State formations: global histories and cultures of statehood 9781108416535, 9781108241380, 9781108403948

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State Formations Featuring a sweeping array of essays from scholars of state formation and development, this book presents an overview of approaches to studying the history of the state. Focusing on the question of state formation, this volume takes a particular look at the beginnings, structures, and constant reforming of state power. Not only do the contributors draw upon both modernist and postmodernist theoretical perspectives, they also address the topic from a global standpoint, examining states from all areas of the world. In their diverse and thorough exploration of state building, the authors cross the theoretical, geographic, and chronological boundaries that traditionally shape this field in order to rethink the customary macro and micro approaches to the study of state building and make the case for global histories of both premodern and modern state formations. John L. Brooke is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Historical Research at The Ohio State University. He has previously explored the topic of state formation in his prize-winning books, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (1989) and Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). Julia C. Strauss is Professor of Chinese Politics at SOAS University of London. Her work on twentieth-century state building and institution building in China and Taiwan has been published widely, including Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: Statebuilding in Republican China, 1927–1940 (1998) and essays in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Asian Studies. Greg Anderson is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica (2003) and The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (forthcoming), which makes a case for an “ontological turn” in historical practice.

State Formations Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood

Edited by

JOHN L. BROOKE The Ohio State University

JULIA C. STRAUSS SOAS University of London

GREG ANDERSON The Ohio State University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108416535 doi: 10.1017/9781108241380 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Brooke, John L., 1953– editor. | Strauss, Julia C., editor. | Anderson, Greg, 1962– editor. title: State formations : global histories and cultures of statehood / edited by John L. Brooke, Ohio State University, Julia C. Strauss, soas University of London, Greg Anderson, Ohio State University. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny, usa : Cambridge University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2017045851| isbn 9781108416535 (hardback) | isbn 9781108403948 (paperback) subjects: lcsh: State, The – Philosophy. | State, The – Case studies. classification: lcc jc11 .s757 2018 | ddc 320.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045851 isbn 978-1-108-41653-5 Hardback isbn 978-1-108-40394-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the presenters, commenters, and audience participants at the Ohio State Center for Historical Research Program in State Formations: Histories and Cultures of Statehood, 2013–2015

Contents

page x

List of Figures and Maps

xi xii

List of Tables List of Contributors

xvii xxii

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Approaches to State Formations

1

John L. Brooke and Julia C. Strauss

part i definitions 1

On the Person of the State

25

Quentin Skinner

2

The State as a Social Relation

45

Bob Jessop

3

Was There Any Such Thing as a Nonmodern State?

58

Greg Anderson

part ii foundings 4

Comparative Perspectives and Early States Revisited

73

Rita P. Wright

5

(Re)Introducing the State on the Medieval Swahili Coast

90

Chapurukha M. Kusimba

6

Renaissance States of Mind

108

Michael Martoccio

vii

viii

7

8

9

Contents Bringing the Sarkā r Back In: Translating Patrimonialism and the State in Early Modern and Early Colonial India Nicholas J. Abbott Revolutionary State Formation: The Origins of the Strong American State William J. Novak and Steven Pincus The Founding of Nondemocratic States Richard Bensel

124

138 156

part iii agendas 10

Empire as State: The Roman Case

175

Clifford Ando

11

12

13

14

15

Weights and Measures and State Formation: The View from the Early American Republic Stephen Mihm Mapping Power: The Shape of the State in the Post–Civil War American South Gregory P. Downs To Bee or Not to Bee: The Coproduction of Modern Science and the Modern State John F. M. Clark Taxes and the Two Faces of the State since the Eighteenth Century Yannis D. Kotsonis Regimes and Repertoires of State Building: The Two Chinas and Regime Consolidation in the Early 1950s Julia C. Strauss

190

202

215

229

244

part iv memberships 16

17

18

The Mesopotamian Citizen Conceptualized: Affect, Speech, and Perception Seth Richardson

261

Military Mobilization and the Experience of Living with the Ming State Michael Szonyi

276

Ethnicity and Power in Early Modern Europe and Asia

290

Victor Lieberman

19

Patriliny and Modern States in the Middle East Diane E. King

305

Contents 20

Social Service, Convivialismo, and Hegemony in Colombia

ix

317

Rebecca Tally

21

Indian Affirmative Action and the Postcolonial State

331

Anupama Rao

Conclusion: Notes toward a Global Synthesis John L. Brooke and Julia C. Strauss Index

345 361

Figures and Maps

Figure 17.1 Contradictory accounts of the Suo household. Map 4.1 The ancient Indus drainage. Copyright Rita P. Wright. Map 17.1 Ming China locations mentioned in the text. Copyright Jeff Blossom.

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page 283 77 280

Tables

5.1 Summary of relationships between the East African coast, the hinterland, and the Indian Ocean, 300 bc–ad 1950 6.1 Florentine payments for Arezzo, 1384–1390 9.1 Characteristics of the foundings of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Third Reich 9.2 The constituting events in the foundings of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Third Reich

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page 97 116 164 171

Contributors

Nicholas J. Abbott, Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University, recently earned his PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and was the Dissertation Fellow at the Center for Historical Research in 2015–2016. Greg Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University. His work focuses on ancient Greece and historical thought. He is the author of The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica (2003) and The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (forthcoming), which makes a case for an “ontological turn” in historical practice. Clifford Ando is David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor and Professor of Classics, History, and Law at the University of Chicago and Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. His books include Roman Social Imaginaries: Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire (2015); Citizenship and Empire in Europe, 200–1900: The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years (2016); Religion et gouvernement dans l’Empire romain (2016); and, with Paul du Plessis and Kaius Tuori, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (2016). Richard Bensel is the Gary S. Davis Professor of Government at Cornell University. He is the author of Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (Cambridge, 2008), The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth

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List of Contributors

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Century (Cambridge, 2004), and The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, 2000). John L. Brooke is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University. He has previously explored the topic of state formation in his prize-winning books, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (1989) and Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). John F. M. Clark is Director of the Institute for Environmental History and Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. His publications include Bugs and the Victorians (2009) and Aesthetic Fatigue (2013). Gregory P. Downs is Professor at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Appomattox: Military Occupations and the Ends of War (2015), Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (2011), and a prize-winning book of short stories. With Scott Nesbit, he created the digital history site Mapping Occupation. With Kate Masur, he coordinated historians’ efforts to create the first-ever National Park Site devoted to Reconstruction, coedited The World the Civil War Made (2015), and cowrote the first-ever National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Reconstruction. Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Codirector of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre at Lancaster University, England, and a Professorial Research Fellow at Cardiff University, Wales. His most recent books are The State: Past, Present, Future (2015), Towards a Cultural Political Economy (coauthored with NgaiLing Sum, 2013), and Cultures of Finance and Crisis Dynamics (coedited with Brigitte Young and Christoph Scherrer, 2014). Diane E. King is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. She is the editor of Middle Eastern Belongings (2010) and the author of Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq (2014). She was a Senior Fellow at the OSU Center for Historical Research in 2013–2014. Yannis D. Kotsonis is Professor of European History at New York University, and the founding director of the NYU Jordan Center for the

xiv

List of Contributors

Advanced Study of Russia. His most recent book is States of Obligation: Taxation and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and the Early Soviet Republic (2014). Victor Lieberman is the Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Asian and Comparative History at the University of Michigan. His books include Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580–1760 (1984), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (1999), Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2003–2009), and Why Was Nationalism European? Ethnicity and Power in Southeast Asia and Europe c. 1400–1840 (forthcoming). Chapurukha M. Kusimba is Professor of Anthropology at the American University. He has authored or coauthored several books, including The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (1999). Michael Martoccio is a postdoctoral fellow in history at Northwestern University, where he earned a PhD in History. He was a Dissertation Fellow at the OSU Center for Historical Research in 2013–2014. Stephen Mihm is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007). William J. Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. His publications include The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (1996), The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (2003), and Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (2015). Steven Pincus is the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 2002), England’s Glorious Revolution 1688–1689 (2005), 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009), and The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (2016). Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College and Associate Director at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. She is the author of The Caste Question (2009).

List of Contributors

xv

Seth Richardson is an Assyriologist and historian who works on ancient state collapse, Old Babylonian cuneiform texts, and a range of issues in Mesopotamian economic and cultural history. He is the author of more than two dozen articles and editor/co-editor of several historical books, including Ancient States and Infrastructural Power (2017), Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World (2010), and Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem (2014. He is currently the Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London. His work has been translated into at least eighteen languages and includes The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 Vols. (Cambridge, 1978), Machiavelli (1981), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), and Visions of Politics, 2 Vols. (Cambridge, 2002). Julia C. Strauss is Professor of Chinese Politics at SOAS University of London. Her work on twentieth-century state building and institution building in China and Taiwan has been published widely, including Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: Statebuilding in Republican China, 1927–1940 (1998) and essays in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Asian Studies. Michael Szonyi is Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. His books include Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (2002), Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Frontline (2008), and A Companion to Chinese History (2017). Rebecca Tally is Assistant Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York. She was a Fellow at the OSU Center for Historical Research in 2014–2015. Rita P. Wright is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is founder and chief editor of Case Studies in Early Societies (Cambridge), editor of Gender and Archaeology, coeditor with Cathy L. Costin of Craft and Social Identity (1998), and author of Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society (Cambridge, 2010).

