which property and public authority were
intertwined and formalized. This means that disputes over inheritance
(again, one of the most frequent form of conflicts in all societies) were, if
the inheritance in question were large and important enough to the
overall stability of the society, by definition formal competitions over
position in the status system. The key point to bear in mind is that
competition over property in this society had to be conducted on the
basis of the legitimacy of the claims of the contestants because in a society
of property holders the terms on which claims to property were trans-
mitted was of the utmost concern to all property holders. The assertion of
a claim to property had to be done in such way as to minimize the
consequences of a change in ownership to other stakeholders in the
system of property relations. The issue here is not the willingness of
particular individuals to escalate disputes beyond the norms and customs
governing violence: undoubtedly many individuals did in fact do so and
many more would have used unrestrained violence to obtain the favorable
resolution of a property dispute. The issue instead has to do with the
willingness of other stakeholders in the overall system to permit the
emergence of precedents that threatened their own tenure over their
own property. This means that disputes over property, strictly speaking,
even when involving violence, were conducted according to rules, and
these rules structured the amount and timing of the violence that was
permissible in the pursuit of individual selfish goals.
This means that the most frequent form of war in premodern Europe
(dynastic wars, about which more below) had the structure and logic of
lawsuits in which violence was considered to be a legitimate mechanism
of conflict resolution. And the amount of legitimate violence that these
conflicts could generate was regulated both by the logic inherent in the
nature of the dispute (i.e. how much effort and resources an actor is
willing to mobilize in order to achieve a goal) and the degree to which
varying conflicting claims appealed to the overall interests of property
holders. The point of a dynastic war of succession was to assert a superior

claim to property (in this case title and office) under stable institutional
conditions and to have this claim accepted as legitimate under the laws
and customs of the overall society. This was as true at the highest levels of
European society as it was at the lower end of the scale. This meant that
those pursuing property disputes had to do so in such a way as to
minimize its collateral effects on other stakeholders.
The consequences of this institutional structure were profound on the
conduct and nature of high politics and, of course, war and violence. Late
medieval and early modern Europe was comprised of composite polities
ruled by a small group of interrelated families who transmitted power
through the generations according to rules of succession that were a form
of property law. Conflicts over the succession to lordships generally
occurred when there were situations in which the laws of succession did
not clearly specify the rightful heir.15 Two major points need to be made
about dynastic wars: (1) unlike social wars, dynastic conflict was about who
was the rightful heir to a lordship and the assertion of this right did not have
implications for the institutional structure of society16 and (2) wars of
succession almost never led to the incorporation of one polity into another.
Late medieval and early modern Europe was full of ramshackle dynastic
unions in which the autonomy of each of the component parts was
maintained and respected.17 To be ruled by a prince who also had other
titles was the norm. The dynastic union of England and Scotland in
1603 did not bring into being a ‘united’ kingdom; there was a union of
‘crowns’ but not a union of parliaments as was to occur in 1707 with the
Act of Union. A dynastic war asserted the right of a prince to be lawful heir
to another principality, but this in no way implied the aggrandizement of a
15
That these claims could often remain dormant for generations does not indicate that they
were simply being manipulated for other purposes. Frank Tallett makes this point well:
“Moreover, the [dynastic hereditary] rights themselves were above all important, and
rulers pursued them with a seemingly irrational disregard for where the lands lay and the
practical difficulties that would be encountered in enforcing them.” War and Society in
Early Modern Europe, 1495–1715 (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 18.
16
Dynastic wars of succession could lead to a clarification of the laws of succession of a
polity. The best example of this is the emergence of “Salic” Law as the law of the French
succession which became a part of the fundamental law of the kingdom as a result of its
successful defense by the Valois kings of France in their successional dispute with the
kings of England. It was reaffirmed at the end of the sixteenth century when Henry of
Bourbon, king of Navarre, became Henry IV, king of France, by right of descent in the
direct male line of the house of France even though he was related to the last Valois kings
of France by 22 degrees!
17
See Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Kinship, Property and Authority: European Territorial
Consolidation Reconsidered,” Politics and Society (February 27, 2015): doi:10.1177/
0032329215571279.
‘state’. When the now United Kingdom entered into yet another dynastic
union with the house of Hanover in 1714 there was no question of a
deeper union between the electorate and the kingdom which remained,
as was the norm, separate entities.18 In other words, it is critical that the
reader keep in mind that the objective of expansion was not the creation of a
centralized state. The objective of expansion was to maximize the prestige,
status and power of the dynasty: and the political strategies that dynasts
used to maximize their goals were institutionally distinct from those pur-
sued by those trying to maximize state power. Dynasts wanted, above all,
the maximum power and status with the maximum amount of stability,
and they therefore had to pursue their interests constrained by the funda-
mental laws and logics of dynastic property accumulation even if these
conflicted with the interests of the ‘state’.
That the primary concern of dynasts was the family can be best
illustrated by an example. As a consequence of a dispute over the feudal
rights of the crown over fiefs, Philip Augustus, king of France
(1180–1223), conquered Normandy, Maine and Anjou between
1202 and 1216 from John, king of England (1199–1216). In doing so
Philip Augustus vastly expanded the royal demesne (he added Cham-
pagne, Artois and Provence through dynastic inheritance). Note, how-
ever, that the kings of France did not accumulate territory as an end in
and of itself. Instead, they proceeded to parcel out these new lands to
younger sons of the house of France through appanages. While these
were fiefs of the crown that were granted on the condition that they
reverted to the crown upon the failure of the male line or the succession
of the cadet branch to the throne, these grants to cadets severely limited
the resources of the crown. Indeed, on occasion they could come to pose
a grave threat to the senior line of the family (as was to occur with the
dukes of Burgundy).
This policy of endowing cadets had the effect of creating great mag-
nates who were virtually autonomous of the crown and had interests of
their own that often conflicted with those of the king. Time and time
again kings of France alienated parts of the kingdom for the benefit of
dynasty. It is important to underline the fact that the creation of appan-
ages for the sons of John II, king of France, in the second half of the
fourteenth century occurred during the context of military confrontation
with the kings of England. In other words, in the midst of the war of the
18
On the dynastic union of Hanover and Great Britain, see Mitchell Allen, “The Anglo-
Hanoverian Connection: 1727–1760,” PhD Dissertation (Boston University, 2000); see
also Uriel Dann, Hanover and Great Britain 1740–1760 (Leicester University Press,
1991).
succession called the Hundred Years War, the kings of France, at a time
when they presumably needed every resource they could cobble together
to fight the war, alienated huge tracks of territory and blocs of rights and
privileges to younger sons! Such policies are incomprehensible as the
work of men concerned about a ‘state’. Centralization was not, therefore,
a logical consequence dynastic territorial expansion. Indeed, it seems
clear that the kings of France paid little heed to the needs of expanding
‘the state’. The principal reason that the crown acquired most of the great
fiefs and appanages of France by the eighteenth century is dynastic
accident. As a consequence of the failure of collateral branches of the
house of France (and by the accession to the throne of cadet branches)
most of the great French principalities were absorbed into the demesne.
This did not, however, imply the creation of a centralized state. The
kings of France ruled Provence as count of Provence, Normandy as duke
of Normandy and so on. State-centric historians and political scientists
have, therefore, misunderstood the historical processes that are being
addressed in this chapter. Dynastic consolidation did not lead to central-
ization. As A. W. Lewis argues:
Modern scholarship has often treated Capetian history almost purely from the
growth of royal power and the unification of modern France. These themes do
not emerge from, and sometimes conflict with, the data on the royal kinship and
successional structures provided by the sources. Hereditary succession to the
throne may be viewed as an aspect of constitutional history, but the appanages are
incomprehensible as the work of the architects of a centralized territorial state.
Rationalization of this conflict between evidence and theory has often been
couched either as condemnation of the appanages or as an apology for the
motives of the kings and for the options that were open to them. That the
object of such appraisal should have been, not idiosyncratic, but the normal
behavior of successive generations of kings, suggests the inadequacy of the
analytical concepts employed. A different perspective is gained by the use of
more primitive sociological terms: the themes of Geschlecht and its relation to its
honor and lands. Capetian practice may be seen entirely in terms of fixed rules of
familial order and property. These are that, at every succession, (1) the principal
honor and the undivided patrimonial lands were transmitted to the eldest son and
(2) provision for cadets was made from territorial acquisitions, by marriage to
heiresses, or by ecclesiastical placement, according to the amount of available
land and the rank of the sons.19
The dynastic nature of European high politics and violent political com-
petition can best be illustrated through an examination of the origins of
the Hundred Years War. The Hundred Years War had its origins in the
19
Andrew W. Levis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies in Familial Order and the
State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 193.
complicated and overlapping feudal jurisdictions created by the dynastic

activity of French princes.20 In the twelfth century, as a result of dynastic
inheritance, the Anglo-Norman composite monarchy came into the pos-
session of the house of Anjou in the person of Henry Plantagenet. Henry
inherited the counties of Anjou, Maine and Touraine from his father
20
There is a vast and expanding literature on the issues discussed here. Good
introductions are: Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War:
England and France at War c. 1300–c.1450 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989); Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337–1453
(New York: Penguin, 1999); Scott Waugh, England in the reign of Edward III (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); idem., “Tenure to Contract: Lordship and
Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England,” English Historical Review, no. 101 (October
1986), pp. 811–39; Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England
1272–1377 (New York: Routledge, 1980); Malcolm Vale, The Origins of the Hundred
Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250–1340 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
idem., English Gascony 1399–1453: A Study of War, Government and Politics During the
Later Stages of the Hundred Years’ War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
idem., Charles VII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Richard Vernier,
The Flower of Chivalry: Bertrand de Guesclin and the Hundred Years War (Rochester:
Boydell, 2003); Richard Barber, The Black Prince (Stroud: Sutton, 2003); Richard
Kaeuper (ed.). Violence in Medieval Society (Rochester: Boydell, 2000); idem., War,
Justice and Public Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); John Bell
Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and
Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Simon Walker,
The Lancasterian Affinity 1361–1399 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Kenneth Fowler, The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster
1310–1361 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969); Clifford Rogers (ed.), The Wars of
Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (Rochester: Boydell, 1999); W. M. Ormrod,
“Edward III and his Family,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (October 1987),
pp. 398–422; idem., The Reign of Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990); idem., Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1995); W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Thirteenth Century (Dover: Boydell,
1985); idem (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century (Dover: Boydell, 1986); idem
(ed.), England in the Thirteenth Century, Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1991; John
Gillingham and J. C. Holt (eds.), War and Government in the Middle Ages (Totowa:
Barnes and Noble, 1984); Charles T. Wood, Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints
and Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Constance Brittain Bouchard, “Strong of Body, Brave and Noble”: Chivalry and
Society in Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Anne Curry, The
Hundred Years War (London: Macmillan, 1993); Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston
(eds.), The Battle of Crécy 1346 (Rochester: Boydell, 2005); Juliet Vale, Edward III and
Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Context 1270–1350 (Rochester: Boydell, 1982); J. S.
Bothwell, Edward III and the English Peerage: Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and
Political Control in 14th Century England (Rochester: Boydell, 2004); idem (ed.), The
Age of Edward III (York: York Medieval Press, 2001); Bernard Bachrach, State-
Building in Medieval France: Studies in Early Angevin History (Brookfield: Ashgate,
1995); Bryan Bevan, Edward III (London: Rubicon, 1992); Andrew Ayton, “Edward
III and the English Aristocracy at the Beginning of the Hundred Years War,” in:
M. Strickland (ed.), Armies, Warfare and Chivalry (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1998),
pp. 173–206; and, Michael Bennett, “Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the
Crown, 1376–1471,” English Historical Review, no. 113 (June 1998), pp. 580–609.
Geoffrey V, count of Anjou, and the Anglo-Norman realm from his

mother Matilda, daughter of Henry I, king of England and duke of
Normandy. In 1152 the young Henry II married Eleanor, heiress of
Aquitaine, the divorced wife of his lord Louis VII, king of France. Using
dynastic tools, the house of Anjou came to exercise varying forms of
lordship over much of eastern France, thereby creating a fertile ground
for dispute between the kings of France and their greatest vassals, the
kings of England.
It is important to note here that Henry II did not dispute the fact
that he held his lands in France as a vassal of the king of France. Not
only did he himself perform homage to Louis VII and Philip Augustus,
but he made sure that his sons did so as well on numerous occasions.
Henry II, as the greatest prince in Latin Christendom, did not want to
set a bad example for his vassals. He could not, as a matter of self-
interest, simply repudiate the authority of the king of France. Indeed,
every king of England until Edward III acknowledged these ties of
vassalage in person in ceremonies of homage. The real difficulty was in
working out just what exactly these feudal rights meant, above all in
the realm of jurisdiction.
To be a king in medieval Europe meant, above all, being the ultimate
court of appeal within the kingdom, whether it be France, England or
Germany. By the laws and customs of this society a vassal of a lord had
the right of appeal to his lord’s lord. The kings of France, like those of
England and Germany, sought to assert the superior rights of the crown
and especially of the Parlement of Paris, as the supreme judicial body for
all the fiefs subject to the king of France, including those ruled by the
house of Anjou. This meant that in disputes between the house of Anjou
and their vassals within their French principalities, nobles who were
either in conflict with the Angevins or dissatisfied with their justice could
appeal to the king of France as their lord’s lord. By the laws and customs
of fiefs, vassals who defied a summons to appear in court to receive their
lord’s justice were subject to the forfeiture of the lands, titles and privil-
eges held of that lord. This is what vassalage meant. These legally
forfeited lands could then be used to endow relatives and reward others
in ties of dependency. The enforcement of the judicial privileges of the
crown was, in other words, a major source of patronage for late medieval
and early modern rulers in a society in which patronage was the basic
currency of power. The potential for conflict under these circumstances
is self-evident. These issues and problems were a logical consequence of
the institutional structure of political relations into the eighteenth cen-
tury. The exercise of lordship was a great deal more than can be
expressed in the matrices of raw power and coercion.
In the fluid context of Henry II’s complicated family life (to put it
mildly) Louis VII and especially his son Philip Augustus began to assert
the right of ultimate appeal. These disputes came to a head in the reigns
of Henry II’s sons Richard I and King John. Under John’s leadership the
house of Anjou lost the core of their French inheritance to the Capetians
but retained Aquitaine and later acquired other French lands through
inheritance (the county of Ponthieu, e.g. which came with Edward I’s
wife Eleanor of Castile in 1279). Through much of the thirteenth century
the relationship between the houses of England and France settled into a
pattern of occasional open hostilities interspersed with years of dynastic
harmony. But the basic problem remained unresolved despite attempts
to work out the specific content of the rights of the French crown over
fiefs (most famously with the Peace of Paris of 1259 in which Henry III
performed liege homage to Louis IX and officially became a peer of
France). Ultimately, the kings of France had leverage over the behavior
of the kings of England because whenever a dispute threatened, the kings
of France could confiscate the fiefs under their undisputed jurisdiction
(after 1259 this happened twice – in 1294–7 and 1324–7 – both times
leading to brief wars with ultimate restoration of the kings of England to
their remaining lands in France).
The feudal and dynastic relations between the houses of France and
England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provide the back-
drop against which the ‘War of the French Succession’ can be under-
stood. The more immediate cause, however, was the failure of the direct
line of the Capetians. Between 987 and 1316, the Capetians had had the
extraordinary good fortune of an unbroken line of sons succeeding their
fathers as kings of France. This remarkable dynastic stability was pro-
foundly important to the trajectory of French history. This changed in
1316, when Louis X died leaving a posthumous son John I (who died
shortly after childbirth). In 1316, Louis X’s daughter was excluded from
the French succession in favor of her uncle (Louis X’s younger brother)
Philip V, who also died without male heirs in 1322. Philip V was then
succeeded by Charles IV, the youngest of the surviving sons of Philip IV,
who died in 1328, also only leaving daughters. In 1316, the first prece-
dent had been set of preferring a younger brother over a daughter in the
case of the French succession. The question in 1328 then became which
of the close male relatives of the last kings of France was the rightful heir.
The closest male relative of the last Capetian kings was Edward III, king
of England, who was the son of Isabella of France, daughter of Philip IV
and sister to the last three kings of France.
Edward’s claim was through the female line and under the then
turbulent conditions of English affairs in the aftermath of the coup
against his father, Edward II, and the establishment of a regency under
his mother and her lover, there was no question of asserting Edward’s
claim. The French nobility had, in any case, acted quickly to acknow-
ledge Philip, count of Valois, nephew of Philip IV and first cousin to the
last three kings of France, as Philip VI, king of France. Philip VI was the
closest living male relative to Philip IV in the male line.21 Given that this
was an unprecedented set of circumstances the law of the French succes-
sion gave no clear guidance on the legitimacy of the exclusion of women
as well as of males whose claims came through descent in the female line.
By acting quickly, Philip VI established a precedent that would become
accepted as the law of the French succession, but only after this was
contested by Edward III and his decedents in the Hundred Years War.22
War, therefore, became a form of judicial combat in which God would
grant victory to the contestant whose claim was most legitimate.23
The Hundred Years War was, therefore, dynastic in two senses: (1) it
was a struggle over which of a small circle of closely related men was the
legitimate heir to the kingdom of France and (2) it was also fought over
long-standing tensions over the nature of feudal tenure (a situation
created in the first place by dynastic inheritance). As such, the Hundred
Years War can be taken as an archetypical example of dynastic wars of
succession and therefore of the relationship between the causes of war
and the institutional structure of the contestants. Needless to say, such
events did not occur between Islamic and Christian polities.
The accumulation of disparate and often far-flung territories under the
rule of a common prince even when accompanied by violence did not
make the ‘states’ of Europe larger. The rulers of dynastic Europe pursued
family interests above all else. Wars of succession and clashes over
dynastic rights simply determined which of a small circle of closely related
individuals would succeed. The kings of Latin Europe, ultimately, pur-
sued strategies that were no different from those of any other great
magnate or, for that matter, of peasants and for exactly the same reasons.
The key point to make here is that while rulers would attempt to raise
the largest and best-equipped forces that they could there were profound
restraints on just how far they could push their societies to mobilize in
21
Note that French property law had, by the fourteenth century, long established the
superior rights of nephews over cousins in the succession.
22
See Craig Taylor, “The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown,”
French History, no. 15 (December 2001), pp. 358–77.
23
See Matthew Strickland, “Provoking or Avoiding Battle? Challenge, Duel and Single
Combat in Warfare of the High Middle Ages,” in: Strickland, Armies, Chivalry and
Warfare, pp. 317–43; see also Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
support of these objectives. All societies contain a certain amount of total

military potential: that is, a theoretical map of the various kinds of
resources and sources of military manpower. Rulers must decide how
and at what cost that military potential is tapped in pursuit of their varied
and changing goals. In low stakes conflict, the costs of mobilizing certain
categories of military potential are high: medieval rulers were profoundly
reluctant to mobilize their peasants in the pursuit of limited goals. If,
however, the stakes of conflict increased to include some fundamental
threat to the social order, then the forms of military potential mobilized
increased as did their willingness to engage in more intense forms of
violence. In this context, it is worth noting how profoundly stable this
system of property and power turned out to be. The rights of inheritance
were far and away the most legitimate form of property, and it was very
rare for a dynasty to be completely disenfranchised from its possessions
without compensation. It is worth noting that Louis XVI was the des-
cendant in the unbroken direct male line of Hugh Capet (died 996). And
it is worth emphasizing the profound rarity of coups in premodern
Europe dynastic polities: it is a question worth contemplating as to why
there were so few attempts by powerful subjects to displace dynasties on
their thrones (even when there were conditions of regency and minority).
At the end of the day, any social order that can replicate itself for
800 years must be recognized as being exceptionally stable. Of course,
European society underwent many profound changes between the year
1000 and the French Revolution, but dynasticism as a system of power
relationships remained constant throughout. Its exact institutional
appearances and forms evolved over time, of course, but in a deep sense
Louis XVI is, as an actor, recognizably in the same category as his
ancestor Hugh Capet and not in the same category as his nineteenth-
century successors who ruled France, in which the overt and formal link
between land and public power had been severed.
Institutions and Total War

While one of the basic building blocks of European social organization
was the relationship between kinship, property and political authority,
there were, of course, other institutional nodal points of power and
authority in this society. In addition to dynastic actors, there were a
whole host of other organizational forms. And these corporate actors
engaged in varying kinds of political competition, cooperation and con-
flict with one another as well as with dynastic actors. The precise consti-
tutional relationships between these bodies were often contested, and
these contests generated conflict and sometimes violence. In the
following I consider three kinds of social conflicts that generated enough

violence to be classified as wars: (1) conflicts between different social
orders, but especially involving peasants and landlords; (2) religious
conflicts and (3) constitutional conflicts most often involving the crown
and other centers of power within society (especially estates).
Peasants and Social Conflict

While the dynastic order in Europe was remarkably stable, lasting as it
did for something on the order of 800 years, in other respects the
European political system underwent periods of violent contestation
over, to varying extents, the nature of the social order. Those involving
peasant revolts are the easiest to understand and explain. European
social relationships were fundamentally contractual and legal in nature.
The emergence of a relatively stable social equilibrium by the year
1000 was accompanied by an explosion of charters and documents that
regularized social relationships across time and space. One aspect of this
was the definition of the rights and obligations of landowners in relation-
ship to those of both other landowners and those of the peasantry. As is to
be expected, once the rules regulating the relationship between landlords
and the peasantry were laid down, they were subject to constant renegoti-
ation with landlords and peasants pushing to the limits the boundaries of
their rights in relationship to the other. Under conditions where peasants
felt that the fundamental terms of the relationship had deviated from
their understanding of their contractual rights and obligations, the resort
to organized large-scale violence was a possibility. When such conflicts
did turn violent, the scale of the violence was generally extreme. Any
questioning of the established order that went beyond the permissible
would have been met with horrible violence. In these conflicts, both sides
used high levels of symbolic and physical violence in order to achieve
their goals: and these goals were varying degrees of change in the insti-
tutional structures that governed the relationships between the groups.
And while most peasant revolts failed in a political sense, the intensity of
the violence of these conflicts served as a fundamental reminder of limits
of legitimate authority and the cost of coercion. After all, landlords would
not kill their workforce in large numbers unless they believed that they
posed a massive challenge to their authority and property.
Of course, peasants were not the only social order that conflicted with
landlords: the towns and urban corporations of medieval Europe were
vibrant and thriving communities with real military potential and bound
to the rest of society through a wide range of contractual arrangements.
As with the peasants, the towns and urban corporation sought to
maximize their legitimate rights and power in society in relationship to

other social groups and organizational categories. And, on occasion,
these conflicts could generate intense political violence. The most
famous cases of these types of wars occurred in the Low Countries
during the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries (and in some sense
through the eighteenth century) where communal and guild organiza-
tions proved formidable in mobilizing military power. The other related
cases involved the urban and rural communal movements in the Alpine
regions that would become the Swiss Confederation. Swiss corporate
institutions proved to be lethal opponents of princely authority and
fought the chivalries of Austria and Burgundy to a standstill. Outside of
these more spectacular cases were a whole of intense competition
between varying categories of corporate and dynastic entities. War and
violence between these groups was more intense and less chivalric than
pure aristocratic competition and could easily intensify when the consti-
tutional issues at hand were sufficiently important.
Religious Conflict
The second category of total wars in Latin Europe related to religion.
From the very beginnings of Christianity, Christians struggled with the
problem of uniformity and diversity in belief and practice and all Chris-
tian societies invested huge amounts of resources in ensuring theological
and institutional uniformity within their communities. This drive toward
standardization and uniformity could and did generate immense friction
against natural tendencies of localization and diversification. And these
frictions could generate intense levels of violence.
The religious wars are the best remembered category of European total
war, and with good reason. The destruction of the confessional unity of
Latin Christendom was indeed a serious business. Aside from the con-
cerns for the afterlife that motivated a pious and devout world, there were
serious, practical implications to the dissolution of the medieval Church.
The dynastic and feudal structure of Latin European society was deeply
enmeshed with the structures of the Church. Not only did the Church
dispose of vast wealth and patronage, but it was one of the principal
repositories for the younger, disinherited sons of the nobility. The intro-
duction of primogeniture is inconceivable without the unique structure
of the Latin Church with its celibate clergy in a society in which illegit-
imate children had no rights of inheritance. The higher clergy were by
definition great personages in the politics of Latin societies and the
Church formed one of the estates of medieval society. The princes of
the Church exercised ecclesiastical lordship with immense consequence
to the politics of the secular world. Attacking this network of institutions

and foci of power and influence was bound to be resisted with violence
on a grand scale.
The great struggle for survival in the centuries following the collapse of
Roman political authority had hardened the Latin Church.24 By the
twelfth century it had been transformed into a leaner more militant
entity. Central to the emergence of the medieval Latin Church (with a
reformed papal monarchy at its head) was the imposition of uniformity of
law and practice on the community of Latin believers. The institutional
structures of late medieval Europe were grounded in an ecclesiastical
organization predicated on a uniform belief structure: opting out was
simply not an option. The Church had always been actively involved in
the fight against heretics, Pagans and Muslims, but by the twelfth century
it was doing so in new ways. In addition to preaching and financing holy
war, the ecclesiastical hierarchy created a new knighthood of hardened
professional soldiers who were instrumental in the military fortunes of
the Latin west.25 Under these circumstances, heresy was by definition a
political act of defiance, to be met with persuasion when possible, but
with terrible violence when necessary.
All of this is to say that religious wars approached the total end of the
spectrum. The stakes were fundamental in these cases, and this made
toleration, coexistence and cooperation that much more difficult; it also
made the violence less easy to contain through the use of chivalric codes
and dynastic marriages (the normal mechanisms of conflict resolution
in aristocratic society). The Reformation did not sever the fundamental
unity of Latin Christendom; it complicated and changed its internal
dynamics while preserving its essence. The conflict with Islam was
fundamental in a way the struggle against heretics was not, but in both
cases it is the nature of the stakes that determined how the fighting
proceeded and what the nature and parameters of peace could be. This
suggests that the stakes of conflict are a critical variable in determining the
nature of the violence that it produces. The Reformation closed and com-
plicated certain traditional ways of doing things that had previously
24
The best introduction to the emergence of the reformed medieval papacy is Colin
Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050–1250 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989). See also Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph
and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 2nd edn (Malden: Blackwell, 2003).
25
Prior to the launching of the First Crusade, the Church had made an enormous effort to
redirect the internal violence of Latin Christendom outwards against Pagans and
Muslims. Though attempts at enforcing a ‘Peace of God’ made little headway, it laid
the foundations for an organized and sustained effort that directed military expansion
outwards. See H. Cowdrey, “The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,”
Past and Present, no. 46 (February 1970), pp. 47–67.
worked as mechanisms for peaceful cooperation like marriages. That

this process was so long and horribly violent is an indication of what was
at stake.
It is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that religion qua
faith was a cause of war in Latin Europe. The argument here is that what
was religious about the religious wars was conflict over the rules of
society; rules that people were never free to simply opt out of.26 By
challenging the doctrines of the Church Protestants were calling into
question the legitimacy of networks of power and influence in this world.
Whatever people believed in their heart of hearts, in those places where
the Reformation was triumphant certain traditional patterns and net-
works of political power (especially ecclesiastical lordship) were over-
thrown. Under these circumstances violent opposition was to be
expected.
The Wars of Religion may not have been caused by ‘faith’, but once
begun they were extremely difficult to resolve by normal processes of
negotiation. These contests tended toward zero-sum games, in which the
annihilation of the enemy as corporate group was the objective. This lack
of restraint coupled with the institutional nature of the armies employed
to resolve these questions gave these wars a ferocity that contrasted with
those which proceeded and followed them. In France, Spain, the
Habsburg lands, England and the principalities of Germany, these wars
were fought to their logical conclusion – in France and the Habsburg
lands the triumph of the Catholic Reformation was as complete as it had
been violent. In the Wars of Religion, the axiom that had governed
medieval warfare that your enemy was worth more to you alive than
dead, broke down. The aristocracy of France engaged in a bloody
slaughter in which magnates murdered magnates in a cycle that went
on for thirty years – a cycle retribution and counter-retribution of which
the infamous Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day is exemplary.27 The
very same nobility that had sought to limit violence through the insti-
tution of ransom engaged in assassination as a matter of policy. Marriage,
an institution that was fundamental to Latin European high politics,
could no longer be used in traditional ways once religious affiliation
became an issue. Time and time again during the course of the religious
wars, expulsion and forced homogenization led to massive transfers of
26
See Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). See also Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Framing Religious Conflict
and Violence: An Historical Institutionalist Approach,” (March 31, 2016). Available at
SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2757450.
27
See Holt, The French Wars of Religion; and R. J. Knecht, The French Civil Wars,
1562–1598 (London: Longman, 2000).
population that foreshadowed those of the twentieth century. All of this

culminated in the Thirty Years War when between a third and half of the
Central European population perished.
Note also that in the case of social wars we are not really discussing the
issue of territorial conquest. Territory was an entirely subsidiary issue in
the religious wars. What was at stake was the structure of society, not
whether one prince happened to rule one particular place or the other.
These kinds of issues did come up in course of these wars, but only
because these issues became ultimately linked to other deeper questions.
While the ultimate outcome of the contests differed from place to place,
the fundamental stakes were the same everywhere. How these conflicts
were resolved varied across Europe and determined fundamental ques-
tions of social organization, but it was a redefinition not a wholesale
rejection.
During the wars of religion European societies experienced violence,
disruption and dislocation on a scale not exceeded until the twentieth
century. Each of the conflicts resulted in changes in social structure and
in the relationship between society and political authority. In none of the
religious wars was territory or territorial consolidation a primary issue.
No doubt territory changed hands in the course of these wars, but
ultimately, the most important outcomes of these wars were the consti-
tutional settlements that emerged out of them, not the boundaries of
principalities or kingdoms. Social relationships changed everywhere;
territorial ones were only occasionally and indirectly altered.
Note the profound difference between dynastic conflict and the reli-
gious variety. In dynastic conflict the point of violence was to arrive at
an agreement with a minimal collateral impact on the civilian popula-
tion: the point was to persuade society of the legitimacy of a claim under
stable institutional conditions while doing the minimal possible damage
to collateral populations and interests. In religious war the whole point
of the exercise was to impact the civilian population in a direct and
immediate way. The battles, in this sense, were the necessary precondi-
tions to undertaking the real task: the conversion (or reconversion) of
an entire population that may or may not want such changes. It is also
worth emphasizing that under conditions of religious conflict rulers
were willing to mobilize sources of military potential that under normal
circumstances they would have considered to be anathema. The reli-
gious wars involved all segments of European society and all forms of
power were mobilized during them including the arming of the peas-
antry under certain circumstances. The religious wars were marked by
violence at a popular level: there were not and could not be ‘neutrals’ in
these conflicts, however much certain individuals and groups tried.
Indeed, one of the major themes of the religious wars from an aristo-
cratic perspective is just how much military agency non-aristocratic
groups had. The religious wars were, therefore, total in two senses:
(1) the goals of the actors were total in nature and (2) the mobilization
of resources and violence were also total. In pursuit of religious object-
ives rulers and communities pushed their institutions to the very limits
and sometimes beyond. Only the gravest of political and social chal-
lenges could sustain such an undertaking; and, more importantly, the
ability of the elites to control the process of religious change was limited
and only episodically successful.
Constitutional Conflict
European social organization was anchored in separate but equal parts by
dynasticism and corporatism. The emergence of corporate institutions
(especially the church, estates and representative institutions) was a
profound development in European civilization and constitutes one of
the great gifts of medieval Europe to the modern world. While the exact
configurations of corporate and representative institutions differed across
time and space by 1300 these were deeply embedded in European social
organization everywhere in Latin Christendom. The most spectacular
clashes involving corporate groups and rulers occurred between repre-
sentative institutions and monarchies although, of course, corporations
clashed with one another as well (cities, bishops, universities, cathedral
chapters and the like were in constant tension with one another, and
these conflicts could also generate violence and ‘war’). These conflicts
were fundamentally conflicts over the nature of authority and the exact
power relationship between different groups within society. In some
cases, these conflicts produced what we would consider to be ‘revolu-
tions’ although these processes (especially in the Low Countries during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England in the seventeenth
century) tended to very rapidly merge with other religious and social
conflicts as well (which, of course, were also about authority).
The key point to bear in mind about these constitutional conflicts is
that the vast majority of them tended toward the limited end of the total
spectrum. The relationships between the vast network of corporatist and
representative institutions and higher orders of authority were conducted
on a contractual basis. Within the parameters of these contractual rela-
tions, different groups attempted to push the limits of their authority in a
manner that would be familiar to any modern observer of the relationship
between the US Congress and the executive branch. And these attempts
to maximize the autonomy and authority of one corporate group in
relationship to others inherently generated friction and conflict. On rare

but significant occasions these conflicts could escalate to the point where
either the ruler sought to suppress the group or the group sought to
abolish the monarchy (the obvious examples of this are the Swiss who
escaped imperial and Habsburg authority by the sixteenth century, the
United Provinces, which eventually reverted to the form of a constitu-
tional monarchy in the eighteenth century and England, which of course
after the traumas of the civil wars reverted to Stuart rule before changing
the order of succession in favor of the Catholic James II’s Protestant
daughter and son-in-law during the Glorious Revolution). In those cases,
where representative institutions withered or were suppressed by the
ruler (as occurred in Bohemia and Denmark and partially in France
and Spain among other examples) other forms of corporate institutions
continued to function including the bureaucracy that had emerged by the
eighteenth century. While rulers could choose to ignore or suppress
certain corporate groups at certain times, at no point in the history of
Latin Europe were rulers able to ignore and disregard the contractual
rights of all of the groups with which it experienced friction. Without the
cooperation of legitimate corporate entities, no ruler could mobilize
resources.
To summarize: European conflict between the years 1000 and 1789
was grounded in the social institutional structure of the society. The
degree of mobilization and the violence generated by conflict were
dependent on the political objectives of the contestants. Limited wars,
grounded in a fundamentally stable property rights regime and anchored
in the structure of public authority were conducted with restraint and
ritual pageantry. Conflicts that involved some aspect of the social order
were both more intense and more difficult to resolve (the normal tool of
dynastic Europe, marriage, was a tool that could not be deployed easily in
these disputes). Territorial expansion meant the extension of dynastic
authority and not the expansion of the state. Ironically, the most violent
and intense types of conflicts in medieval and early modern Europe were
completely non-territorial in nature: they were constitutional in nature
and did not result in the expansion of territorial states (rulers and reli-
gions may have changed, but the political boundaries were not the
primary concern in these conflicts). The only arena in which total reli-
gious war involved territorial questions was on the frontier with Islam
and, until the fourteenth century, the Pagan northeast. I now turn to the
problem of how Europeans did in fact use violence (as well as other
mechanisms such as religious conversion) to expand the territorial
boundaries of their society. In other words, what does ‘conquest’ mean
in this period and how did social actors conduct it?
Conquest and Territorial Domination in Medieval and Early

