State Formation, Theory of

In his essay of 1958, "Was There a Renaissance State?" Federico Chabod proposed that states did emerge in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but he was properly cautious in equating Renaissance states with modern states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 He considered alien to the Renaissance state such essential features of the modern state as patriotism, national identity, and boundaries. Even the term "state," or stato, did not acquire its celebrated modem impersonality-its distinctness from the person of the ruler-until the eighteenth century.2 It was nevertheless axiomatic, Chabod argued, that Renaissance balance-of-power diplomacy was predicated on the existence of states. He was familiar with Max Weber's claim that the Italian signoria "was the first political power in Western Europe which based its regime on a rational administration with (increasingly) appointed officials."3 On the basis of Weber's sociology of the bureaucratic state and the city and Otto Hintze's studies on the formation of states and the Prussian civil service, which were still in vogue at the time he composed his essay, Chabod was led to argue that the salient characteristic of the Renaissance state was a staff of trained officials with distinctive routines and

State formation in the developing world can be explained as growing centralisation and institutionalisation. To understand why some states struggle with state formation, or the processes of centralisation, the model provided by Charles Tilly, in his analysis of state formation in Western Europe, is applied to Lebanon, starting at the onset of the 1975 civil war and concluding with an analysis of the post-Syrian occupation environment. With the appropriate conditions it is possible to use Tilly’s model of war making and the state to measure state formation, or the lack thereof, in the developing world. Conclusively, in the case of Lebanon, it is evident that progress towards strong state formation has been made because of processes of war that are similar to those Tilly outlines in his historical analysis of Western Europe.

The untimely death of the Swedish historian Jan Glete has extinguished an original and penetrating intelligence. Though he was only sixty-one, he has left a formidable body of work (including twelve substantial monographs) which deserves to be better known than it is; many historians would have saved themselves time and embarrassment by reading it. The core of his interests was summed up in the title of one of his earlier books, the centenary history of the Swedish engineering concern ASEA which he published in 1987, ‘a study in the organisational, technical and economic development of a great enterprise’. He was an economic historian with a keen interest in state formation. His work was both fully informed by theoretical insights (though it was characteristic of him to have little time for the most fashionable theoreticians), and founded on extensive archival research in several countries. He read prodigiously in at least seventeen languages. Above all, he took technology seriously as a fundamental component of modern history; he did not disdain to master the details, and he did not run away from the complexity of modern states and organisations to take refuge in simple theories about simple structures. ‘Technology is part of many political, social and economic processes studied by historians and economists’, he argued, ‘and technical skills are often decisive for success and failure in human activity’. While the rest of the historical world was obsessed with the ‘military revolution’, Glete early identified navies as the most complex and technically advanced organisations in early modern Europe. ‘In an environment of fragmented and unorganised resources’, as he writes in this book, ‘a complex organisation has power far beyond the individual resources accreted to it’. Over a series of monographs, he examined the links between naval development and state formation from different perspectives, and in different countries. In most of these studies comparisons are drawn with the Swedish case, but only in this, his last book, did Glete comprehensively tackle the naval history of his own country. Swedish naval archives are rich but scattered and disorganised, and for some periods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even the outline of wars and battles (always the first interest of an older generation of historians) has not been properly defined. Shipbuilding, gun-founding, manning and victualling have never been covered on this scale. Indeed, scarcely any country's naval administration has been studied in this sophisticated manner, as the key to state formation. This is our first detailed analysis of the beginnings of what Patrick O’Brien has called the ‘fiscal-naval state’, and what he and Glete regard as the prototype of the modern industrial economy. It was characteristic of Glete that he made available to other scholars not only his analysis but the raw materials which underlay it; in this case numerous statistical tables, and a sixty-two page fleet list with details of every Swedish warship over two centuries, and the strength of the fleet for every year.

