The Long Run of European State Formation - article ; n°1 ; vol.171, pg 137-150

Charles Tilly

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Publications de l'École française de Rome - Année 1993 - Volume 171 - Numéro 1 - Pages 137-150
Instead of following a unilinear model, European states followed many different paths to the relatively uniform consolidated state that began to prevail in the 19th century. The relative concentration of coercion (as represented, e.g., by the presence of great landlords with private armies) and capital (as represented, e.g., by the importance of commercial cities) strongly affected the way rulers assembled the means for war, which in turn had powerful effects on the process and direction of state formation. A useful simplification distinguishes capital-intensive, coercion-intensive, and capitalized coercion paths toward the consolidated state.
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• Publié par: PUBLICATIONS_DE_L-ECOLE_FRANCAISE_DE_ROME0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1993
• Nombre de lectures: 77
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Charles Tilly
The Long Run of European State Formation
In: Visions sur le développement des États européens. Théories et historiographies de l'État moderne. Actes du
colloque de Rome (18-31 mars 1990). Rome : École Française de Rome, 1993. pp. 137-150. (Publications de
l'École française de Rome, 171)
Abstract
Instead of following a unilinear model, European states followed many different paths to the relatively uniform consolidated state
that began to prevail in the 19th century. The relative concentration of coercion (as represented, e.g., by the presence of great
landlords with private armies) and capital (as represented, e.g., by the importance of commercial cities) strongly affected the way
rulers assembled the means for war, which in turn had powerful effects on the process and direction of state formation. A useful
simplification distinguishes "capital-intensive", "coercion-intensive", and "capitalized coercion" paths toward the consolidated
state.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Tilly Charles. The Long Run of European State Formation. In: Visions sur le développement des États européens. Théories et
historiographies de l'État moderne. Actes du colloque de Rome (18-31 mars 1990). Rome : École Française de Rome, 1993.
pp. 137-150. (Publications de l'École française de Rome, 171)
http://www.persee.fr/web/ouvrages/home/prescript/article/efr_0000-0000_1993_act_171_1_3036CHARLES TILLY
THE LONG RUN OF EUROPEAN
STATE FORMATION *
Variations among the histories of European states are vivid, but
available representations of them are pallid. Students of state
formation have long divided among there different ways of
approaching their subject : political history portrays a series of
individual paths, one per country (e.g. Artéus & Stromberg-Back
1981, Beik 1985, Brewer 1989, Ingrao 1987, Levack 1987, Schräm
1985, Shue 1988, Skowronek 1982, Werner 1985). Political
development models typically postulate a single central of state
formation - either an ideal type or a particular case such as France
or Great Britain - and treating all others as failed approximations to
that model (e.g. Banks 1972, Grew 1978, Huntington 1968, Kuhnle
1973, Lee 1988, Lüdtke 1980, O'Donnell 1972, Strayer 1970).
Comparative politics often describes a limited number of alternative
types, each with a distinctive destination and path of change, under
the assumption that the experiences of different states clustered as a
result of shared problems and mutual influence (e.g. Anderson 1986,
Badie & Birnbaum 1979, Migdal 1988, Poggi 1978, Shennan 1974,
Zolberg 1987).
Analysts have much less often adopted a fourth approach, the
one I want to outline here. Let us call it the analysis of ordered paths .
It involves thinking of the various paths of transformation followed
by different states as defining a continuous field of possibilities, a
field itself produced by multiple combinations of the same
fundamental variables (e.g. Alapuro 1988, Anderson 1974, Bulst &
Genet 1988, Genet & Le Mené 1987, Hechter & Brustein 1980). Stein
Rokkan had some such conception in mind when he sketched out
his famous "conceptual maps" of European state formation (Rokkan
1975, Rokkan & Urwin 1982). But Rokkan's analysis made it almost
* I have adapted much of this paper from chapters 1 and 2 of my Coercion,
Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1990, Oxford, 1990. The bibliography
includes both items cited directly in the paper and publications illustrating the
alternative approaches to state formation I distinguish at the start. 138 CHARLES TILLY
impossible to take account of the cumulative effects of change over
time and extremely difficult to deal with the character and influence
of interactions among states.