Modern Europe28
Europe is not, needless to say, a geographical reality: it is, instead, a
collection of societies united to varying degrees by common norms,
customs and laws. The basic unity of this world was provided by religious
institutions: by definition every single community in medieval Europe
belonged to a unit of the Church. On top of this fundamental common
and uniform religious infrastructure were a variety of other shared insti-
tutional frameworks such as dynasticism, corporate and representative
institutional forms, and pan-European networks of aristocrats, scholars,
artisans, merchants and the like. Within the boundaries of Latin Chris-
tendom, certain categories of cooperation and social relationships could
be conducted with relatively low transaction costs. Dynastic conflicts
could be resolved or contained by dynastic means within Latin Christian
societies (the Reformation complicated this, but Protestants and Cath-
olics still married, although the transaction costs of doing so increased
substantially). Outside of these institutional boundaries the nature of
political relationships, including war, took place in a profoundly different
institutional context. It is not that cooperative political and social rela-
tionships were impossible across civilizational frontiers: it is simply that
the costs for doing so were much higher and the instruments that were
deployed to achieve these cooperative goals were less dense, less stable
and more easily reneged upon than those deployed internally. The most
obvious tool that European dynastic entities were unable to deploy was
marriage. This fact has profound implications for the nature of conflict
between Muslims and Latin Europeans: marriage, as has been discussed
above, was the principal mechanism for establishing claims to authority
and power in Europe. Much of what constitutes the ‘expansion’ of
European ‘states’ prior to the French Revolution was actually, in fact,
the expansion of dynasties and the relationship of this type of expansion
to that of the state is both theoretically and empirically weak. This was
emphatically not the case when Europeans faced non-Latin societies.
To understand why this is the case requires stepping back a little bit
and viewing the evolution of European social order in the period
1000 to 1500 through a different lens than most social scientists are
accustomed to. One of the fundamental problems with the approach of
the state formation literature to European societies and conflict during
28
For an excellent introduction to “comparative” conquests, see David Day, Conquest:
How Societies Overwhelm Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Space
limitations prevent me from engaging in a deeper analysis of the problem of how and
why domination occurs across time and space.
the medieval period is the lack of a nuanced and differentiated model of

what precisely is expanding during this period. There is a tendency to
think of Europe in geographical and territorial terms, but this is a mis-
take. Instead European society must be defined in institutional terms as
communities that share a certain density of interactions in a common
institutional context. Europe is better understood as a type of society and
what is expanding in the period starting around the year 1000 is this
society, initially to other parts of ‘Europe’ (i.e. England, and then from
there Wales and Ireland, through military conquest and settlement,
Scotland, Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary through religious
conversion followed by institutional alignment with mainstream Latin
society, and the Pagan northeast through crusades and militant settle-
ment) and then eventually to the non-European world. The key point
here is that Europe did in fact have a basic template for territorial
conquest, and this template was repeatedly deployed and refined in the
centuries under consideration here (and in some sense up until the
twentieth century) in zones that were, in institutional terms, not Latin
Christian.29
Latin Europe had by the tenth century shrunk to be almost cotermin-
ous with the Frankish Empire at its zenith: that is, Gaul, Germany west of
the Elbe and northern Italy. Slowly, in a process of conversion in the
wilds of the Pagan north and east, the structure of Latin social organiza-
tion, beliefs and political forms was transposed on Vikings, Slavs and
Magyars. With the acceptance of Latin Christianity came integration into
the life of Western civilization with all the momentous consequences that
this entailed.30
29
See Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (Princeton University Press, 1994). See also
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversions: From Paganism to Christianity (New York:
Henry Holt, 1998); and, idem., The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from
Muhammad to the Reformation (New York: Viking, 2004).
30
There is an interesting set of counterfactuals that put these claims into context. In the
eleventh century the British Isles were, of course, Christian, obedient in some sense to
Rome. It was not, however, within the mainstream of what was becoming a more
militantly uniform Latin Church. In England, Wales and to a much lesser extent
Ireland, the social structure (including ecclesiastical) were brought into the
mainstream of Latin civilization through conquest; most spectacularly in the case of
England, which was (with papal approval) conquered by Normans. The Anglo-Normans
then proceeded, much less systematically than had been the case in England, to carve out
marcher lordships on the frontier with Wales and by the thirteenth century had
successfully brought Wales into line with the mainstream of Latin ecclesiastical and
secular organization. In the case of Scotland this same process occurred through
emulation rather than through conquest. Here the kings of Scotland imported Anglo-
Norman institutions along with settlers who transformed Scottish society (incompletely
to be sure) into something more recognizably Latin Christian. See R. R. Davies, The First
English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (New York: Oxford
This is a fundamental point that is important to underline: the barbar-

ian invasions were not ended through military defeat (and in those cases
where they were defeated on the battlefield, as were the Magyars in the
tenth century, the use of military force was instrumental to attaining other
ends). Instead, they were brought into the fold of Christianity through
conversion, the objective of which was social transformation. The pur-
pose of the violence deployed against the Vikings, Slavs and Magyars was
designed to incentivize them to change their institutional profile: terri-
torial expansion in this case means not the expansion of Latin European
polities but the introduction into the Latin family of polities of new
members who were accepted with full equality in this community.31 This
emphatically did not mean that these formerly Pagan societies suddenly
became peaceful in their relations with their Christian neighbors. Vio-
lence, quite obviously, remained one of the ways in which conflicts were
mediated. It was, however, channeled and therefore constrained by new
social structures that were imported along with Christianity. In accepting
Latin Christianity, the barbarians were not simply entering into a new
faith: they were entering into a political community, and membership in
this political community altered the nature and consequences of political
conflict and violence. The larger point, therefore, is that while violence
could be a mechanism to integrate alien societies into a larger political
community this was not the only way in which integration could be
achieved.
It should also be noted that social transformation (i.e. Christianiza-
tion) was a conscious policy pursued consistently over generations.
Medieval lords – ecclesiastical and secular – understood that by implant-
ing the Church and dynastic lordship in societies that were organized
along different lines (even, as was the case in Wales and Ireland, when
they were technically Christians obedient to Rome, but retained religious
and social structures different from those of Latin Europe proper) they
were seeking to transform how these societies operated at all levels. In
doing so they were making their enemies conform to patterns that made
them more predictable and amenable to conflict resolution using
common institutions (such as dynastic marriage). They were, in other
University Press, 2000); idem., Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282–1400
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); idem., Domination and Conquest: The
Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); and idem., Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
31
This process of creating new members of the community of Latin Europeans societies
continued until the modern period when the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand were incorporated into the basic fabric of Western political and social life.
words, establishing particular configurations of power relations. The

expansion and contraction of Latin Europe can be measured by the
fluctuations in the boundaries of social organization.
As the Pagan societies of Europe’s north and east were being inte-
grated through coercion and persuasion into Latin Christendom, the
Latins began their great counteroffensive into Iberia, the central Medi-
terranean and finally Palestine and Syria – all former lands of the Chris-
tian Roman empire that had fallen to Islam in the seventh and eighth
centuries. In these lands the Latin Europeans fought to impose Latin
Christian rule and social structure through violence and coercion with
lasting success in Iberia and Sicily but ultimate failure in the eastern
Mediterranean. Unlike the integration of Pagan societies into the fold of
Latin Christianity, the confrontation with Islam religious conversion was
directly correlated with military victory.32 The ebb and flow of the
communities of believers shifted in accordance with the fortunes of battle
and conquest. Whether through violence or peaceful persuasion, the
overall impact by the twelfth century was the expansion of a Latin
Christendom that had achieved greater coherence, wealth and prosperity
than had existed for centuries.
The key point here is that territorial conquest, in the realist sense, only
occurred on the frontiers of Latin European society and in all cases
(including those in the Americas) the violence of war and battle was only
a prelude to the actual process of conquest that occurred through the
settlement of people and the implantation of particular categories of
social institutions on them. In order to conqueror territory and hold it,
Latin Europeans had to physically possess it in a demographic sense:
meaning that either the indigenous populations ‘converted’ to a Latin
European institutional identity or it was entirely displaced as was to
occur in some instances in Iberia and later in the Americas (especially
British North America).33 This is very much the same logic that is
currently driving the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. On occasion
this process of conquest could lead to the physical expansion of an
existing polity: most notably in Iberia and later on in Spanish America
(which was legally a part of Castile rather than being a separate entity).
But for the most part the phenomenon of conquest implied something
much more profound than simply one polity expanding at the expense of
32
See, for example, Alan Forey, “The Military Orders and the Conversion of Muslims in
the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 28, no. 1 (2002),
pp. 1–22.
33
In this sense the European colonial experience in Asia and especially India was
something that was qualitatively new in the history of European domination.
another. It meant the physical movement of people and the settlement of

this people on top of a society organized along different lines and the use
of violence to force fundamental institutional changes in the conquered
society. Generally, with the notable exception of Ireland, this process of
conquest and settlement led to a permanent shift in the identity of
populations that were conquered: Prussia, for example, went from being
wholly ethnically Balt and religiously Pagan in the year 1200 to becoming
by 1400 fully German and Latin Christian – both the original population
and the settlers merged into a new society that was defined by the insti-
tutions of the settlers. This type of conquest meant the replication of
institutional forms that first emerged in the former Carolingian heart-
lands (roughly along the Rhine) and then implanted upon alien popula-
tions in a staggering variety of geographical and social contexts.
Conquest in medieval and early modern Europe meant profound
violence and social dislocation in order to change the basic identity of
an area. Such an enterprise could never be undertaken by Latin Chris-
tians against other Latin Christians. Only under conditions of deep
religious or social division would ethnic cleansing and militant settlement
be undertaken. Under normal conditions of dynastic conflict, the use of
such instruments of domination were unthinkable aside from being
counterproductive (after all, what interest could a king of England have
in forcing his French domains to become ‘English’). What is important
to underline, however, is that Latin Christians understood total war
perfectly well and did not require either advanced technology or the
resources of a bureaucratic state to conduct it: as is the case in the
modern world, the problem in engaging in this form of total war is that
it can only be deployed under certain conditions and constitutes, there-
fore, a completely inappropriate tool against equals.
Conclusion
The warfare model in the state formation literatures draws on a Dar-
winian understanding of war and conflict in premodern Europe. In
Sections 2 and 3 of this chapter I have sought to undermine this
understanding of war by providing an alternative theoretical and empir-
ical account of medieval and early modern European conflict and
violence. My fundamental critique of the realist model that underpins
the warfare model in the state formation literature is that there is a
fundamental lack of a differentiated and nuanced model of the role,
patterns and outcomes of political violence in the premodern world.
In contrast to the view that premodern European political conflict
and violence was driven by a Darwinian logic of elimination through
military conquest, I have presented an ontology of political violence

based on the stakes of conflict rooted in institutions. Conquest, in the
realist sense, only occurred on the frontiers of Latin Christendom:
within Latin Christendom the forms of violence almost never lead the
expansion of polities and were instead either about rank and status or
about the constitutional relationships of the varying parts of society.
Where conquest did indeed occur, on the frontiers of Latin Christen-
dom, its primary consequence was not the expansion of existing polities;
instead its primary consequence was the expansion of a particular kind
of society. While Tilly was correct that political violence was ubiquitous
in premodern Europe, he fundamentally misunderstood its patterns
and consequence.
The question that remains to be addressed is what difference does this
new model of war and violence in premodern Europe do to the European
political development literature? In the Tilly et al. account of European
political development war, violence and coercion are the mechanisms
that cause the formation of the administrative and bureaucratic structures
of the modern state. War and violence are, therefore, the independent
variables, and the modern administrative and bureaucratic structures are
the dependent variable (and are equated with the modern state). This
chapter has been focused on demonstrating that Tilly et al.’s independ-
ent variable is fundamentally flawed: war, violence and coercion were not
in premodern Europe fundamentally about the expansion of states.
I have addressed the administrative and bureaucratic dimensions of the
European development literature elsewhere.34 For the purpose of this
chapter it is necessary to conclude with a brief pointer toward potential
routes to new perspectives on the emergence of the modern state in
Europe.
The focus on war, violence, coercion and administration in the Euro-
pean Development literature has been the result of both theoretical and
empirical agendas that view the process of state formation in Europe, as
we have seen in Section 1, as the slow, deliberate and definitive extension
of the power of (mostly) the crown over all other power centers of the
medieval world: specifically, the Church, the nobility and the urban
elites. The story of the emergence of political modernity is the story of
the crown constructing the institutional capacity to assert and then
sustain a claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence within society. It
34
See Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Bureaucracy, Administration and Authority: European
State Formation Reconsidered,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming;
See also idem, “Give Corruption a Chance,” The National Interest, no. 128 (November/
December 2013), pp. 38–45.
is this monopoly of violence that becomes the central facet of the state,
and the administration is the formal manifestation of the majesty and
power of the state. ‘Authority’, in this story, becomes a function of the
ability of the crown to coerce and compel its subjects (but, note, not
‘citizens’ until the French Revolution) to do its bidding. All that is
required, in the final resort, to explain the emergence of the modern
state in this framework, is the creation by the crown of the capacity to
assert supremacy: once this capacity has been created all else becomes
mere implication. The rise of administration becomes a proxy for the rise
of the modern state.
There are, however, both theoretical and empirical grounds for being
skeptical of this grand edifice. The empirical grounds for being skeptical
of this version of European political development has been extensively
covered in this chapter. That is, the account of violence and coercion that
is held to have led to the modern state is fundamentally flawed because it
assumes that the purpose of political violence in premodern Europe was
the creation of the structures of the modern state. Instead, as we have
seen in Sections 2 and 3, there is very little in the way of empirical
evidence to sustain this account of war, violence and coercion in pre-
modern Europe. Indeed, Tilly et al.’s model of political violence is
completely undifferentiated and simply asserts that the purposes of all
political violence was, ultimately, about centralization.
The theoretical grounds for being concerned about the role that
administration has come to occupy in the state formation literature
has to do with the basic definition of the modern state and its implica-
tions. For several millennia now human societies have created political
structures that can be termed ‘states’. What we call the ‘modern state’,
however, is a historically unique phenomenon that emerged organic-
ally in Western Europe by the nineteenth century and has been char-
acteristic of Western political organization ever since. This modern
state is defined by several characteristics, each of which is necessary for
an entity to be properly termed ‘state’. These characteristics are a
monopoly on legitimate violence over a defined territory and popula-
tion over which no higher authority exists. Defined as such, it is clear
that what is being described is a type of political authority and,
critically, not a type of administration.
Having a monopoly on legitimate violence over a defined territory
and population does in fact require organization and administration: it
does not, however, require a particular type of ‘administration’ (specif-
ically, it does not require what Max Weber called a ‘rational-legal’
bureaucracy). It is entirely possible (and logically coherent) to have a
‘modern state administration’ operate according to principles other
than those that define modern Western societies (i.e. an administration

or bureaucracy that functions on the basis of meritocracy underpinned
by specific liberal notions of fairness and ethical conduct). In other
words, it is critical to bear in mind that the puzzle at the heart of
European political development is not primarily a problem of adminis-
tration (although these also exist of course): it is, instead, primarily a
problem of authority. Having a modern state (replete with modern
administrative forms) does not imply anything about how power and
authority actually function within it. One important implication of this
is that much of the literature on ‘state formation’ actually focuses on the
wrong end of the problem: it is focused on explaining how the adminis-
trative structures of European societies evolved and attained their
‘modern’ forms when the real problem is not the existence of bureau-
cracy but rather its internal logic. And this internal logic is covered by
the domain of the concept of political authority. Another way of putting
this is that we need to distinguish between the sources of administration
(the concern of the state formation literature) and the sources of the
actual behavior within them.
This shift away from the traditional focus of the state formation
literature on war, administration and coercion toward a more properly
sociological perspective that pays due attention to the basic social
institutions that actually impel behavior, places this argument within
the theoretical terrain staked out by Philip Gorski and Julia Adams.35
Both of these scholars have sought to reframe the traditional concerns
of the state formation literature in a different and refreshing light by
examining how power actually functions; and what Gorski and Adams
have shown is that the logics of kinship and religion have a surprising
and often unexpected impact on the core concerns of the state forma-
tion literature: ‘hard’ power. This chapter is an attempt to push the
state formation literature away from a reified model of power and
toward a more properly sociological account that takes seriously social
organization and not merely administration caused by war, violence
and coercion.
35
Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern
Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary
Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. (University of
Chicago Press, 2003).
Part IV
Vistas
8 War and State in the Middle East
Reassessing Charles Tilly in a Regional Context1
Dietrich Jung
University of Southern Denmark
“States make war and wars make states.” In this simplistic form, the
proposition of Charles Tilly certainly makes sense for Middle Eastern
state formation. The contemporary political landscape of the Middle
East evolved from the violent competition of European powers and its
explosion in the First World War. At San Remo in 1922, the victorious
war alliance, in particular, Great Britain and France, eventually decided
about the distribution of Ottoman territories and to a large extent
determined the political borders of the modern Middle East.2 In this
way, the First World War ultimately had a strong impact on the subse-
quent formation of regional states. Moreover, the victorious war powers
were decisive in admitting regional leaders to and preventing others
from state power. In drawing the political borders of the contemporary
Middle East, they almost completely disregarded the political aspir-
ations of the respective populations with their diverse religious and
ethnic loyalties. To be sure, the state borders of the Middle East are
not artificial as some scholars often like to claim. Although fixed under
colonial domination and often in an arbitrary way, they nevertheless are
the result of historical processes and undoubtedly reflect both the
dominant strategic interests of Europe’s great powers and the political
ambitions of their regional clients.
Looking at the academic field of Middle Eastern area studies, the
discipline has not contributed all too much to enlighten us about the
relationship between war-making and state-making in the region. Unfor-
tunately, Lisa Anderson’s verdict that “Middle Eastern studies have
contributed relatively little to the development of analytical approaches
1
The final version of this chapter was written as a partner of Centre for Resolution of
International Conflicts (CRIC, University of Copenhagen). The author would therefore
like to thank the Danish Council for Strategic Research for its financial support of CRIC.
2
In this chapter, I define the modern Middle East according to the general academic
standard as a state system comprising Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, Iran, the states of the Fertile
Crescent and of the Arab Peninsula.
221
222 Dietrich Jung
in political science” has largely remained true.3 Given the relatively

belligerent nature of Middle Eastern politics, surprisingly few scholars
on the region took theoretical inspirations from Charles Tilly’s work.
A pioneering book in this respect was Michael Barnett’s study Confront-
ing the Costs of War (1992).4 In taking up the examples of Israel and
Egypt, Barnett examined the relationship between state power and war
preparation, that is to say the “sustained mobilization and consumption
of resources” by the respective governments.5 This examination led him
to question the general assumption derived from Tilly’s model that war
preparation increases the state’s control over society through enhancing
its capacity to extract resources.6 In Israel and Egypt, according to
Barnett, since the Six-Day War in 1967, war preparation rather has
resulted in the decline of state capacities.7 In his article on the First
Gulf War between Iran and Iraq (1980–8), Thierry Gongora made a
similar point in concluding that European patterns of war-making and
state-making might not be valid for post-colonial state formation.8 From
the perspective of security studies, Keith Krause also put the validity of
Tilly’s model in question and pointed to the different nature of bargain
that we can observe in postcolonial state-building processes.9 Finally,
Steve Heydemann made in his anthology on war in the Middle East some
references to Tilly.10 Heydemann perceived his book as a deliberate
response to the apparent gap regarding studies on the impact of war
and war preparation on Middle Eastern states and societies. In his
introductory chapter, he mentions Tilly’s work in order to make the
claim “that European experiences should not be seen as offering an
automatic starting point” to study the relationship of war and state in
the contemporary Middle East.11 According to Heydemann, it was the
path-dependency of the research agenda initiated by Tilly, meaning its
3
Lisa Anderson, “The State in the Middle East and North Africa.” Comparative Politics,
vol. 20, no. 1 (1987), pp. 1–18, here at p. 1.
4
Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in
Egypt and Israel (Princeton University Press, 1992).
5
Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War, p. 11.
6
7
8
Thierry Gongora, “War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East.”
International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (1997), pp. 323–40, here at
p. 335.
9
Keith Krause, “Insecurity and State Formation in the Global Military Order: The
Middle Eastern Case.” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 2, no. 3 (1996),
pp. 319–54.
10
Steve Heydemann, War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000).
11
Heydemann, War, Institutions and Social Change, p. 9.
War and State in the Middle East 223
focus on and generalization of the European historical experience due to

organizational trends in the social sciences, that explains the lack of
inspiration by Tilly for more sophisticated studies on war-making and
state-making in the Middle East.12
This brief and therefore necessarily incomplete glance at the state of
the art discloses a deep skepticism regarding the application of “Euro-
pean models” in analyzing Middle Eastern state formation. Yet why
should the concepts that have been derived from the European historical
experience not help us to understand the relationship between war and
state in the Middle East? Does the “analytical hegemony of Europe”13 in
the model of Charles Tilly indeed diminish its validity with respect to the
Middle East? The basic argument of this chapter is that the analytical
toolbox of historical sociology provides us with conceptual tools also
well-suited for the understanding of non-European and therewith
Middle Eastern state formation. It is not the European origin of these
concepts, but their methodologically reflected and contextualized appli-
cation, that decides their validity. I will develop this argument in four
steps. First, I briefly recapitulate the theoretical core elements of Tilly’s
thesis in light of some other relevant concepts of historical sociology. The
argument in this section is twofold. On the one hand, I suggest to
enhance Tilly’s model by Weber’s category of legitimacy. Drawing on
Weber’s sociology of domination does not only help to understand the
ideational dimension of state-building processes, but also to analyze this
dimension with respect to different cultural settings. On the other hand,
I define the quality of these sociological concepts as ideal types, as
heuristic instruments that enable their application in historically different
contexts. The second step represents an analytically guided and selective
view on warfare and state formation in the Middle East. Through the
conceptual lenses of historical sociology, this part will discuss some of the
particularities that have distinguished the relationship of war and state in
the Middle East from the historical example of Europe.14 In referring
selectively to the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, the third step
12
Heydemann, War, Institutions and Social Change, pp. 1–7. The eleven chapters of the
book deal with general questions of historical and contemporary state formation in the
Middle East, mainly through case-study approaches. However, while the book marks in
empirical terms an important and rare contribution to the subject of war and state
formation in the Middle East, the theoretical and conceptual outcome is rather limited
as most authors do not really relate to the war-making and state-making debate as they
evolved in the course of Tilly’s work.
13
Heydemann, War, Institutions and Social Change, p. 4.
14
For this brief theoretical section, see my concept of world society as a broader frame of
reference: Dietrich Jung, “The Political Sociology of World Society,” European Journal of
International Relations, vol. 7, no. 4 (2001), pp. 443–74; Dietrich Jung, Orientalists,
224 Dietrich Jung
presents some tentative suggestions regarding the status of Tilly’s model

in light of the scholarly debate about Middle Eastern authoritarianism.
To a certain extent, we can observe Tilly’s mechanism in reverse. Finally,
I will conclude with some general remarks on Tilly, with respect to the
application of the tools of historical sociology in contemporary research
on Middle Eastern states.
Tilly’s Paradigm and Historical Sociology