Based upon the idea that debates regarding the “public sphere” have paid insufficient attention to the notion of multiple publics and the movement of texts across state borders, this article explores how print culture provided ways of promoting transterritorial publics. It does so by revisiting the vexed notion of the “British problem” in the seventeenth century and relations between Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians, and by emphasizing the need to consider print culture in tandem with state formation. It demonstrates that a significant volume of printed material––produced both in England and Scotland, and sometimes collaboratively––reflected and promoted cross-border cooperation, thereby fostering a nascent Anglo-Scottish public. It also emphasizes that the practices involved were intimately linked to attempts to establish federal political institutions that both responded to the existence of a “British” public and necessitated its further development. Ultimately, however, the need to address and maintain such a public led to printed texts being used to navigate tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, to the point where Anglo-Scottish interests gave way to national interests, where resistance grew to the legitimacy of using print as a cross-border device, and where print helped to undermine cross-border cooperation.

This chapter examines the process of centralization and state formation in Japan during the sixth and seventh centuries, a span of time incorporating the conclusion of Japan's final archaeological era, the Kofun period (250-600 ce), and the start of Japan's first historical period, the Age of Reform (c. 552-710 ce). A number of key events accelerated the political reform process, including the adoption of Buddhism in the mid-sixth century and the related political upheaval that led to the prominence of the Soga clan; court restructuring during the reign of the monarch Suiko and the regency of Prince Shotoku. Japan's sixth-century confederacy, led by the Yamato uji (clan), extended from central Honshu to Kyushu and comprised territories dominated by aristocratic uji. The Suiko reign (592-628) became an era of great social and political development in Japan. It began during the time of the powerful Sui dynasty (581-618), the centralized Chinese state that united northern and southern China after centuries of disunion.

This chapter looks at the later Roman state (the Mediterranean world and western Europe in the period from the later third to the early fifth centuries CE) through the prism of David Graeber’s theory. In this period, tax rates increased, and the size of the imperial administration expanded substantially. It has often been thought that this strengthening of state power reduced the scope for market exchange. Yet recent archaeological evidence has decisively refuted such theories. In many regions of the Roman Empire, monetization and inter-regional exchange reached levels not seen in previous periods of ancient history. How to explain this apparent paradox? Graeber’s insistence on the link between state formation, metal currency, and the formation of impersonal markets may help to make sense of these developments. The late antique strengthening of state power did not curb the dynamism of the Mediterranean economy but promoted an extension of market logics to new fields of life. In particular, the introduction of a new “hard” gold currency, the solidus, and the imposition of a new taxation system promoted an increase in monetization and a further expansion of commodity markets.

Existing models of state formation are derived primarily from early Western European experience, and are misleading when applied to nation-states struggling to consolidate their dominion in the present period. In this volume, scholars suggest that the Western European model of armies waging war on behalf of sovereign states does not hold universally. The importance of 'irregular' armed forces - militias, guerrillas, paramilitaries, mercenaries, bandits, vigilantes, police, and so on - has been seriously neglected in the literature on this subject. The case studies in this book suggest, among other things, that the creation of the nation-state as a secure political entity rests as much on 'irregular' as regular armed forces. For most of the 'developing' world, the state's legitimacy has been difficult to achieve, constantly eroding or challenged by irregular armed forces within a country's borders. No account of modern state formation can be considered complete without attending to irregular forces.

In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation in early modern maritime Asia may compare to religions like Islam and Christianity, and deserves further study.

ABSTRACTRecent studies have challenged older views that the British state of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was rather powerless. However, such studies have focused largely on the executive, and particularly on the development of centralized revenue departments, or on the role of county elites in implementing state policies in the localities. This essay considers state formation as it was manifested at the base of the governmental system, and examines the extent of, and reasons for, support of national policies at the parish level. It argues that state power derived in part from institutional changes and innovations in procedure which made government in the localities more uniform, more professional, and more accountable; but that initiatives by parish vestries and a willingness on the part of such local elites to implement national policies also help to explain the strength of the state.

