Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990 - 1992 Revised Edition

I first want to direct people's attention to the very thoughtful comments on John Wolfsberger's review. I'm afraid that his ridiculous 3-sentence review will have undue influence purely because it is the only negative review, and thus continues to be displayed up front as the 'most helpful' critical review by default, even though so far 0 out of 26 people have found it helpful. He clearly never got past the introduction (or possibly the title).

Tilly essentially provides us with a historical thought experiment in which he seeks to determine how much of the historical variation in the development of European states can be elucidated through an exploration of city/state interaction and the accumulation (total volume) and consolidation (distribution) of capital and the material means of violence. This might sound like a historical-materialist analysis to some, but Tilly never focuses on class conflict as a driving force of history. Again, he's simply interested in bringing out interesting relationships between capital and coercion, such as the relationship between capitalist expansion and the ability to raise capital-intensive professional armies (as only an industrialized economy can facilitate) vs. mercenary or peasant armies, setting in motion a cycle of economic and militaristic expansion that made the industrialized nation-state the dominant form of state of the modern era.

In the process, he closely examines cities as crucial hubs of the flows of capital and the consolidation of military might in the hands of a centralized state. Combining all these factors, he does an excellent job of highlighting some of the causes of the different patterns of development in the different regions of Europe - from the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, who rose and fell with the fate of militarized mercantilism in luxury goods, to the different fates of Eastern and Western Europe once a continental division of labor set it - dynastic seats of power in Eastern Europe, in which economic diversity and social pluralism were stunted by the dominance of large-scale landowners and capitalist agriculture, vs. the development of cottage industry and later factory organization in Western Europe. Pretty straightforward history, actually, and Tilly never claims to be making any startling new discoveries, so much as teasing out the full implications of such a theoretical framework. As a big-level thinker, he clearly enjoyed writing the book, which also makes it an enjoyable, if challenging read.

A good book indeed! It goes on with step by step analysis.

Pretty interesting take on state formation over 900 years in Europe. The reflections on its applications to modern day developing countries not so useful but not core to the book, a unnecessary add on I thought.

An excellent overview of how violent coercion has been part of our DNA since city and federalized states arose, and how it became infused with capitalism. If one seeks to understand things from how they really are and not how we wish them to be, a useful reminder of the history, the methods, the reasonings - and the reasons we need to evolve our thinking, organization and behavior, fast.

good book teaches you everything economically in value you need to know about these country's history. I might even buy another copy for a friend.

Great book!

In this book Tilly examines a thousand years of European history to answer the questions `what accounts for the great variation over time and space in the kinds of states that have prevailed in Europe since AD 990, and why did European states eventually converge on different variants of the national state?' (p. 5). Examining the nature of European international society at the start of the period under examination (990 AD), he identifies the existence of multiple types what might loosely be thought of as `states'. These include empires, city-states, theocracies, principalities, duchies, caliphates and khanates, but nothing akin to the national states that came to dominate the continent over the next millennia.

In examining the transition to national state dominance, Tilly highlights that war was the major driver of change. For rulers, gaining or maintaining the upper hand in war meant having to muster increasing numbers of men and material over time. In their common quest to extract these resources more efficiently, different European rulers faced different choices depending on the extent of capital (defined broadly by Tilly as `any tangible mobile resources, and enforceable claims on such resources', p. 17) within their territories. In regions where capital was scarce rulers generally resorted to coercive measures of resource extraction and created large extractive state bureaucracies. In regions where capital was abundant rulers were able to leverage this to finance warfare without needing to create large bureaucracies at all. Tilly examines in detail Russia as an example of a coercion-intensive state and Venice as an example of a capital-intensive state.

Much of Tilly's book traces the movement of states along either a coercion-intensive or a capital-intensive path to statehood, but Tilly also examines the process of `negotiation' that rulers underwent when developing extractive measures. He observes that gaining the support of a class of powerful land owners was vitally important to rulers in coercion-intensive regions, whereas gaining the support of capitalists (i.e. those in control of capital; Tilly does not use this term in a Marxist sense and his references to `capitalists' should not be confused as references to bourgeoisie) was vitally important in capital-intensive regions. Through the process of negotiation rulers often made concessions to their populations and to these classes in particular, which constrained resource extraction in important ways and which often shaped the nature of different societies within states.

Regarding the relationship between warfare and state organisation, Tilly identifies four discrete periods: patrimonialism (up to the fifteenth century), characterised by monarchs who were also generals and who extracted resources from territory they directly controlled; brokerage (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries), characterised by rulers relying heavily upon capital to pay mercenary armed forces; nationalisation (eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries), characterised by increasing absorption of militaries and the accompanying means of resource extraction into the state apparatus, leading to the expulsion of mercenaries from warfare; and specialisation (mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries), characterised by increasing regulation, bureaucratisation and institutionalisation in which national militaries were separated from other agencies such as police forces, and came to be merely one agency playing a well-defined role alongside several other government agencies that played their own well-defined roles. The relationship between coercion, capital, warfare and the state changed significantly between each epoch, creating an oscillation of advantage in waging warfare between capital-intensive and coercion-intensive states over time.

Only relatively recently, during the periods of nationalisation and specialisation, did advantage in warfare cease to oscillate between capital- and coercion-intensive states and instead go to those states that could effectively muster a mixture of both. In Tilly's view this change is the key to understanding why national states have risen to pre-eminence in the last three centuries. He examines England (and later the United Kingdom) as an example of such a state, where capital accumulated in London while at the same time a powerful landed aristocracy existed in the countryside. Resultantly, rulers had to negotiate with both capitalists and land owners but they were eventually able to exploit this situation to form a state that was much more effective at war making than either capital- or coercion-intensive states. Tilly calls this middle road the capital-coercion path to state formation.

Since the eighteenth century the national state has been so successful at war making that this form of state has progressively integrated, destroyed or converted other forms of European states to the point where it has become predominant not just in Europe but globally. This is the focus of the last few chapters of this book, which explain first how the European state system became a global state system and second why this transplantation has at best been only partly successful. At this point of the book Tilly demolishes the body of theory developed in the decades after the Second World War that posited that the path to modern statehood was linear and that the European experience could be transplanted to other regions. Instead, Tilly asserts, the European experience was far from linear, is not necessarily transferrable to other cultures, and even if it was that would not matter because contemporary circumstances are different to those that Europe experienced historically during its long and varied road to state formation.

In the last chapter Tilly hones in on the differences between the historical experience of Europe and the post-Second World War experience of the rest of the world. In particular, he concludes that the interference of external powers in the affairs of developing states ensured that those states had a different experience to Europe and that great power intervention may actually be the key factor that prevents developing states from effectively modernising. Although Tilly's core arguments about the European experience are difficult to fault, this last chapter dates the book (which was published in 1992) and is only useful for explaining the trajectory of non-European state development during the Cold War. Readers who are interested in an explanation of the experience of these states since then will need to look elsewhere.

This book also offers only a very brief explanation of the causal factor underlying state development: war. Tilly briefly explains that war resulted from rulers attempting to gain security by creating buffer zones around the core areas they controlled. If this was successful, these buffer zones naturally integrated into the core over time, creating the need for expansion into new buffer zones. Multiple rulers pursuing this logic resulted in war where the buffer zones met. Unfortunately Tilly does not further develop this explanation, nor does he offer a compelling body of evidence to support it. Those looking for answers to questions about the causes of war are therefore encouraged to look elsewhere; this book constitutes an excellent analysis not of the causes of war, but of the state formation that resulted from it. In examining the rise of the national state in Europe, Tilly's book offers a simple argument about a complicated situation. It executes this argument superbly.