In a book chapter from 1985, Charles Tilly put the inherent relation-
ship between war-making and state-making in European history in the
rather ironic formula of “war making and state-making as organized
crime.”15 He identified a mechanism of protection and extraction
facilitating the transition of the protection rackets of former warlords
into state-like institutions. In a specific form of interdependence, state-
makers accumulated the means of coercion, while civilian entrepre-
neurs accumulated societal wealth. These mutual accumulation pro-
cesses gradually established a new kind of reciprocal relationship
between military and civilian elites. The dialectical relationship
between civil claims of protection (security) and the states’ need for
extraction (taxation) tamed the violent forces of this social process in
two ways. Internally, the formal rationalization and legal institutional-
ization of state–society relations brought about the liberal and pluralist
democratic state which we perceive as the role-model for successful
state-building today. Externally, the violent elimination contest of
emerging states has been gradually transformed into economic com-
petition between states as mutually accepted like-units, as sovereign
actors within the international framework of a “norm-governed society
of states.”16
In Tilly’s analysis, the “civilized” standards of both the modern
national state with democratic institutions and the international
system of states governed by international law were the late and non-
intended outcomes of intensive bargaining processes between war-
makers and state-makers. From its beginning these processes were of
Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam
(Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), ch. 3.
15
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91.
16
Chris Brown, “World Society and the English School: An ‘International Society’
Perspective on World Society,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 7, no. 4
(2001), pp. 423–42.
a path-dependent nature and they reflected the particular historical

context in which the circularity of the state competencies of territorial
control and economic extraction evolved.17 With respect to European
state formation, Tilly suggested that the emergence of modern state-
hood was characterized by the “central paradox (. . .) that the pursuit
of war and military capacity, after having created national states as a
sort of by-product, led to a civilianization of government and domestic
politics.”18
In thus emphasizing the inherent relationship between state forma-
tion and war, however, Charles Tilly’s paradigm was anything else
than new. Rather, he reformulated some of the core assumptions
of historical sociology. With reference to the violent history of Euro-
pean state building, it was, amongst others, Max Weber who defined
the central feature of modern statehood as “the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”19 In
Weber’s words, the war-prone formation of state monopolies of phys-
ical force was a long-lasting process of “political expropriation” in
which all political communities other than the state gradually had been
deprived of the means of coercion.20 Contrary to Tilly, however,
Weber added to this process an ideational factor. In order to establish
consolidated states, the factual monopoly of the use of physical force
has to be considered legitimate by both rulers and ruled. Stable
systems of political authority cannot rest on a monopoly of coercion
alone, but this state monopoly has to be anchored in the cultural and
symbolic order of society at large. A political order needs legitimacy.
Long-lasting political institutions require a stable set of rules that
in normative and cognitive ways regulate the social conduct of rulers
and ruled. In referring to the inner justification of systems of domin-
ation, Weber precisely distinguished political authority from mere
power relations by the category of legitimacy, which explains the
relative stability of political orders. His concept of legitimacy aims
therefore to give an answer to the question of when and why people
obey.21 Moreover, the power of the ruling elite depends on the effi-
cient exertion of political authority by its administrative and security
staff. They represent crucial intermediaries in the transfer of state
power into practices of everyday life. Like the population at large,
17
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil
18
Tilly, Coercion, p. 206.
19
Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds.) (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 78.
20
Weber, From Max Weber, p. 83. 21
Weber, From Max Weber, p. 78.
226 Dietrich Jung
the administrative and security apparatuses are linked to their rulers by

symbolic patterns of legitimacy, as well as by material benefits.22
With regard to modern statehood, Weber defined the obedience to
political institutions as resting on legal or rational authority, that is to say
on the belief “in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those
elevated to authority under such rule to issue commands.” This modern
form of authority is based on formal legal procedures according to which
political authority is distributed and exerted by rulers who have been
chosen through legally anchored and standardized selection processes.
These formal procedures distinguish them sharply from pre-modern or
traditional forms of authority. Contrary to the formally rationalized
patterns of modern authority, Weber defined traditional legitimacy by
personal ties and the “established belief in the sanctity of immemorial
traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them.”23
In the 1930s, Norbert Elias critically took up Weber’s core definition
of the modern state and described European state formation as a “civil-
izing process.” In doing so, he applied a double perspective:
The civilizing process, seen from the aspects of standards of conduct and drive
control, is the same trend which, when seen from the point of view of human
relationships, appears as the process of advancing integration, increased
differentiation of social functions and interdependence, and the formation of
ever-larger units of integration on whose fortunes and movements the
individual depends, whether he knows it or not.24
In his theory of the civilizing process, Norbert Elias put together the
macro-sociological dimension of state formation with its micro-
sociological consequences: the ways in which the evolution of the
modern state has shaped forms of the individual. Combining Weber with
Freud, Elias understood the immanent link between the macro- and
micro-levels as the conversion of outer constraints into self-restraints.
His conclusion was that the formation of modern states has been
reflected in increasingly differentiated patterns of self-control on the side
of the individual.25 The pacifying institutional setting of modern state-
hood was accomplished by a particular normative molding of the public
22
Weber clearly distinguished between legitimacy as part of an authority structure that
relies on symbolic resources and legitimacy as a result of material benefits. The latter,
political legitimacy resting on material resources is certainly also an at least implicit
element of Tilly’s model.
23
Claus Wittich (eds.), vol. I (New York: Bedminister Press, 1968), p. 215.
24
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and
Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1939]), p. 332.
25
Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 443–56.
behavior of individuals. In Elias, reading state structures and social

practices are inseparably knitted together, and the maintenance of public
order relies on both functioning state institutions and forms of norma-
tively guided social action that are able to transform legal authority into
daily practices.
In historical terms, however, this civilizing process has not been “civil-
ized” at all. On the contrary, Elias traced the origin of both the internal
pacification of society and the autonomy of the modern individual back
to an unrestricted and violent elimination contest in which any individual
or small group struggled among many others for resources not yet
monopolized.26 In mainly abstracting from the history of France, Elias
differentiated between two distinct phases in the emergence of the
modern state monopoly of physical force:
1. In the first phase, a factual monopoly of physical force is established.
An increasing number of people lose direct access to the means of
force, which progressively becomes centralized in the hands of a few
and thus placed outside open competition.
2. In the second phase, this relatively private control over the monopoly
of physical force tends to become public, that is, it moves from the
hands of state-makers into a political setting of legal institutions and
appointed rulers under the control of the public.27
The first phase of the monopoly mechanism Elias associated with abso-
lutist and authoritarian forms of rule. The second phase he understood as
the deposition of coercive state-makers by the establishment of forms of
legal political authority based on the idea of popular sovereignty and
representative democratic institutions. In this second phase of the mon-
opoly mechanism, Tilly’s central paradox – the civilization of domestic
politics – appears as the emergence of the modern democratic state, in
Max Weber’s terminology as the transition from traditional to rational
authority. Consequently, modern state formation does not only comprise
the establishment of the monopoly of physical force, but also the gradual
transformation of the normative and institutional order on which this
monopoly rests; a transformation from personal rule toward democratic
governance.
Both Elias’ two phases of the monopoly mechanism, and Tilly’s bar-
gain model of protection and extraction, reduce social complexities and
historical data to an enormous extent. They offer interpretative frame-
works at a high level of abstraction and with a parsimonious integration
26
Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 351. 27
Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 345–55.
228 Dietrich Jung
of variables. In contrast to Weber, they both depart from macro-

sociological considerations and largely disregard the symbolic cosmos
in which state formation takes place. In putting his focus on capital and
coercion, in particular, Tilly is almost blind with respect to the ideational
factors that attach meaning to state–society relations. In light of this
deficiency, Weber’s “sociology of understanding” seems to be a neces-
sary completion. In a similar way, Sinisa Malesevic emphasized the
combination of coercive power with normative justification in the rise
of the modern national state.28 The Weberian approach of combining
ideational factors with coercion is particularly important to understand
the stabilization of forms of rule and the complex nature of the bargain
processes between national states and societies. Historically, we cannot
reduce these processes to the agency of a group of coercive state-makers
and an economically productive society alone. It is important to acknow-
ledge the role of a variety of intermediate groups such as bureaucrats,
judges, state-appointed clerics, as well as military and security personal,
in establishing legitimate forms of rule. In the end these groups are the
decisive players in the daily transmission and perpetuation of state
power.29
To sum up, Charles Tilly’s thesis about the inherent relationship
between war-making and state-making is embedded in a specific trad-
ition of historical sociology that has developed its analytical tools in
selectively drawing on the historical experience of European state for-
mation. Thereby these tools – Tilly’s mechanism of protection and
extraction, Elias’ phases of the monopoly mechanism, or Weber’s types
of legitimacy – have the quality of ideal types. They are means of
research that do not copy historical reality in a descriptive way. As
heuristic instruments they refer to empirical observations in their con-
ceptual quality. Ideal types are sociological constructs derived from
logically accentuated, concrete and significant historical phenomena.
28
Sinisa Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 9.
29
The work of “military sociologists” in the 1960s and 1970s is still a useful contribution in
understanding the role of war-making and, in particular, the military as a social
institution on the path to democracy. Morris Janowitz, for example, argued that in
spite of very different developmental paths, the “participation in armed conflict has
been an integral aspect of the normative definition of citizenship” and emerged as a
“hallmark of democracy” in Western states, Morris Janowitz, “Institutions and
Citizenship in Western Societies,” Armed Forces and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (1976),
pp. 185–204, here at p. 190. This was partly due to the fact that the
professionalization and technological advancement of the military in the nineteenth
century was paralleled by the introduction of middle-class elements into the previously
aristocratic armed forces, cf. Jacques van Doorn, The Soldier and the Social Change
(Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1975).
Consequently, social reality is not directly portrayed in them, and their

application does not tell us how things ought to be. Ideal types
are abstract instruments of social research; however, they are con-
structed with reference to historically concrete social institutions.30
Following Weber’s methodological way, once labeled as “heuristic
Eurocentrism,”31 in the following section I will apply the above-
described ideal types of social theory to the historical experience of
the Middle East in order to understand the specific trajectories in
regional state formation.
War-Making and State-Making in the Middle East

In the history of the Middle East we may observe a number of similar
processes of the circularity of protection and extraction as in Europe.
The establishment of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, for instance,
could be interpreted with the help of Tilly’s model taken as an ideal type.
From this perspective, modern Turkey and the Iranian state have roots in
patrimonial state structures which, previous to colonial times, evolved in
century-long accumulation processes characterized by the relationship
between warfare and the making of political institutions.32 In the nine-
teenth century, Egyptian state formation possibly reminds us most
closely of the ideal types of historical sociology. During the reign of
Muhammad Ali (1811–49), we can observe the monopolization of phys-
ical force with regard to a certain territory and population, as well as the
gradual evolution of a modern state administration. From the mid nine-
teenth century onward, the traditionally legitimized authority of the
Egyptian ruler then came under pressure of a constitutional movement
30
Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Polity” [1904], in: Edward
A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (eds.), Max Weber: The Methodology of the Social Sciences
(New York: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 85–95.
31
Toby E. Huff and Wolfgang Schluchter (eds.), Max Weber & Islam (New Brunswick:
Transaction, 1999).
32
In comparing the various historical paths of the formation of individual Middle Eastern
states, Illya Harik showed in which ways a number of contemporary states can trace their
formative processes back into pre-modern and pre-colonial times. In this way, he also
emphasizes the questionable assumption that in the Middle East we are confronted with
an “artificial state system,” that is to say a state system that supposedly rests on the
interests of colonial powers alone. Following Harik’s analysis there are regional paths of
state formation that we can trace back to the pre-colonial era. The firm establishment of
the modern state with its territory and people, however, largely has been shaped by the
imperatives of international politics and colonial rule, Iliya Harik, “The Origins of the
Arab State System,” in: Giacomo Luciani (ed.), The Arab State (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990); Regarding the internal dynamics of regional state formation
after the First World War, see Elie Podeh, “The Emergence of the Arab State System
Reconsidered,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 9, no. 3 (1998), pp. 50–82.
230 Dietrich Jung
which comprised a number of crucial intermediaries of state power such

as younger bureaucratic and cleric state employees, as well as military
personal. These constitutionalists demanded the transformation of the
absolute monarchy toward a form of legal authority based on representa-
tive institutions. They initiated social transformations that could
be understood in terms of the second phase of Elias’ monopoly
mechanism. However, these visible processes of modern state formation
were derailed in the context of the colonial penetration of the region. In
1876, the European Great Powers began to seriously interfere with
Egypt’s administration. At the appeal of the Khedive Ismail, European
controllers began to supervise the strained public finances of Egypt. The
establishment of the Caisse de la Dette Publique disrupted the crucial
linkage between coercion and capital accumulation. Yet this foreign
control over Egypt’s state finances was only a prelude to the eventual
occupation of the country by Great Britain in 1882.33 For most countries
in the Middle East, the modern state as an institutional setting and as a
membership condition for the “international society of states” was even-
tually not the result of intense bargaining processes between regional
state-makers with their respective populations, but it was conditioned by
the interests of international powers and eventually implemented by the
rules of decolonization. From this perspective, Tilly’s model serves us
well to understand the crucial differences of context in which the con-
temporary Middle Eastern state system emerged.
This different context of Middle Eastern state formation is also clearly
visible in the patterns of warfare and post-colonial state formation, which
have characterized the region since 1945. The political histories of
Palestine and of the Gulf region are two examples where war, peace
and state formation are closely intertwined, however, in a very different
way as Tilly’s model would have proposed. In the case of Palestine, the
institutions of the Israeli and of a nascent Palestinian state largely have
been built without direct contact to a population and a territory. The
Zionist movement imported its organizational structure into a country
whose indigenous population was largely excluded from the movement’s
state-building efforts. Some decades later, the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) almost copied the Zionist example and erected
state-like institutions in exile. The state-makers on both sides did not
extract war-relevant resources from their subject populations, but they
draw them to a large extent from the international system. Creating
institutions such as the Palestinian National Council, the Executive
33
Cf. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations (London:
John Murray, 1968), pp. 1–37.
Committee, the Palestinian National Fund, and its various military

organizations, the PLO organizations developed into a “state in exile.”34
In both cases, Israeli and Palestinian state-building, the central bargain
process took place between state-makers, international organizations,
diasporas, transnational groups and other states, largely bypassing the
respective populations on the ground.35
On the one hand, this particular structure of the Palestine conflict
brought about a certain confusion of international and regional conflicts
and contributed enormously to the militarization of Middle Eastern
states in general. The region’s role in international politics allowed the
ruling elites to extract significant political rents from the international
system. These political rents facilitated the cooptation of the elite and the
building-up of huge security apparatuses that predominantly have been
directed against the regimes’ own populations. In this way, many states
consolidated the first phase of the monopoly mechanism, the establish-
ment of monopolies of physical force, and prevented its second phase,
their subsequent nationalization and the path toward representative gov-
ernments. On the other hand, the impact of the Palestine conflict on
international politics has put major constraints on the military behavior
of regional states. The interlacement of regional with international con-
flicts to a decisive extent limited the length and intensity of regional inter-
state wars and therewith the ability of regional war-makers to profoundly
change the political structure of the Middle East. Thus, both the imperi-
alist system and the subsequent structural conditions of the Cold War
strongly conditioned Middle Eastern state formation.
The changing coordinates of international politics are also important
in understanding why the Gulf region more recently has developed into
a major regional theater of war. The First Gulf War between the Islamic
Republic of Iran and Saddam Husain’s Iraq (1980–8), the Iraqi occupa-
tion of Kuwait (1990), the Second Gulf War, in which an international
alliance liberated the emirate from Iraqi occupation (1991), the low-
intensity warfare with which the United States and Great Britain main-
tained the non-flight zones over Iraq, the US-led military occupation of
Iraq (2003), and the establishment of territorial control in substantial
parts of Iraq by the militias of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS)
in 2014 are thereby inherently connected with each other. Until the
34
Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement
1949–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
35
Cf. Dietrich Jung, “Global Conditions and Global Constraints: The International
Paternity of the Palestine Conflict,” in: Dietrich Jung (ed.), The Middle East and
Palestine: Global Politics and Regional Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
232 Dietrich Jung
Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–9), the international power structures

prevented large-scale interstate warfare in the Gulf region, as we know it
from European state formation.36 Until the 1970s, for more than
150 years it was Great Britain that exerted military control over the area.
The survival of the Gulf Principalities as “family-states” – Kuwait,
Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman – was not the result
of any negotiations between state makers and their respective societies,
but largely due to British protection in light of Saudi expansion.37 Since
the Second World War, the United States gradually took over the British
role of protection. In the context of the Cold War, Gulf security became
closely knitted into US containment policies. Prior to the Islamic
Revolution, any larger war to settle territorial and ideological issues
between Iran and Iraq was therefore impossible. Instead the two states
turned the areas predominantly populated by Kurds into their military
battlefield, thereby exploiting the fragmented nature of the Kurdish
people. In supporting the separatist aspirations of different Kurdish
factions against each other the two countries were engaged in a sort of
war of proxies.
In the course of the post–First World War negotiations, the territories
with predominantly Kurdish population were mainly distributed among
three territorial states: Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Since 1945, the conflicts
between these three states and Kurdish movements resulted in seven
wars.38 Besides the wars in Turkey (1984–99) and Iran (1946–7 and
1979–88), the Kurdish conflict has been most belligerently fought out
in Iraq, where four wars have taken place. The Kurdish conflict is
essentially characterized by questions of territorial consolidation and
political integration, in which the interest of the Turkish, Iranian and
Iraqi states have clashed with Kurdish aspirations for autonomy or
independence. In all three cases, the national state-building processes
have been threatened by separatist tendencies among their Kurdish
populations. In contrast to the state elite in Iraq, Turkish and Iranian
rulers had been able to gain some legitimacy through economic and
symbolic means among the Kurdish segments of their respective popu-
lations. In the late 1970s, however, this phase partly came to an end. In
both states, the economic disparities between the Kurdish regions and
36
Cf. Gregory F. Gause III, “Iraq’s Decision to Go to War, 1980 and 1990,” Middle East
Journal, vol. 56, no. 1 (2002), pp. 47–70.
37
Cf. Michael Herb, All in the Family. Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle
Eastern Monarchies (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999).
38
For the war statistics used in this section, see Dietrich Jung, Klaus Schlichte and Jens
Siegelberg, Kriege in der Weltgesellschaft: Strukturgeschichtliche Erklärung kriegerischer
Gewalt (1945–2002) (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003).
other parts of the countries translated into ethnically perceived conflicts

between winners and losers of the regimes’ modernization efforts. In
utilizing the internal fragmentation of the Kurds, however, Turkey, Iraq
and Iran have been able to successfully prevent the emergence of an
independent Kurdish state. Only under the international protection
scheme for Northern Iraq since the second Gulf War in 1991, Kurdish
state-makers had the opportunity to build up administrative and sym-
bolic state structures on the territory of the Iraqi national state. In the
northern parts of Iraq, they have built viable state institutions that
would justify the establishment of an independent Kurdish state. How-
ever, this Kurdish political entity has so far not been able to achieve the
necessary international recognition.39
These examples may suffice to show the various ways in which the
ambitions of Middle Eastern state-makers have been constrained and
have prevented similar societal dynamics as those from which Tilly’s
model was derived. In light of these differences of historical context
between European and Middle Eastern state formation, Ian Lustick
(1997)40 explained “the absence of Middle Eastern great powers” with
the constraints that were imposed on regional state formation by the
structural context of an existing international order. Lustick argued
that due to established international norms and great-power policies,
Middle Eastern state-makers were not able to fight those large-scale
state-building wars as their European predecessors did. From its
inception the Middle Eastern state system was dominated by the larger
unit of the Western state system and therefore not allowed to operate
by the same rules.41 The agency of the political entrepreneurs of the
Middle East has unfolded in the context of a hegemonic international
system. The models developed by Charles Tilly, Max Weber and
Norbert Elias provide us with the conceptual means to understand
these differences, rather than give us blueprints for the evolution of
regional states.
The “Eastern Question System” Carl Brown developed in light of
these historical particularities of the region is an organizing and
explanatory device of state formation for the Middle East and the
Balkans. At the core of this system he discerned an intense center-
periphery struggle in which domestic and international politics became
39
For a concise history of the Kurds, see the book of David MacDowell, A Modern History
of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).
40
Ian S. Lustick, “The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political ‘Backwardness’
in Historical Perspective,” International Organization, vol. 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1997),
pp. 653–83.
41
Lustick, “The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers,” pp. 655–63.
234 Dietrich Jung
thoroughly blended and confused.42 While the territories of the

Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Balkan provided European
powers a convenient arena in which to fight out their rivalries with little
risk, regional and local forces were able to instrumentalize the politics of
international powers to their own ends. Sinisa Malesevic argued there-
fore to critically review the nationalist narratives about the Balkan
uprisings in the nineteenth century. According to Malesevic , “there
was very little if any nationalism” in these early nineteenth-century
rebellions against Ottoman rule.43 The territorial dismantlement of
the Ottoman Empire resulted from a confusion of international,
regional and local levels leading to a systemic characteristic according
to which no outside state has been able to dominate and organize the
Middle East. At the same time, no state from within has been able to do
so either.44 Consequently, the Middle East has remained to be a region
without a hegemonic power structure and a clear hierarchy of regional
forces.45
According to Brown, the Eastern Question System has shaped to a
large extent the existing territorial political landscape of the Middle East
and the Balkan. Taken his device of systemic interaction together with
the analytical insights of historical sociology, the territorial demarcation
of Middle Eastern states and the emergence of their monopolies of
physical force reflect compromises of both the interests of international
great powers and the assertions of regional actors. The establishment of
state monopolies in the region has not taken place in an environment of
relatively free military competition, but it evolved from regulated and
restricted relationships among existing states and regional state-makers.
In this international setting, however, state-society relations have been
rather under-prioritized. The successful formation of Middle Eastern
states strongly relied on the relationship between international powers
and regional state makers, as well as among the emerging regimes in the
region. This specific pattern has been reflected in a security concept
42
Carl L. Brown, International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game
43
Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, p. 96.
44
Brown, International Politics and the Middle East, pp. 270–4. In his interpretation of the
international relations of the Middle East, Fred Halliday also has emphasized the
patterns of international and regional interference by state and non-state actors as a
major characteristic in the making of the modern Middle East as a region in international
politics: Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and
Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
45
Cf. Martin Beck, “The Concept of Regional Power as Applied to the Middle East,” in:
Henner Fürtig (ed.), Regional Power in the Middle East: New Constellation after the Arab
Revolts (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).
prevalent in the region that distinguishes itself radically from the way in
which notions of security have developed in Europe.
Keith Krause argued that the competitive nature of European state
formation resulted in a predominantly externally oriented security con-
cept. This stress on external security permitted a strong identification of
state security with the security of its citizens and thus a high legitimacy of
state rule.46 The eventual subordination of the military to the civilian
state elite in Europe, according to Krause, was the result of this overlap-
ping notion of security together with the bargaining processes between
military men and entrepreneurs.47 The development of this historically
specific security concept contributed heavily to the convergence of
nation, state and society. In the Middle East, instead, the security of
the state has largely been synonymous with the security of the regimes in
power and not with society at large. In the structural context of Brown’s
Eastern Question system, Middle Eastern state formation has not known
similar bargaining processes between the military and civil society as in
Europe. Thus a convergence of state and society has been essentially
obstructed. Through the lenses of Norbert Elias’ monopoly mechanism,
the second phase of modern state formation, the control and adminis-
tration of the state monopoly of physical force through forms of repre-
sentative government has not yet taken place. This observation is
reflected in the academic debate about the resilience of authoritarianism
in the Middle East.48
The “Arab Spring” and Middle Eastern

Authoritarianism: Tilly on Its Head
Beginning in the winter 2010/2011, the wave of popular uprisings that
run across the Arab world took most scholars on the Middle East by
surprise. Deeply engaged in the understanding of the resilience of Arab
authoritarianism and regional obstacles to democracy, the scholarly
community had to face public and internal criticism for not being able
to predict the dramatic events leading to the fall of Egypt’s Hosni
Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi who
46
Krause, “Insecurity and State Formation,” p. 320.
47
Krause, “Insecurity and State Formation,” p. 325.
48
A good overview of the academic debate provides the anthology of Oliver Schlumberger
(ed.), Debating Arab Authoritarianism. Dynamics and Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes
(Stanford University Press, 2007); while the book by Michelle Pace and Peter Seeberg
(eds.) gives an inside look at various EU policies to promote democracy in the region:
The European Union’s Democratization Agenda in the Mediterranean (London: Routledge,
2009).
236 Dietrich Jung
ruled their respective countries for decades. However, what initially

looked like the initiation of a transformation of the monopoly of physical
force in the hand of specific regimes to state institutions under the
control of representative forms of government largely ended in the res-
toration of authoritarian rule or civil war. In most states of the region,
authoritarian forms of government remained to be relatively untouched,
in Egypt a new military-controlled regime was established under Abd al-
Fatah al-Sisi in 2013, after a one-year intermezzo that brought the
Muslim Brotherhood into power. While in the Egyptian case the trans-
formation of the state monopoly into forms of civilian government was
successfully prevented, in Syria and Libya popular unrest led to civil war
and the erosion of the monopoly of physical force by the state. At the
point in time this chapter was written, only Tunisia seems to be experi-
encing a transformation of its political institutions according to the ideal
types of Norbert Elias’ twofold monopoly mechanism, leading to a
nationalization and civilization of government.
From the perspective of Norbert Elias’ model of the monopoly
mechanism, only the establishment of a few regional monopolies of
physical force can be linked to violent elimination contests. Most state-
makers in the Middle East accomplished the first phase of the monopoly
mechanism by the direct transfer of state institutions from colonial to
postcolonial rule. The second phase, however, the nationalization and
democratization of the monopolistic state structures, is still in its infancy.
This applies in particular to Arab states and – for the time being – seems
not to have been fundamentally reversed by the Arab Spring. Although
Turkey and Iran have developed quite different forms of republican
systems, including patterns of electoral democracies,49 the political insti-
tutions of most Arab states remain utterly authoritarian in which electoral
processes hardly provide anything more than a smoke screen for auto-
cratic rule.50 Here, Elias’ second phase of the monopoly process almost
has been reversed. We can observe the strengthening of structures of
personal and oligarchic authority at the expense of attempts to establish
forms of democratic governance.
Ironically, this remarkable resilience of authoritarianism and personal
rule in the Middle East, that is to say the regions clear deviation from the
European path, brings Tilly back in. One of the explicative devices
49
There is no doubt that within the EU accession framework, the political system of
Turkey has by far advanced more toward a liberal democracy as the Iranian system in
which all democratic mechanisms are in the end subject to the control of the clerical
establishment and its state security apparatus.
50
An exception from this might be the election in Iraq in 2010 which has been described as
one of the most free and rule-following elections in the history of the Arab region.
applied to make sense of Middle Eastern authoritarianism, the concept of

the so-called rentier state, largely builds on Tilly’s logic of protection and
extraction. A conceptual tool of international political economy, it tries
to understand the exceptional features of Middle Eastern politics
through the ways in which regional states were integrated into the inter-
national political economy. The main argument runs as follows: By
achieving huge economic rents at the international level the rulers of
oil-rich states did not need to establish effective representative institu-
tions. The political economy of the region rendered the crucial relation
between taxation and representation irrelevant.51 In short, a circularity of
the competencies of territorial control and economic extraction simply
has not developed. Consequently, the regional oil-producing states have
gained both their material foundations and their political legitimacy
primarily from the international system.
This separation between ruler and ruled, between state and society,
has also characterized Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Although these states did
not dispose over enough natural resources to attract sufficient economic
rents, they were able to attract means from oil-rich regional states and
international powers due to their role of “confrontation states” to Israel.
Through their neighborhood to Israel they became key players in the
Palestine conflict, and they have been able to attract substantial political
rents at regional and international levels. In the case of Egypt and Jordan,
the presidential and royal autocrats have even turned their rent-seeking
strategies upside down. In striking peace accords with Israel in 1979
(Egypt) and 1994 (Jordan), they successfully turned previous war divi-
dends into peace dividends. In sum, based on economic and political
rents, according to the rentier-state model, Arab states have been able to
build up an enormously high level of regime security, while holding
societal demands for more participation at bay.
With the concept of the rentier state, Tilly’s structural logics are at
the heart of a major analytical device to explain the lack of democratic
governance in the Middle East. Contemporary political scientists have
translated the absence of the second phase in Elias’ monopoly mechan-
ism into the resilience of authoritarianism. Yet in Tilly’s mechanism the
circularity of protection and extraction leads to the emergence of the
modern democratic state, whereas in the concept of the rentier state it is
the absence of this pattern of state–society relations in the Middle East
51
See Hazem Beblawi, “The Rentier State in the Arab World,” in: Giacomo Luciani (ed.),
The Arab State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Giacomo Luciani, “Oil
and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East,” in: Louise
Fawcett (ed.), International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2005).
238 Dietrich Jung
that explains the resilience of authoritarian rule in the region. Drawing

from the same model, the conclusions point in opposite directions. The
rentier state model turns Tilly on its head. Without diminishing the
explicative validity of the concept of the rentier state, it nevertheless
suffers from similar deficiencies as Tilly’s work, excluding the symbolic
context of state rule and its role as a source of legitimacy. Thus it seems
well worth listening to some of the critics of the slogan of “no repre-
sentation without taxation.” In particular, those critics who demand the
inclusion of ideational elements, in Malesevic terms, the centrifugal
ideologization by the national state,52 in understanding the authoritar-
ian path that Middle Eastern state formation has taken.
A number of scholars and media pundits, for instance, fundamen-
tally question the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Defining
Islam as an all-encompassing, determinant and unchanging system,
they assume Muslim culture to be inherently different from the demo-
cratic culture of the West. Consequently, they perceive the resilience
of authoritarianism as a result of the predominantly Islamic symbolic
order of the region, rather than of structures of international political
economy. In their eyes, the values and norms of Islam support the
legitimacy of authoritarian rule and explain the absence of liberal
democracy.53
In pointing to the examples of Turkey and Iran, also predominantly
Muslim states, another camp assumes Islamic diversity and therefore
questions the aforementioned determination of the political culture of
the region by Islam. They have singled out Arab social culture as an
obstacle to democratic governance. This camp emphasizes the patri-
archal nature of the political culture of the region and the roles which
tribal formations, extended families, and kinship-ties in general have
played in Arab politics. Accordingly, they do not perceive Islam, but
specific traits of Arab culture as a key factor in legitimating Middle
Eastern authoritarianism.54 Yet the question is whether the various
personal ties which characterize Arab societies are anti-modern or
anti-democratic per se? In Europe and the United States, community
types of social organization have been rediscovered as compatible with
and even conducive to the establishment of modern democracies.55
52
Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, pp. 11–13.
53
Paradigmatic for this position is, for instance, the article of Bernard Lewis, “The Roots
of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 266, no. 3 (1990), pp. 47–60.
54
Alfred Stepan and Graeme B. Robertson, “Arab, Not Muslim, Exceptionalism,” Journal
of Democracy, vol. 15, no. 4 (2004), pp. 140–6.
55
See here in particular the work on “social capital” by Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi
and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
In the Middle Eastern context, however, they are exclusively perceived

as obstacles to modern developments, as anachronistic remnants of a
traditional past.
Important here is the general argument that religion and culture
might serve as symbolic reservoirs on which incumbent regimes can
draw in order to consolidate their authoritarian rule. Having Tilly’s
model in mind, the international structural context can explain the
emergence of Middle Eastern authoritarianism; its resilience over
decades, however, only can be explained in adding ideational factors.
To be sure, analyzing this ideational dimension in applying simplistic
concepts of homogenous Islamic or Arab cultural systems is utterly
flawed. The ways in which culture works is historically contingent and
therefore diverse. Rather, we observe the mobilization of ethnic, reli-
gious or ideological sources by incumbent regimes in crisis. In the
aftermath of the Arab Spring this becomes, for instance, apparent in
the divide between Shiite and Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria, the
zero-sum interpretation of secular versus religious political movements
in Egypt, or the ideologies of Arab, Kurdish, Iranian and Turkish
nationalism that have had an impact on the violent developments in
both Syria and Iraq. Moreover, Lisa Wedeen’s study on Syria clearly
showed that the legitimizing symbolic structure of authoritarian rule
can be the deliberate construction of an incumbent regime. The
extremely repressive response of the Assad regime to the public dem-
onstrations partly might be explained that these have completely eroded
this source of self-generated legitimacy of the Syrian state. It is precisely
at this point, in the stabilization of forms of political authority, where
Weber’s category of legitimacy and Malesevic’s concept of centrifugal
ideologization come in as necessary completions to Tilly’s model, that
otherwise has proven its validity in analyzing the Middle Eastern con-
text, although in observing counterfactual empirical evidence.
Theory of Contemporary State Formation: Charles Tilly

and Beyond
This sketch of the relationship between war-making and state-making in
the Middle East can support Tilly’s thesis in its most general sense. Also
in Middle Eastern state formation warfare is intimately linked to the
establishment of modern state apparatuses and to the ways in which
(Princeton University Press, 1993); and Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
240 Dietrich Jung
political institutions have developed. Wars are inscribed in the evolution