Journal Article Rethinking Middle East politics: state formation and development Get access Rethinking Middle East politics: state formation and development. By Simon Bromley. Oxford: Polity. 1994. 203pp. Index. £39.50; ISBN 0 7456 0907 4. Pb.: £11.95; ISBN 0 7456 0908 2. Fred Halliday Fred Halliday 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 70, Issue 3, July 1994, Pages 588–589, https://doi.org/10.2307/2623797 Published: 01 July 1994

In 2013 the Netherlands lost its standard bearer in international law. After a short period of illness, Pieter Hendrik Kooijmans died at the age of 79 on 13 February 2013. Some time before his illness the author had an extensive and frank interview with Judge Kooijmans who reflected on his life and work, especially on his intellectual formation, his understanding of the essence and core functions of law, his experiences as UN special rapporteur on torture, his ideas on reform of the International Court of Justice, and the great changes that have taken place in international law. This portrait shows a fine man with a strong sense of justice who was fully dedicated to the substance of public international law without turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and relative influence in international and domestic affairs. The interview is preceded by an introduction and concludes with some observations on his long and productive life in the service of peace, justice, and respect for human rights through the law.

Although ideological conflict and ideological competition are not new in international affairs, they have come to play a major role in the crisis of our times. The modern revolution in communications has made it possible for ideas to reach vast audiences with great speed; capture of the thoughts and opinions of men has become a prime objective in the struggle between power blocs. In the United States, a growing concern with the course of the ideological battle was expressed a few years ago in a widely publicized search for “the national purpose,” a quest which earlier Americans, living in a quieter world, would probably have found both unseemly and unnecessary. Much of American foreign policy since 1946 has been based upon the assumption that the ideological drives of Communism determine the world policy of the Soviet Union, though the truth of this belief has been widely debated.

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?

Recently several distinct literatures have thematically converged around the topic of non-European state-making: political scientists – both comparativists and international relations scholars, historical sociologists, comparative and world historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and others, have begun to interest themselves in state making or state formation in non-European settings, and also in state making in historical periods other that the early modern period (Vu 2010). These various literatures, as is to be expected, both exhibit important similarities and expose different disciplinary foci and obsessions. One difficult-to-exaggerate crucial similarity across these literatures is that Tilly’s quip “war made the state, and states made war” figure as an explicit or implicit interlocutory in them. While Tilly presumably would never have de-contextualised this generalization and claimed universality for it, always emphasizing context and initial conditions, the core argument of this paper is nevertheless that nomad state making in the Eurasian steppe, at least, does not follow this pattern. War-like and barbarian as they may seem in Eurocentric and Sinocentric sources and histories, not to mention popular culture, the nomads of Eurasia, I will argue, formed states mainly in order to secure trade, not to conquer and rule. The effect of this pattern of state making was an Eurasian political economy, rather than a Waltzian international system. Let me be clear at the outset; this is not a Marxist or a World System Theory, or economistic reductionist, argument. Modes of production and class conflict do not figure prominently in my argument and material explanatory factors do not weigh heavier than political factors. Instead, my argument is that nomad states took the (non-European, non-Tillean) form they took because they did not need to, and there was no strategic payoff to, develop more centralized, bureaucratic, and socially penetrating and/or responsive forms to achieve the goal of securing trade. (Less)

The close, reciprocal relationship between overseas expansion and domestic state formation in early modern Western Europe has long been understood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portugal, the Netherlands, and England used the resources arising from their Atlantic colonies and Asia trades to defend themselves against their respective Spanish and French enemies. Creating and sustaining a territorial or trading empire, therefore, enabled polities not only to survive but also to enhance their standing with-i n the hierarchy of European states. The proposition that success overseas facilitated state development at home points however to the opposite logic, that where kingdoms failed as colonial powers they might well suffer from inhibited state formation. Indeed, if the example of England demonstrated how empire augmented a kingdom's power, then the experience of its neigh-bour, Scotland, seemed to reveal one possible outcome for a country unable to access colonial expansion. In 1707 Scotland negotiated away its political sovereignty and entered into an incorporating union with England. The new British framework enabled the Scots to access English markets (both domestic and colonial) previously closed to them. This does not mean that the 1707 union was simply an exchange of Scottish sovereignty for involvement in England's economy. Pressing political concerns, not least the Hanoverian succession played an equal if not more important role in the making of the British union. The question of political causation notwithstanding, the prevailing historiography of 1707 still places Scotland in a dichotomous framework of declining continental markets on the one hand and the lure of more expansive trade with England' domestic and overseas outlets on the other.