Preface

This volume offers an overview of approaches to the state for the new century. We are aggressively global and historical. Where typically such projects are confined to the kinds of states that are “modern,” “Western,” or both, we consider here the full range of state experience over five millennia, and in every major region of the world. This project has brought together historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists bound by a set of common interests in the state and its operations. While we are not necessarily in full agreement on every point, we are collectively committed to pursue four important lines of inquiry on the matter of the state writ large. First, while our very language makes it inevitable to speak about “the state,” the spirit of this project is to focus on “state formations.” “Formations” has many meanings: this multivalence presents a fascinating interpretive opportunity. One obvious meaning of “state formations” involves the moment of origin, the founding of states in time past. “Formations” also means the state as “an object with a particular set of forms” – in terms of functions, institutional structures and capacities, boundaries, and the ways in which the state is justified. And in addition to formations as beginnings and as forms, we are particularly interested in formation as ongoing action and processes that often lead to reformation. States have their beginnings and in those founding moments establish forms, but they also have to endure through time. This happens in a variety of ways: through the establishment of key state organizations, through incremental adaptation, and upon occasion at points of critical (dis)juncture. But other parts of this process of (re)formation might not be as obvious. The state is in a constant process of redefinition as the constant xvii

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forming and reforming of power within itself and in relation to stakeholders in society. Indeed, many would argue that the state does not exist except in the day-to-day engagement of its actors in political strategies, practices, and technologies. Second, and in departure from most previous projects, we see our mandate as global. The modern comparative analysis of the state has focused on the West, and this typically has meant the European system of states. Since the founding of the modern academy, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War, European states were almost without exception considered the nearly universal example of the state – one against which all other experiences of statehood were benchmarked. European imperialism had swept away, or appeared to have swept away, virtually all other traditions of power and governance around the world, and it left distorting effects as it retreated after the Second World War. Thus the European consolidation of sovereign national power, with various paths to something called the “modern national state” in different European contexts, became the central concern of the field. The rest of the world was, if not ignored, then either marginalized or measured against a European putative ideal. Europe’s awkward American stepchild, the United States, with its hybrid federal system and its insistence on its own exceptionalism, has generated its own entirely separate historiography, typically ignored in state formation studies. So-called underdeveloped parts of the world were characterized primarily by what they lacked in terms of European standards: impersonal bureaucracies, resource extraction capacity, and industrialization. From its origins this project has worked against the traditional grain to wrestle with the varieties of state formations around the world by including the United States as well as Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Third, this commitment by its very nature requires that we take a longer chronology. The varieties of state formation involve polities beyond Western Europe whose experiences of statehood are very different and often very ancient. Study of regions beyond Western Europe necessarily drives us into a deeper chronology, certainly to before the early modern expansion of European empire and back into medieval and ancient contexts where state formation analysis has an important literature. Our chronological expansion backward in time leads directly into a controversy that runs through this book. Is the state in its essence “modern”? Was there no such a thing as the premodern state? Some of our number argue as much; others take issue with this sweeping pronouncement. Clearly, a commonsense understanding would be that social formations

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of some definition have for thousands of years claimed coercive authority and binding rulemaking over peoples within more or less bounded territories; whether these entities should be defined as states may be up for grabs. Finally, the combination of a long chronological reach and the conceptual struggle over the essential “modernity” of the state means that we necessarily are engaging with what has come to be a central debate in the recent literature on the state: the question of its sociological boundaries. Was and is the state an “autonomous” actor, separate and distinct from the society that it claims to govern, or is it somehow inextricably “embedded” in that society? While some chapters in this volume argue that the state is inherently “autonomous,” none of them takes the reverse position that the state is merely a puppet of class interest. Most of our contributors engage to some extent with the notion that the state has some degree of autonomy from society while simultaneously being interpenetrated with society in complex and subtle ways. Since we consider the premodern and modern variants of the state, this volume works to suggest the different ways in which both premodern and modern polities are embedded in their societies, and to argue that the analysis of this embeddedness creates a common field of debate. We also explore the question of hybrid approaches that take seriously both the autonomy and the embeddedness of the state. Thus we propose a broad agenda. We are looking at state formations through global time and space; we are deeply involved in the contemporary debate over the relationship of state and society. These considerations inform this collective examination of state formations through time. If our examination is collective, our contributions are plural: we come at the problem of the state project from competing theoretical perspectives, and we are concerned with four different dimensions of that project: definitions, foundings, agendas, and memberships. First, what is the essential form of the state? Is it a freestanding and autonomous entity, or is it simply a manifestation of the power dynamics operating in a given society? Or is the state real, but manifested only in the actions of authorized state actors? And, critically important, did the state exist in the ancient and medieval past, or was it coproduced with modernity? These questions are introduced in our opening section of chapters, “Definitions.” Second, how are states founded? Here, the chapters in “Foundings” confront the problem of state formations as state beginnings in the ancient past, in early modernity, and in the twentieth century. How and under

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what terms do configurations of state power emerge at given moments, successfully asserting claims to authority and legitimacy of people and territory? Third, we are interested in what states do with those claims, and how they go about it; this is the fundamental question of our section on “Agendas.” Diverse literatures have long explored the problem of state capacities, and much of this work has revolved around the ability of states to raise money and assemble force to achieve goals. Our approach has been to focus on the strategies and technologies that shape these state capacities, and the practices that states and state actors use to achieve the goals – limited and extensive – that they set in motion. Finally, we are interested in people, the “Memberships” of states and societies. Subjects and citizens participate in the state in a variety of ways, and we are interested in the subtle tensions and effects that this participation entails. Most basically this involves the quality of that membership – what in the modern context we assume is equal citizenship. But we are also concerned with the ways in which the assertion of state agendas inflects and refracts the personal and collective life of a state’s peoples. Taken together, these perspectives open up critical perspectives on the contemporary approaches to states and state formations. Importantly, this volume works to put contested literatures in conversation. By transcending geographic, chronological, and theoretical boundaries, we hope that this effort will spark new conversations and lead to new approaches to the historical analysis of state power. The chapters in this volume were presented in a two-year program at the Ohio State University on “state formations” and then at a tumultuous workshop in Columbus in September 2015. As we met that weekend, questions about the shape and future of the state in human affairs were on everyone’s minds. It was obvious from simply looking at the day’s headlines that in many places the state was under siege, but contrary to the triumphalist liberal predictions at the end of the Cold War some twenty years ago, the state was doing anything but fading away. Indeed, it was quite unclear what the eventual shape of the state would prove to be. In short, what was happening around us even as we met – as events have unfolded since – made clear that states are constantly forming and reforming, and that a set of political arrangements made by the state to resolve one crisis may be utterly incapable of handling other, unanticipated crises. As we looked out on the world that weekend, a clear consensus developed in the room. “The state” is never a finished project, but goes through

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periods of profound crisis and reformation. Rather than “withering away,” as predicted after the events of 1989, the state is all the more critical in the early twenty-first century. And certainties about its structure, function, and history that seemed so clear seven decades ago at the end of World War II have faded.

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Acknowledgments

This volume is the culmination of a program of seminars put on by the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research between the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2015, ending in a two-day workshop in Columbus in September 2015. Greg Anderson began the planning for this program in the winter of 2012, writing the initial proposal and working with the CHR steering committee to shape the seminar series. We thank Leo Coleman, David Hoffman, Eric MacGilvray, Chris Otter, Kristina Sessa, and Ying Zhang for their unfailing effort on the committee and during the seminar series. John Brooke and Greg Anderson managed the program from the first invitations in the summer of 2012 through to the September 2015 workshop. The CHR State Formation program hosted five fellows, John Clark, Diane King, Michael Martoccio, Julia Strauss, and Rebecca Tally, all of whom have contributed chapters to this volume; Nick Abbott was recruited to submit his chapter during his fellowship year with the succeeding CHR Program on Kinship and Family in Historical Time. Among the faculty and graduate students who were able to attend the September 2015 workshop, we remember the late Drew Cayton, and we thank John Brown, Abigail Buffington, Svienn Johannson, Timothy Leech, Morgan Liu, Joy McCorriston, and Joshua Wood. Although they were unable to participate in this volume, we thank Mark Bevir, Annabel Brett, Gary Gerstle, Timothy Mitchell, Josiah Ober, and R. Bin Wong – who presented papers during the seminar series – for their contribution to our collective conversation. Gary Gerstle was a welcome presence at the workshop. In addition, we want to thank the following faculty in History, Anthropology, Political Science, Comparative Studies, and Geography for their insightful comments on papers during the 2013–2015 seminar series: Alice Conklin, Theodora Dragostinova, Julie Field, David Hoffman, Anthony Kaldellis, Diane xxii

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King, Morgan Liu, Eric MacGilvray, Dodie McDow, Benjamin McKean, Chris Otter, Chris Reed, Mytheli Sreenivas, Inés Valdez, and Joel Wainwright. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Ohio State College of Arts and Humanities, the Department of History, and an anonymous donor for their collective monetary support for the Center, and for the State Formations program. Peter Hahn, both as chair and as dean, and Nathan Rosenstein as chair, have been unstinting in their support. Zeb Larson provided critical editorial support at a key moment. We also want to thank Chris Adams, Chris Burton, and Steve McCann for their unfailing professionalism in running the logistics for the series and the workshop. Kristina Deutsch and Mathivathini Mareesan in editorial and production at Cambridge helped us bring this book into material form with great efficiency and good cheer. Finally, we want to thank our heroic editor, Deborah Gershenowitz, for her great wisdom in seeing the virtues of our project, and unfailing skill in seeing us through to this volume.