of the modern Middle Eastern state system, yet often in a different way
than Charles Tilly observed it in European history. There are no linear
paths connecting regional wars with the formation of states through
extended processes of the circularity of protection and extraction. More-
over, in the complex setting of international, regional and local power
relations, what Carl Brown named the Eastern System, we cannot iden-
tify warfare as an independent variable in the formation of Middle
Eastern states. The emergence of Jordan is a good case in point. The
ruling dynasty, the Hashemite family, has never lived in the territories of
the modern state of Jordan before. Having their roots in the Hejaz, today
a part of Saudi Arabia, the Hashemites received this chunk of Ottoman
territories from Great Britain as both an acknowledgment for siding with
London against the Ottomans in the First World War (the so-called Arab
revolt of 1916) and as a compensation for France’s destruction of the
short-living Kingdom of Syria (1918–20) under Hashemite rule. The
state monopoly, then, was erected with the help of British troops, and
until the 1950s a British officer remained the commander in chief of the
Jordanian army. Consequently, none of the features of modern statehood
in Jordan was acquired through a historical process combining war-
making and state-making, which comes close to Tilly’s ideal type. Never-
theless, the royal family succeeded in consolidating Jordanian state struc-
tures and achieving a comparatively high level of political legitimacy.56
This reassessment of Charles Tilly’s work in the regional context of the
Middle East comes to the conclusion that Tilly and other historical
sociologists have provided us with a still useful ideal type of state forma-
tion and its relationship to warfare. Yet this ideal type explains the origin
of the modern state as a social institution as such, rather than the
concrete paths which the formations of historical states have taken.
Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the studies of Barnett,
Gongora or Heydemann find so much divergence from Tilly’s model in
analyzing the relationship between war preparation and the building of
state capacity in contemporary Middle Eastern state formation. These
studies, however, are not dealing with the emergence of the state as a
social institution. They are not concerned with the formation of national
states as a by-product of war, but they analyze the relationship between
56
For the political history of Jordan see Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1993); and Philip Robins, A History of Jordan (Cambridge
University Press, 2004); chapter 4 of Jung, Petersen and Sparre deals with the role of
Islam in the establishment of legitimate rule by the Hashemite dynasty: Dietrich Jung,
Marie J. Petersen and Sara L. Sparre, Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam,
Youth, and Social Activism in the Middle East. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).
war preparation and state power in historically existing states. What we

can derive from the work of historical sociologists are conceptual yard-
sticks for investigating state-building processes, but not theoretical blue-
prints according to which the evolution of concrete states has to
take place.
As heuristic instruments the models of Charles Tilly and Norbert Elias
are still valuable tools to understand contemporary processes of state
formation. It is not their European origin that put their validity into
question but the flawed idea that they ought to find correspondence in
historical reality. However, in order to comprehend the consolidation of
different patterns of state rule, of various shifts in state capacities, the
absence of democratic governance in many parts of the world, or of so-
called state failures such as in Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq we must comple-
ment Tilly’s model with Weber’s category of legitimacy and Elias’ per-
spective of the mutual interdependence of macro- and micro-sociological
developments. In this way, the analytical apparatus of historical sociology
allows us to integrate the historical experiences and cultural traditions of
non-European societies and to analyze them as expressions of the “mul-
tiple modernities” that have characterized modernization as a historical
process.57
The modern state is not only a coercive macro-structure, but also a
network of interdependent social actions. In everyday life the state is a
complex and often amorphous tangle of social practices of which we
make sense in reference to a social image that we call the modern state.
The ways in which we imagine the state, however, are embedded in
historically and culturally different patterns of meaning.58 In analyzing
contemporary state formation we therefore must keep Elias’ linkage
between these macro- and micro-sociological dimensions in mind. We
have to analyze the various ways in which schemes of formal legal
authority and daily social practices interlace. Moreover, the form and
nature of historical sets of rule are strongly influenced by the intermedi-
aries which transmit political power to society at large, as well as by the
specific relationship among the political, economic and religious elite.
With respect to the latter, the authoritarian rulers of the Middle East
seem to be particularly successful in the co-optation of both religious
establishments and representatives of the middle class, while excluding
the influence of the broader population on the conduct of state rule.
57
S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1 (2000), pp. 1–29.
58
Cf. Klaus Schlichte, “State Formation and the Economy of Intra-State Wars,” in:
Dietrich Jung (ed.), Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars. A Political
Economy of Intra-State War (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 27–44.
242 Dietrich Jung
Apparently, the Arab Spring also was not able to do away with this
mixture of coercion and cooptation that has been sufficient to maintain
the state monopoly in the hands of rather narrowly defined political
regimes.
A final point that we should not underestimate is linked to the implicit
normative assumptions behind Tilly’s thesis and, in particular, Elias’
concept of the monopoly mechanism. For both, democratic governance
appears as the progressive end-result of modern state formation.
Although not intended by European state-makers the democratic state
based on the rule of law, the division of powers, and representative
institutions of government has been turned into the normative blueprint
for successful state formation. As a “living political entity,” however, the
authoritarian Middle Eastern state seems not to be less successful than its
liberal democratic competitor, at least not from the perspective of the
incumbent regimes. The Middle Eastern experience hints to the fact that
there might be other forms of reciprocity between state-makers and
societies than Tilly’s model suggests. It seems to be important to analyze
the various ways in which the micro-sociological dimension of societal
values and norms has repercussions in the institutional setting of con-
temporary states. The longevity of the authoritarian state in the Middle
East is not a result of structural configurations alone. To a certain extent,
authoritarian rule must enjoy legitimacy and become a reference point
for individual strategies and ways of life. The high level of patronage and
corruption in the region is not only a result of authoritarian rule and
economic deprivation, but also a genuine expression of forms of social
reciprocity that contradict the normative pretentions of the formally
rationalized norms of “good governance.”
9 Beyond Mere War
Authority and Legitimacy in the Formation of the Latin
American States
Robert H. Holden
Old Dominion University
Introduction
When observed against the worldwide panorama of state formation, the
states of Latin America compose a group with two salient features. The
first is a crisis of order and legitimacy. The second is the exceptionally
long duration of that crisis, which began in 1808 with the collapse of the
Spanish monarchy. On close inspection, irregularities in the depth, char-
acter and timing of the crisis appear; for example, Chile, Costa Rica and
Uruguay continue to stand apart for their relatively more peaceful,
democratic, stable and law-abiding ways. Still, across Latin America,
the high expectations raised in the 1980s by the nearly uniform shift
away from military rule and the tumultuous populisms of previous
decades, toward more stable and democratic forms of governance, have
largely been disappointed. Lawless violence, impunity and the rule of
elected but inept and corrupt governments – some of whom have already
summoned back to life the old authoritarian habits – persist almost
everywhere.
No one is more aware of the protracted nature of the crisis of order
and legitimacy, or laments it more, than Latin Americans themselves.
“Our States are sclerotic and hypertrophic, incapable of satisfying the
needs of our peoples and of providing the fruits that democracy is
obligated to deliver,” declared Oscar Arias, the retiring president of
Costa Rica at yet another summit meeting of Latin American heads of
state in 2010. Mocking the high-level chatter about democracy and
development that prevails at such meetings, and criticizing the intelli-
gentsia’s fondness for sterile theories of the region’s “eternal victimiza-
tion,” Arias pointed out that Latin America had advanced little in
recent decades, and in some ways had even fallen behind, particularly
in three crucial dimensions of state formation: the construction of
reliable institutions, respect for the rule of law and bureaucratic effect-
iveness. His speech was a short, blunt version of the conclusions about
243
244 Robert H. Holden
the region’s “crisis of governability” that the United Nations Develop-

ment Programme (UNDP) reached in its massive 2004 study of Latin
American democracy.1
What accounts for Latin America’s general failure to govern itself
according to the constitutional norms its leaders have habitually pro-
claimed? No matter how we choose to classify the symptoms of distress –
whether as problems of order, legitimacy, institutional effectiveness or
governability – they all point to some fundamental deficiency in the
state formation process, toward the existence of what Guillermo
O’Donnell has called a “severe incompleteness of the state” that seems
to have become even more prominent since the period of democratic
consolidation began in the 1980s.2 Accordingly, few items on the
research agenda of the historian of Latin American state formation
seem more urgent than the twofold problem of accounting for both
the source of the legitimacy-order crisis, and its remarkable persistence.
In pursuit of that goal, the section that follows will both suggest
a procedural approach to the problem and identify the distinguishing
characteristics of the Latin American state. The next section will offer
reasons for rejecting as inapplicable the so-called bellicist theory
of state growth as an explanation for those characteristics. The
third section will argue for the relevance of two neglected spheres of
state making, authority and legitimacy. Finally, I will proffer an alter-
native explanation for the Latin American state’s longtime failure to
thrive that emphasizes the centrality of beliefs about authority and
legitimacy.3
1
Oscar Arias Sánchez, “Que cada palo aguante su vela” (República de Costa Rica,
Presidencia de la República, 2010). Arias spoke with some authority. Nearing the end
of his second (non-consecutive) term as president, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in
1987 for having piloted Central America out of the region-wide war that engulfed it in the
1980s, during his first period as president (1986–90). For the UNDP study, see Programa
de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, La democracia en América Latina: Hacia una
democracia de ciudadanas y ciudadanos (New York: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para
el Desarrollo, 2004). Similar confessions of failure can be found in Cumbres
Iberoamericanos de Jefes de Estado y de Gobierno, Declaración de Viña Del Mar,
November 7–11, 1996, www.segib.org/documentos.php; and in Organization of
American States, Convención Interamericana Contra la Corrupción, March 29, 1996,
www.oas.org/Juridico/spanish/Tratados/b-58.html, in which the signatories agreed to
“consider” taking steps aimed at adopting “norms of conduct for the correct, honorable
and proper observance of public functions.”
2
Guillermo A. O’Donnell, “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America:
A Partial Conclusion,” in: Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo A. O’Donnell and Paulo Sérgio
Pinheiro (eds.), The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), p. 314.
3
For another appeal to the relevance of legitimacy in state-making, see the chapter on the
Middle East in this volume by Dietrich Jung.
Beyond Mere War 245
What Is the Latin American State?

Turning first to the theoretical literature on state formation, we find at
the center of that work the epochal contributions of Charles Tilly, a
specialist in the history and sociology of the early modern and modern
periods of Europe. Writing toward the end of his career, in the mid-
1990s, Tilly described his research program as a “historically embedded
search for deep causes operating in variable combinations, circum-
stances, and sequences with consequently variable outcomes” (emphases
added). For good measure, he went on to condemn the “invariant
thinking” that had produced so many useless transhistorical models – a
method, he wrote, “doomed to eternal failure.” The historical problems
to which Tilly had dedicated his career to investigating – collective
action, social revolution and state formation – drew him into “big struc-
tures, large processes, and huge comparisons,” to quote the lighthearted
title of one of his books. What Tilly therefore seemed to be promising
anyone in search of the “deep causes” of state formation – the theme of
this collection – is variability on a vast scale in both process and out-
come.4 Given both the grandeur and ubiquity of variability, the question
is how to handle it. In two short paragraphs, Tilly recommended a
threefold procedure. Start with “plausible ontologies – representations
of what is to be explained in terms of a given process’s boundedness,
continuity, plasticity, and complexity.” Second, specify the relevant
“fields of variation” or the way that the sources, processes, forms and
outcomes of, say, state formation, relate to a variety of other phenomena.
Finally, a “valid” analysis ought to end up with some “principles of
variation” that apply to different aspects of the problem. As always, Tilly
did not fail to acknowledge the difficulties and uncertainties awaiting
researchers inclined to follow his advice – there was, he warned, “plenty
of work to do.”5
Following Tilly, I will begin by offering a brief “plausible ontology” of
the states of Latin America. Then, in proceeding to his second step, I will
concentrate on two “fields of variation” – first, war making, and second,
the interrelated problems of authority and legitimacy. In a nutshell,
I intend to reject the first as scarcely relevant, and hold up the second
as a cardinal component of any explanation of Latin America’s govern-
ability crisis. The procedural method is Tilly’s, but if there is a “general
4
Charles Tilly, “To Explain Political Processes,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 100,
no. 6 (May 1995), pp. 1594–1610, here at pp. 1595, 1600, 1602; idem, Big Structures, Large
Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).
5
Tilly, “To Explain Political Processes,” pp. 1605–6.
theory” behind what follows, it would be that of “multiple modernities,”

as elaborated primarily by S. I. Eisenstadt and Charles Taylor. As the
civilization of modernity swept beyond Europe, it created possibilities
distinct from those in Europe. The result, according to Eisenstadt:
“A great variety of modern or modernizing societies” that shared many
features but that also revealed striking differences as a result of those
societies’ particular responses to modernity and their continued inter-
action with it. Modernity’s spread beyond Europe entailed, therefore,
not wholesale adoption, but “the continuous selection, reinterpretation
and reformulation” of modernity’s norms as well as the emergence of
distinctive institutions.6 A clear case of such “reformulation,” I argue, is
the Latin American state. It is true that one can find distinct trajectories
of state making within Latin America, as already noted in the first
paragraph of this essay, but they took place along a larger path that clearly
diverged from, say, the western European or the North Atlantic path, as
will be seen below. In its insistence on the continuous reinterpretation
and adaptation of modernity’s cultural program, Eisenstadt’s theory
coincides with Tilly’s own suppositions about variation.
Let us begin by improving Tilly’s definition of the state, which he
called “a distinct organization that controls the principal concentrated
means of coercion within a well-defined territory, and in some respects
exercises priority over all other organizations operating within the
same territory.”7 This definition only implies an end or purpose that
ought to be made explicit, which I would do by adding that the state’s
end is always to abate disorder by creating a system of laws not subject
to any other power.8 Tilly refers to this aspect of the state only
obliquely (“and in some respects exercises priority over all other
organizations”), probably because he was operating in the modern
European arena, where it could be taken for granted. As we have
6
S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vols. 1 & 2 (Leiden:
Brill, 2003), 2:520–2. Similarly, Charles Taylor noted that modernity can only be
understood in the plural, in terms of the diverse “self-understandings” or multiple
“social imaginaries” that have constituted modernity; Charles Taylor, Modern Social
Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1–2.
7
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), pp. 130–1.
8
My definition is a compound of F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (London: C. A. Watts & Co.,
1966), pp. 16–17, 21; and Alexander Passerin D’Entrevès, The Notion of the State: An
Introduction to Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 96. We could step
back still further and consider Oakeshott’s distinction between a state understood as a
lordly “managerial apparatus” (universitas) or as a free “association of human beings”
(societas), and his argument that both views have been “contingently joined by the choices
of human beings in the character of a modern European state”; Michael Oakeshott, On
Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 323.
Beyond Mere War 247
already seen, however, order is not an end that can be taken for
granted in the Latin American state-building context.
At the outset, therefore, we would have to concede that the primary
attribute of quite a few Latin American states has been their lack of
achievement as states, for in their quest to abate disorder, they have
manifestly failed. In most of the Central American countries, as well as
generally in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and periodic-
ally almost everywhere else, we see continuing signs of the world’s oldest
crisis of independence – 202 years, as of this writing, and showing little
sign of easing. If Tilly’s calling was to explain the success of certain states
in the North Atlantic world, it has fallen to others to try to explain the
historic feebleness and inferiority of their Latin American imitators. Over
time, their failure has expressed itself in numerous ways – in the more or
less constant agony of reorganization, the fugacious loyalty of a congeries
of fighting forces, the indignity of not possessing the legitimacy required
for an authoritative system of laws to command widespread obedience.
I have tried elsewhere to explain these qualities, with particular atten-
tion to the five states of Central America, by holding up what I called
these states’ “improvisational character.”9 Their well-known inclination
toward instability, I wanted to point out, was rooted in a commitment to
the habitual reassembly of the state apparatus itself, on a pro tempore basis,
out of the labor of a mélange of collaborators, including regional caudillos
(roughly, warlords or political bosses) and their followers, municipal-
level authorities and strongmen and, later, the armed forces or factions of
the armed forces. This constant need among state makers to attract and
maintain allies made the state’s officeholders much more than a mere
government, for they were essentially reorganizers of the state itself.
Nowhere was that reorganizational task more evident than in the prim-
ordial requirement of every new government to attract and hold the
loyalty of the fighting forces to which it owed its rise to constitutional
office, and the concomitant need to kill off, buy off or otherwise co-opt
anyone capable of mobilizing an opposing force. The significance of this
fact goes well beyond a simple computation of relative troop strength at
the disposition of the contenders. For it was not the capacity or strength
of the state’s incumbents vis-à-vis its opponents that mattered as much as
the certain knowledge among the subjects of the state that the state itself
was not the ultimate power holder. In short, real sovereignty was held by
9
Robert H. Holden, Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central
America, 1821–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 1, pp. 25–8; idem,
“Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research
Agenda,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 2 (May 1996).
whatever fighting forces had won the last battle or could plausibly
threaten the incumbents. Chronically improvisational, such states could
scarcely expect to apply their legislative dispositions except by violence,
owing to the fact that they were not perceived as either the legitimate or
even the ultimate source of the power required to enforce compliance. It
was therefore frequently expedient for the nominal subjects of these
nominal governments to bargain independently with various fighting
entities instead of with the government itself.10
Over time, the symptoms of improvisationalism changed. Outright
warfare among rival caudillos for control of the state had faded in most
of Latin America by the late nineteenth century, though in some places
such as Central America it continued well into the twentieth century.
Rival party militias under the command of their respective caudillos
contested the Costa Rican civil war of 1948, obeying a pattern that also
graced the politics of Honduras and Bolivia, among others, into the
1950s. What persisted almost everywhere, with a diversity of manifest-
ations, were the particularisms of a patrimonial political culture in which
expressions of power remained tied, not to institutions of state, but to
individual strongmen or their organizations.
A second feature of the “plausible ontology” that Tilly called for
follows from the first. Recall that taxation/extraction (Tilly applies the
terms interchangeably) was one of the three corners of Tilly’s triangu-
lar model of interactive state making (the other two being war making
and capital accumulation).11 But in most of Latin America we have
not often seen “states” engaged in an unqualified way in the collection
of revenue for state-building purposes. For the most part, state makers
have been predatory rent seekers dependent on clientelistic networks
to distribute plunder and dispense violence. The last attribute has
probably lost some of its validity over the last two or three decades,
but it is by no means irrelevant even today; in fact, it is a fair descrip-
tion of political life in Guatemala in 2010, where huge personal for-
tunes stand to be made by state agents who avoid taxation/extraction
and who subvert the state’s responsibility for maintaining order.12
10
Holden, Armies without Nations, pp. 25–6.
11
Tilly, Big Structures, p. 141; idem, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,”
in: Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State
Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91, here at p. 172.
12
For many people in Latin America, especially in countries such as Guatemala, El
Salvador, and parts of Mexico and Brazil, power over their lives has been routinely
exercised for generations by shadowy, composite “governments” of politicians,
gangsters, soldiers and wealthy entrepreneurs who pact, divide, compete, make war
and realign under conditions of total unaccountability. For Guatemala, Ivan Briscoe
magisterially synthesized the evidence in “A Criminal Bargain: The State and Security in
Beyond Mere War 249
Grzymala-Busse pointed out the importance of distinguishing between

the capture of resources by the state (Tilly’s idea) and the capture of
resources by state agents. She observed that because predatory regimes
“deliberately weaken state institutions,” they have the weakest states
and they tend to be more personalistic.13 Predation and personalism
remain well-known features of the patrimonial values underlying Latin
American state formation, and highly congruent with the region’s
equally notorious inconsistency in applying the rule of law.
Finally, the continuity of state incompetence (“fragility” appears to be
the favored euphemism at the moment), including the violence that has
always seemed to accompany the patrimonial political culture of the
region, has to be recognized. A 2007 UN report on the five states of
Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and
Nicaragua) described them as places where “violence appears to be
endemic” and the rule of law practically nonexistent. Levels of general
violence, homicide rates and kidnapping for ransom were among the
highest in the world, having actually risen since the regional wars ended
there in the early 1990s. State agents, including those charged with
maintaining lawful order, routinely collaborate with the non-state per-
petrators of criminal violence.14 In Brazil, an investigator observed in
2000, “The first and most basic issue in the next decade for government
and civil society is to cope with lawless violence.” The systematic viola-
tion of rights has been “a trademark of Brazilian political history” at least
since the end of the empire, in 1889.15 In Rio de Janeiro, dealers in illegal
drugs since at least 2000 have become a “new type of political actor” by
building “mediated links into the state not just to obtain resources but
also to gain access to the state power that facilitates their ongoing crim-
inal activities.”16 During Argentina’s December 2001 wave of looting
and vandalism, police and other state agents maintained their reputation
Guatemala,” working paper no. 88 (Madrid: Fundación para las Relaciones

Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior, 2009) www.fride.org/publication/658/the-state-
and-security-in-guatemala.
13
Anna Grzymala-Busse, “Beyond Clientelism: Incumbent State Capture and State
Formation,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 41, no. 4/5 (April/May 2008), pp. 638–73,
here at p. 639.
14
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, Crime and Development in Central America:
Caught in the Crossfire (New York: United Nations, May 2007), p. 17, passim; Briscoe,
“A Criminal Bargain,” pp. 10–11.
15
Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, “Democratic Governance, Violence, and the (Un)Rule of Law,”
Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 2 (2000), pp. 119–43, here at p. 139.
16
Enrique Desmond Arias, “The Dynamics of Criminal Governance: Networks and Social
Order in Rio De Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (May 2006),
pp. 293–325, here at p. 298.
for lawless violence by collaborating with the looters.17 In Mexico in

2009 alone, the police and the army confronted each other more than 65
times, guns drawn and sometimes exchanging gunfire, as the army
sought to collar drug smugglers within the ranks of the police, even
though high-ranking army officers (along with officials of the federal
prosecutor’s office) themselves were also found working with drug smug-
glers.18 Latin America’s 140,000-plus homicide deaths per year are twice
the world’s average, making it the most violent region in the world after
Sub-Saharan Africa.19 Democracy remains a distant prospect. “Power
has not been dispersed; corruption persists or has worsened; and politics
continues to be characterized by personalistic exchange relationships,
lack of accountability, wide executive discretion, and absence of the rule
of law.”20
Looking back on the three features of the Latin American state just
proposed, it seems clear that quite a few countries qualify as places where
the prevailing ethos is “parapolitical,” recently defined by a group of
scholars as situations in which criminals act like sovereigns, and sover-
eigns act like criminals in a systematic but clandestine way. Individuals
associated with the state – especially those responsible for security and
intelligence operations – work closely with criminal elements to subvert
formal constitutional procedures, while relying on contraband trade and
acting autonomously within the political system for criminal purposes.21
In Latin America, this is hardly a new phenomenon; what I have called
elsewhere the “parainstitutional” agents of public violence have been
(I tried to show) deeply rooted features of Latin America’s state forma-
tion process.22
17
Javier Auyero, “The Political Makings of the 2001 Lootings in Argentina,” Journal of
Latin American Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (May 2006), pp. 241–65; Laura Kalmanowiecki,
“Origins and Applications of Political Policing in Argentina,” Latin American
Perspectives, vol. 27, no. 2 (March 2000), pp. 36–56.
18
Julie Watson and Olga R. Rodríguez, “In Northern Mexican [sic], Soldiers Increasingly
Suspicious of Often Corrupt Police in Drug War,” Associated Press, November 9, 2009;
Marc Lacey, “In Mexico, Sorting Out Good Guys From Bad,” New York Times,
November 2, 2008.
19
Alessandra Heinemann and Dorte Verner, Crime and Violence in Development:
A Literature Review of Latin America and the Caribbean (World Bank Policy Research
Working Paper no. 4041, 2008), pts. 1, 2, 5.
20
Judith Teichman, “Merging the Modern and the Traditional: Market Reform in Chile
and Argentina,” Comparative Politics, vol. 37, no. 1 (October 2004), pp. 23–40, here at
p. 23.
21
Robert Cribb, “Introduction: Parapolitics, Shadow Governance and Criminal
Sovereignty,” in: Eric Wilson (ed.), Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and
Criminal Sovereignty (London; New York: Pluto Press, 2009), p. 8.
22
Holden, Armies without Nations, pp. 14–15 and throughout.
Beyond Mere War 251
What Can War Explain about Latin American

State Making?
Turning to Tilly’s second task, that of specifying the relevant “fields of
variation,” I would like to begin by weighing the variable in state forma-
tion that Tilly made famous – war. As European states engaged in wars to
defeat internal rivals and to repulse or devour external ones, they grad-
ually monopolized war making, a process that required huge outlays of
resources and thus forced the states, in varying degrees, to bargain with
their subjects or soon-to-be citizens, Tilly wrote. Over time, in return for
more and more rights, including those of consent and representation,
plus the imposition of certain limits on the state’s authority over them,
citizens gradually paid more taxes, allowed themselves to be drafted into
fighting nationalistic and patriotic wars and accepted the central author-
ity’s abridgement of local rule. “Capital-intensive” and “coercion-inten-
sive” states followed distinctive paths in this process of negotiation, but
everywhere, “bargaining over the state’s extractive claims produced
rights, privileges, and protective institutions that had not previously
existed.”23 Considering the centrality of that argument to the theme of
this collection, I think it is worth recalling the modesty, even self-
disparagement that accompanied Tilly’s presentation of his “war makes
states” proposition and its many derivatives and elaborations. “The
argument brings with it few illustrations and no evidence worthy of the
name,” he wrote; and again, the argument is “very, very crudely” stated
and “may well be wrong. I certainly provided no evidence here for its
correctness.”24 Others have questioned the validity of Tilly’s model even
for Europe itself.25
For the Latin American case, let us begin with Miguel Centeno’s
splendid study of the relationship between war making and state making,
an explicit attempt to test Tilly’s proposition that war makes states. In
Latin America generally, Centeno observed, “state power has always
been shallow and contested” in contrast to Asian and European states.
Why? Hypothesizing, with Tilly, that a history of big international wars
makes states rich and powerful and even ties them more firmly to the
majority of its inhabitants, Centeno argued that just because Latin
23
Tilly, Coercion, pp. 9–10, 68–9, 94, 100–4. Also see idem, Big Structures, pp. 9–10.
24
Tilly, “War Making and State Making,” p. 170; idem, Big Structures, pp. 142, 143.
25
Graeme Gill’s finely honed summary of the evidence against Tilly concludes that while
war may have stimulated the growth of state bureaucracies and their tax-collection
capacities, factors other than war were at least as important, and sometimes war
mattered very little; The Nature and Development of the Modern State (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 154–8.
American states so rarely engaged in big international wars, they have

remained comparatively weak, underdeveloped and incompetent: “The
geopolitical tendency toward peace and the underdevelopment of
the state are closely linked.” But why didn’t the Latin American state
fight big international wars? “Because it did not form sophisticated
political institutions capable of managing wars. No states, no wars.”
Thus, on this view, it takes competent states to make big war. But it also
takes big wars to make competent states, for international peace
“deprived the [Latin American] states of a potentially important impetus
for development.” The argument is explicitly circular, for it states that
the reason states did not go to war was because they were too weak and
disorganized to do so. And the reason that they stayed weak is because
they did not go to war. Besides making them unfit to fight big wars, the
incompetence of these states had another consequence: it made them
incapable of preventing internal conflict, and as a result, civil war and
political violence became almost routine.26 Evidently, then, the appro-
priate question is, “Why were the Latin American states weak and
incompetent to begin with?” for this is the condition that explains why
they supposedly avoided big wars in the first place, and presumably why
they continued to avoid big wars while confronting serious political
violence within their own borders. Centeno acknowledged as much, a
point I will return to in due course.
While Centeno excluded the Central American countries from his
analysis of Latin America, he nevertheless observed that they represented
unspecified “important exceptions” to his arguments.27 Now I would
like to undertake my own test of Tilly’s proposition by focusing on the
Central American states, emphasizing three points. First, as I have
argued elsewhere, “war” needs to be broadened into “public violence”
in order to capture more accurately the reality of this aspect of state
formation. The modern association of “war” with organized (and over-
whelming) violence between nation-states with clearly defined borders
would limit and even distort the reality of violent conflict on the isthmus
over the last two centuries. Of course “wars” in the plain sense of the
26
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), pp. 20–6, 265–9, 271. Both
Centeno’s characterization of Latin America as a region that has avoided large-scale
international war since independence, and his explanation, were challenged by Jorge
I. Domínguez, who argued that the Latin American “peace” only began in
the late nineteenth century, and was owing to international factors including the
maintenance of a South American balance of power. Jorge I. Domínguez, Boundary
Disputes in Latin America (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2003),
p. 20, passim.
27
Centeno, Blood and Debt, 1, n.1.
Beyond Mere War 253
word did take place but they can best be understood within the larger
perspective conveyed by “public violence” – the killing, maiming and
destruction that take place within the field of state power, engaging not
only agents of the state but their collaborators and rivals – including
criminal gangs, death squads, party militias, vigilantes and twentieth-
century guerrilla “armies of national liberation.”28 Second, in compari-
son to the rest of Latin America, the isthmus has probably endured more
public violence than any other country or area of the region.29 Third, few
episodes of public violence in Central America have been devoid of
strong international dimensions, often including the direct participation
of forces of various kinds from neighboring isthmian countries (as well as
the United States from time to time), so that almost all strife even when
contained within the borders of a single country can usually be con-
sidered international in scope. As a result, it cannot be said that Central
America has been lacking in international violent conflict.
In short, the Central American countries have sustained nearly two
centuries of intense state-associated violence – almost all of it with strong
international aspects – and yet can still claim to have some of the most
feeble and incompetent states in all of Latin America. Even the Cold
War period’s fusion of internal and external threats associated with
communism did little to enhance state capacity, for the build-ups that
occurred were almost entirely confined to military and other security-
related functions, rather than, say, any significant gain in “extractive”
capacity or in levels of accountability to a newly empowered citizenry.
Moreover, they were paid for by a resource-rich ally, the United States.
When the threat of communism faded in the late 1980s, and the military
more or less submitted itself to civilian rule, the state as a whole
remained weak and ineffective. Whatever gains to state effectiveness
may have been owing to international conflict elsewhere, it sapped state
effectiveness in Central America, further impoverishing their inhabitants
while whittling away at what little legitimacy might be attributed to the
state. In Central America, we see inept states but no lack of internation-
ally oriented conflict. State incompetence cannot therefore be explained
by the absence of international conflict in Central America – a place that,
as Lindo-Fuentes put it, war had already become a “way of life” within
the first two decades of independence.30
28
For more on “public violence” as a concept see Holden, Armies without Nations,
pp. 9–24.
29
Holden, Armies without Nations, pp. 28–9.
30
Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 48.
Costa Rica is the one exceptional Central American state – for

its comparative capacity, stability, legitimacy and achievements in
extending the benefits of social democracy. These are characteristics
that even set it apart from most other countries in Latin America. Like
its isthmian neighbors, Costa Rica’s public violence has invariably been
strongly international in character, involving alliances as well as strife
with the fighting forces of other states. On the other hand, by the 1920s,
Costa Rica had allowed its armed forces to shrink to the point that the
national military establishment could be abolished after the 1948 civil
war with scarcely a word of dissent, and replaced with a national
gendarmerie. Tilly’s dictum would suggest “no military, so no war, and
therefore no state.” But this is exactly the opposite of Costa Rica’s
experience. Having abolished its national military establishment, Costa
Rica became a comparatively successful state, so that success could no
more be said to be the result of international conflict and militarization
than could the failure of the other four countries of Central America.31
Costa Rica is a successful state, and the others are failures or near-
failures. Yet all have regularly had to confront internationalized vio-
lence, though Costa Rica for most of the last century has carried on
without a regular military establishment.
In Central America, as in much of the rest of Latin America, war and
the threat of war cannot therefore be said to have exercised a strongly
independent influence on the course of state formation except to further
debilitate already-decrepit states. They were born weak, unstable, coer-
cive, quasi-legitimate and incompetent, and – with the few exceptions
already noted – they stayed that way. The Tillyesque idea that a certain
relationship between “war” and “the state” exerted an independent effect
on the formation of the state should be discarded, for Latin America at
large and the Central American region in particular.
When Is a State or Government “Legitimate”?