Eighteen years ago, a group of us, including Stein Rokkan,
published a collective work that sought to overcome the weakness of
country-by-country political histories, unilinear political
development models, and typological treatments à la comparative
politics. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Tilly
1975) provided historically-grounded criticism of prevailing models,
and proposed accounts of different aspects of European state
formation and transformation that gave unusual emphasis to
coercion, extraction, and warfare. The analysis struck a responsive
chord among students of states, and stimulated valuable new work.
But we unwittingly committed two serious errors that no one has
yet fully corrected. The first was to assume implicitly that Europe's
genuine experiences of state formation belonged to Prussia, France,
Great Britain, and few other countries, while other national
experiences - including those of states that did not survive
independently into the twentieth century - constituted failures,
deviations, or derivative cases. The second was unthinkingly to
substitute for the old unilinear accounts a new unilinear account
that gave much more emphasis to coercion, extraction, and warfare.
My contribution to this symposium results from an effort to
correct those errors, to work toward explanations of European state
formation and transformation which account for the multiple paths
European states actually followed, and which give no more priority
to the experience of Prussia or France than to that of Genoa, Baden,
Portugal, or the Ottoman Empire. The most this brief essay can
accomplish, however, is to identify some historical facts that
standard analytic schemes explain badly, and to sketch an
alternative explanation.
It took a long time for national states - relatively centralized,
differentiated, and autonomous organizations successfully claiming
priority in the use of force within large, heterogeneous, contiguous,
and clearly-bounded territories - to dominate the European map. In
990, a thousand years ago, nothing about the world of manors, local
lords, military raiders, fortified villages, trading towns, city-states,
and monasteries foretold a consolidation into national states. Even
five hundred years later in 1490, the future remained open; despite
the frequent use of the word "kingdom", empires of one sort or
another claimed most of the European landscape, and federations
remained viable in some parts of the continent. Some time after
1490 Europeans foreclosed those alternative opportunities, and set
off decisively toward the creation of a system consisting almost
entirely of relatively autonomous national states. In our own time, THE LONG RUN OF EUROPEAN STATE FORMATION 139
furthermore, we see signs that those autonomous national states are
giving way to international blocs, treaties, markets, and networks of
capital. No teleology centered on one destination will do.
In 1490, armies consisted largely of mercenaries hired by the
campaign, clients of great lords, and citizen militias. Standing
armies had displaced urban militias in France and Burgundy, but
few other realms. Tribute and personal rents still bulked large in
royal revenues. Within the larger states, communities, gilds,
churches, and regional magnates retained large areas of immunity
and self-government. Administration chiefly concerned military,
judicial and fiscal affairs. Europe's central zone continued to teem
with tiny jurisdictions. Since city-states, leagues of cities, dynastic
empires, principalities having only nominal bonds to larger
monarchies or empires, and ecclesiastical entities such as the
Teutonic Order all coexisted (however contentiously) on the
continent, it was not clear that national states as we know them
would become Europe's dominant organizations. Not until the
nineteenth century, with Napoleon's conquests and the subsequent
unifications of Germany and Italy, would almost all of Europe
consolidate into mutually exclusive states having permanent,
professional armed forces and exercising substantial control over
people in areas of 100,000 square kilometers or more.
City system and state system spread very unevenly, and in
contrasting ways, across the European map. In the year 990, cities
were small and scattered almost everywhere north of the Alps. They nevertheless denser, and relations among them more intense,
in a band extending north from Bologna and Pisa across the Alps to
Ghent, Bruges, and London. Secondary zones of urban
concentration appeared in southern Spain and southern Italy. The
Mediterranean lands hosted significantly more cities than those
bordering the Atlantic or the Baltic. Europe's two largest cities were
then Constantinople and Cordoba, not only major centers of trade
but seats respectively of the Byzantine empire and the Umayyad
caliphate; each had a population approaching half a million
(Chandler and Fox 1974 : 11). Over the next millennium the central
band remained Europe's most intensely urban zone, but it widened,
and its center of gravity shifted northward toward the great Atlantic
ports. From 1300 onward, the band of connected cities north of the
Alps grew disproportionately.
Cities shape the destinies of sta