Introduction Approaches to State Formations John L. Brooke and Julia C. Strauss

Ours is a large topic, with its two cross-cutting questions – state formations in time and space, the boundary between state and society – and four problematics – definitions, foundings, agendas, and memberships. Our opening and closing chapters pursue two agendas, one framed by theory, the other by history. Here in our introduction we provide a very brief, simple sketch of the broad streams of theoretical commitment on the state, and particularly on the question of its relative autonomous demarcation from society. We then review the chapters in this volume with an eye toward their position on the issue of state autonomy or embeddedness, and propose ways in which they might contribute to a hybrid approach. Our conclusion returns to these theoretical problems, but puts them in motion in time and space, attempting a sketch of a synthesis of the shifting character of state formations from the Bronze Age to modernity.

§ § § § § A volume considering the state in history must necessarily address basic questions about the very nature of the entity. What exactly is a state? Where does it begin and end? What is its relationship to the society it claims to rule? How should it be defined and circumscribed as an object of analysis? These are central questions for an account of state formations, whether in the distant past or in the modern world. Here we lay out a brief genealogy of thinking about the state from its late nineteenth-century beginnings to contemporary debates. We see broadly two competing lineages initially framed by Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci, focusing respectively on a macro approach to institutions and capacities and a micro approach to cultures and practices. 1

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John L. Brooke and Julia C. Strauss

A word of caution is required here. While there is clearly a continuous Weberian tradition focusing on the bounded autonomy of the state, the countervailing approaches that posit the state as fundamentally embedded in cultures and societies have segmented into competing perspectives that cannot described as a whole as “Gramscian”: even the catch-all term of “culturalist” that we use here is probably inadequate. If these competing orientations are often seen as contradictory and mutually exclusive, they are certainly potentially complementary; we will be looking for suggestions of a fruitful integration of macro and micro, of institutions and practices. And it is striking that political scientists, historians, and archaeologists, working in layers of modern and premodern time, have recently begun to converge around common conversations deriving from Weber and the various culturalist approaches to the state.

§

§

§

§

§

Theoretically informed approaches to the longer history of the state run back ultimately to Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes and their visions of the secular prince and the leviathan state standing above mere society. We begin, however, with the classical sociology of the late nineteenth century. Marx would eventually be important, but because his thoughts on the state were scattered, and seemingly shaped by an assumption that the state was little more than a mechanism of class rule, his influence would await later development. So the field was really left to Max Weber, whose influence has been pervasive and enduring. Building on the evolutionary stage theories so central in the thinking of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, G. W. F. Hegel, and Auguste Comte, Weber separated pre-state from state, and laid out three types of routine state authority, in two flavors. Pre-state societies were governed by the gerontocratic or patriarchal authority of either councils of elders or chiefs. When the household and lineage authorities of “patriarchal” chiefs were expanded by administrative followers, their domains – on the way to statehood – became patrimonial: kings were divinely anointed patriarchs to entire societies. Pre-state gerontocracy and patriarchy and state patrimonialism were all grounded in “traditional authority,” though monarchy would require a considerable degree of Weber’s “charismatic authority” to maintain its grip on sovereignty. Patrimonial monarchs gradually expanded their household staffs into increasingly autonomous bureaucracies, eventually moving the state to a new “legal-rational authority.”

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As a good subject of the Prussian Kaiser, Weber did not have much to say about the end of monarchy in political revolutions. But his modes of authority – traditional (exercised in patrimonialism), legal-rational (expressed above all by routinized, specialist bureaucratic structures), and charismatic (most frequently expressed by the founders of great religions) – have had a long and enduring reach. Weber’s typologies are ideal types and are therefore quite static, and he never explicitly proposed how pre-state societies transitioned to patrimonial states, how patrimonial states transformed into bureaucratic ones, or how charisma fades or continues to animate either traditional or legal-rational authority. These questions are the history of the state writ large.1 Approaches to the state in history running back to the beginning of the twentieth century began with the assumption that the state was a real and autonomous entity. Taking their cues from Weber and the imperatives of nation building in the era of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Germany, scholars of the state through World War II felt no need to justify and refine their assumptions about the state: it was simply self-evident that the state existed.2 As World War II ended and the Cold War settled in, American political scientists backed away from the concept of “the state” since it was indelibly linked with Soviet and Nazi “totalitarianism.” For two decades, liberal pluralists, notably David Easton, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond, focused on process and culture as self-regulating systems rather than structures and institutions of enduring states. In this view, there was no real state, only a “system” in which social groups competed on increasingly equal grounds for the advancement of their interests.3 By the early 1970s, the obvious role of the state in foreign war and domestic turmoil had reawakened interest in its workings and nature, launching a rediscovery of the classical political sociology of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, and Weber. This renewed interest was manifested first – paradoxically – in Samuel Huntington’s conservative Political Order and 1

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Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1947), 324–386; Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14–52; Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity, Stephen Kalberg, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State: Origins, Structure and Significance, Keith Tribe, trans. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). David Ciepley, “Why the State Was Dropped in the First Place: A Prequel to Skocpol’s Bringing the State Back In,” Critical Review 14 (2000), 157–213, esp. 159–167. Ciepley, “Why the State Was Dropped in the First Place,” 167–201; Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991), 77–96.

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Changing Societies (1968), and Perry Anderson’s Marxist Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974).4 A distinct “fiscal-military” school developed around the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, examining the rise of the state in early modern and modern Europe in terms of military power and state capacity.5 They were closely allied with a rising and influential neo-autonomist school, which published manifestos for the study of the state as a bounded, autonomous entity in the early 1980s, particularly Theda Skocpol’s States and Revolutions (1979), which offered a structural analysis of social revolutions in agrarian empires. This seminal book was followed by a collection coedited by Skocpol with Peter Evans and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Bringing the State Back In (1985), which stands as the pivotal manifesto for the neo-Weberian state autonomy school.6 The leading exemplars of this understanding, by Skocpol, Hendrik Spruyt, Rueschemeyer, Tilly, and Mann, with a later generation of scholarship best exemplified by Thomas Ertman, Philip Gorski, and Julia Adams, have tilted heavily toward European and American contexts. Within these European limits, Thomas Ertman’s The Birth of the Leviathan has provided the comprehensive Weberian interpretation of the emergence of rational-bureaucratic governance out of traditional patrimonialism. Ertman surveys the entire continent from the collapse of Rome to the eve of the eighteenth century, mapping European state formation in terms of a matrix of patrimonial and bureaucratic infrastructure and absolutist and representative regimes. While Philip Gorski offers a challenge to Ertman in arguing (with another side of Weber) that Calvinism was critically important for an effective bureaucratic revolution in Europe, Julia Adams’s subtle account of the role of powerful merchant families in 4

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Samuel Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974). Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” Archives européennes de sociologie 25 (1984), 185–213, republished in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 109–136. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 Vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986–2012); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Democracy, Revolution, and History, Theda Skocpol, ed., with the assistance of George Ross, Tony Smith, and Judith Eisenberg Vichniac (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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the coalescence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands extends and deepens Ertman’s analysis of the grip of patrimonial governance in early modern Europe.7 The presumption of state autonomy, however, was quickly challenged by a countervailing notion of state embeddedness. Where the autonomous state derives from Weber, the embedded state derives ultimately from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, brushed by an early encounter with the liberal systems theorists, and then reformulated in the wider “cultural turn” into distinct, if related understandings. Broadly speaking, the culturalists argue that state power is deeply embedded in and enacted through social networks and cultural constructions, to the point that its hard objective, “autonomous” existence is a mirage.8 Writing from Italian prisons in the 1930s, Gramsci argued that hegemonic culture shaped by class actors in civil society was a critical dimension in any “state formation.” European and American Marxists had been cutting their ties with Soviet orthodoxy since 1956, and by the late 1960s a series of lines of inquiry had opened up, all in some way connected to Gramsci. Throughout the 1960s, E. P. Thompson, in his work on class, power, and culture in early modern and early industrial England, was a formative figure in the Gramscian revival; he with anthropologist James C. Scott stressed “subaltern” resistance to hegemonic culture.9 Gramsci stood at the center of the debate on state autonomy between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband that dominated British Marxist circles for a decade after 1968. Both argued that in key respects the state was 7

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Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). For an important review, see George Steinmetz, “Introduction: Culture and the State,” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, George Steinmetz, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–49. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964); and Thompson’s essays republished in Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

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unreal, a phantasm. Against Miliband’s relatively orthodox understanding that the liberal state was directly controlled by capital, Poulantzas argued that the state was not so much a free-standing entity as a complex “relationship of forces” in a wider society, and as such was a highly volatile, contested arena.10 Poulantzas’s framework has been carried forward in the wider work by Bob Jessop on the “strategic relational approach,” and has been influential in the wider cultural approach to the state.11 So too has been a seminal commentary on the Poulantzas-Miliband debate by Philip Abrams, written in 1977 and published posthumously in 1988. Abrams suggested that there is a “state-system” of discrete institutions and practices, and a “state-idea” of ideals and myths: the dynamics between these domains, rather than simply “the state” as an isolated agent, should be the center of analysis.12 Michel Foucault had already launched his powerfully influential reversal of Gramscian Marxism. Rather than focusing on a bourgeoisie consciously crafting hegemony in civil society as a cultural bulwark to the control of the levers of state power, Foucault focused on the ways in which the institutions of the state itself acted to reshape society, to discipline the individual.13 At the same time, in lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979 but published in English only in the past decade, Foucault outlined a wider analysis of the history of the state. In his early lectures looking at the patrimonial premodern state, 10

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Clyde W. Barrow, “The Miliband-Poulantzas Debate: An Intellectual History,” in Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, eds., Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3–52; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (Houndmills: McMillan, 1985), 53–83; Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 319–364. See Jessop, Chapter 2, this volume, and Jessop, The State: Past, Present, and Future (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). In addition to the Gramscian-Poulantzas analysis, Jessop’s analysis has been shaped by Abrams, Foucault, Mitchell, and Bourdieu, discussed briefly in what follows. Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 59–89. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans. (1961; New York: Random House, 1965); Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (1975; New York: Vintage, 1979). There are a few voices suggesting that the distance between Foucault and Gramsci might not be all that great: David Kreps, “Introduction,” in Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 1–9; Asli Daldal, “Power and Ideology in Michel Foucault and Antonia Gramsci: A Comparative Analysis,” Review of History and Political Science 2 (2014), 149–167; Michael Burawoy, “Cultural Domination: Gramsci Meets Bourdieu” (2011), http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Bourdieu/Lecture%202.pdf.