In the conclusion of his book, Centeno left a provocative clue to a very
different explanation for state feebleness in Central America and else-
where in Latin America. He observed that war can only contribute to
state making among states that are reasonably well organized to begin
with. Europe enjoyed these preconditions for successful state making –
and thus war making – but Latin America did not. As a result, Latin
31
This finding – that war sometimes didn’t make viable states, and that viable states could
arise without war – parallels Gill’s criticism of Tilly for Europe; Gill, The Nature and
Development of the Modern State, pp. 154–8.
Beyond Mere War 255
American countries were not prepared to fight big wars, so they didn’t.
War, Centeno concluded, was little more than an “accelerating mech-
anism for a process that had its origins somewhere else [emphasis added].”
But just where is that “somewhere else”? For the deep causes of diverse
state-formation processes, the place to go, Centeno asserted, is “the very
problem of political authority and order,” for states probably cannot
come into being “where no authority has previously existed.” Centeno
divided “authority and order” into two components, both of which Latin
America lacked: “organization” and a socio-cultural congruence between
states and the communities they sought to dominate.32 Ending up by
rejecting the Tilly dictum as inapplicable in Latin America, Centeno
therefore suggested but did not develop an alternative hypothesis for
state incompetence.
The rest of this essay takes over where Centeno left off, by proposing to
analyze authority as an alternative “field of variation” that could be
helpful in understanding diverse state-formation outcomes. However,
in a flagrant departure from the conventional use of the term “authority,”
I refer, not to the one who holds power (potestas) but rather to the
authoritative source (auctoritas) of a norm or moral principle, in this case
norms or principles that can be applied to test the legitimacy of a regime
or government. My main guide here is the work of the late Alvaro D’Ors,
the Spanish jurist for whom the key to understanding human organiza-
tion of any kind could be found in the fundamental character of the
distinction between potestas and auctoritas. Legitimacy (legitimus) derives
from law (lex), implying that power exercised under the law is legitimate
power. “Law” in this context implies more than mere “legality” (i.e.,
positive law enunciated by some social collectivity) but a more perman-
ent law, one that does not depend on a social contract but on principles
of natural or divine law, as well as the rational requirements of scientific
knowledge. Such is the “authority” that confers legitimacy. Yet this
authority cannot be effective unless it is socially recognized, perhaps by
way of state-established courts of justice, the voice of a widely respected
individual, certain institutions independent of the state, or religious
authorities. Hence I refer to “legitimating authority” (i.e., an authority
according to which legitimacy is rightfully weighed) rather than to
the more conventional “legitimate authority” (i.e., a power holder con-
sidered to be legitimate).
32
Centeno, Blood and Debt, pp. 106–7, 275–8. Centeno added that war can make states
only when “some form of union” emerges between state institutions, on the one hand,
and a particular social class, but this condition has been fulfilled numerous times in
certain countries without any discernible impact on state competence.
So, on D’Ors’ view, the role of authority is never to exercise power but
to speak to power. Authority is always counterposed to power. The role
of power is to seek the approval of authority but never to claim it for itself,
for to do so would be to exceed its natural limits. And like authority,
power too must be “socially recognized,” though the most influential
factor in the social recognition of power will be whether or not it has
received the assent of authority. D’Ors encapsulated his argument about
the distinction between authority and power in two now-famous aphor-
isms: La autoridad es el saber socialmente reconocido y la postestad es, pre-
cisamente, el poder socialmente reconocido (“Authority is socially recognized
knowledge, and power is precisely socially recognized power”). From
which it follows, Pregunta quien puede y responde quien sabe (“He who
can, asks; he who knows, answers”). Only those with the socially-
recognized power to do so can question authority; only those with
socially recognized authority can reply. Hence, authority can never exe-
cute or block acts that belong to power; it can only endorse or condemn
them. Of course, whether power actually enjoys the assent of authority
may be uncertain, as can the degree of power’s social recognition. In any
case, the modifier “legitimate” cannot logically be applied to authority;
authority is authority, and it never depends on power. Only power can be
legitimate or illegitimate.33
If the norm is power’s strict separation from authority, the tragic
drama of our age, according to D’Ors, has been the state’s ascription of
authority to itself, a move that entailed replacing legitimacy with mere
legality. The state, as the source of positive law, in effect claims to
legitimate itself, as did the agents of the state established by the French
Revolution. As the nineteenth century wore on, liberal democratic
regimes dropped all references to legitimacy except as pure constitutional
legality. The trend culminated in Hans Kelsen’s famous justification of
political power as purely a matter of law, which alone bestows legitimacy.
As a result, modern democracies struggle to make a coherent appeal to
legitimacy. For example, a particular government is said to be “illegitim-
ate” when it lacks popular support and can only govern by force. But
33
Alvaro D’Ors, Ensayos de teoría política (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra,
1979), pp. 85, 91–2, 112, 151–2; idem, La violencia y el orden (Madrid: Editorial
Criterio-Libros, 1998), pt. 2ª, cap. 1. An excellent introduction to D’Ors’ thought is
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “The Political Philosophy of Alvaro D’ors,” The Political
Science Reviewer, vol. 20 (Spring 1991), pp. 144–85. The distinction among power,
legitimacy and authority demanded by D’Ors is also asserted by Jean Elshtain,
Sovereignty: God, State and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 12–13. For a
similar interpretation see Hannah Arendt, “What Was Authority?” in: Carl J. Friedrich
(ed.), Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 81–112.
Beyond Mere War 257
what proportion of the population does it take to make a government

illegitimate? German and Italian totalitarian regimes were at one time
massively popular; a majority of Germans and Italians never came close
to resisting them. But none of us today would qualify either regime as
legitimate. The only alternative, it would seem, is to seek legitimacy in
the authority of the natural law tradition or in divine law. Indeed, D’Ors
asserted, the notion of legitimacy as something greater than law has
persisted, and with it the lingering assumption that only a power that
complies with that “something” merits obedience.34
A more immediate consideration, for the purposes of this essay, is to
notice how the failure to properly distinguish authority, legitimacy and
power has emptied “legitimacy” of any substantive meaning, even
though we cannot seem to let the concept go. In the mid-1970s, “legit-
imacy” was already “pretty unfashionable” among scholars, wrote Peter
H. Smith at the time. He argued that “the cultural determinants of
politics” (by which he meant legitimacy) were being overlooked by
investigators who erroneously assumed that Latin America must be
evolving toward democracy.35 By then, scholars of the Latin American
state were already displaying a nearly exclusive interest in power and its
distribution, in the belief that power alone authorizes and legitimates, or
that legitimacy, if it exists at all, is too hard to define and impossible to
measure, or that legitimacy discourses are nothing but the cunning
dissimulations of powerholders.36 Richard Morse stood practically alone
among prominent historians of Latin America in conceiving the core
34
D’Ors, Ensayos de teoría política, pp. 151–2, 135–46; D’Ors’ claim that liberalism can give
no convincing account of the source of its authority because modern democratic regimes
have in effect swallowed authority is shared by Stephen R. L. Clark, Civil Peace and
Sacred Order (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 82, 92. Cognate arguments can be
found in Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political
Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 30–1, 49, 89–90; Carl J. Friedrich,
Tradition and Authority (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), ch. 8; Jacques Maritain,
Man and the State (London: Hollis & Carter, 1954), pp. 115–20; Bertrand de Jouvenel,
Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (University of Chicago Press, 1957),
pp. 29–33.
35
Peter H. Smith, “Political Legitimacy in Spanish America,” in: Richard Graham and
Peter H. Smith (eds.), New Approaches to Latin American History (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1974), pp. 225–55, here at pp. 227, 254. “Dominance” and “achievement-
expertise” were his proposals for Latin American-type legitimacies.
36
For examples, see Derek Sayer, “Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident
Remarks on ‘Hegemony’,” in: Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday
Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 367–78, here at p. 375; Alan Knight,
“The Modern Mexican State: Theory and Practice,” in: Miguel Angel Centeno and
Fernando López-Alves (eds.), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin
America (Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 177–218; idem, “Weapons and Arches
in the Mexican Revolutionary Landscape,” in: Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of
problem of the region’s political history to have been the search for the
legitimization of power.37 Occasionally, the fog dissipated enough to
suggest once again that something about legitimacy seemed important
even if we could not quite put our finger on it. A contemporary example
is the UNDP’s above-cited 2004 study, “Democracy in Latin America,”
whose authors argued that Latin Americans had to solve their govern-
ability crisis by trying to “build a new legitimacy for the State.” The study
went on to mention “legitimacy” 22 times over the course of its 288 pages
but without once either probing its meaning or discussing the conditions
that might give rise to the construction of a “new legitimacy.”38
About midway between Smith’s vain attempt to revive the study of
legitimacy and the UNDP project, the Brazilian Francisco C. Weffort
observed that the entire half-century since the 1930s had constituted “a
crisis of legitimacy” in Latin America. In a poignant and evidently
personal reminiscence, Weffort wrote that one had to have lived through
that crisis in order to know precisely just how truly it was a crisis of
legitimacy, to have shared the general intuition that some fundamental
deficiency was ravaging the state, or society, or both at once. “Through-
out that period it was (and remains) a characteristic feature of the Latin
American mind to know that things were (and indeed remain) ‘mis-
taken,’ whatever the place and whatever the reasons for the ‘mistake’.”
Weffort identified the effects of the “mistake” in terms much like the
characteristics I earlier associated with the “improvisational state”: to
Weffort, it was “a chronic instability apparent in the continual threats
of coups d’état and in political phenomena such as populism and military
interventions.”39
In Weffort’s account, “legitimacy” seems to be what that state would
have acquired had some fundamental, yet unnamed and rather mysteri-
ous defect or “mistake” been corrected. “Something” was out of place,
or missing entirely, or its nature perverted. The result was Weffort’s
“chronic instability,” or my “crisis of order and legitimacy,” or
O’Donnell’s “severe incompleteness of the state.”
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994), pp. 24–66, here at pp. 42–3, 60–2; Florencia Mallon,
“Reflections on the Ruins: Everyday Forms of State Formation in Nineteenth-Century
Mexico,” in: Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, pp. 69–106, here at
pp. 70–1.
37
Richard M. Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 127.
38
United Nations Development Programme, Democracy in Latin America: Towards a
Citizens’ Democracy (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2005).
39
Francisco C. Weffort, “The Dilemmas of Political Legitimacy,” CEPAL Review, no. 35
(August 1988), pp. 127–42, here at p. 132.
Beyond Mere War 259
That “something,” that curious omission or deficiency, I propose, is

precisely a way of gauging legitimacy that descends from a socially recognized
principle of authority, or even from some divergent methods and principles
of authority that nevertheless overlap in a complementary way, defusing the
potential for conflict among them. When understood as a quality that
depends on authority, the concept of legitimacy can be cured of its vaguely
intuitive status and acquire the analytical strength it is supposed to possess.
To affirm or contest the legitimacy of a given regime or administration is to
deploy some norm or cluster of norms dictated by a particular authority. To
understand the source of consensus or conflict driven by rival claims of
legitimacy, it is not enough to know that one band contests the legitimacy
or “right to rule” of a regime, and another one defends it. We need to go
further, and try to identify the nature of the authority that each band has
chosen as the source of the norms or principles that guides its judgment of
the regime’s legitimacy. In weighing the legitimacy of a regime, in other
words, we find that people believe in one authority or another, and it is
precisely the failure to find a way of harmonizing that diversity of beliefs in
one or another authority that accounts, in large part, for Latin America’s
interminable “crisis of legitimacy.” To repeat: Authority, on this view,
cannot itself be either legitimate or illegitimate, nor can it ever exercise
power itself. What authority does require is social recognition, and it is
precisely the absence of a more or less unitary, socially recognized principle
of authority that distinguishes the Latin American state formation process.
To frame the problem in these terms is to opt for a mode of explanation
that grants priority (as Smith sought to do) to the realm of culture in state
formation, over against the prevailing preferences for materialist, institu-
tionalist, rational-choice and power-based modes. None of the latter, as
Rae argued, can excavate the deep sources of state formation. To under-
stand just why people choose the “interests” that dominate such explan-
ations requires an investigation of the moral content of their choices.40 In a
similar vein, Lehman identified culture as the primary site for the study of
“political legitimations,” which he argued (following Berger and
Luckmann) are always constituted by values (rules of the game) that in
turn require the enunciation of some core moral principles. Partisans and
powerholders alike apply moral imperatives – the first, to accuse or acclaim
the powerholders; the second, to justify their own power.41
40
Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 24–44, 304–305. The primary field of variation in this study was the
definition of insider–outsider boundaries for determining the membership of a polity.
41
Edward W. Lehman, The Viable Polity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992),
pp. 141–2.
And so we ask, which authority principles were at play in a given

society, at a given time? How were they deployed to test the legitimacy
of a particular political program, regime or government? How did conten-
tion over the rightful sources or principles of authority shape the four
most obvious and persistent symptoms of state incompetence: corrup-
tion on an Olympian scale, intolerably high levels of public violence and
disorder, widespread indifference to the rule of law and political
instability?
The Search for Authority in Latin American State Making

If an enfeeblement of traditional understandings of authority swept the
West, as D’Ors averred, the cultural and political codes available to their
assailants, their defenders and other actors varied immensely as between,
say, Britain and the United States, on the one hand, and New Spain or
Spain itself. In this way, following Eisenstadt, the same general move-
ment could yield distinctive outcomes in particular places. If authority
was somehow reconstructed or refounded in a non-traditional guise in
the first group of countries, in much of Latin America the process of
reconstructing authority that should have begun after 1808 remains
unfinished. In showing how this might have happened, I would like to
outline the ways in which political authority had been understood before
the crisis of 1808, how it had already been challenged well before 1808 by
the monarchy itself, and how these conflicting interpretations were then
seized on, further reinterpreted and applied in competitive ways in the
post-independence republican context.
Basically, the peoples of the new republics divided over three different
conceptions of legitimating authority. The first was the traditional, medi-
eval belief (“translation” theory) that authority originates naturally or by
divine ordination in the body politic, which freely decides to endow the
power to govern upon whomever it regards as the most qualified person
or group. The ruler thus holds power by a free act of the people, who can
in turn take away that power if it is misused, and transfer it to some more
qualified ruler. In translation theory, the consent of the political commu-
nity is the defining act. Monarchs with absolutist pretensions gradually
defined a deviant “designation theory” under which the body politic acts,
not freely, but under Providential direction, to designate the ruler whose
distinction as a leader is so evident that he must have been divinely
chosen for leadership. Here, the political community is duty-bound to
make an irrevocable designation. The third approach was the proto-
democratic ideology (“liberalism”) of the Age of Revolution, into which
the Hispanic republics were born. Liberal ideology clearly owed a good
Beyond Mere War 261
deal to translation theory, but it also challenged that theory by rejecting

the divine-law basis of authority by absolutizing the will of the majority
(Rousseau) or the state (Hobbes), and its disregard of the traditionally
conceived ends of state power – namely, the protection of the common
good. To the liberals, the state was not defined according to any divinely
ordered natural “end” but by history, which is to say, by purely human
goals and desires.42
An underlying clash of “translation,” “designation” and “liberal”
conceptions of legitimate political authority not only shaped political
conflict in Latin America but kept it going, fueled in part by the fact that
it followed the destruction of a manifestly incompetent and corrupt
monarchy that had defined its authority in terms of a divine-right
“designation” theory. Liberals drew on aspects of both translation and
designation theories of authority to legitimate their rule. Some conser-
vatives, horrified by the specter of democracy, resorted to the “designa-
tion” thesis to defend divine-right monarchy. Liberals eventually did
likewise, but now to defend a quasi-absolutist, authoritarian state
governed by liberal principles eventually corrupted by utilitarianism,
positivism and social Darwinism. Many others – perhaps the most
authentically “traditional” elements of society – upheld the “transla-
tion” view, along with its distinctive teleology and natural- or divine-law
premises.
Three contemporary historians have grappled with the implications of
these understandings for nineteenth-century politics in Latin America.
O. Carlos Stoetzer documented a heterodox argument in favor of a
widespread “translationist” understanding of authority in Hispanic
America that, he further claimed, was deployed to justify the rebellion
against the Bourbon monarchy. Stoetzer made much of the clash
between the designationist outlook of the late Bourbons and the transla-
tionist premises of the Spanish Americans, but he confined his analysis
strictly to the independence wars. Austen Ivereigh distinguished an
“ecumenical” liberalism (strongly translationist) from a “monistic”
(more designationist, and thus absolutistic) liberalism. Ivereigh, unlike
Stoetzer, recognized that pre-independence assumptions about author-
ity remained in play for some decades after independence, but omitted
42
Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1945]), pp. 235, 430–3, 443–50, 454–6, 459,
460–4, 469–73. Similarly, conflict over opposing notions of auctoritas – an “ascending”
theory that located authority in the people, and a “descending” notion that associated it
with a supreme being – was the central theme of Walter Ullmann, A History of Political
Thought; the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965). Ullmann further argued
that these distinctions persisted into modernity at pp. 7 and 229–30.
any speculation about how they might have persisted over the long
term, and limited his analysis to church–state matters. In a series of
works, our third historian, François-Xavier Guerra, not only tracked
(like Stoetzer) the impact of distinctive beliefs about authority from the
late Bourbon period through the independence wars but went on to
document their presence well into the nineteenth century. Guerra also
proposed that the conflicts over the nature of the appropriate legitimat-
ing authority that animated the independence movement and the polit-
ics of the nineteenth century persisted throughout the twentieth century
as well. A liberal view of the nation as a voluntary association of equal
individuals (among whom sovereignty collectively resided) never ceased
to clash with a more traditional understanding of authority that des-
cended from translation theory, in which sovereignty rested in a mosaic
of concrete social and geographical corporate entities rather than indi-
vidual persons. On the second view, legitimacy is conveyed by means of
pacts and the enunciation of special privileges, rights and duties associ-
ated with the group. Pactismo, or the habit of governing through special
arrangements with distinctive groups, in effect lived on to disrupt the
liberal project.43
One result was the consolidation of personalistic and patrimonial
institutions. In the absence of a consensus on the source of authority,
the right to rule was increasingly evaluated in highly personalistic terms.
Hence caudillismo, patrimonialism, patron-clientage – animated and
reshaped after independence under the influence of modernity. Today
they remain symptomatic expressions of the absence of a socially recog-
nized moral authority capable of providing the criteria necessary for
weighing legitimacy. Thus, the tendency toward crisis, violent disorder
43
O. Carlos Stoetzer, The Scholastic Roots of the Spanish American Revolution (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1979); Austen Ivereigh, “Introduction: The Politics of
Religion in an Age of Revival,” in: Austen Ivereigh (ed.), The Politics of Religion in an
Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London: Institute
of Latin American Studies, 2000), pp. 1–21, here at pp. 13–15; François Xavier Guerra,
“De la política antigua a la política moderna: La revolución de la soberanía,” in: François
Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière (eds.), Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica:
Ambigüedades y problemas, siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1998), pp. 109–39, here at pp. 135, 139; idem, Modernidad e
independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE,
1992), pp. 51–3, 72–9; idem, “The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation
and Its European Roots,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 26, no. 1 (February
1994), pp. 1–35, here at pp. 34–5. See a comparative treatment of the principle of
consent in the independence movements of Latin America and the United States by
José Carlos Chiaramonte, “The Principle of Consent in Latin and Anglo-American
Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 36, no. 3 (August 2004),
pp. 563–86, here at pp. 577–82.
Beyond Mere War 263
and indifference to the rule of law. The authority-centered nature of the

crisis also clarifies one of the most glaring features of Latin American
political conflict: the ubiquity and persistence of a discourse that
demonizes and violently condemns the political enemy while associat-
ing him with imminent catastrophe. Precisely because the underlying
disagreement concerned the appropriate source of moral authority,
there was no place for a political enemy but in jail, exile or a coffin. If
mere interests were at stake, a rational choice would have dictated
compromise. But in a moral battle, especially one over the identity of
authority competent to judge legitimacy, compromise is rarely an
option.
Disagreements over basic beliefs about the source of the authority
capable of endowing legitimacy seeded and sustained a long-term crisis
of legitimacy in Latin America. The range and diversity of such beliefs,
as well as their contradictory character and thus their potential for
conflict, exceeded the limits of the threefold taxonomy of authority that
prevailed in the early decades of independence. Their range and diver-
sity cannot be adequately documented within the scope of a single
essay. A few examples will have to suffice to illustrate the endurance
and ubiquity of, first, a crisis of legitimacy; second, allusions (usually
indirectly or implicitly, and perhaps not even consciously) to diverse
authorities in order to justify contradictory legitimacy norms; and third,
the demonization and violent condemnation of an enemy associated
with imminent catastrophe. All three characteristics are eventually syn-
thesized in a rhetoric of “national salvation” – a phrase that turns up
repeatedly in the political history of Latin America.
Such discourses were frequently directed against members of an
opposing faction of the same party or political band. The Mexican
Gen. Porfirio Díaz’ “Plan de la Noria” (November 1871) can be taken
as a convenient example. In justifying his revolt against the just-elected
government of Benito Juárez, a fellow liberal whose administration
Díaz himself had honorably served, Díaz referred to the liberal-
controlled National Congress as “a chamber of courtesans” and “a
cataclysm of perversion and immorality”; he accused the Juárez
administration of having forgotten “the laws and practices of Christian
civilization” and of turning the republic into “an immoral and corrupt
farce.” Díaz’s “Plan” concluded: “Let us fight, then, for the cause of
the people and the people will be the sole owner of its triumph.” He
pledged “the observance of the constitution” and asserted “that no
citizen should impose himself and perpetuate himself in the exercise
of power, and this will be the last revolution.” Of course, Díaz would
go on to violate, more spectacularly than any president in Mexican
history, the very promises at the heart of his revolt.44 But note how he
appealed to traditional values and Christian virtues – transcendent
authority – in justifying the overthrow of rulers invariably character-
ized as “tyrants” – a move specifically authorized by the medieval and
early modern “translation” theorists.
In 1932, another caudillo, Augusto Sandino, appealed to transcendent
authority when he called for Nicaragua’s freedom from occupation of the
U.S. Marines – a freedom attainable “only by bullets, and at the cost of
our own blood, we have said, and that nest of political scoundrels who
are fighting each other to take over the whip of the invader will be
annihilated by their own guilt in a not too distant future.”45 The guerrilla
leader’s authority for his challenge to the legitimacy of the Nicaraguan
state emerged from a self-concocted synthesis of traditional Christianity,
magic and paganism. Sandino saw himself as the divinely chosen “war-
ring messiah-prophet” of the imminent redemption of the entire planet,
not just Nicaragua.46
Three decades later, Sandino’s Marxist epigones organized the Frente
Sandinista de Liberación Nacional to forcefully remove another tyran-
nical government. Like Sandino, they claimed exclusive leadership of a
redemptive millenarian movement whose quest for a legitimate govern-
ment originated in their belief in semi-mystical authority. The Sandi-
nistas, as they styled themselves, called their authority “scientific,” for it
was “history” that justified their challenge to a regime they regarded as
illegitimate. Professing faith in the “historical character of the proletariat
as the most revolutionary and fundamental class for the maximum
development of our liberation process,” they identified themselves as
the historically denominated “vanguard” and thus the sole legitimate
organizer of the proletariat in both its violent conquest of power and its
subsequent administration of power.47 Unlike Sandino’s, their move-
ment triumphed, with the collapse of the dictatorship of Anastasio
Somoza Debayle in 1979.
44
For more examples of the intensely moralistic and violent tone of political rivalry and an
extended analysis of political demonization, see Holden, Armies without Nations,
pp. 31–3.
45
Augusto César Sandino, Pensamiento político (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988),
p. 445.
46
Marco Aurelio Navarro-Génie, Augusto “César” Sandino: Messiah of Light and Truth
(Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 92, 142, 146–57.
47
Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, “Plataforma general político-militar del
FSLN para el triunfo de la revolución popular sandinista,” in: Dennis Gilbert and
David Block (eds.), Sandinistas: Key Documents/Documentos Claves (Ithaca: Latin
American Studies Program, Cornell University, 1977).
Beyond Mere War 265
In his attempt to lead a socialist revolution from the elective office of

the presidency of Chile, Salvador Allende likewise identified his ultimate
authority as “history,” and the proletariat as its instrument – a discovery
he attributed to a synthesis of freemasonry and “the humanism of all ages
and particularly . . . Marxist humanism.” Just as “history” led first Russia
and then China to blaze the trail toward socialism, in 1970 “once again,
history has permitted a break with the past” in Chile. It was to the
authority of history, as revealed by his Marxist-humanist-Masonic ideol-
ogy, that Allende appealed in justifying the legitimacy of the regime he
sought to build in the name of the proletariat: “a democratic, national,
revolutionary and popular Government which will open the road to
socialism” and to the creation of a “new man” in a “classless society.”48
In 1973, the legitimacy of Allende’s government would in turn be chal-
lenged by the country’s armed forces. In removing what they called “an
illegitimate, immoral government” from power, Chile’s military leaders
appealed to the constitution and the country’s laws. They acted, they
said, “before God and history,” out of a “moral duty” imposed on them
by the majority of the population. Two years later, Gen. Augusto Pino-
chet, the leader of the coup and now the unelected president of Chile,
elaborated on the contradictory sources of authority at play in the crisis of
1970–73: “The existence and propagation of Leninism-Marxism in the
world today represents the destruction of the basic moral foundations
from which the Western and Christian civilizations derive. . . . The world
today faces an unprecedented form of war” between Christianity and
communism. “I devotedly implore Our Holy Lord,” Pinochet con-
cluded, to keep Chile’s “flame of liberty” from burning out.49
Finally, contemporary Latin American political life forces us to con-
sider yet another kind of belief about the source of legitimating author-
ity that has been seen throughout the post-independence history of the
region. Where an office of state is understood to be what I described
above as an opportunity to distribute plunder and to dispense violence
in order to protect plunder rights, there is no interest in achieving
anything “for” the state, for to occupy any given office of state is simply
to possess an instrument for personal enrichment. The state’s grand
purpose is still the abatement of disorder through lawgiving and
48
Régis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1971), pp. 65, 115, 117, 119, 170, 174.
49
Government Junta of the Armed Forces and Carabineros of Chile, “Order of the Day
Number 5,” in: Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr. (eds.), The Politics of
Antipolitics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 198–9; Augusto
Pinochet, “Speech,” in: Loveman and Davies Jr., The Politics of Antipolitics, pp. 204,
205, 207.
coercion, but only insofar as disorder interferes with the aim of self-
enrichment. I call it the “entrepreneurial state.” Nothing, therefore,
about this kind of “modern” state can be explained by Tilly’s theory of
state expansion, with its neat Weberian assumptions about war making,
taxation, bargaining and citizenship. Still, the contemporary
Guatemalan state, say, is a modern state, and like every other human
artefact, it is the product of ideas about what it ought to be for, or what
makes it “legitimate,” a status that in turn seeks justification in the
name of some kind of authority. To those who have accommodated
themselves to the entrepreneurial state, a legitimate state is one that
affords office holders and their dependents the freedom to function as
entrepreneurs.50 The “authorizing” principle of this concept of legitim-
acy might be moral nihilism, in which values themselves are thought to
be arbitrary and justice is therefore a fiction. This principle competes
with, but frequently defeats, more traditional, justice-oriented theories
of legitimacy put forward in countries such as Guatemala by some
political parties, non-governmental organizations, social movements,
and religious authorities as well as individuals whose notion of citizen-
ship presumes a different sort of authority principle (perhaps one of
those mentioned above) and thus a different standard of legitimacy.
In Latin America, a dynamic diversity of rival moral authorities, and
hence a diversity of legitimacies, established the basic conditions for
the rise of weak and inefficient states, endless violence and indiffer-
ence to the rule of law. I identified three main alternative authorities
(those linked to liberalism and to translation and designation theory)
that first emerged during the period of the independence movements,
but it is the very inventiveness of the ongoing search for authorities (as
the examples just given reveal) that merits attention at the moment.
New or reformed state institutions can achieve little in the absence of a
socially-recognized authority – one derived from an axiology conceived
variously as secular or supernatural, a composite of the two, or as
stemming from the natural law tradition – that is capable of bestowing
legitimacy on a state, regime or government. Without such recogni-
tion, state institutions are in no position to derive any long-term
strength from warfare in any of its guises. War is a feature of Latin
American political life that accelerated, not the formation of successful
states, as Tilly argued for Europe, but rather state deformation and
failure. The fatal impairment of the Tilly thesis is its reification of the
state and the corollary of a behavioristic determinism (“wars make
50
Described as a “transactional model” by Briscoe, “A Criminal Bargain,” p. 17.
Beyond Mere War 267
states”) entailed by reification. This essay has documented the sterility

of that approach in the Latin American context. Collective entities like
states are constituted by individual persons and apart from the acts of
persons, they have no independent reality.51 This is the principle
I have tried to deploy in showing how personal commitments to a
diversity of comprehensive beliefs about the sources of moral authority
can explain state instability and incompetence more satisfactorily than
the Tilly thesis.
51
See the discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s reasoning in opposition to a Hegelian-style
hypostasis of the state and similar entities in Robert Piercey, The Uses of the Past from
Heidegger to Rorty: Doing Philosophy Historically (Cambridge University Press, 2009),
pp. 183–6.
10 How Tilly’s State Formation Paradigm
is Revolutionizing the Study of Chinese
State-Making*
Victoria Tin-bor Hui

University of Notre Dame
As a rule, states without orderly families and trustworthy gentleman,

and without the threat of foreign invasion, will perish. Only then do we
learn that we survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.1
Charles Tilly’s state formation paradigm is often criticized as Eurocentric

and inapplicable to non-European contexts. Recent generations of social
scientists, whether in political science or sociology, have been trained to
challenge the Eurocentrism prevalent in putatively universal theories.
Thus, critics often argue that there is no “automatic . . . relationship
between war and increased state strength” and that one should not graft
“mainstream social science onto comparative historical studies.”2 Critics
overlook that Tilly’s approach eschews universal laws and advocates
causal mechanisms; it would be a mistake to liken Tilly’s paradigm with,
for instance, Kenneth Waltz’s balance-of-power theory. Moreover,
Tilly’s paradigm examines the interaction of “coercion” and “capital”
and so there are multiple state formation pathways even in Europe. This
chapter suggests that a more fruitful way to understand various criticisms
is to see them as specifying scope conditions. In this perspective, the
* I thank Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg for inspiring this manuscript, Anna
Leander, Robert Holden, Marjolein ‘t Hart, Michael Davis, Yuan-kang Wang, Ja Ian
Chong, Alex Dukalskis Stephen Balch and participants at the University of Chicago’s
Program on International Politics; Economics and Security for helpful comments on
different versions of this argument and Christine Gorman for research and editorial
assistance.
** This chapter is part of a larger project that has received funding from the Smith
Richardson Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the
Fulbright Fellowship Program, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International
Scholarly Exchange, the East Asia Institute Fellows Program on Peace, Governance and
Development in East Asia supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Institute for
Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and the Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame.
1
Mencius 6B15
2
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), pp. 104, 276.
268
Tilly and Chinese State-Making Studies 269
bellocentrist paradigm is remarkably applicable to historical China

because this case is far less confounded by various scope conditions. In
addition, the fact that warfare gave rise to bureaucratization and citizen-
ship in China light years ahead of Europe also makes Tilly’s paradigm an
ideal tool for scholars who wish to debunk Eurocentrism. Thus, even
though Tilly’s paradigm has suffered from repeated onslaughts in the
field of state formation, it has ignited a quiet revolution in sinology. The
rest of this chapter first discusses Tilly’s critics and then examines Chi-
nese state-making.
Tilly’s Critics
Tilly’s oft-cited quote “war made the state, and the state made war”3 has
been subject to numerous criticisms.4 Miguel Angel Centeno argues that
this “standard bellicist model” masks “a blinding empirical Eurocen-
trism” that obscures the fact that the Western experience represents the
“true exceptionalism.”5 He declares that “war did not make states in
Latin America.”6 The reason is that while “total wars” in Europe pro-
duced strong states made of “blood and iron,” “limited wars” in Latin
America produced only weak states made of “blood and debt.”7 Robert
Holden concurs that “the Tillyesque idea . . . should be discarded for
Latin America.”8 Similarly, Jeffrey Herbst argues that the European
experience is predicated on scarcity in land and abundance in popula-
tions and so “does not provide a template for state-making in other
regions of the world.”9 In Africa, abundant land supplies combined with
low population densities have rendered wars of territorial conquest
unattractive and state-building costly. The resulting states are thus weak
and fragile. Nic Cheeseman also believes that “the development of states
in Africa has had little to do with war,” “in stark contrast to the model
developed by Tilly.” In the Middle East, Dietrich Jung contends that
3
Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in: Charles Tilly
(ed.), The Formation of the National States in Western Europe (Princeton University Press,
1975), pp. 3–83, here at 73.
4
This discussion of Tilly’s critics is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. For
more comprehensive reviews, see Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea, “Tilly Tally: War
Making and State Making in the Contemporary Third World,” International Studies
Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (2008), pp. 27–56; Tuong Vu, “Studying the State through State
Formation,” World Politics, vol. 62, no. 1 (January 2010), pp. 148–75.
5 6
Centeno, Blood and Debt, pp. 166, 275. Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 163.
7
Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 23.
8
Robert H. Holden, “Beyond Mere War: Authority and Legitimacy in the Formation of
the Latin American States,” Chapter 9, this volume.
9
Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
270 Victoria Tin-bor Hui
“Tilly’s mechanisms . . . do not apply” because “the international power

structures prevented large-scale interstate warfare in the region.”10
According to critics, Tilly’s thesis is wrong about not just non-
European states, but also Western European states. Hendrik Spruyt,
for instance, argues that the ability to wage war is just an intervening
variable in European state formation, and that this factor itself has to be
explained by the prior causal variable of economic change and the
ensuing coalitional politics.11 Phil Gorski and Vivek Sharma similarly
challenge what they call “the neo-Darwinian model” and propose a
“neo-Malthusian” argument that focuses on “dynastic states, patrimo-
nial rulers and limited wars.”12 Moreover, Jeppe Strandsbjerg contends
that Tilly’s paradigm takes no account of “space formation,” which is
the very foundation of the sovereign territorial state.13 In addition,
Peter Halden suggests that Tilly’s thesis fails to account for the absence
of “state-enhancing effects” in either the Holy Roman Empire or the
Habsburg domains.14
Nevertheless, these critics may have less disagreement with Tilly than
they realize. As Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea observe, state formation
analyses of both European and non-European cases are, “at heart,
entirely consistent with Tilly: less war, or less intense war, leads to
weaker states.”15 Nevertheless, even this statement inadvertently turns
the state formation paradigm into a universal law. Tilly’s approach in fact
refrains from universal theories, which make invariable propositions
irrespective of contexts, and focuses on causal mechanisms, which have
varying effects depending on contexts. As an historical institutionalist,
Tilly’s research goal was to identify recurrent causal mechanisms that
combined differently with varying initial and environmental conditions
to produce radically different outcomes.16 Critics are thus misguided if
they challenge Tilly’s paradigm on the ground that there is no automatic
relationship between war-making and state-making.
10
Dietrich Jung, “War-Making and State-Making in the Middle East,” in: Dietrich Jung
(ed.), Democratization and Development: New Political Strategies for the Middle East (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), pp. 3–32, here at pp. 23, 16.
11
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton University Press,
1994), p. 30.
12
Philip Gorski and Vivek Sharma, “Beyond the Tilly Thesis: ‘Family Values’ and State
Formation in Latin Christendom,” Chapter 4, this volume.
13
Jeppe Strandsbjerg, “The Space of State Formation,” Chapter 5, this volume.
14
Peter Haldén, “The Realm as a European Form of Rule: Unpacking the Warfare Thesis
through the Holy Roman Empire,” Chapter 6, this volume.
15
Taylor and Botea, “Tilly Tally,” p. 30.
16
Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 83.
Scholars of state formation should also look beyond the catchy phrase
“war made the state, and the state made war.” The usual characteriza-
tion of Tilly’s paradigm as “bellicist” is wrong in two senses. First,
Tilly’s paradigm emphasizes “capital” as well as “coercion,” so that
there are three major trajectories in Europe – “coercion-intensive,”
“capital-intensive” and “capitalized-coercive.”17 When critics say that
the European experience has no relevance for the non-European world,
they should specify which European trajectory. Second, while it is true
that “coercion” plays a more important role than “capital” in Tilly’s
formulation, the term “bellicist” is misleading because it commonly
means “warlike” instead of “war-centered.” According to Daniel
Nexon, the term “bellocentrist” is more accurate and is also what Tilly
himself preferred.18 Furthermore, when critics argue that the state
formation paradigm does not operate in non-European contexts, espe-
cially the contemporary world, it is worth remembering that Tilly
himself argued as much. He specifically critiqued the “political devel-
opment” argument that “supposed that a single standard process of
state formation existed.”19 For Tilly, such an approach also “miscon-
strued the Western experience on which they ostensibly drew.”20 Tilly
went so far to suggest that scholars should consider “the possibility that
the Western experience was . . . an aberration, a dead end, or simply one
among many paths.”21
In addition to scholars of state formation, Tilly’s paradigm is also
challenged by international relations (IR) scholars who seek a “histor-
ical sociology of international relations.”22 These scholars strongly
object to Kenneth Waltz’s treatment of the balance of power as a
universal law across time and space. Probably because Tilly’s emphasis
on “coercion” reminds them of Waltz’s on power, they mistakenly lump
Tilly with Waltz. Most notably, John Hobson complains that Tilly
“perfectly reproduces the neorealist theory of the state and international
relations.”23 As noted above, Tilly’s historical-institutionalist approach
is highly sensitive to timing and initial and environmental conditions.
17
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992, 2nd edn (Oxford:
18
Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict,
Dynastic Empires and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 69.
19 20
Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), pp. 193–4. Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), p. 194.
21
22
Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds.), Historical Sociology of International
Relations (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
23
John M. Hobson, “The Two Waves of Weberian Historical Sociology in International
Relations,” in: Hobden and Hobson, Historical Sociology of International Relations,
pp. 63–81, here at p. 64.
Indeed, Tilly’s paradigm is consistent with what Stephen Hobden

suggests is “the most fruitful direction for the [IR] discipline to follow”:
multicausality, interdisciplinarity and integration of international and
domestic politics.24
When Tilly’s paradigm is properly understood, various criticisms may
be seen as specifying the scope conditions – or what Tilly called “envir-
onmental conditions” – for the bellocentrist thesis. As Tuong Vu
observes, Spruyt, for instance, “does not refute Tilly’s thesis completely
but only suggests the limit of its scope.”25 Similarly, Centeno’s critique
may contribute to a tighter war-make-state thesis: “For the ‘coercion-
extraction cycle’ to begin, the relevant states must not have alternative
sources of financing.”26 This means that if there is a system where
external financial sources are not forthcoming then Tilly’s thesis may
be applicable. A similar argument can be made about the availability of
“rents” in the Third World, such as significant foreign aid in Egypt, oil in
the Middle East and diamonds in Africa. If there is a system where such
“rents” are not available, then we may find stronger and more responsive
states rather than “rentier states.” Herbst’s argument regarding the
population-to-land ratio may also be reframed accordingly. That is, if
there is a system where “population densities are relatively high and
vacant land is limited or nonexistent, so that the value of conquering
land is higher than the price to be paid in wealth and men,” we may find
the same “life and death imperative to raise taxes, enlist men as soldiers,
and develop the necessary infrastructure to fight and win battles.”27
Herbst suggests that the parts of Asia with “extraordinary paddy works”
do resemble Europe in this regard.28 Taylor and Botea offer another
reason why the “war-making/state-making connection” holds in rice-
growing Vietnam: the presence of “a core ethnic group and a revolu-
tionary ideology.”29 This explains why “war in Vietnam contributed to
state-building while war in Afghanistan was state-destroying.”30 This
hypothesis begs the question how the Vietnamese came to form “a core
ethnic group” in the first place – and if this development is related to
Vietnam’s long history of foreign invasion and internal wars. And this
24
Stephen Hobden, “Historical Sociology: Back to the Future of International Relations?”
in: Hobden and Hobson, Historical Sociology of International Relations, pp. 42–59, here at
p. 43.
25
Vu, “Studying the State,” p. 153. 26
Centeno, Blood and Debt, p. 130.
27
Herbst, States and Power in Africa, pp. 13–14. However, as suggested by the Malthusian
logic, after a certain point, very high population-to-land ratios may make state-building
more challenging.
28
Herbst, States and Power in Africa, p. 39. 29
30
condition may be more restricted to the modern era, while Centeno’s

and Herbst’s conditions may be more transhistorical.
Tilly and the Case of China

Following Herbst’s description, China is an Asian country where
hydraulic and paddy works line the countryside. So is China a case that
confirms Tilly’s state formation paradigm? Tilly himself did not think so.
As he suggested in Coercion, Capital, and European States, “Empire was
long China’s normal condition.”31 Thus, “China became the great land
of rebellions and civil war, but not of war among multiple states. For that,
Europe held the record.”32 Tilly was apparently following the conven-
tional wisdom, both Eurocentric and Sinocentric, common before the
latest research on Chinese state-making. Even Bin Wong, who is deeply
influenced by Tilly’s comparative history, argues that the Eurocentric
narrative of warfare and extraction has “little to say” about “the dynamics
of Chinese state formation and transformation” because “China was not
one of several ambitious and competitive states seeking to order domestic
space and expand its international presence at the expense of similar
competitors.”33 As we shall see, what Tilly said about China is the most
Eurocentric and unhistorical statement that he ever made.
Tilly mentioned only in passing China’s Warring States era. But IR
scholars – especially realists – have long presumed the similarity of this
case to Europe. Most notably, Waltz suggests that “We can look farther
afield . . . to the China of the warring states era . . . and see that where
political entities of whatever sort compete freely, substantive and stylis-
tic characteristics are similar.”34 Hobson rightly complains that realists
refer to historical systems only to prove that “world politics must always
have been governed by the timeless and constant logic of anarchy.”35
But if we dismiss historical systems just because they are realists’
favorites, we would commit the same sin of ahistoricism. Indeed, a
multidisciplinary study of the ancient Middle Eastern, ancient Greek,
ancient Roman, ancient Indian, ancient Chinese, early modern Chinese
31 32
Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), p. 128. Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), p. 72.
33
R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European
Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 101, 103.
34
Kenneth Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My
Critics,” in: Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), pp. 322–45, here at 329–30.
35
John M. Hobson, “What’s at Stake in ‘Bringing Historical Sociology Back into
International Relations?’” in: Hobden and Hobson, Historical Sociology of International
Relations, pp. 3–41, here at p. 10.
and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican systems shows that Waltzian realists

have misplaced their faith. Contrary to Waltz’s assertion that “hegem-
ony leads to balance . . . through all of the centuries we can contem-
plate,”36 all eight historical systems exhibit weak balance of power
against hegemony. The co-editors Stuart Kaufman, Richard Little
and William Wohlforth conclude that “What is universal in inter-
national systems . . . is a mix of anarchy and hierarchy.”37
Hobson is so critical of Tilly’s state formation paradigm that he over-
looks Tilly’s relevance to his other project on Eurocentrism. In The
Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Hobson lashes out at Eurocentric
accounts that suggest that “the West has allegedly enjoyed dynamically
progressive, liberal and democratic values and rational institutions from
the outset” while the East “has allegedly endured despotic values and
irrational institutions.”38 He particularly rebuts Marx’s view of China as
a “rotting semicivilization.”39 Peter Perdue, a prominent historian of the
Qing dynasty, similarly complains that “Hobsbawm, Wallerstein, and
Landes all find in the fragmentation of Europe the source of the dyna-
mism that led it to conquer the world . . . But they limit this dynamic only
to Europe.”40 While anti-Eurocentrism has led Hobson to dismiss Tilly’s
bellocentrist paradigm, the same sentiment has inspired Perdue and
other sinologists to integrate Tilly into the study of Chinese state-
making. Like Hobson, recent generations of sinologists reject the pre-
sumption of China’s cultural uniqueness and work strenuously to situate
Chinese history with world history. They find Tilly a lightning rod in this
endeavor. As Daniel Little highlights, “Tilly’s work served to provide
new questions for Chinese historians and new conceptual frameworks
within which to attempt to explain the large processes of change that they
were analyzing. State-formation, taxation, military provisioning and
popular politics were themes and theories that Tilly’s work helped to
frame within recent work in Chinese history.”41 This, of course, does not
36
Kenneth Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” International
Security, vol. 18, no. 2 (1993), pp. 44–79, here at p. 77.
37
Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William C. Wohlforth, “Conclusion: Theoretical
Insights from the Study of World History,” in: Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and
William C. Wohlforth (eds.), The Balance of Power in World History (New York: Palgrave,
2007), pp. 228–46, here at p. 228.
38
John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (London: Cambridge
39
Hobson, Eastern Origins, p. 12.
40
Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 525, 527.
41
Daniel Little, “Charles Tilly’s Influence on the China Field,” June 11, 2008. See: http://
thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/06/charles-tillys-influence-on-china-field.html.
mean that Tilly-inspired historians believe that China is just like Europe.
As Alice Miller nicely puts it, “This is emphatically not to say that
China’s experience need be judged according to the degree it conformed
to or deviated from the trajectories of European nation-states.”42 Rather,
the purpose of the new Chinese historiography is to “unite the models of
historical change in the West with an apprehension of the unique and
indigenous patterns and trends of a more ‘China-centered’ approach” so
as to “locate ‘China’ in its broader regional and even global context in a
genuinely world history.”43
Chinese State-Making in the Classical Period

How do war-making and state-making processes unfold in the Chinese
case? As I argue elsewhere,
Many IR scholars have made passing references to the ancient Chinese system to
support their claim to universality . . . Indeed the ancient Chinese system
witnessed processes of international competition that are strikingly familiar to
IR scholars. Similar to the early modern European system, the ancient Chinese
system experienced prevalence of war, disintegration of feudalism, formation of
international anarchy, emergence of territorial sovereignty, and configuration of
the balance of power. However, this system eventually succumbed to universal
domination. This is an uncomfortable fact that few IR scholars are prepared to
confront.44
To understand why ancient China shared similar processes with early
modern Europe but reached diametrically opposite outcomes, I propose
a dynamic theory of international politics. International competition is
seen as processes of strategic interaction between domination-seekers
and targets of domination who use competing strategies and who are
simultaneously facilitated and burdened by competing causal mechan-
isms. Realists tend to examine only countervailing mechanisms and
strategies that check attempts at domination, that is, the balance of power
and the rising costs of expansion and administration. I suggest that we
pay equal attention to coercive mechanisms and strategies that facilitate
domination, that is, divide-and-conquer strategies, ruthless stratagems
42
Alice Miller, “Some Things We Used to Know about China’s Past and Present (But
Now, Not So Much,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 16, no.1–2
(2009), pp. 41–68, here at p. 65.
43
Miller, “Some Things We Used to Know,” pp. 60, 63.
44
Victoria Tin-bor Hui, “Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics: Insights
from Comparing the Ancient Chinese and Early Modern Europe,” International
Organization, vol. 58, no. 1 (2004), pp. 175–205, here at p. 176.
and self-strengthening reforms.45 In the ancient Chinese system, realist

checking mechanisms indeed operated to block attempts at domination.
But states overcame them with coercive strategies and policies. Ultim-
ately, the state of Qin achieved universal domination in 221 BC by
pursuing the most comprehensive self-strengthening reforms and the
most ruthless stratagems.
If realist theories explain the ancient Chinese system only half-way,
what about Tilly’s bellocentrist paradigm? It is worth repeating that we
are dealing with a pristine case unencumbered by any scope conditions
for state formation: Tilly’s “capital,” Herst’s low population-to-land
ratios and Centeno’s alternative financial sources. As such, the warfare
dynamics work well beyond any state formation scholars could imagine.
First, war made the state as international competition compelled ancient
Chinese states to pursue self-strengthening military, economic and
administrative reforms. In the so-called governance arms race,46 the state
of Qin developed the highest state capacity to engage in total mobiliza-
tion for war. Second, states made war as self-strengthened states could
mobilize more wherewithal of war, enjoy higher chances of victory,
consolidate conquered territories and extract resources from conquered
populations. The system thus witnessed increasingly intense inter-
national competition, with frequent warfare, recurrent territorial trans-
fers and dramatic rise and decline – even death – of great powers. The
war-make-state-and-state-make-war cycle produced such a Hobbesian-
cum-Machiavellian world that it eventually reached the logical culmin-
ation, producing the triumph of the universal Leviathan.
Centeno and Holden argue that the warfare thesis does not work in
Latin America. It is noteworthy that war also weakened rather than
strengthened the state in early modern Europe. While ancient
Chinese states pursued self-strengthening reforms (i.e., they mobilized
the wherewithal of war by increasing the state’s administrative-extractive
capacity), early modern European states, in particular, “Spain” and
“France,” followed self-weakening expedients (i.e., they mobilized the
wherewithal of war by relying on intermediate resource-holders such as
military entrepreneurs, tax farmers, creditors and venal officers).47 Such
45
The term “self-strengthening reforms” is adopted from the late Qing concept “self-
strengthening movement (ziqiang yundong),” and the classical concept “rich country
and strong army (fuguo qiangbing).”
46
This term is borrowed from Kaufman, Little and Wohlforth, “Conclusion: Theoretical
Insights from the Study of World History,” p. 229.
47
Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 32–7, ch. 3 and 4. My discussion of
European “self-weakening expedients” is indebted to Thomas Ertman, Birth of the
expedients turned European states into composites of contradictions:

despotic but ineffective, autonomous but incapable and bulky but rotten
from within. Thus, while war made the state through self-strengthening
reforms in ancient China, war deformed the state through self-weakening
expedients in early modern Europe. Europe could eventually escape the
stagnation trajectory often associated with the East only because “the
United Provinces,” “England,” “Sweden” and “Prussia” charted an alter-
native, state-strengthening model which was later emulated by Revolution-
ary France and other European states. Paradoxically, then, the “European
experience” is rather applicable to the non-European world, especially
Spanish colonies in Latin America.
The Chinese case further confirms Hobson’s argument regarding
the “myth of the centralized and rational Western state, 1500–1900.”48
Europeanists often believe that state formation processes are uniquely
European and modern. Max Weber famously argued that China “repre-
sents the purest type of patrimonial bureaucracy that is unencumbered by
any counterweight.”49 However, the Chinese bureaucracy had been the
object of admiration by European reformers in earlier centuries. Jesuits,
who began to arrive in China at the turn of the seventeenth century, took
great pains to learn Chinese civilization. They were immensely impressed
by Chinese administration and wrote many tracts on the subject. The new
knowledge of China reached Europe at precisely the time when progres-
sive reformers were searching for ways to rid their states of venality. A work
by Matteo Ricci appeared in five European languages by 1648.50 Chinese
influence was particularly strong in Prussia. According to Herrlee Creel,
when Europe’s first written civil service examination was introduced in
Berlin in 1693, “the inspiration came from China.”51 Of course, the
Chinese bureaucracy had been in existence for two millennia since the
late Warring States period. As Wong points out, “Ideas and institutions
that are specifically ‘modern’ in the West are simply not ‘modern’ in
China.”52 Vu thus remarks that, “If China is still sometimes treated as
an ‘anomalous case,’ more sophisticated studies have turned the tables and
made European states look like historical laggards.”53
Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge
48
49
Claus Wittich (eds.), vols. I and II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
p. 1102.
50
Herrlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China (University of Chicago Press, 1970),
p. 24.
51 52
Creel, Origins of Statecraft, p. 24. Wong, China Transformed, p. 101.
53
Vu, “Studying the State,” p. 151.
China was light years ahead of Europe in terms of not only

bureaucratization, but also citizenship. As I argue elsewhere, citizenship
rights “indigenously sprouted on Chinese soil long before they blos-
somed on European soil.”54 This argument, of course, goes against both
Eurocentric and Sinocentric conventional wisdoms. As Hobson points
out, “Eurocentrism typically extrapolates backwards the modern concep-
tion of political democracy all the way to Ancient Greece. It then fabri-
cates a permanent picture of Western democracy by tracing this
conception forwards to Magna Carta in England (1215), then to
England’s Glorious Revolution (1688/9), and then on to the American
Constitution (1787/9) and the French Revolution (1789) . . . The imme-
diate problem here is that . . . as late as 1900 genuine political democracy
in the West remained a fiction.”55 Reminiscent of Edward Said’s
orientalism, this fiction is widely shared among Chinese and sinologists.
Although Karl Max’s notion of “Asiatic mode of production” and Karl
Wittfogel’s notion of “hydraulic despotism” have been rejected, it is still
presumed that the origins of democracy are unique to Western civiliza-
tion and alien to Chinese civilization. Wong suggests that citizenship is “a
culturally foreign concept.”56 Elizabeth Perry believes that the Chinese
conception of rights “from Mencius to Mao” refers only to socioeco-
nomic rights and has no place for political rights.57
Hobson argues that “the theory of oriental despotism is a fabrica-
tion.”58 Again, he could use Tilly’s paradigm to make his case. Tilly
observed a paradox in European state formation: Militarization goes with
civilianization, and centralization goes with constitutionalism.59 When
European rulers pursued dynastic ambitions in the international arena,
they were compelled to bargain with resource-holders in the domestic
realm. State–society bargaining for the wherewithal of war then created a
variety of rights. If citizenship rights are defined as recognized enforce-
able claims on the state that are by-products of state–society bargaining
over the means of war,60 then we can restore the military basis of
citizenship rights – both political and socioeconomic – in Chinese state-
making.
In the Warring States period, ambitious rulers faced the familiar
challenge of how to motivate the people to fight and die in war. Inter-
national competition thus compelled three state–society bargains. The
54 55
Hui, War and State Formation, p. 168. Hobson, Eastern Origins, pp. 290, 293.
56
Wong, China Transformed, p. 93.
57
Elizabeth J. Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao – and
Now,” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 6, no. 1 (2008), pp. 37–50.
58 59
Hobson, Eastern Origins, p. 283. Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), pp. 122, 206.
60
Tilly, Coercion (2nd edn), pp. 101–2.
first was material welfare: Because the security of the state rested with
the well-being of the peasantry, rulers made land grants to peasants in
return for military service, taxes and corvée. The second bargain was
legal protection: Various states publicly promulgated legal codes meant
to bind rulers and ruled alike. The third bargain was freedom of expres-
sion: an interstate market of talent nurtured the flourishing of the
“Hundred Schools of Thought.” Wong argues that the European phe-
nomenon of popular sovereignty had no place in China’s late imperial
state dynamics.61 He overlooks that the Warring States era was a
different world. The received wisdom that the Mandate of Heaven
rested with the Son of Heaven was a post-unification construction by
Han’s Emperor Wu (r. 140–87 BC). The Mandate of Heaven as origin-
ally articulated in the classical era insisted on the ultimate sovereignty of
the people. Most notably, the Mencius unequivocally places the Man-
date in the hands of the people because “Heaven does not speak; it sees
and hears as the people see and hear.”62 In discussing the bad last
Shang ruler, Mencius is quoted to say: “I have heard about the killing
of the ordinary fellow Zhou, but I have not heard of the assassination of
any ruler.”63 This passage is reminiscent of Hobbes’ complaint about
resistance theorists: “they say not regicide, that is, killing of a king, but
tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant, is lawful.”64 Mencian thinkers
thus preceded European resistance theorists in arguing that tyrants
ceased to be rulers, properly speaking.
Chinese State-Making in the Modern Period

Does the bellocentrist paradigm work only in the classical era? While IR
scholars have paid much attention to the Warring States period, histor-
ians of China have focused on the modern period. Before the new wave
of Chinese historiography, however, theorists of both Eurocentrism and
Sinocentrism view modern China in very negative light. In the Chinese
nationalist narrative, the period from the First Opium War (1839–42)
to the establishment of the People’s Republic (1949) is known as
the “century of national humiliation.”65 Marx was so disparaging of
China’s backwardness that he believed the “only hope for progressive
emancipation . . . lay with the Opium Wars and the incursion of British
61 62 63
Wong, China Transformed, p. 101. Mencius 5A5. Mencius 1B8.
64
Thomas Hobbes, Birth of the Leviathan, pt. 2, ch. 29.
65
See Jindai Zhongguo bainian guochi ditu (Atlas of the Century of National Humiliation in
Modern China), edited by People’s Press Cartography Office (Renmin chubanshe
ditushi) (Beijing: People’s Press, 1997).
capitalists.”66 Consistent with Hobson’s aspiration to bring agency back

to the East, Tilly-inspired historians have highlighted how successive
Chinese regimes engaged in rigorous state-building efforts.
As Alice Miller contends, if state formation refers to “the development
of increasingly large standing armies . . ., new methods and levels of
taxation to finance increasingly expensive military establishments, state
bureaucracies to manage an expanding array of state functions, an
enhanced capacity to penetrate society and mobilize increasingly large
segments of its population for its purposes; and an integrative capacity to
enlist the identification of its subjects as ‘citizens’ with state fortunes,”
then Tilly’s framework “does offer a basis from which to analyze the
patterns of China’s modern state-building.”67 Miller argues that China’s
“first effective effort at modern state-building” took place under the late
Qing in the 1900s.68 The sweeping reform measures included reorgan-
ization of the central bureaucracy, creation of China’s first modern army
and police, establishment of modern schools and introduction of a
constitutionalist movement. Although these measures triggered the
“Tocquevillian effect” (that an authoritarian regime is most vulnerable
to a revolution when it begins to reform itself)69 rather than saved
the Qing, Miller emphasizes that they “did lay the foundation for succes-
sive episodes of state-building thereafter, first under the early Republic,
then under the Nationalists in Nanjing after 1928, and then under the
communists . . . after 1949.”70 Covering the same late Qing and Repub-
lican eras, Ja Ian Chong examines Chinese state formation against the
backdrop of foreign intervention. While the critical role of foreign
encroachment is reminiscent of the Latin American experience, a state
formation perspective also calls into question the victimization narrative
that foreign intervention ineluctably weakened the Chinese state.71
In mainstream Chinese historiography, the Qing dynasty had already
failed in an earlier round of reforms called the “foreign affairs move-
ment” or “self-strengthening movement.” The program was shattered
by China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5. Recent
66
67
Miller, “Some Things We Used to Know,” pp. 64–5.
68
Miller, “Some Things We Used to Know,” p. 67.
69
Tocqueville argued that “the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it
seeks to mend its ways . . . Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a
grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s
minds. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1955), p. 177.
70
Miller, “Some Things We Used to Know,” p. 67.
71
Ja Ian Chong, “Imposing States: External Intervention and the Politics of State
Formation,” unpublished PhD thesis (Princeton University, 2008).
historiography, especially research by Allen Fung on the army and

Benjamin Elman on the navy, shows that the Qing’s defeat was not at
all preordained.72 Foreign observers at the time had expected a close
fight, even a Chinese victory. What caused the Qing defeat was the lack
of drilling and training among the rank and file and of unity among
various divisions and fleets. Nevertheless, the “humiliating” result of
the war led Chinese intellectuals and foreign observers to reason back-
ward and conclude that the Qing’s self-strengthening efforts were
doomed from the start. While the lack of coordination is certainly a
sign of state weakness (a problem that the New Policies of the 1900s
sought to address), it is remarkable that international competition
compelled drastic state-building reforms in the modern period as in
the classical period.
The Chinese nationalist narrative also omits historians’ insight that
war “politicized the citizenry in a liberating sense.”73 The decades from
the 1890s to the 1930s represented a time when Chinese intellectuals
openly debated the notions of constitutional monarchy and republican-
ism. Philip Kuhn points out that the first petition by the educated elite
to the Qing court for popular representation in 1895 was “only conceiv-
able under the duress of imminent foreign conquest.”74 Orville Schell
highlights that the May Fourth era (around 1919) was a great “Chinese
Enlightenment.”75 Arthur Waldron observes that the Republican
period under the Northern government of 1912–28 was “a period of
professedly parliamentary rule,”76 enjoying “substantial economic
growth, . . . freedom of the press . . ., and a flowering of culture.”77
Likewise, Stephen MacKinnon points out that the short-lived Nation-
alist-Communist unity government at Hankou in 1938 was marked by
power-sharing among rival militarists and thus witnessed “the absence
of the repressive power of the state.”78 Against the backdrop of Japanese
72
Allen Fung, “Testing the Self-Strengthening: The Chinese Army in the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894–1895,” Modern Asian Studies, Special Issue: War in Modern China, vol. 30,
no. 4 (1996), pp. 1007–31; Benjamin Elman, “Naval Warfare and the Refraction of
China’s Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure,
1865–1895,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (2004), pp. 283–326.
73
Stephen MacKinnon, “The Tragedy of Wuhan, 1938,” Modern Asian Studies, Special
Issue: War in Modern China, vol. 30, no. 4 (1996), pp. 931–94, here at p. 943.
74
Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford University Press, 2002),
p. 123.
75
Orville Schell, “China’s Hidden Democratic Legacy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, no. 4
(2004), pp. 116–24.
76
Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 264.
77
Waldron, From War to Nationalism, p. 264.
78
MacKinnon, “The Tragedy of Wuhan,” p. 935.
invasion, “parliamentary-like debate,” “third-party movements” (inde-

pendent of both the Nationalists and Communists), the free press and
the arts flourished and “reached a twentieth-century zenith.”79 The
conclusion of the Communist-Nationalist civil war, unfortunately,
aborted China’s democratic experiments. After 1949, totalitarian states
emerged on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Chinese State-Making in the Imperial Period