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Foucault discussed the nobility’s claims of history against royal bureaucracy, and he embedded sovereignty in the sacred homology of royal body and body politic.14 Examining the ways in which the modern state has taken up the “biopolitics” of population management, Foucault argues that the modern state was similarly embedded in the cultures and institutions of “governmentality.” Articulated in a web of forms of knowledge power, including modern science, of institutional penetration, including schools, hospitals, prisons and modern militaries, and new purposes of power, and of the enhancement of population health and well-being, governmentality both extends and entangles the state in a wider network of power and institutions, enmeshing state citizens in this web of power relations.15 Foucault’s understandings, with Gramsci as a background echo, had a formative, shaping role on key studies published in the 1980s and 1990s, most importantly Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (1985), Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (1988), and George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social (1993), positing, respectively, English state formation as a cultural revolution, British occupation of Egypt as grounded in an earlier bilateral cultural colonization, and German local regulation variably shaping the rise of the welfare state. Gramsci, Scott, and Corrigan and Sayer’s Great Arch all shaped the noted 1994 collection of essays on Latin America, Everyday Forms of State Formation, in which Gil Joseph and Daniel Nugent argue for a complex interaction of state institutions and popular culture in a process of “negotiation of rule.”16 At the same time, Timothy Mitchell reformulated Abrams’s paradox into

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Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 115–138, 217–218. For useful overviews, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104; and Stephen W. Sawyer, “Foucault and the State,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 36 (2015), 136–164. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Michel Senellart, ed., Graham Burchell, trans. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Michel Senellart, ed., Graham Burchell, trans. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

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what he calls the “state effect” – the agency of state actors and practices spread far into the fabric of society and economy in a reciprocal interpenetration, to the point that “the state” has no clear boundaries, but is manifested as an effect of this interaction.17 James C. Scott in 1998 reversed his field of vision from subaltern peoples to state actors, arguing that states seek to make their worlds “legible,” engaging in “high modern projects” that sweep aside local complexity.18 Gramsci’s hegemony, Jessop’s strategic relations, Foucault’s governmentality, Mitchell’s state effect, Scott’s all-seeing state: these comprise competing approaches that shape the contemporary cultural analyses of state formations. To these we should add Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere” and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” – models of the configurations of print culture and associational life that shape citizens’ relationships with state and nation.19 Habermas and Anderson are similarly indebted to an early encounter with Gramsci, before that to the Frankfurt School, and back distantly to the competing influences of Marx and Hegel. Thus the intellectual history of the state over the past century has moved from Weberian origins through a postwar pluralist systematics to the modern debate, which is shaped by two broad schools of thinking, stressing the autonomy of the state from society and the embeddedness of the state in and through society. Inevitably there are voices and influences that blur these boundaries. Most importantly, Pierre Bourdieu, who succeeded Foucault as the leading voice in French sociology, made what might be called a move from culture to the state. Famous in symbolic anthropology for his structural analysis of the Berber house and more widely for his analysis of the “field of cultural production,”20 Bourdieu constructed a sociology that posits that social formations are defined by 17

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Mitchell, “The Limits of the State”; Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture, 76–97; Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For an extended discussion, see Chapter 3 in this volume. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society; translated by Thomas Burger in association with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Forms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, William Rehg, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). Pierre Bourdieu, “The Berber House, or the World Reversed,” Social Science Information 9 (1970), 151–170; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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discrete fields of action governed by field-specific “habitus” and “doxa”: an individual’s socialized practice and behavior and the wider culture’s rules for a given social field.21 In the late 1980s, he turned his field theory to the problem of the state, developing a history of the state in a series of recently published lectures, revisiting and revising Weber in an account of the evolution from the familial politics of the monarch to the bureaucratic politics of the modern state. While critiquing Weber in arguing that the state wielded a monopoly of symbolic as well as physical violence, Bourdieu nonetheless is self-consciously Weberian in his analysis of the autonomy of the state as a social field, with its own rules and practices.22 While Weberians have embraced Bourdieu’s field theory of the state, it has been attacked as “insipid Whiggery,” reviving Emile Durkheim’s search for stability and glossing over the reality that modern states are typically forged in revolution “with iron and fire wielded by real human beings.”23 And even more broadly, one of our contributors, William Novak, has issued a call for state histories that go “beyond Max Weber,” and beyond a theory of the bureaucratic state rooted in monarchist, aristocratic Prussia, to rethink democracy: “to finally re-center a more democratic understanding of the nature and extent (for good and ill) of modern state power.”24

§ § § § § At the other end of the longer history of thinking on the state, the comparative analysis of the premodern state lies within the domain of anthropological archaeologists who, from somewhat different starting points, have developed a debate that mirrors that on the modern state. Where the history of the modern state began with Weber, archaeologists began with Marx, and consequently they avoided the state until comparatively recently. Here the founding thinker was V. Gordon Childe, who forced analytical rigor on the typological studies of artifacts that 21

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Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72–95, 159–197. Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992 Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau, and Marie-Christine Rivière, eds., David Fernbach, trans. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014); Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12 (1994), 1–18. Dylan Riley, “The New Durkheim: Bourdieu and the State,” Critical Historical Studies 2 (2015), 261–279, quotes at 277, 279. William J. Novak, “Beyond Max Weber: The Need for a Democratic (not Aristocratic) Theory of the Modern State,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 36 (2015), 43–91, quote from 83.

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dominated archaeology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Childe focused archaeological analysis on questions of technology and modes of production; by the 1940s and 1950s – systematized by Julian Steward as “cultural ecology” – his thinking shaped what was known as “processual archaeology.” Reacting against the ahistorical structural-functional school of anthropology, the processualists were “neo-evolutionary” – sketching human history over the long term in relation to the natural environment – they were nonetheless suspicious of the contingency and necessarily tight chronology of an archaeology of the state.25 Over the past thirty years, processualism has shifted – and been challenged – creating an alignment of debate analogous to that over the modern state. The shift among processualists was to incorporate Weberian problematics much more explicitly, in a new focus on authority, power, and capacity that puts work by archaeologists Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus, Bruce Trigger, and Timothy Earle in conversation with state autonomists like Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.26 Challenges come from two directions. Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher reject the limits of neo-evolutionary thinking, and are essentially neo-Weberian; their 2008 Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-modern States in particular establishes a rigorously empirical comparative global map of Weberian problems of state capacity, bureaucratization, and accountability that reaches back to antiquity. A more absolute challenge has come from the self-described post-processualists, participating in the wider cultural turn, developing new approaches of archaeological interpretation that are explicitly concerned with the problem of states and state formations. Norman Yoffee, in Myths of the Archaic State, extends James Scott’s account of the “high modern project” to the efforts of ancient state authorities to impose “legibility”; Seth Richardson argues provocatively that these were efforts to create the image of sovereign authority where its reality was sorely lacking.27 Bruce Routledge engages directly 25

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Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edn. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Adam T. Smith, “Archaeologies of Sovereignty,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011), 415–432, esp. 417–419. Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-modern States (New York: Springer, 2008). Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Seth Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State,” Past & Present 215 (2012), 3–49.

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with Gramscian and Foucauldian understandings to explain state formation in Iron Age Moab: his Archaeology and State Theory and Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape provide important overarching statements of the cultural turn in the archaeological study of state formation.28 Thus the study of states and state formations across time stands at a particularly auspicious juncture. After decades of talking past each other, theorists of state formation, archaeologists, and historians are speaking the same language, if perhaps in two dialects. They are engaged in a common conversation, a conversation that both spans the premodern/ modern divide over the past five millennia and is increasingly global. To summarize boldly, this conversation is predominantly focused on capacity and boundaries: what do states have the resources to accomplish, and where do they start and stop? The Weberian project is particularly concerned with state capacities – the degree to which the state is able to fund and organize the defense and advancement of a population and a territory. The neo-Weberians, in reacting to the liberal pluralists, have also been concerned about boundaries, less the obviously physical boundaries of the state, and more so the question of the autonomy of state institutions from social and economic spheres. The various culturalist approaches to the state have pushed back on the question of state boundaries, stressing the embeddedness of the state in society, whether in the enchanted homologies of a premodern state or the disenchanted interpenetration of society and the modern state. More importantly, the culturalist framework splinters a monolithic autonomous state into complex relations, effects, practices: Thomas Lemke’s summary is apt: “practices instead of object, strategies instead of function, and technologies instead of institution.”29 Is there room for a hybrid accommodation of Weberian and culturalist priorities? However heretical this might seem, this hybridity certainly is within the realm of the possible. Patrick Carroll, writing about the autonomous/military-fiscal schools and Foucauldian governmentality studies, suggests that “emergent macro power[,]. . . while emerging from micro disciplinary practices [,] cannot be reduced to them.” Elaborating, he suggests that “we can develop a distinctively cultural analysis of state

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Bruce Routledge, Archaeology and State Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Thomas Lemke, “An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory,” Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory 8 (2007), 43–64, quote at 58.