It may be said that, even if the bellocentrist paradigm works in China in
the formative (656–221 BC) and modern (1839–1949) periods, it surely
cannot work in the two millennia in between. After all, the most deeply
held belief about China in both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism is Chi-
nese oneness. As Hobson observes, the Eurocentric contrast between
“an eternal image of ‘dynamic West’ versus an ‘unchanging East’”80
ultimately rests with the differentiation between the “European multi-
state system” and the “Eastern single-state system.”81 Bin Wong agrees,
suggesting that “China never really experienced permanent fragmenta-
tion after its period of intense interstate competition ending in the third
century B.C.E. . . . China’s equilibrium political form came to be a
unified agrarian empire.”82
The Tillyan approach calls into question the Chinese presumption of
unity and uniformity and helps to uncover a picture of duality and
diversity. Of all Tillyan insights, the foremost is the injunction against
the retrospective approach. If we take for granted the states we see today
and work backward for their state-making experiences, we would bury
the “hundreds of states that once flourished but then disappeared.”83
Such an approach also leads to the certainty of hindsight bias that blinds
us to various suppressed historical alternatives not taken. Tilly thus
advocated the prospective approach, whereby the researcher proceeds
from a political unit’s formative era and searches forward for alternative
paths and outcomes.84 It is noteworthy that the Chinese nationalist
discourse takes precisely the retrospective approach. The late Tan
Qixiang, the chief editor of the state-sponsored Zhongguo lishi dituji
(Historical Atlas of China),85 explicitly argued that historical China should
79
MacKinnon, “The Tragedy of Wuhan,” p. 937. 80
81 82
Hobson, Eastern Origins, p. 17. Wong, China Transformed, pp. 76–7.
83
84
Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” pp. 14–15.
85
Tan Qixiang, Jianming zhongguo lishi dituji (Concise Historical Atlas of China) (Beijing:
Xinhua shudian, 1991). Following the Chinese convention, Chinese names begin with
surnames unless the scholars in question go by English names.
be seen from the perspective of today’s Chinese.86 The problem is best

illustrated by the very Chinese term for China, “zhongguo.” Today,
“zhongguo” is taken to mean the singular, powerful “middle kingdom.”
But when “zhongguo” was first coined in the classical period, it referred to
“central states” in the plural form. Even in the imperial era, “zhongguo”
was a geographical concept – like “Europe” – and did not become a
country name until the late nineteenth century.87 Because the Chinese
language does not distinguish between the singular and plural forms, the
original meaning of “zhongguo” is easily lost in retrospective accounts.
To interrogate the presumption of zhongguo’s oneness, I borrow from
the Tillyan-cum-Weberian conception of the effective state as one “that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force
within a given territory.”88 In this perspective, establishment of Chinese
unity should involve effective exercise of central control. As for the
“given territory,” China’s official historians generally take “historical
China” to refer to the maximum territorial reach achieved under the
Qing dynasty. Ge Jianxiong, however, acknowledges that such an expan-
sive definition is biased against Chinese unity by fiat: The “central
kingdom” controlled this vast space for only 81 years, from 1759 (when
the Qing established the new realm of “Xinjiang” in the Zungharian and
Tarim basins) to 1840 (when the Qing began to lose to the British in the
First Opium War).89 (More below.) Ge thus resorts to a minimal defin-
ition: the maximum territorial reach achieved under the Qin dynasty in
214 BC. This territorial space is bounded by the Yellow River in the
northwest, the Yin Shan and the lower Liao River in the northeast, the
Sichuan basin in the west, the eastern edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou
plateau in the southwest, the Guangdong and Guangxi regions in the
south and the coastline in the east.90 This space encompasses all the
arable lands in the north China plain, the Wei River valley and the Yangzi
valley. Although boundaries shifted over time, Qin’s territorial reach
serves as a relatively reasonable benchmark because it defined for subse-
quent unified dynasties from the Han through the early Qing what it
meant to rule “all under Heaven.” Court records call this Chinese space
“guannei (inside the pass)” or “neidi (the interior)”, and the space
86
Tan Qixiang, “Lishishang de zhongguo (Historical China),” in: Qiusuo shikong (An
Exploration of Time and Space) (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi, 2000), pp. 2–4.
87
Qixiang, “Historical China,” pp. 2, 3.
88
Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds.) (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 78.
89
Ge Jianxiong, Tongyi yu fenlie: Zhongguo lishi de qishi (Unification and Division: Insights
from Chinese History) (Beijing: Sanlian, 1994), p. 79.
90
Ge Jian Xiong, Unification and Division (1991), pp. 106, 179.
between the minimal and maximal definitions – that is, Manchuria,

Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan, Yunnan and Tibet – “guanwai (beyond
the pass)” or “the periphery.” It is noteworthy that even the minimal
definition yields only 991 years of unification throughout the long span of
Chinese history up to 2000 (see Table 10.1). In short, zhongguo more
often took the plural form than the singular form.91
How do the warfare dynamics work if zhongguo alternates between the
plural and singular forms? In line with my earlier argument that war
made the state in ancient China and deformed the state in early modern
Europe, I propose that war made the state in eras of plural zhongguo and
weakened the state in eras of singular zhongguo. That is, while China
charted a state-strengthening course in eras of division, China followed
the “European” state-weakening model in eras of unification.
Whether in the Warring States period or subsequent eras of division,
war made the state as contending “central states” were compelled to
Table 10.1 Chronology of Unification over the Interior (up to 2000)92
Duration of Duration of No. of Yrs of

Dynasty or Period Dynasty/Period Unification Unification
Neolithic period 5500–3000 BC – –

Longshan period 3000–2000 BC – –
Xia?93 2070–1600 BC
Shang 1600–1046 BC – –
Zhou 104594–256 BC – –
Western Zhou 1045–771 BC
Spring/Autumn 770–453 BC
Warring States 453–221 BC
Qin dynasty 221–206 BC 214–209 BC 5
Han dynasty 202 BC–AD 220
Western Han 202 BC–AD 9 108 BC–AD 22; 130
Xin 9–24
Eastern Han 25–220 50–184 134
Three Kingdoms 220–265 – –
91
A more in-depth discussion, see Victoria Tin-bor Hui, “China’s Expansion to the
Periphery: Why Some ‘Peripheral Regions’ Became Parts of China While Korea and
Vietnam Did Not,” in: Geoffrey Wade (ed.), Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences
of Polity Expansion in Asia (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
92
Years of unification are adopted, with some adjustments, from Xiong, Unification and
Division (1991), p. 79.
93
The existence of the Xia period is subject to dispute.
94
All dates before 841 BC are rough estimates.
Table 10.1 (cont.)
Duration of Duration of No. of Yrs of

Dynasty or Period Dynasty/Period Unification Unification
Jin dynasty 265–420

Western Jin 265–317 280–301 21
Eastern Jin 317–420
16 Kingdoms 304–439
Northern and Southern 420–589 – –
dynasties
Sui dynasty 581–618 589–616 27
Tang dynasty 618–907 630–755 125
Five dynasties and ten 907–960 – –
kingdoms
Song dynasties 960–1279 – –
Northern Song 960–1126
Southern Song 1127–1279
Yuan dynasty 1279–1368 1279–1352 73
Ming dynasty 1368–1644 1371–1629 258
Qing dynasty 1644–1911 1683–1850 167
Republic of China 1912– – –
On mainland 1912–1949
In Taiwan 1949–
People’s Republic of 1949– 1949–2000 51
China
Total: 991
pursue self-strengthening reforms to mobilize human and material

resources. The war-make-state-and-state-make-war cycle would reach
the logical conclusion when the most powerful and resourceful “central
state” conquered all rivals and established the “central kingdom.” But
what happened when there was only one victor left? The Mencius, a
Confucian classic, had predicted circa 260 BC that “states . . . without
the threat of foreign invasion will perish.”95 Following this Mencian
wisdom, I argue that unification weakened the “central kingdom”
because, first, the ultimate victor was no longer compelled by the exigen-
cies of war to keep up with state-strengthening efforts, and, second, the
much enlarged empire should face the loss-of-strength gradient and so
should experience reduction in state capacity – defined as the state’s
ability to mobilize resources and implement policies – in areas further
away from the capital. The burden of ruling a sizable zhongguo meant that
95
Mencius, 6B15; dated by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Emergence of China
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming), p. 157.
the “central kingdom” had to depend on local leaders to maintain social

order. The imperial state thus turned to a hybrid form of government
that combined direct rule and indirect rule. The central court appointed
magistrates down to the department and county levels, but gave them
such scanty resources that they had to rely on the cooperation of “a range
of extra-bureaucratic actors and groups, including local militias, clan and
lineage associations, and members of the local gentry.”96 The imperial
state also did not provide a budget for support staff so that magistrates
had to rely on a “sub-bureaucratic staff” of clerks, secretaries and tax-
collectors who made their livings from imposing surtaxes and fees on
local populations. If direct rule is the key to “modern” state capacity,
then it is of immense historical significance that the post-Qin “central
kingdom” lost the capacity for direct rule. Thus, although the Chinese
state remained strong by world standards well into the Jesuit era, it was
much weaker than its smaller Warring States predecessors.
When the Qin dynasty was first established in 221 BC, the new
“central kingdom” still enjoyed a high level of state capacity. This is
because Qin had created an immensely strong state equivalent to the
modern totalitarian state, and all vanquished states had developed prov-
inces and counties, which could be readily absorbed into Qin’s central-
ized bureaucracy. Yet, Qin’s First Emperor was not content with ruling
only the territorial space inherited from the Warring States system. He
sought to rule “all under Heaven” and conquered further to the Ordos in
the north and the Nanling regions in the south (Guangdong and
Guangxi). The high costs of sending massive armies to two frontiers in
opposite directions brought about unsustainable levels of taxation and
conscription. While the competent First Emperor could still hold the
empire together, the Second Emperor imposed even heavier extractions
and harsher punishments but was uninterested in the administration of
the empire. In the face of massive rebellions, the Qin dynasty quickly
collapsed in 206 BC.
The ensuing Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) in its early years was
restricted to the territorial space of the Warring States system. By the
time of Emperor Wu (r. 140–87 BC), however, the Han court had
eliminated all internal rivals in northern China and thus proceeded to
restore Qin’s maximum territorial reach. It is worth noting that the
regions south of the Yangzi River were then inhabited by Yue peoples
who spoke languages unintelligible to people from northern China.
Because the Qin court’s control over this alien territory was tenuous,
96
Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern
China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), p. 24.
local leaders easily restored independence during the Qin-Han transi-

tion. After successful conquest, the Han continued to hold this territory
through indirect rule.
The Chinese state in singular zhongguo would be weakened by not just
the reversal of the war-make-state dynamics in the interior, but also the
extension of war to the periphery. Throughout the long span of Chinese
history, the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) sent armies to the Western
Regions (the Zungharian and/or the Tarim Basins), southern Manchuria,
northern Korea and Southeast Asia; the Sui dynasty (581–618) to the
Western Regions, southern Manchuria, northern Korea and Southeast
Asia; the Tang dynasty (618–907) to the Western Regions, Mongolia,
eastern Tibet, southern Manchuria and northern Korea; the Yuan dynasty
(1279–1368) to Korea, Japan, Yunnan, Burma, Vietnam and Java (after
subjugating the vast Eurasian steppe zone and the Song dynasty); the
Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the Western Regions, Mongolia, southern
Manchuria, northern Korea, Burma, Vietnam and beyond in South and
Southeast Asia; the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the Western Regions,
Mongolia, Tibet, Nepal and Taiwan.97
Why is it that war in the interior strengthened the state while war to the
periphery weakened the state? First, the periphery was politically and
culturally not part of historical zhongguo until the early twentieth century.
(Even the southern half of “the interior” was culturally non-Chinese until
the late Tang.) More importantly, the steppe zone was geographically
distant and different. As argued above, attempts at domination must
overcome the countervailing mechanism of rising costs of expansion
(and that of balance of power).98 In the Warring States era, the state of
Qin could overcome the mechanism of costs partly because the system
was relatively small, occupying only the central plain and surrounding
regions in northern China. When the unified Qin dynasty expanded to
both the south and the north, the empire disintegrated. What set the
limits to Qin’s expansion? While the Qin had developed the capacity to
mobilize massive armies of several hundreds of thousands, the ability to
move and supply armies over long distances was a function of geography
as well as state capacity. The vast periphery “beyond the pass,” in
particular, is more similar to Africa than the Chinese interior in geo-
graphical features. According to Herbst, it is prohibitively costly for state-
builders to establish control over inhospitable territories with low popu-
lation densities and large supplies of land.99 Similarly in historical China,
97
For a more focused discussion of expansion and costs, see Hui, “China’s Expansion to
the Periphery.”
98 99
Hui, War and State Formation, pp. 24–6. Herbst, States and Power in Africa, p. 13.
long-distance campaigns beyond arable lands involved immense

expenses on logistics. Expansion to the periphery thus repeatedly
weakened the state. An ambitious court that ignored this geopolitical
imperative would sooner or later face budget deficits. As Wong observes,
while China’s regular land taxes could generally meet ordinary expend-
itures, the extraordinary demands of military campaigns would lead to
fiscal crises.100 Although the imperial state could impose special land
surtaxes, commercial taxes and forced “contributions” from the rich,
there were strict limits to revenue extractions from an agrarian economy.
When confronted with a budget crisis, the seemingly powerful “central
kingdom” was forced to choose between two equally unpalatable alter-
natives: retrenchment, which would mean giving up immense human
and material costs already invested; or heightened extractions, which
could provoke peasant rebellions as in the Qin.
In the Han dynasty, the early official rhetoric attributed Qin’s rapid
collapse to ruthless expansionism and extractions. By the time the Han
court had consolidated control over the entire “interior,” however,
Emperor Wu was tempted to seek domination beyond Qin’s conquests
to the Western Regions, southern Manchuria/northern Korea and
northern Vietnam. It did not take long for Emperor Wu to turn budget
surpluses into budget deficits. In order to generate new revenues from
unprecedented salt and iron monopolies, the Han court held the
“Discourses on Salt and Iron” in 81 BC. During the policy debate,
scholar-officials criticized that “the farther we expand, the more the
people suffer.”101 The Han dynasty eventually lasted, partly because
the court managed to increase revenues, and no less because it
adjusted its ambitions to balance the books. (In Tillyan fashion, the
extraordinary revenues from the iron and salt monopolies would
become ordinary revenues for the rest of Chinese history.)
The fact that the Han was relatively long-lasting created a positive
example for expansion, which effectively countered the Qin’s negative
example. Just as Han’s Emperor Wu sought to emulate and surpass
Qin’s First Emperor, ambitious emperors in subsequent dynasties
strove to emulate and surpass Emperor Wu. Unsurprisingly, every
expansionist court soon exhausted accumulated surpluses and faced
budget deficits. The Sui dynasty chose to increase extractions and
suffered Qin’s consequence. The Tang dynasty opted for partial
retrenchment, but it was still weakened by another expansion-induced
problem: warlordism. When the Tang court established permanent
100
Wong, China Transformed, pp. 90, 94.
101
Quoted in Xiong, Unification and Division, pp. 111–12.
frontier armies to fight increasingly distant campaigns and to garrison

increasingly distant military outposts in the Western Regions, it essen-
tially “relinquished effective control over the military governors, whose
troops came to owe primary allegiance to their immediate superiors
rather than the distant authorities in the capital.”102 After the An
Lushan Rebellion of 755, the seemingly mighty Tang dynasty disinte-
grated into a system of semi-autonomous warlords. The Mongol Yuan
dynasty was better at controlling the steppe zone – after all, it was the
Mongol homeland. Yet, after the Yuan had established itself in Dadu
(Beijing), it was forced to give up the Western Regions because
defending the area against competing Mongol forces was “a financial
drain.”103 The Ming dynasty harbored ambition to dominate the
steppe in a Mongolian style, but expensive campaigns accomplished
little other than driving Mongol forces to take evasive actions.
It was not until the high Qing that the “central kingdom” could finally
project power to the periphery. This was made possible by two unpre-
cedented developments. First, a “revolution in logistics” as Qing offi-
cials implemented state-strengthening measures to supply the powerful
cavalry and infantry forces armed with Jesuit-made cannons. Second, a
“commercial revolution” as the region south of the Yangzi River had
become so productive that it was exporting vast quantities of agricul-
tural products and handicraft goods to global markets. The Qing thus
had a much deeper pocket to pay for the costs of expansion and
administration than any previous dynasties. Nevertheless, the Qing
could not change a hard fact on the ground: new conquests in the
periphery continued to be a drain on imperial finance. When the Qing
experienced budget deficits in the face of internal rebellions and foreign
encroachment in the nineteenth century, it contracted increasingly
larger loans with international financiers against future customs rev-
enues. As the Qing court followed the “European” model of financing,
it expectedly became increasingly weak and corrupt in the modern era.
The Qing’s logistical revolution in the eighteenth century deserves
more attention. This episode of Chinese history offers another close-
up account of war-making and state-making, restores agency to a
formidable “Other” of the “central kingdom,” and explains how
zhongguo expanded from the minimum definition to the maximum
102
David A. Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900 (New York: Routledge, 2002),
p. 14.
103
Thomas T. Allsen, “The Yuan Dynasty and the Uighurs of Turfan in the 13th
Century,” in: Morris Rossabi (ed.), China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its
Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
pp. 243–80, here at p. 261.
definition. In Chinese nationalist narratives, as noted above, the Qing

is a corrupt dynasty that brought national humiliation to China. But
the Qing was in fact “one of the most important cases of state building
that has come down to us.”104 While it is true that the Qing’s efforts at
strengthening the state failed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, what is often overlooked is that its self-strengthening efforts
in the early years were remarkably successful. It is also important to
realize that the “China” that the Qing dynasty took over in 1644 was a
small fraction of what the Qing achieved at its height in 1759. The
early Qing faced intense competition from the Tsarist and Zunghar
empires. While the Qing negotiated border-demarcation treaties with
the Russians, it engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Zunghar
Mongols from the 1670s to the 1750s. In the seventeenth century, the
Zunghar Empire ruled most of the Mongolian steppe and the Zun-
gharian basin, dominated the Tarim basin and exerted immense influ-
ence on the Tibetan Plateau – that is, it ruled most of the periphery
ringing the interior.
In Perdue’s Tilly-inspired analysis, the prolonged Qing-Zunghar
struggle drove both belligerents to engage in “competitive statebuild-
ing.”105 To increase their “stateness,” both sides were compelled “to
mobilize economic and military resources, build administrative organiza-
tions, and develop ideologies of conquest and rule.”106 In a stereotypical
Tillyan fashion, the mobilization of “grain, horses, soldiers, civilians,
nomads, grass, uniforms, and weaponry”107 from the interior to the
frontier required the Qing to engage in “administrative innovations that
built an increasingly centralized and coordinated bureaucracy.”108 Such
efforts further “transformed the fiscal system, commercial networks,
communication technology, and local agrarian society.”109 On the part
of the Zunghars, competition with the Qing similarly compelled them to
“undertake significant steps toward ‘self-strengthening’,”110 building
fortified cities, manufacturing cannon and other weapons (and loading
small cannon on camelback), developing mining industries to manufac-
ture gunpowder, importing gun-casting and cartographic technology
from Russians and Swedes, exacting payments of grain, animals and
men from subject populations, and fostering trade and agriculture.111
104
Charles Horner, Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global
Context (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 60.
105
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 549. 106 Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 18, 518.
107 108
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 519. Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 549–50.
109 110
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 527. Perdue, China Marches West, p. 307.
111
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 305; James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History
of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 90–4.
What tilted the balance in this “governance arms race” was the relative
ease of state-building as shaped by Herbstian population-to-land ratios.
The Qing court, once it had consolidated control over the populous
interior, could bring “the full weight of Chinese wealth to overwhelm
steppe warfare.”112 The Zunghar Mongols, in contrast, occupied a vast
steppe zone with low-density population centers sparsely distributed
across pasturelands and oases city-states. Their resources were equally
“widely scattered, from the valleys of the Irtysh, Orkhon, and other rivers
to the salt and potential golden sands of lakes Yamysh and Balkash.”113
Because the Zunghars “had to collect much more fragmented materials
over a vast, unintegrated space,” their state-building project was “much
more challenging and, ultimately, ephemeral.”114
When the Zunghar Empire enjoyed the unified leadership of Galdan
(1671–97), Tsewang Rabdan (1697–1727) and Galdan Tseren
(1727–45), it could manage to survive between the expanding Qing
and Tsarist empires. However, as James Millward points out, “For all
their might . . . Central Eurasian nomad powers were fractious. Their
customary acceptance of either lateral or patrilineal succession,
depending on who won the political and military contest to inherit the
khanship, ensured many numbers of bloody transitions and political
fragmentations.”115 After the death of Galdan Tseren in 1745, the Zun-
ghar Empire descended into bitter internecine struggles. Emperor Qian-
long (1736–95) could then subjugate the Zunghar Empire once and for
all in 1755–57 (and exterminate the whole Zunghar people). When
Qianlong’s armies marched on to dominate the Tarim Basin in 1759, a
new realm of “Xinjiang” (meaning new territories) was created. Zhongguo
finally took on the maximum definition.116
In Perdue’s Tillyan account, however, success at eliminating an
existential rival was a curse in disguise. The war-make-state perspective
“not only helps to explain why the Qing grew; it can also explain why
the empire fell.”117 The extermination of the Zunghar Empire and the
delimitation of a fixed border with Russia “fundamentally changed the
Chinese political economy of state-building while Europeans continued
112
Peter Lorge, War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795 (New York:
Routledge, 2005), p. 172.
113 114
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 519. Perdue, China Marches West, p. 518.
115
Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, p. 40.
116
In the mid-nineteenth century, local leaders in Xinjiang rebelled against Qing rule when
the Qing was under the onslaught of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion.
Nevertheless, the Qing reconquered Xinjiang in 1876–8 and turned the region into a
province in 1884.
117
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 546.
to invest in their wars.”118 When Emperor Qianlong received Britain’s

Macartney embassy in 1793, he was not unaware of Britain’s rising
power, but he had little interest in the weapons and manufactures the
British had to offer – in sharp contrast to his interest in Jesuit-made
cannons just decades ago. Perdue conjectures that had the Zunghar
Empire held out, the Qing would have continued to engage in state-
strengthening, possibly by purchasing the latest technologies from
Britain.119 Paradoxically, Qing’s success at exterminating the Mongol
empire eventually contributed to its subsequent weakness.
Had various peripheral empires and central states held out, the history
of Chinese citizenship would also have taken a different course. If the
Eurocentric theory of oriental despotism rests with the presumption of
Chinese oneness, then it is of immense significance that zhongguo in fact
alternated between the singular and plural forms. In general, while
singular zhongguo was more despotic, plural zhongguo was more condu-
cive to the development of citizenship rights defined as state–society
bargains. Qin’s unification of the Warring States system already aborted
the development of nascent Chinese citizenship.120 Under the Qin dyn-
asty, all elements of classical citizenship rights disappeared. Peasant
welfare was abandoned: the imperial court increased tax burdens and
further drafted more than 800,000 men to expand to the northern and
southern frontiers. The principle of justice was eroded: punishments
became so harsh that there were about 1.4 million convicts to provide
forced labor to build the Emperor’s palaces and tomb. Freedom of
expression was similarly stifled: all books except Qin’s court records
and those on medicine and agriculture were seized and burnt, and
460 scholars who expressed doubts about the Emperor’s policies were
persecuted.
After the Qin Dynasty, the unified “central kingdom” continued to
bury the classical bargains of legal protection and freedom of expression
but restored that of peasant welfare. This may explain why sinologists
hold the mistaken view that the Chinese know of only socioeconomic
rights but not political rights. From the Han on, a key government
function was to keep track of harvest conditions and grain prices so
that officials could efficiently deliver famine relief. As Wong explains,
this “strong interest in peasant welfare” was developed “not from an
altruistic sense of charity or benevolence but because an economically
viable peasantry was understood to be the basis for a politically success-
ful government.”121 Does this mean that singular zhongguo could
118 119
Perdue, China Marches West, p. 550. Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 563–4.
120 121
Hui, War and State Formation, p. 178. Wong, China Transformed, p. 77.
nevertheless promote human well-being? Theoretically speaking, a

benign dictator could do a lot of good deeds. However, it was not
reliable to count on the benevolence of every reigning emperor. As
unification effectively turned “all under Heaven” into the Son of
Heaven’s private property, there was no effective sanction to prevent
the emperor from enslaving his subjects and exploiting their wealth. Ge
Jianxiong observes that annual revenues were mostly spent on court
consumption rather than public projects.122 Furthermore, as discussed
earlier, when expansionist emperors faced budget crises, they were
more tempted to increase taxes and corvee than to recall expeditionary
forces.
In eras of division, in contrast, competing “central states” would
again be compelled by international competition to introduce open
policies to attract new talent and develop neglected regions to enlarge
their tax bases. Of course, rulers in plural zhongguo remained auto-
cratic – just as early modern European states were absolutist. And the
classical bargains of legal protection and freedom of expression were
not restored. But the very existence of a “central states” system neces-
sarily gave rise to the “right of exit,” which made rulers aware of limits
to extractions lest the people would move to competing “central states.”
As the classic Book of Odes warns rulers, “Never have you cared for my
welfare. I shall leave you and journey to that fortunate land.”123 Eur-
opeanists argue that the right of exit served as an implicit check on
arbitrary power, and even a substitute for formal representation in
modern European politics.124 Its importance in historical China should
therefore not be underestimated. After all, population size was the basis
of military power and economic wealth. Thus, the Tillyan paradigm
allows us to see that the Chinese state was simultaneously more capable
and less autocratic in eras of plural zhongguo.
The contrast between plural and singular zhongguo is even more pro-
nounced if we extend the analysis from the interior to the periphery.
First, steppe regimes were based on more egalitarian state–society rela-
tions, thus allowing some political freedom. However, the steppes did
not provide a viable exit option for ordinary Chinese because they were
hindered by both heavily garrisoned borders and their belief in Chinese
cultural superiority. Second, while imperial emperors treated weaker
122
Xiong, Unification and Division, p. 201.
123
Quoted in Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State, p. 118.
124
Eric L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981), p. 118; Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously:
A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization, vol. 51, no. 4
(1997), pp. 513–53, here at p. 518.
neighbors in Korea and Vietnam as inferiors, they were often forced to

recognize powerful regimes in Inner Asia as equals, and even as superiors
from time to time, despite the rhetoric of hierarchical tributary relations.
Third, the steppe zone in Inner Asia was a land of plenty for millennia
before it descended into poverty with its partition by the Qing and Tsarist
empires. These three elements suggest that the prolonged independence
of steppe regimes contributed to the relative stability of the historical
Asian system until the high Qing.
Tilly and Chinese State-Making Today

Tilly’s state formation paradigm is revolutionizing the study of Chinese
state-making because it facilitates rethinking of both Eurocentric and
Sinocentric received wisdoms. Contrary to the view that Chinese history
has no significant military conflicts, war has in fact played a “central role
in shaping and reshaping the definition of China and its political
order.”125 Contrary to the perception that war brought about nothing
but chaos and sufferings, war also stimulated the birth of Confucianism,
Legalism, Daoism, Sunzi militarism and other schools of thought in the
classical era – and they have remained the foundation of Chinese civiliza-
tion to this day. And contrary to the belief that China was “patrimonial”
and “despotic,” war also created the supposedly “modern” phenomena
of bureaucratization and citizenship in China 2,000 years ahead of
Europe.
Does Tilly’s approach still have relevance for Chinese state-making
today? The People’s Republic has followed the trajectory of singular
zhongguo, imposing dictatorial rule and subjugating peripheral regions.
Unlike previous eras, moreover, the availability of modern means of
communication and transportation has significantly alleviated the loss-
of-strength gradient, allowing Beijing to impose its will throughout an
expansive conception of zhongguo close to the maximum definition. In
Taiwan, the Nationalist party similarly built a police state in the early
decades. But Chiang Ching-kuo eventually led the island state on to the
trajectory of plural zhongguo, introducing democratic reforms to mobilize
both domestic and international support in Taiwan’s ongoing competi-
tion with Beijing.
Will the People’s Republic ever become a strong and democratic
state? Unification per se is not problematic. Indeed, the experience of
the European Union shows that unification can be conducive to
125
Lorge, War, Politics and Society, p. 3.
constitutional democracy, international peace and economic prosper-

ity. What has haunted Chinese history is the means by which unification
has been achieved and maintained – by “the barrel of a gun” in Mao
Zedong’s oft-cited quote. Chinese intellectuals from Sun Yat-sen to
Yan Jiaqi have understood this root problem of Chinese politics. They
have advocated the federal-democratic model in order to restore diver-
sity amidst unity.126 Current Chinese leaders, however, claim that
federal democracy is unsuited to Chinese culture and that it would lead
to division and chaos. But Tilly’s paradigm allows us to see that the
roots of plural zhongguo and citizenship are as indigenous to Chinese
soil as the roots of unitary zhongguo and despotism. Chinese history in
fact offers a rich indigenous democratic legacy. Now that Tilly’s para-
digm is revolutionizing scholarly understandings of Chinese state-
making, what is missing is Tilly-inspired new thinking among Chinese
scholars and Chinese leaders. If Chinese leaders are genuinely con-
cerned about the people’s welfare, Chinese history shows that there is
no need to fear citizenship rights or regional autonomy.
126
Yan Jiaqi, Lianbang Zhongguo gouxiang (A Conception for a Federal China) (Hong Kong:
Mingbao chubanshe, 1992).
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Name Index
Aakjær, Svend, 141 Bonney, Richard, 17, 25, 45, 118

Abrams, Philip, 47 Botea, Roxana, 82, 96, 177, 269–70, 272
Acemoglu, Daron, 4 Bothwell, J. S., 198
Adams, Julia, 8, 29, 103, 217 Bouchard, Constance, 198
Agnew, John, 28 Bramsen, Bo, 144
Allen, Mitchell, 104, 196 Branch, Jordan, 128, 148
Allmand, Christopher, 198 Brenner, Neil, 129
Allsen, Thomas, 289 Brenner, Robert, 46, 49
al-Sayyid, Afaf, 230 Brewer, John, 17, 25, 45, 77, 112
Anderson, Lisa, 221 Briscoe, Ivan, 248–49, 266
Anderson, Perry, 10, 48, 67–69, 93 Brown, Carl, 233–35, 240
Arendt, Hannah, 256 Brown, Chris, 224
Arias, Enrique, 249 Brown, Lloyd, 139
Arias Sánches, Oscar, 22, 243 Brown, Peter, 205
Asch, Ronald, 25, 44, 118, 161 Brunner, Otto, 48
Auyero, Javier, 250 Buisseret, David, 128, 143–44
Ayton, Andrew, 115, 198 Bull, Hedley, 84
Bunce, Valerie, 94
Bachrach, Bernard, 198
Badie, Bertrand, 57 Carroll, Patrick, 9–10, 26, 29
Balslev, Svend, 140 Centeno, Miguel, 80, 82, 87, 251–52,
Barber, Richard, 198 254–55, 268–69, 272–73, 276
Barnett, Michael, 222, 240 Cheeseman, Nic, 269
Bartelson, Jens, 130, 171 Chernilo, Daniel, 31
Bartlett, Robert, 201, 211 Chiaramonte, José, 262
Barudio, Günter, 161 Chong, Ja Ian, 280
Bean, Richard, 76, 81–82 Clark, Stephen, 257
Beaulac, Stéphane, 160 Clausewitz, Carl von, 16
Beblawi, Hazem, 237 Clemens, Elisabeth S., 8
Beck, Martin, 234 Corrigan, Philip, 9
Beik, William, 44 Cosgrove, Denis, 131
Bendix, Reinhard, 31, 95 Cowdrey, H., 205
Bennett, Michael, 198 Cox, Robert, 28
Berger, Peter, 259 Craig, Gordon, 88
Bevan, Bryan, 198 Craig, Paul, 163
Biggs, Michael, 128 Creel, Herrlee, 277
Bjørnbo, Axel, 144 Cribb, Robert, 250
Blackbourn, David, 16 Curry, Anne, 198
Bloch, Marc, 75
Blunt, Anthony, 151 D’Entrevès, Alexander, 246
Bodin, Jean, 103, 118, 176 D’Ors, Alvaro, 255–56, 260
Bohanan, Donna, 119 Dalché, Patrick, 143
325
326 Name Index
Dann, Uriel, 104, 196 Ghani, Ashraf, 178

Davies, Rees, 48, 181, 211 Gibbs, G.C., 118
Day, David, 210 Giddens, Anthony, 2–3, 11, 17, 32, 52,
De Búrca, Gráinne, 163 131–33, 136
de Jouvenel, Bertrand, 257 Gilbert, Felix, 15, 52–53, 60
Debray, Régis, 265 Gill, Graeme, 252, 254
Dewald, Jonathan, 111 Gilliard, Frank, 110
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 55 Gillingham, John, 110, 198
Dobbins, James, 178 Glete, Jan, 17, 25
Domínguez, Jorge, 252 Gongora, Thierry, 222, 240
Downing, Brian, 17, 26, 52, 87, 100, 183 Gorski, Philip, viii, 19, 52, 57, 113, 134,
Drew, Nancy, 109 217, 270
Droysen, Gustav, 55 Graff, David, 289
Duby, Goerges, 109 Green, Judith, 198
Duchhardt, Heinz, 44, 158, 160 Gregory, Derek, 133
Due-Nielsen, Carsten, 1, 149 Grzymala-Busse, Anna, 249
Dufour, Frederick, 29, 41 Guerra, François-Xavier, 262
Dunbabin, Jean, 106, 169 Gustafsson, Harald, 141–42
Durkheim, Émile, 7, 17
Haldén, Peter, viii, 20, 156, 160, 165, 172,
Edgerton, Samuel, 143, 151 175, 177, 270
Egnell, Robert, 156, 172 Hale, John, 76, 151
Ehlers, Joachim, 161, 166, 168, 173 Hall, Peter, 3
Eisenstadt, S. N., 241, 246, 260 Halliday, Fred, 28–29, 234
Elden, Stuart, 133, 141 Harik, Illya, 229
Eley, Geoff, 16 Harley, John, 128, 138
Elias, Norbert, 2, 11, 16, 22, 168, 173, 175, Harvey, David, 136
226–28, 230, 233, 235–37, 241–42 Heering, H.T., 149
Elliot, John, 141, 148, 164, 175 Hegel, Georg, 16
Elman, Benhamin, 281 Heinemann, Alessandra, 250
Elshtain, Jean, 256 Hempel, Carl, 9
Ertman, Thomas, viii, 9, 17–18, 26, 44, Henneman, John, 198
54–55, 57, 66, 68–69, 82, 90, 100, 112, Herb, Michael, 232
183 Herbst, Jeffery, 5, 78, 95, 269, 272–73,
Evans, Peter, 26 287
Heydemann, Steve, 222–23, 240
Fazal, Tanisha, 94 Hinsley, F. H., 246
Fehrenbach, Elisabeth, 172–73 Hintze, Otto, 9, 15–16, 19, 25, 52–56,
Feldbæk, Ole, 1, 149 59–68, 112, 183
Fenger, Ole, 141 Hirschman, Albert, 156, 169, 172
Finer, S. E., 183 Hirst, Paul, 4, 129
Fletcher, Richard, 211 Hobbes, Thomas, 103, 176, 261, 279
Forey, Alan, 213 Hobden, Stephen, 10, 28, 271–72
Foucault, Michel, 9, 129 Hobson, John, 10, 28, 39, 271, 273–74,
Fowler, Kenneth, 198 277–78, 280, 282
France, John, 181 Hoffman, Philip, 44
Freud, Sigmund, 226 Holden, Robert, 22, 247–48, 250, 253, 264,
Friedberg, Aaron, 94 269, 276
Fukuyama, Francis, 3–4, 178, 183 Holden, Robert H., ix
Fung, Allen, 281 Holt, J. C., 198
Holt, Mack, 206
Gaddis, John, 94 Horner, Charles, 290
Gause III, Gregory, 232 Huff, Toby, 229
Gellner, Ernest, 84, 96 Hui, Victoria Tin-bor, ix, 22, 44, 78,
Genicot, Leopold, 106, 111 275–76, 278, 284, 287, 292
Name Index 327
Iggers, Georg, 15 Lorge, Peter, 291, 294

Ivereigh, Austen, 261–62 Luciani, Giacomo, 237
Luckmann, Thomas, 259
Jackson, Robert, 79, 84, 177 Lustick, Ian, 233
Janowitz, Morris, 228 Lynn, John, 116
Jansson, Per, 172
Jensen, Hans, 140 MacKinnon, Stephen, 281–82
Jessop, Bob, 6, 129 Malesevic, Sinisa, 90–91, 228, 234, 238–39
Jianxiong, Ge, 283, 293 Mallett, Michael, 116
Jiaqi, Yan, 295 Mallon, Florencia, 258
Jones, Colin, 116 Mann, Michael, 2, 9, 11, 17, 52, 121,
Jones, Eric, 120, 293 131–32, 136, 169, 183, 185
Jones, Rhys, 130 Maritain, Jacques, 257
Jung, Dietrich, ix, 21–22, 223, 231–32, Martins, Herminio, 31
240, 244, 269 Marx, Karl, 7, 9, 16–17, 30, 32, 35, 49,
274, 279
Kaeuper, Richard, 198 Massey, Doreen, 136
Kagan, Richard, 139, 144, 150–51 McAdam, Doug, 270
Kalmanowiecki, Laura, 250 McMichael, Philip, 13, 34
Kang, David, 74, 80 McNeill, William, 76
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 170 Mead, William, 145, 147
Kaspersen, Lars Bo, x Meier, Christian, 172
Kaufman, Stuart, 274, 276 Mencius, 268, 279, 285
Keen, Maurice, 191 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 136
Kelsen, Hans, 256 Merrington, John, 47
Kennedy, Paul, 80 Migdal, Joel, 79–80
Knecht, R. J., 206 Miller, Alice, 275, 280
Knight, Alan, 257 Miller, Stephen, 44
Knudsen, Johannes, 146 Mitteis, Heinrich, 48
Koenigsberger, Helmut, 111, 118 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,
Koselleck, Reinhard, 7 17, 176
Koziol, Geoffrey, 192 Moore, Robert, 106
Kradin, Nikolay, 169 Morrall, John, 85, 93
Kragh, Helge, 145 Morris, Colin, 205
Krause, Keith, 222, 235 Morse, Richard, 257
Kuhn, Philip, 281, 293 Mukerji, Chandra, 128–29, 133–34, 138,
Kula, Witold, 140 151, 153
Kuper, Adam, 154
Kurtz, Marcus, 80, 90 Nanetti, Raffaella, 238
Nettl, J. P., 163
Lachmann, Richard, 4, 10 Neugebauer, Wolfgang, 55, 62
Lapointe, Thierry, 41 Neumann, Iver, 156
Latour, Bruno, 128, 137–38, 149 Nexon, Daniel, 134, 271
Lauridsen, Peter, 146, 150 Nørlund, Niels, 144–45, 147
Lawson, George, 10 North, Douglas, 86, 120
Lefebvre, Henri, 136
Lehman, Edward, 259 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 244, 258
Leonardi, Robert, 238 Oakeshott, Michael, 246
Levis, Andrew, 197 Oestreich, Brigitta, 60
Lewis, A. W., 197 Oestreich, Gerhard, 15, 60
Lewis, Bernard, 238 Olwig, Kenneth, 130, 145
Lindo-Fuentes, Héctor, 253 Oppenheimer, Franz, 16
Little, Daniel, 274 Oresko, Robert, 118
Little, Richard, 274, 276 Orloff, Ann Shola, 8
Lockhart, Clare, 178 Ormrod, W. M., 198
328 Name Index
Osiander, Andreas, 160–62, 164, 170, 176 Ruggie, John, 28, 83

Osterhammel, Jürgen, 16 Runciman, Walter Garrison, 83
Pace, Michelle, 235 Sahlins, Peter, 104–5, 148

Papke, Gerhard, 162 Said, Edward, 7, 278
Parker, David, 44, 47 Salibi, Kamal, 240
Parker, Geoffery, 76 Sandino, Augusto, 264
Parker, Geoffrey, 76, 81, 116 Sayer, Derek, 9, 86, 257
Parrott, David, 119 Sayigh, Yezid, 231
Parry, John, 140 Schlichte, Klaus, 232, 241
Parsons, Talcott, 8 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 229
Perdue, Peter, 274, 290–91 Schlumberger, Oliver, 235
Perroy, Edouard, 110 Schmidt, Benjamin, 139, 144, 150–51
Perry, Elizabeth, 278 Schmitt, Carl, 16
Petersen, Carl, 144 Schroeder, Paul, 92
Petersen, Marie, 240 Schubert, Ernst, 172
Philpott, Daniel, 103 Schultze, Hagen, 174
Pickles, John, 135 Scott, H.M., 118
Pierson, Christopher, 6 Seeberg, Peter, 235
Pinheiro, Paulo, 249 Seward, Desmond, 198
Pizzorno, Alessandro, 93 Sewell, William, 2
Poggi, Gianfranco, 11, 17, 129, 155, 163, Sharma, Vivek Swaroop, x, 19, 21, 105–6,
175 184, 186, 195, 215, 270
Porter, Bruce, 17, 73 Shaw, Martin, 11, 162
Posen, Barry, 81 Siegelberg, Jens, 232
Potter, Mark, 44 Simmel, Georg, 17, 95
Preston, Philip, 198 Skelton, Raleigh, 135
Prestwich, Michael, 198 Skinner, Quentin, 6
Price, Joseph, 115 Skocpol, Theda, 9, 11, 17, 26, 28, 31–32,
Putnam, Robert, 238 44, 52, 56
Smail, Daniel, 140
Qixiang, Tan, 282 Smith, Anthony, 96
Smith, Peter, 257–59
Rae, Heather, 134, 259 Smith, Steve, 41
Ranke, Leopold von, 15 Soja, Edward, 130, 133
Rasler, Karen, 73 Solnick, Steven, 94
Reinhard, Wolfgang, 16 Sombart, Werner, 60
Revel, Jacques, 140 Sørensen, Axel, 141
Ricci, Matteo, 277 Sparre, Sara, 240
Ricoeur, Paul, 267 Spruyt, Hendrik, xi, 10, 19, 26, 83, 86, 93,
Riley, Dylan, 9–10, 29 133, 165, 183, 270, 272
Robertson, Graeme, 238 Stacey, Robert, 191
Robins, Philip, 240 Steinmetz, George, 2, 32–33
Robinson, James, 4 Stepan, Alfred, 238
Rodríguez, Olga, 250 Stoetzer, O., 261–62
Roeder, Philip, 94 Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, 172
Rogers, Clifford, 115, 198 Stolleis, Michael, 161, 176
Rokkan, Stein, 2, 53, 57–59, 61, 67 Stone, Lawrence, 17
Rommen, Heinrich, 261 Storrs, Christopher, 17, 26
Rosenberg, Hans, 90 Strandsbjerg, Jeppe, xi, 20, 143, 149, 270
Rosenberg, Justin, 4, 10, 28 Strayer, Joseph, 81
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 261 Strickland, Matthew, 201
Rowen, Herbert, 118
Rowlands, Guy, 117 Tallett, Frank, 195
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 26 Tarrow, Sidney, 270
Name Index 329
Taylor, Brian, 82, 96, 177, 269–70, 272 von Ranke, Leopold, 15, 55
Taylor, Charles, 246 Vu, Tuong, 269, 272, 277
Taylor, Craig, 201
Teichman, Judith, 250 Walker, Simon, 198
Teschke, Benno, xii, 10, 18, 29, 45, 47, Wallerstein, Immanuel, 28, 31, 34–35, 41,
49–50, 103, 160 84, 274
Thies, Cameron, 73, 79, 82, 183 Waltz, Kenneth, 17, 38, 268, 271, 273–74
Thompson, Grahame, 4 Watkins, Paul, 198
Thompson, William, 73 Watson, Julie, 250
Thornton, Patricia, 286 Watts, John, 165
Thucydides, 172 Weber, Eugene, 81
Tilly, Charles, 1, 11–17, 26–31, 52–53, 73, Weber, Max, 6–7, 9, 13, 15–16, 22, 30,
98, 105, 113, 131, 141–42, 154–60, 34–35, 40–41, 44, 60, 82–83, 112,
164–66, 174–76, 181–82, 185, 224–29, 130–32, 223, 225–28, 233, 239, 241,
239–42, 245–48, 269–75, 294–95 277, 283
Tjällén, Biörn, 171 Wedeen, Lisa, 239
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 280 Weffort, Francisco, 258
Tracy, James, 47 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 15, 90
Troeltsch, Ernst, 60 White, Lynn, 75
Turgeon, Nancy, 29 Wickham, Chris, 167
Turnbull, David, 147 Wilhelmsen, Frederick, 256
Wilson, Peter, 117, 161
Ullmann, Walter, 261 Wittfogel, Karl, 278
Ulsig, Erik, 141 Wohlforth, William, 274, 276
Unger, Roberto, 84 Wolf, Armin, 112
Urry, John, 133 Wolf, Eric, 47
Wong, Bin, 273, 277–78, 282, 288, 292
Vale, Juliet, 198 Wood, Charles, 198
Vale, Malcolm, 198 Wood, Ellen, 46
Verner, Dorte, 250 Wood, James, 115
Vernier, Richard, 198
von Aretin, Karl Otmar Fh., 163–64 Zacher, Mark, 94
Subject Index
absolutism, 44, 54, 61, 63, 65–66, 68, 112, Honduras, 248–49
118, 132, 147 Nicaragua, 249, 264
Act of Union, 104, 195 centralisation, 14, 20, 165
Actor-Network Theory, 138 centres of gravity, 9–10
Africa, 4, 78–79, 97, 120, 177, 269–70 Autonomous State Centre of Gravity, 9
Anglo-American sociology, 11 Culture Centre of Gravity, 9
Arab Spring, 223, 236, 239, 242 military-fiscal centre of gravity, 9, 30
sciences centre/fourth centre, 9
bandwagoning, 86 individual rights, 14
Bavaria, 113, 168 civil society, 6, 44
bellicist theory, 22, 53, 67, 73–74, 78–83, class conflict, 36, 47, 53, 55
86–90, 92, 95–96, 99–101, 105, 107, class-formation, 8
110, 112–15, 122, 244, 269, 271 collective security systems, 86
bello-centric theory of state-formation, 11, comparativism, 8
See warfare-paradigm composite monarchy, 141, 148, 198
Berlin Wall, 3–4 Congress of Vienna, 92
Bielefeld School, 15 contested relationality, 7
Bohemia, 63–65, 209, 211 cultural turn, the, 8
Borussian Historiography, 15
bourgeois class, 14 decolonisation, 4, 21
bourgeois revolution, 15 designation theory, 260, 266
Brandenburg, 27, 58, 65, 159 determinism, 8, 134, 266
Brandenburg-Prussia, 37, 54, 56, 59, 61, discursive power, 137–38
63, 65, 69 Dutch Republic, the, 27, 55, 58–59, 62, 87,
buckpassing, 86 113
Burgundy, 111, 190, 196, 204 dynastic consolidation, 100, 105, 197
dynastic marriage, 205, 212
Calvinism, 62, 66, 134 dynastic unions, 109–10
capital-labour, 35 dynastic war, 104, 195, 201
capitalised-coercion model, 27, 33, 43 dynasticism, 108–9, 202, 208, 210
capitalism, 8, 12–14, 18, 26–27, 29–30,
34–36, 39, 43, 46, 50–51 East Africa
capitalist modernity, 28, 49 South Sudan, 4
Carolingian Empire, 45, 61, 75, 106, 167 East Asia, 4, 74, 80, 287
cartographic technologies, 128, 149, 152 China, 2, 22, 78, 96, 265, 268–95
Catholic Church, 20, 99, 108, 121 Mongolia, 284, 287
Central Africa Tibet, 284, 287
Democratic Republic of Congo, 177–78 Eastern Africa
Central America Somalia, 97, 177–78, 180
Costa Rica, 22, 87, 243, 248–49, 254 Eastern Europe, 4, 55, 58, 91
El Salvador, 248 Czech Republic, the, 160
Guatemala, 248, 266 Hungary, 55, 58, 62–65, 68, 159, 171, 211
330
Subject Index 331
Poland, 55, 58–59, 62–65, 68, 90, 102, infidels, 190

112, 160, 164, 211 institutionalism, 8
Yugoslavia, 4 instrumental rationality, 13, 41
Eastern Question System, 233–35 internal balancing, 86, 88
econo-centrism, 10 internal logic, 13, 30, 51, 217
economism, 17, 46 internalism, 13, 17–18
Elbe, 107, 211 interstate system, 3, 18, 28, 30, 34, 36–39,
Enlightenment, 14 42–43, 45–46, 48, 51
epistemic discourses, 7 intervention, 6–7, 280
epistemic power, 138–39 Islamic Revolution, 232
European Economic Community, 94 Islamic State, 231
European Union, 94, 163, 294 Italian Wars, the, 192
evolutionary stagism, 13
external balancing, 86 Kurdish populations, 232–33
failed states, 6, 74, 79, 82, 96–97, 177, 184 Latin America, 4, 22, 87, 90, 243–67, 269,
female inheritance, 99, 109–11 276–77
feminism, 8 Liberalism, 26, 257, 260, 266
feudalism, 14, 36, 61, 63–64, 68, 75, 93, ecumenical liberalism, 261
121, 275 monistic, 261
fields of variation, 245, 251 limited war, 99, 121, 190, 193, 209
First Gulf War, 222, 231 lineage systems, 154–55, 166–67, 175,
fiscal-military state, 25, 39, 45 178–79
Flanders, 58 Lorraine; See Lothringen
fragmented sovereignty, 58, 158, 160, 175 Lothringen, 168
Franconia, 168 Low Countries, 57, 61, 67, 204, 208
French Revolution, 120, 164, 194, 202,
210, 216, 256, 278 Magdeburg, 65
Fronde, the, 104 Manchuria, 284, 287–88
Marx/Weber synthesis, 8, 29
Gaul, 167, 211 Marxism, 6, 26, 31
geopolitical macro-paradigm, 27, 40 Neo-Marxism, 10
globalisation, 3 Mecklenburg, 63, 65
Glorious Revolution, the, 104, 209, 278 Merovingian Empire, 106–7, 167
methodological internationalism, 39, 49
Habsburg, 54, 96, 101, 158–59, 163–64, methodological nationalism, 18, 31, 39
206, 209, 270 Middle East, 4, 21, 221–42, 269, 272
heretics, 105, 190, 205 Bahrain, 232
heuristic Eurocentrism, 229 Egypt, 221–22, 230, 235–37, 239, 272
historical semantics, 7 Iran, 221–22, 229, 231–32, 236, 238
Historical Sociology, 1–2, 8, 11, 13 Iraq, 4, 222, 231–32, 236, 239
bellicist Historical Sociology, 11 Israel, 222, 237
Comparative Historical Sociology, 13 Jordan, 237, 240
International Historical Sociology, 28 Kuwait, 231–32
Neo-Weberian Historical Sociology, 13, Oman, 232
17, 28, 31, 41 Palestine, 213, 230–31, 237
Weberian Historical Sociology, 30, 45 Qatar, 232
Holstein, 145 Syria, 213, 236–37, 239–41
Holy Roman Empire, 20, 54, 85, 155, Turkey, 221, 229, 232–33, 236, 238
158–60, 164–66, 178, 270 United Arab Emirates, 232
Hundred Years War, 197, 201 military revolution, the, 75–80, 101,
115
individualizing, 33 military-fiscal state, 17
individuation, 8 mode-of-production macro-paradigm,
industrialisation, 8, 32, 95 27, 40
332 Subject Index
modern state, the, 3, 5–6, 14, 36, 44, 83, Palestinian Liberation Organization, 230
127, 130, 132, 215–16, 226–27, Peace of Paris of 1259, 200
240–41 Peloponnesian War, 172
Modernisation Theory, 12, 14, 17–18, 31, permanent war-state, 39, 49
33, 51 phenomenology, 135–37
modes of production, 46, 136–37 political accumulation, 46–48, 50
monopoly mechanism, 227–28, 230–31, political economy, 8–9, 50, 237
235–37, 242 political expropriation, 225
multi-linearity, 13, 18, 27, 30, 32, 43 post-colonialism, 8
multiple modernities, 22, 241, 246 post-sovereignty, 3
power of authorship, 138, 152
Neo-Conservativism, 7 primogeniture, 19, 99, 107–9, 111, 119,
neo-Darwinian model, 98–99, 101–2, 121, 204
270 Protestant Reformation, 113
Neo-Hintzeanism, 10, 25–26, 53 Prussia, 55, 58–59, 68, 88–89, 101, 104,
neo-Malthusian approach, 100–1, 121, 270 113–14, 214, 277
neorealism, 27, 38, 43
nomological-deductive covering law, 8 quasi-Darwinian approach; See neo-
non-linear temporalities, 13 Darwinian model
Normandy, 169, 196–97, 199
North Africa, 4 rational choice, 8
North America realism, 21, 27, 39, 105, 181–82, 186, 193,
Canada, 212 214
Mexico, 248, 250 Realpolitik, 15
United States, 87, 94, 96, 212, 238, 253, rebels, 105, 190
260 regime shifts, 4
Northeast Asia renaissance, the, 20, 100, 113, 116, 128,
Korea, 287–88, 294 143–44, 149
Northern Europe, 55, 58 rentier state, 21, 237–38, 272
Britain, 18, 28, 37, 45, 88, 104, 119, 221, Rhine, 58, 104, 107, 214
230–31, 240, 260, 292 rise of the West, the, 120
Denmark, 62, 66, 69, 88, 144–47, Russia, 27, 58, 68, 77, 265, 291
149–50, 209
England, 12, 27, 35, 43, 45, 50, 54, 56, Safavid Empire, 229
59, 62–64, 68–69, 75–76, 87, 102–4, Salic Law, the, 109
111–14, 141, 155, 157, 165–67, 169, Saxony, 63, 65, 111, 168
173, 175, 191, 195–96, 198–200, 206, Schleswig, 145, 150
208–9, 211, 214, 277–78 Second Gulf War, 231, 233
Ireland, 101, 211–12, 214 secularisation, 8, 164
Scandinavia, 141, 211 security dilemma, 39, 90
Scotland, 104, 111, 195, 211 Seven Years War, 45
Sweden, 1, 17, 55–56, 62, 66, 69, 88, Sino-Japanese War, 280
101, 104, 112, 114, 149, 171, Six-Day War, 222
277 social wars, 105, 192, 195, 207
United Kingdom, 44, 104, 196 South America
Wales, 211–12 Argentina, 249
Northern Seven Years War, 1 Bolivia, 247–48
Brazil, 248–49
Oceania Chile, 87, 90, 243, 265
Australia, 212 Colombia, 247
New Zealand, 212 Ecuador, 247
Orientalism, 7, 278 Peru, 90, 247
Osnabrück treaty, 158 Uruguay, 243
Ottoman Empire, 122, 164, 221, 229, Venezuela, 247
234 South Asia, 287
Subject Index 333
Afghanistan, 4, 96, 177–80, 241, 272 total war, 190, 204, 214
Southeast Asia, 287 translation theory, 260, 262, 266
East Timor, 4 tri-linearity, 18, 43
Vietnam, 96, 272, 287–88, 294 Turkestan, 284
Southern Europe, 91
Andorra, 87 uni-linearity, 13, 18, 27, 32, 43
Balkans, the, 90, 233 universalising, 33
Italy, 57–58, 61–62, 67, 87, 115, 151, USSR, 4
160–61, 173, 211
Portugal, 69, 92 variation-finding, 33
San Marino, 87
Slovenia, 160 War of the French Succession, 200
Spain, 54, 61–62, 69, 77, 92, 95, 102, War of the Spanish Succession, 192
104, 111–13, 167, 206, 209, 260, 276 warfare-paradigm, 2, 11, 15
sovereign statehood, 3 Warring States era, 78, 278
standard path, 12–13, 16, 18, 30, 43, 51 wars of succession, 103, 105, 192, 195, 201
state break-ups, 4 Weber, Max, 120, 216, 223, 225–26
state consolidation, 4 West Bank, 213
state development, 4 Western Europe, 2, 68, 98, 216
state failure, 4, 241 Austria, 54, 61, 68, 159–60, 190, 204
state theory, 3 Belgium, 92
military-adaptive, 39 France, 18, 27, 37, 43–44, 54, 56, 59,
state-building, 4–5 61–62, 66, 68–69, 77, 79, 91, 99, 102–5,
state-capitalist, 35, 42 111–13, 115–16, 155, 157, 160,
state-formation theory, 3, 8, 186 165–69, 173, 191, 196–97, 199–202,
the first wave, 8 206, 209, 221, 227, 240, 276–77
the second wave, 8, 10 Germany, 16, 57, 59, 61, 65–67, 87–88,
the third wave, 8–10 99–100, 111, 159–60, 166, 168, 173,
statist, 40 199, 206, 211
statist macro-paradigm, 27 Liechtenstein, 87
structural-functionalism, 8 Netherlands, the, 54, 61–62, 66, 88, 92,
structuralism, 8–9, 11 104
Swabia, 168 Switzerland, 57–58, 61–62, 67, 87
systemic context, 84, 89 Westphalian Peace, 3, 15, 158, 160–61
World War I, 59–60, 96, 190, 221, 229, 240
tax system, 14, 149 World War II, 62, 190, 232
territory, 130–33 world-system macro-paradigm, 27
Thirty Years War, 116, 161, 207
Tilly-Thesis, 15, 18, 44–45 Yunnan, 284, 287

Does War Make States - Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology (PDFDrive)

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Does War Make States?

Arising from renewed engagement with Charles Tilly’s canonical work

Lars Bo Kaspersen trained as a sociologist and is now a professor in the

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Contributors page vii

Introduction: State Formation Theory: Status, Problems, and

Part III Omissions 125

Part IV Vistas 219

Thomas Ertman (b. 1959) is Associate Professor of Sociology and

well as a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences,

preoccupied with the concept of space in International Relations and

This volume is the result of two meetings held at Copenhagen Business

Lars Bo Kaspersen, Jeppe Strandsbjerg and

state of state theory and state-formation theory. Based on this we situate

Theorising the State

the 1990s,9 grasping an opportune liberal moment that generated

Whether in classical Weberian12 or Marxist state theory,13 attempts to

Mapping State-Formation Theories

to be examined (e.g. war, war combined with the character of local

model as deﬁned by Carl Hempel. While the third wave constitutes a

often hard to evade within the ﬁeld of state-formation research, this

Locating Charles Tilly

models and generalisations about large-scale political changes. These

autonomous case’, which failed to place ‘the experience of speciﬁc areas

particularities of primarily domestic social conﬂicts.51 It was these

 The militarist-social Darwinists (e.g. Gumplowitz, Ratzenhofer,

Structure of the Volume

Part I contains two chapters examining the logic, plausibility and

bureaucratisation of European states. On the contrary, they trace the

of democracy in many parts of the world. Here we need to include, Jung

Historical Sociology, International Relations and

intellectual thrust – the emphasis on the primacy and (partial) autonomy

Ständische Ordnung in Westeuropa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift,

interests. Tilly’s thesis is positioned in a stylised matrix of extant models

inability to conceptualise systemic change in the form of the medieval-to-

‘third wave’ in Historical Sociology19 seems to have moved beyond the

Studies Encyclopedia, vol. VI (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 3357–75; For a

the nexus between capitalism, war and state-formation methodologic-

into a stylised tri-linear schemer. The chapter concludes by arguing

Overcoming ‘Methodological Nationalism’:

autonomy of government and the impact of external forces upon every

Within this wider recasting of the ﬁeld, the methodological reﬂections

similarities or differences among those locations as consequences of

Defining Capitalism: From Marx to Weber

production for sale on the world-market in which proﬁts were made in

theorise or even acknowledge the transition from feudalism to capital-

The State and the Exteriority of the Interstate System:

administrative innovations to (4) resistance from the subject population to (5)

antecedent and more generic notion of geopolitical fragmentation, Tilly

beyond historical interrogation. In other words, the critique of ‘meth-

The Absence of a Social Theory of War

dominandi of rulers (as power-holders, rulers want to expand by deﬁn-

Two Logics of Capital and Coercion and the Reification

but one: instrumental rationality.49 Tilly assigns a transhistorical sub-

re-deploying and retroactivating them as causal categories, each

Explaining Variations: Tri-linearity and the Bracketing of

late medieval and early modern Europe, the explanation of state

Reversing the Tilly Thesis: Pre-Capitalist States Made

warfare (as noted by Skocpol and Ertman)56 exacerbated the social

The militarist-social Darwinists (e.g. Gumplowitz, Ratzenhofer,