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formation while revealing empirically the complex networks, practices, and materialities through which and out of which states are built and sustained.”30 Whether such a hybrid approach is possible is very much up in the air; perhaps this volume will contribute in some measure to this conversation.

§

§

§

§

§

definitions, foundings, agendas, and memberships With these larger analytical questions in mind, we have organized our chapters around four distinct, yet interrelated themes: 1) definitions, 2) foundings, 3) agendas, and 4) memberships. Each of these sections addresses critical dimensions of state formation(s), and each is organized to span the premodern-modern divide. Although our chapters are shaped by both Weberian and culturalist frameworks, they also work toward theoretical hybridity that encompasses both state theory and cultural analysis. Our authors for the most part implicitly assume that states do have societal and geographic borders, and that they need to build capacity to define these borders. But they also focus on defining strategies, practices, and technologies in state formation(s), and consider notions of reciprocal claims – claims of states on citizen, but also claims of citizens on the state. Boundaries are established, capacities are generated, and claims are asserted in foundings, expanded in agendas, and negotiated in memberships. The three chapters in our opening section, Definitions, establish two crosscutting, classic lines of tension in thinking about the state: 1) between priorities of state autonomy and state embeddedness and 2) between the modern state and its precursors. Quentin Skinner, a founding member of what has been called the Cambridge School in intellectual history, offers a strong statement for the Hobbesian model of the strong and autonomous state. Challenging both Foucault’s fluid account of “governmentality” and the neoliberal argument that the state should fade away in the face of global institutions, Skinner presents the case for the enduring utility, indeed necessity, of the state in our collective lives. Bob Jessop presents a succinct statement of his version of the Gramscian inheritance. State power, in his account, resides in the dynamic relationship between an “asymmetrical institutional terrain” and the strategies state actors

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Carroll, “Articulating Theories,” 571–572. See also Tuong Vu, “Studying the State through State Formation,” World Politics 62 (2010), 148–175, esp. 166–170.

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develop to pursue goals and agendas, strategies that include the construction of stabilizing, hegemonic imaginaries. And the modern state is capitalist – if its actors pursue strategies to advance the interests of capital. Greg Anderson, drawing on both Skinner and Jessop, takes us into a reflection on Timothy Mitchell’s notion of the state effect as it bears on the premodern-modern divide. Anderson links the post-Hobbesian disembodiment of the state, the separation of rule from the mind and body of a king, to the materialist markers of capitalist society. This “peculiarly disenchanted, functionally compartmentalized, metaphysical environment” is the essential condition in which Timothy Mitchell’s modern state effect can function. The enchanted pre-secular world of premodernity had an essential unity of experience – in which there could be no “state.” Thus our opening section takes some strong positions in the modernity of the state, while it remains deeply conflicted on the questions of state boundaries and autonomy. Our six chapters that examine the Foundings of states share common broadly Weberian assumptions. Rita Wright, reviewing the archaeology of the Harappan cities of the Indus Valley, takes on two of the legends in the field: V. Gordon Childe and Karl Wittfogel, who both emphasized technology as a driver of early state formation. Her field evidence demonstrates the construction of very different systems of irrigation in the Harappan cities and towns, as well as different patterns of craft production, suggesting that there was nothing like a clear superordinate early “hydraulic” state, as Wittfogel argued in Oriental Despotism. Rather she suggests that the evidence fits Richard Blanton’s proposal that “exclusionary” hierarchical states – essentially early patrimonial monarchies – emerged sporadically and intermittently, in a wider environment of corporate government by local councils, an ancient and pervasive form of village governance, Weber’s “gerontocracies,” that comprised the foundational political experience for millennia. Chapurukha Kusimba gives us another view into the materialities of the patrimonial state, here among the so-called secondary states of the medieval Swahili coast from roughly 1200 to 1550. Kusimba’s analysis of the archaeology of these East African city-states, focusing on the role of trade, wealth stratification, and theological power, offers a window onto premodern African state formations, but also onto a wider pattern of state formation that seems to have prevailed around the Indian Ocean circuit, as far as Southeast Asia – and beyond.

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Kusimba’s analysis hinges on the multiplicity of roles – as traders, producers, and rulers – that formed the grounding of authority for the patrimonial oligarchies on the Swahili coast. In broad brush, this is a similar story to that Michael Martoccio tells about one event in the founding of a Renaissance Italian state, the Florentine acquisition of the city of Arezzo in 1384. Martoccio’s Florentine patrimonial oligarchs are embedded in an array of multiple, relational identities and overlapping state discourses, central among them a self-conscious claim to the specific legacy of Roman precedent. Challenging Charles Tilly’s model of the role of warfare pure and simple in Renaissance state making, he also offers a closing suggestion, reminiscent of Richardson’s arguments about the “presumptive state,” that the autonomous state Machiavelli and Hobbes described was wishful thinking in the face of the composite state structure and experience of Renaissance Italy. Our next two chapters take us to state formation in the British imperial world. Nicholas Abbott dissects the meaning of the Persian sarkā r – along the dissolving boundary between the Mughal state of Awadh and the British East India Company – raising interesting questions about the hybridity involved in the founding of empires. Sarkā r embedded the bureaucratic state deep in the Mughal patrimonial household: the polities’ prime function was the financial support of the interlocking households of the ruling family. British East India Company officials intervened as Weberian bureaucrats to separate private costs from public funds, but inevitably the connotations and structures of patrimonial sarkā r were woven into the British Raj. Steven Pincus and William Novak pick up a classic founding problem at the far shores of the British empire, in the American Revolution. Here they reject recent wisdom that this was a revolution against the state: they argue that the Declaration of Independence was not simply a rejection of Britain, but of the British Parliament’s failure to govern effectively. Where the Declaration was an argument for a strong state, that strength would be manifested in the states themselves, as the new governments of the individual former colonies enacted the legislation that directly shaped American lives in an era of crisis. Pincus and Novak are working along boundary issues grounded in empire quite different than those in Abbott’s Mughal India: patrimonialism is not the issue, so much as the sovereign plurality deeply rooted in the colonial charters that had set the terms of empire – and self-government – on the North Atlantic coast.31 31

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Here see Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); the

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The American state/s were famously founded in a process by which the popular will was manifested in a new sovereignty through a democratically ratified constitution-making process. In our final Foundings chapter, Richard Bensel presents a powerfully persuasive argument as to how the popular will is manifested in nondemocratic states in twentieth-century Russia, Germany, and Iran. Soviet, Nazi, and Shi’ite revolutionary cadres claim to speak for the “transcendent social purpose” of a people – on the assumption that those people lack the competence to manifest their own will of obviating any need for a plebiscite on which to ground legitimacy. Here we may be seeing echoes of Anderson’s premodern enchantment, in modern form. State foundings involve state capacities; more precisely, they involve the establishment of such capacities in a vacuum, or in a contest of sovereignties. As important, state foundings establish claims, both claims of the state on people, and claims of people on a state. But if states are “formed” in foundings, they must necessarily “reform” themselves in the ongoing routines of recruitment of state actors and shifting challenges of governance. States must perpetuate themselves, ensure their survival, and govern the people. The seven chapters in our section on Agendas start with Weberian assumptions about the shape and expansion of state capacity, but also explore explicitly or implicitly the culturalist problems of practice, strategy, technology, and legibility. Asking questions about the reach of the state into society, one of the critical boundary problems, and a critical question of state “claims,” these chapters take an important step toward a hybrid theoretical approach to state formations. Clifford Ando suggests that the Roman empire ruled by a practice of delegation. The empire might well be most famous for its imperial “technologies” – the road network that reached to the most distant frontier, the imperial cults that reached into every provincial city. But Ando sees here only the fullest elaboration of a system of imperial rule reaching back to the early Bronze Age: the empire was in fact lightly ruled from Rome in a hierarchical federation of oligarchic city-states, in which local elites were encouraged to govern under local law and custom, as long as due deference – and taxes – were paid to the center. Rome was thus a tribute empire with highly efficient Iron Age technologies of governance

essays in James T. Sparrow and Stephen W. Sawyer, eds., Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

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and technologies of state “legibility.” Good roads allowed communications to flow and, as necessary, legions to march; imperial cults allowed provincial oligarchs to participate in the mysteries of Roman founding – extending Anderson’s sacred enchantment to the bounds of the empire. Eventually, in ad 212, citizenship followed the roads and cults, making the empire of Rome for all free people. In this pronouncement of universal equality, Ando sees the first moment of the modern state, and the seeds of the fragmentation of empire, as lightly governed local oligarchs, legitimized in citizenship, moved toward greater autonomy as the center faded. Strangely, but importantly, Ando’s account seems eerily familiar eighteen centuries later, when we turn to two chapters on state practices and technologies in the first century of the history of the United States. Stephen Mihm picks up where Pincus and Novak left off, describing one of the great failures of early American national sovereignty. Since the Bronze Age one of the essential legibilities of state sovereignty has been the establishment of uniform weights and measures, and such was mandated in the U.S. Constitution in 1787. The problem of weights and measures elicited various “high modern” systems of calculation, but the national mandate evaporated in Congress and devolved to the states, which in turn delegated responsibilities to regulation by counties and towns. Confusion reigned. In the absence of a central assertion of sovereignty over a critical state technology, the claims of a national state would languish.32 Gregory Downs presents a subtle picture of the limits of American national power during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The Union brought total war and a doctrine of war powers to the restoration of unity and the abolition of slavery. In April 1865, the United States was the most powerful nation on earth; it had hundreds of thousands of men in arms, it had the will to enforce a new peace, and it had the means with telegraph and railroad to deliver those men deep into slave country. But in the end, the public was unwilling to foot the bill. Downs’s chapter, then, describes the geography of state capacity. Where the army marched, African Americans could escape the grip of slavery, but as it receded, Southern whites violently reestablished their local definition of governance. Downs thus describes three types of state claims: a national claim to sovereignty, the freed people’s claim to liberty through state protection, and Southern white claims to a local police power. 32

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Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Our final three papers in Agendas take us to decidedly national-state strategies of governance.33 John Clark expands on Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and biopolitics: modern science and the modern state have coevolved since the age of Thomas Hobbes. While this “coproduction” has dispelled the religious enchantment that Greg Anderson holds against the concept of a premodern state, it may have created another. Scientific knowledge certainly lies at the core of the biopolitical intervention in society that Foucault describes as “governmentality.” Foucault’s governmentality is really governance beyond the state but embedded in a state context: it rests in the entire array of institutions and cultures of civil society that both depend upon the state and extend its reach into society at large.34 Where science has woven together state and society for Clark, taxation does the same for Yannis Kotsonis. In an analysis building on Gramsci, Poulantzas, and Mitchell, taxation is a means to drive an increasing “legibility” of the citizenry for the state: the state is both “discrete and autonomously powerful, and the state is everything.” Here the boundary of state and society disappears, and the taxpayer becomes a bureaucrat, self-reporting a detailed accounting of income with a check. Here as with Clark’s modern science, practices of knowledge making are critical to an ongoing modern state formation. Occasionally, we are allowed in historical work a controlled comparison. Such is the case with Julia Strauss’s more Weberian analysis of ongoing state formations in the two Chinas in the early 1950s. The People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China both had exactly the same agendas of land reform, both were structurally “Leninist single-party states,” and both shared the same deep political culture. But they constructed very different performative repertoires of mobilization to achieve those ends. The contrasting experience of land reform performances – in the mass drama of public accusation and in an orchestrated local election and committee proceduralism – must have been a critical force in shaping visions of the state and the citizen on the mainland and on Taiwan. As many of these chapters suggest, the question of state agendas is deeply entangled with the question of state membership. The six chapters

33

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One of the critical agendas of statecraft, the construction and maintenance of an international order, is at best parenthetically treated in this volume. Clearly the problem of states in a global system is very important, the subject of ramifying literatures in political science, but it is one that we, for better or worse, neglect here. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 295–296.

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in our section on Memberships engage with the ways in which subjects and citizens engage with the state. Thus membership involves negotiations claims and counterclaims: if the state makes claims on its members, they in turn make claims on the state, or perhaps dodge its agendas. Here we run up against the question of the boundary of the state, but less in the sense of neo-Weberian concerns about its autonomy, and more in the sense of models deriving from the wider cultural turn: of Foucauldian governmentality, Mitchell’s state effect, Jessop’s strategic relations. But as important, this is a story of pushback against governmental hard structures and soft hegemony, in the sense of James Scott’s “art of being governed,” and of what Gil Joseph and Daniel Nugent call “the negotiation of rule.” All of these chapters tell us that the construction of the state, its ongoing reformation, is a mutual, reciprocal process, a constant renegotiation of the terms of consent and legitimacy. Seth Richardson has argued recently that the early state was a presumptive thing, more smoke and mirrors than hard capacity, “topheavy with royal propaganda,” but that life in this mirage gradually formed the state as a real entity.35 The texts of proverbs, capturing on firehardened clay the cultural experience of the peoples of ancient city-states, suggest to him that these people were deeply ambivalent about their anointed rulers. The texts reveal a world of grand pronouncement and countervailing critique that suggests that the veil of “enchantment” thrown up by the premodern ruler was met with “snarky” commentary, but commentary that worked within the necessary fiction that the state should have qualities and capacities to protect its subject people. Thus the earliest states were co-constructed in a fluid dialogue between rulers and subjects – Jessop’s relational state actors – in a perennial attempt to summon the illusion of the state capacity necessary for peace, order, and protection. Ancient states and empires universally mobilized their people for war. How did this relentless state claim shape the behavior of households and families? Michael Szonyi argues that in Ming China, this behavior can be seen as an Abrams/Mitchellian “state effect,” a dynamic response to and participation in a bureaucratic process of military mobilization.In an examination of two controversies about the ordering of draft calls in a wider kin group, he suggests that the rigorous recording of familial genealogies in Chinas was shaped less by Confucian filial piety than by 35

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Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia”; Richardson, “Mesopotamian Political History: The Perversities,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 1 (2014), 61–93.

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a negotiation of state demands for soldiers. Like Kotsonis’s modern taxpayer, households under the Ming were drawn into the bureaucratic functioning of the state, if only to protect themselves from wider demands. Given that the premodern state demanded not just military service, but taxes, tribute, and public corvée labor, we can imagine a host of “state effects” shaping the strategies of households for thousands of years. In the modern world, a claim to state membership is expressed most generally in the culture of nationalism. Victor Lieberman explores the late medieval–early modern roots of nationalism, and suggests that this was a part of the slow process of the disenchantment of the state. Here we get – perhaps in the only chapter in this volume – a consideration of the problem of the cultural “nation.” Looking broadly around what he has called the protected rimlands of Eurasia,36 but focusing on Burma and England, Lieberman sees nationalism’s seeds rooted in “politicized ethnicities.” As the state capacity of these smaller societies expanded with the late medieval–early modern commercial expansions, the folk culture of ethnic solidarity was entwined with the universalizing claims of ruling monarchs into a form of proto-nationalism. Why did nationalism per se eventually emerge in Western Europe? In short, the Reformation and print culture launched the process of disenchantment with the state, though initially in its local intensification, as religion and state were fused in confessional states. Eventually Europe’s, prototypically England’s, development of a discursive, associational public sphere would fully disenchant the state. Diane King’s chapter on the modern Middle East, and specifically Kurdistan, links backward to Szonyi on Ming China and forward to Anupama Rao on modern India. How are household, kinship, and gender classification inflected by the state, but also by expedience of imperialism? Throughout the Middle East, postcolonial states recognize and valorize patterns of patrilineal descent that seem deeply rooted in regional tradition. In Iraqi Kurdistan, patrilineal membership defines one’s membership in village and tribal affiliations that are critical elements of civil status. Certainly these categories do have a considerable history, but in Iraq they are still administered under a system inaugurated by British administrators in 1920, as they took the first colonial census and issued identity cards that are still the basis of patrilineal claims. Again we see state effect 36

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Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 Vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009).

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running from state agendas into what seems to be “autonomous” social structure. How does politics work in the modern state arena? Rebecca Tally offers perhaps our only account of competitive struggle in a political arena, specifically the politics of bread in mid-twentieth-century Colombia. Here the state fades away, and we see critical groupings of state members deploying cultural and strategic resources in the fluid sense of Jessop’s strategic relations. Tally’s theoretical frame – like Jessop’s – is explicitly Gramscian, and shaped by Joseph and Nugent’s formulation of “negotiation of rule.” On one level, Colombia’s bakers were arrayed in trade associations in their efforts to advance their interests; on another, they deployed, more and less effectively, a personal culture of convivialismo that is/was the long-established personal style of the legitimate political actor in Colombia. Tally’s conclusion is that both hegemony and state structure are unstable constructs, constantly evolving and oscillating, requiring constant effort and intervention. In the spring of 2016, high-caste Hindu Jats in the Indian state of Haryana rioted to have their caste status downgraded so they could have access to jobs reserved for historically disadvantaged castes. In our closing chapter – which really is equally about foundings as it is about membership – Anupama Rao explores the legal history of caste, and the difficulties of co-constructed political and cultural identities in modern India. She argues – by reaching back to Philip Abrams’s classic essay – for viewing “caste” as a powerful state effect from the colonial era.37 In a story analogous to King’s and distantly echoing Szonyi’s, Rao argues that caste was mandated not just by the Indian constitution’s simultaneous abolition of caste and compensation for “untouchability,” but in a longer history running back into imperial British administrative decisions. Caste as a religious category was politicized and secularized in this history; state, religion, and society entwined in a complex historical process with ongoing consequences.

§

§

§

§

§

The chapters collected here offer a variety of ways of thinking about states and their historical formations across time and space. The central, recurring theme emerging from our chapters is that statehood, past and present, can be productively analyzed as a complex dynamic or convergence

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Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.”

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between materialities and idealities, between Weberian institutional ensembles and the discourses, ideologies, and practices stressed in more culturalist forms of analysis. They also suggest that the dynamic between institutions and cultural practice is equally complex in premodern and modern contexts. In our conclusion, we suggest some of the ways that explorations of this dynamic can illuminate the trajectories from global, premodern antecedents to modern dimensions of state formation.

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part i DEFINITIONS

1 On the Person of the State Quentin Skinner

This chapter focuses on two claims that have gained widespread acceptance in recent discussions about the state.1 One is that, when we refer to the state, we are simply talking about the institutions and coercive apparatus of government. As a number of commentators have observed, there is a marked contrast to be drawn at this point between Anglo-American and continental European traditions of political thought. Leslie Green in The Authority of the State rightly calls attention to the long-standing “tradition of scepticism in the English-speaking world” about the idea of the state. As he notes, “in contrast with Germany or France where critical reflection about political life tends to begin with the notion of the state, our first thoughts run to ‘politics’ or ‘government.’”2 As I later illustrate, this contrast can be traced as far back as the attack on legal fictions that utilitarian legal theorists mounted toward the end of the eighteenth century. It is true that, a century later, a determined effort was made – by T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and others – to introduce into Anglophone political theory a Hegelian understanding of the concept 1

2

I have made several earlier and overlapping attempts to write about the state. See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell F. Hanson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Quentin Skinner, “From the State of Princes to the Person of the State,” in Visions of Politics Volume Two: Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 325–370. This chapter is a revised and abbreviated version of Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Concept of the State,” in Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 341–383. Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 64.

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of state personality.3 But the main effect of this development was to provoke a self-consciously commonsensical restatement of a purely empirical understanding of the state. As L. T. Hobhouse retorted in The Metaphysical Theory of the State, first published in 1918, “by the state we ordinarily mean either the government or, perhaps a little more accurately, the organisation which is at the back of law and government.”4 A year later, Harold Laski launched a similar attack in his treatise entitled Authority in the Modern State. He castigates Green and Bosanquet for making the dangerous error of supposing the state to be the name of a “collective moral person,”5 and he insists that “a realistic analysis” shows us “that what we term state-action is, in actual fact, action by government” and nothing more.6 It is almost a century since Hobhouse and Laski published their treatises, but it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that their basic view has remained orthodox in Anglophone political theory ever since. As many recent commentators have remarked, there remains “a noticeable tendency” to define the state “in a much more restricted and instrumental fashion than in classical political theory.” The state has come to be viewed as nothing more than “an apparatus of rule,” an apparatus distinguished preeminently by the fact that it involves a monopoly of coercion or, as Weber expresses it, “a monopoly of the legitimate use of force.”7 I turn to the other claim about the state that has recently come to be widely accepted. A number of economic and political developments, we are assured, have undermined and at the same time discredited the power of the state. Perhaps the most obvious of these has been the rise of multinational corporations and other economic institutions of international reach. With their capacity to control investment and employment, they are 3

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See Peter P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 198–230; David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 87–126. Leonard T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Criticism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1918), 75. For Hobhouse’s debate with Bosanquet, see Stamatoula Panagakou, “Defending Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State: A Reassessment of the Bosanquet-Hobhouse Controversy,” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 7 (2005), 29–47. Harold J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 26, 66. Laski, Authority, 29, 37. Murray Forsyth, “State,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. David Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 504.

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visibly able to coerce individual states into accommodating their demands even when these may conflict with the social and economic priorities of the states concerned.8 At the same time, the past generation has witnessed the continuing evolution of international organizations with authority to overturn the local jurisdictions of states, a process greatly reinforced by the widening acceptance of an overarching ideal of universal human rights. Some powerful currents of recent political thinking have further contributed to the questioning of state power with a series of moral denunciations of its supposed deficiencies. Among conservative writers in the period after the Second World War, the increasing levels of control assumed by welfare states were viewed with hostility and even alarm, and we were forcibly reminded that even democratic states can be totalitarian in character. Marxist critics continue to raise the objection that states amount to little more than the executive arms of their ruling classes, an objection that has gained much ground in the face of our increased willingness to tolerate extremes of inequality. Meanwhile no one doubts that even purportedly democratic states have been, and remain, agents of extensive suffering and injustice. Of late, a growing neoliberal consensus has partly caused these anxieties about the state to be replaced by contempt. We are now invited to think of democratic states less as sources of oppression than as agents of bureaucratic inefficiency and waste. Rather than relying on the power of governments to shape our societies, we are urged, we should cultivate systems of “governance.” The revival of this piece of medieval terminology – with its implications of wise guidance as opposed to mere command – appears to have originated with the rhetoric of the World Bank in the 1980s and its desire to impress upon the peoples of the developing world the desirability of making themselves more open to decentralization and market forces. “Government” was seen as bad: the monopolistic enemy of competition and enterprise. “Governance” was seen as good: the enabling friend of innovation and initiative.9 These and other transformations have convinced a number of commentators that, in power as well as reputation, the state is now in terminal 8

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For examples, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–109, 122–179; Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London: Harper, 2001), 40–61, 170–184. On this shift, see David Williams and Tom Young, “Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory,” Political Studies 42 (1994), 84–100.

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decline. The institutions of the state, we are told, are shrinking, retreating, “fading into the shadows.”10 As a result, the concept of the state itself is said to be losing any theoretical significance.11 Foucault drew the moral that it is time “to cut off the King’s head” in political theory, liberating ourselves from the illusion that it still makes sense to talk about the sovereign state.12 Frank Ankersmit has recently gone so far as to conclude that “now for the first time in more than half a millennium the State is on the way out.”13 What should we think of these two current judgments about the state? Neither of them seems to me at all satisfactory, and I should like to devote the rest of these remarks to explaining my doubts. What most strikes me about the claim that states are “on their way out” is how much this contention seems out of line with everyday experience. It is of course undeniable that states have forfeited many of the traditional attributes of sovereignty, and that the concept of sovereignty itself has become disjoined from its earlier associations with the rights of individual states.14 But to make the obvious point that states are no longer sovereign is by no means equivalent (pace Foucault) to deconstructing the concept of 10

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Strange, Retreat, 82–87; Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 420–421. For discussions and criticisms of this claim, see Brian T. Trainor, Justice and the State: On Liberal Organicism and the Foundations of Emancipatory Politics (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1998); Creveld, Rise and Decline, 1999; Hertz, Silent Takeover, 2001, esp. 18–37; Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1, 148–191; Walter Ryan, “Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the State: The Primacy of Politics?” History of the Human Sciences 21 (2008), 94–114; Stephen Krasner, “The Durability of Organised Hypocrisy,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jacobus Delwaide, “The Return of the State?,” European Review 19 (2011), 69–91. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121. F. R. Ankersmit, “Political Representation and Political Experience: An Essay on Political Psychology,” Redescriptions, 11 (2007), 36. For further discussion, see Richard Bellamy, “Sovereignty, Post-sovereignty and Presovereignty: Three Models of the State, Democracy and Rights within the EU,” in Sovereignty in Transition, ed. Nigel Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 167–189; Raia Prokhovnik, Sovereignties: Contemporary Theory and Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 183–246; Neil MacCormick, “Sovereignty and After,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jüri Lipping, “Sovereignty beyond the State,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the “post-sovereign” state, see Patrick Praet, “Prolegomena to the Post-sovereign Rechsstaat,” in Sovereignty in

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the state. The world’s leading states remain the principal actors on the international stage, and the ideal of humanitarian intervention has yet to be invoked in such a way as to challenge the sovereignty of any major state.15 Furthermore, such states remain by far the most significant political actors within their own territories.16 They have become more aggressive in recent years, patrolling their borders with increasing attention and maintaining an unparalleled and rising level of surveillance over their own citizens. They have also become more interventionist, and in the face of their collapsing banking systems have even proved willing to step forward as lenders of last resort.17 Meanwhile they continue to print money (more and more of it), to impose taxes, to enforce contracts, to penalize errant citizens, to subsidize cultural life, to provide health and welfare services, and to legislate with an unprecedented degree of complexity. To a greater degree than it is currently fashionable to admit, they also facilitate markets and act as entrepreneurs on their own account.18 Despite the aspiration of neoliberalism to will away the significance of the state, it remains obvious that most of us are living in nation-states, that this is likely to remain the case for some considerable time, and that statelessness remains an appalling prospect for anyone to contemplate. To speak in these circumstances of the state “fading into the shadows” seems one-sided to the point of inattentiveness. It is or ought to be obvious that political theorists still need to concern themselves with the state and to ask about the role of state power. What of the other claim I began by isolating – that when we talk about the state we are merely referring to an apparatus of government? What most strikes me here is the starkness of the contrast between this view of the state and the way in which the concept was understood during the

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Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See the examples discussed in Fernando R. Tesón, Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 2nd edn. (Irvington-on-Hudson: Transnational, 1997), 175–266; Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For reaffirmations along these lines, see Christopher W. Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michel Troper, “The Survival of Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the implications for the claim that states are “on their way out,” see R. C. Altman, “Globalization in Retreat,” Foreign Affairs 88 (2009), 2–7. For details, see Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Public Affairs, 2011).

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period when it first became the master noun of political discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among political writers of this period, the basic reason for giving prominence to the concept of the state was to mark a categorical distinction between states and governments. When these writers speak about the state, they take themselves to be referring to a distinct person separate at once from rulers and the ruled. The earliest expression of this outlook in Anglophone political theory can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651, in which he informs us at the outset that, in putting forward his theory of public power, he will be speaking “not of the men” but “in the Abstract” about the nature of the “COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE.”19 Although Hobbes is a protagonist of the theory of absolute sovereignty, he never talks in the manner of divine right theorists about the reverence due to kings as the Lord’s anointed or as God’s vicegerents on earth. He always maintains that the status of even the most absolute monarch can never be higher than that of an authorized representative. Furthermore, he gives an exacting account of the duties that such representatives must discharge. He assumes that we can never be expected to submit to sovereign power unless we believe that the outcome will be a more peaceful and settled way of life than we could hope to lead in the state of nature. But if that is so, then the sovereign to whom we submit must incur a corresponding obligation to act in such a way as “to produce the Peace, and Security of the people.”20 It is true that, because all sovereigns are by definition absolute, they cannot be punished or removed from office if they behave iniquitously.21 When they do so, however, they are in clear dereliction of their duty, which requires them to aim at all times “to procure the common interest” by conducting their government in a manner “agreeable to Equity, and the Common Good.”22 If sovereigns are merely representatives, whom do they represent? To understand Hobbes’s answer, we first need to turn to the distinctive account of the political covenant he presents in chapter 17 of Leviathan.23

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Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, Richard Tuck, ed., Revised Student Edition, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Epistle Dedicatory, 3; Introduction, 9. 21 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 19, 131. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 18, 124. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 19, 131; ch. 24, 171. Hobbes, Leviathan, 17, 121, speaks of two ways in which political authority can be established: by “institution” or by “acquisition.” It is only in respect of the former case, however, that he works out his theory of authorization and representation, which is why I concentrate on “government by institution” in what follows.

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As he explains, when such covenants are enacted, it is as if everyone agrees with everyone else that some particular person – a man or an assembly – shall have the right to speak and act in their name. The formula in which the covenant is expressed is accordingly said to be as follows: “I authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.”24 Hobbes has already told us in chapter 16 what it means to authorize a representative. He classifies representatives as artificial persons,25 and explains that “of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority.”26 When, in other words, we authorize our own representation, we must be willing to regard ourselves as the “owners” of whatever is subsequently said or done by our representatives. The reason is that, by our act of authorization, we have granted them authority to act in our name. We must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for their actions as our own, and indeed to have them attributed to us as actions that we have performed ourselves.27 With this analysis Hobbes arrives at his central contention about the implications of covenanting. When we agree to authorize our representation by the artificial person of a sovereign, we transform ourselves from a mere multitude into a unified group. We are now united by our common agreement to live in subjection to law, and by the fact that we have a single determining will, that of our sovereign representative, whose words and actions count as those of us all. But this is to say that we are now capable of willing and acting as one person. As Hobbes summarizes, “a Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented.”28 The effect is to produce “a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man.”29

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25 Hobbes, Leviathan, 17, 120. Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 111. Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 112. For Hobbes on authorization, see David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 120–177; Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36–55; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–180. 29 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 16, 114. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 120.

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The act of covenanting may thus be said to engender two persons who had no previous existence in the state of nature. One is the artificial person to whom we grant authority to speak and act in our name. The name of this person, we already know, is the sovereign. The other is the person we bring into being when we acquire a single will and voice by way of authorizing a man or an assembly to serve as our representative. The name of this further person, Hobbes next declares in an epoch-making moment, is the state.30 “The Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH,”31 and another name for a commonwealth is a CIVITAS or STATE.32 This solves the puzzle raised by Hobbes’s initial contention that all lawful sovereigns are merely representatives. Whom do they represent? According to Hobbes, they represent the person of the state.33 Summing up at the end of chapter 17, he accordingly concludes that the commonwealth or state can actually be defined as “One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author,” while the sovereign is the name of the man or assembly that “bears” or “carries” the person of the state.34 The holder of this sovereign power, Hobbes goes on to emphasize, is a person distinct from both rulers and ruled. He gives the person in question a name of its own, announcing that what he has been describing is “the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN.”35 He subsequently explains how the state can hope to live a secure and healthy life,36 and he devotes a whole chapter to examining its distinctive diseases and the dangers attendant on its death.37 He categorically distinguishes the state not merely from the figure of the sovereign, but also from the unity of the multitude over which the sovereign rules at any one time. While sovereigns come and go, and while the unity of the multitude continually alters 30

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For further discussion, see Arto Tukiainen, “The Commonwealth as a Person in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies, 7 (1994), 44–55; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999), 368–413; Mónica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 158–176. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 120. Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction, p. 9 and ch. 17, 120. Lucien Jaume, “La théorie de la ‘personne fictive’ dans le Léviathan de Hobbes,” Revue française de science politique, 33 (1983); Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person,” 1–29; Martin Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 58–64. 35 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 121. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 120. 37 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 221. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 221–230.

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as its members are born and die, the person of the state endures, incurring obligations and enforcing rights far beyond the lifetime of any of its subjects. Hobbes concedes that no state can be immortal,38 and he takes himself to have witnessed the death of the English state in his own time.39 But he insists that the fundamental aim of those who institute a state will always be to make it live “as long as Mankind,” thereby establishing a system of “perpetuall security” that they can hope to bequeath to their remote posterity.40 The aspiration must be to create an institution with “an Artificiall Eternity of life.”41 The state is admittedly no more than a person “by Fiction,” a purely legal entity,42 but it would nevertheless be a serious mistake to infer that it cannot act as a real force in the world. This would be to forget that, when an authorized representative acts in the name of someone else, the actions of the representative are attributed to the person being represented.43 Once we grasp the concept of an attributed action, it is easy, according to Hobbes, to see how the person of the state, in spite of its fictional character, can be a figure of unsurpassable force and might. When the members of a multitude covenant to institute a sovereign, they allocate him the fullest possible powers to act for the common good.44 But the sovereign upon whom these powers are conferred is merely personating the state: whatever actions he performs in his official capacity are always attributed to the state and count as actions of the state. It is the person of the state who must consequently be regarded as the true possessor of sovereignty. “The Common-wealth only, praescribes, and commandeth the observation of those rules, which we call Law,” so that “the name of the person Commanding” is “Persona Civitatis,” the person of the state.45 Hobbes’s theory of state personality had little immediate impact on English political debate.46 But it quickly captured the attention of continental European commentators on the ius gentium and the law of nature. The first major philosopher to draw heavily on Hobbes’s account was Samuel Pufendorf in his De iure naturae et gentium of 1672. Soon 38 40 42 44 46

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39 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21, 153. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 230. 41 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 19, 135; ch. 28, 221. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 19, 135. 43 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 16, 113. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 16, 111. 45 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 120. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 183, 184. Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 334–344, 361–377 reports a largely hostile reception, with no specific discussions of Hobbes’s theory of the state.

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afterwards Pufendorf’s development of Hobbes’s theory became widely known in France through the work of Jean Barbeyrac, whose annotated version of Pufendorf’s De iure naturae appeared in 1706.47 Although Barbeyrac criticizes Hobbes as well as Pufendorf, his translation gave further currency to the Hobbesian view of the state as the name of a multitude united as one person by their agreement to live under a sovereign representative.48 We find the same conception taken up in France by such jurists as François Richer d’Aube in his Essais of 174349 and Martin Hubner in his Essai sur l’histoire du droit naturel, which first appeared in London in 1757.50 Of all these restatements, however, by far the most influential was that of Emer de Vattel in Le droit des Gens of 1758. Although Vattel is critical of what he describes as Hobbes’s paradoxes, he sees in Hobbes the undoubted hand of an expert,51 and develops an essentially Hobbesian account of the person of the state that in turn played a major role in the assimilation of the idea into Anglophone political thought.52 This process of assimilation may be said to have begun with the publication of Basil Kennet’s translation of Barbeyrac’s edition of Pufendorf in 1717.53 Pufendorf explicitly draws our attention to the fact that (as Kennet’s version puts it) “Mr Hobbes hath given us a very ingenious Draught of a Civil State, conceiv’d as an Artificial Man.”54 Pufendorf begins by offering a much fuller characterization than Hobbes had done of 47

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On Barbeyrac’s translation see Sieglinde Othmer, Berlin und die Verbreitung des Naturrechts in Europa (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 124–134. Samuel Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, trans. Jean Barbeyrac (Amsterdam: Kuyper, 1706), 206: “cette union & cette soûmission de volontez, qui acheve de former l’Etat, & en fait un Corps, qu l’on regarde comme une seule Personne.” On Richer d’Aube, see Yves Glaziou, Hobbes en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1993), 62–63. On Hubner, see Glaziou, Hobbes. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations; or Principles of the Law of Nature: Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (London, 1760), Preface. Emmanuelle Jouannet, Emer de Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit international classique (Paris: A. Pédone, 1998); Stéphane Beaulac, “Emer de Vattel and the Externalization of Sovereignty,” Journal of the History of International Law 5 (2003), esp. 254–260. But for a critique, see Ian Hunter, “Vattel’s Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant Nation,” Grotiana 31 (2010), 108–140. Or perhaps, as argued in David Saunders and Ian Hunter, “Bringing the State to England: Andrew Tooke’s Translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s De offico hominis et civis,” History of Political Thought, 24 (2003), 218–234, with the publication of Andrew Tooke’s translation of Pufendorf’s abridgment of De iure naturae in 1691. Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett, 3rd edn. (London: R. Sare, 1717), VII. II. XIII, 475, col. 2.

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the two different worlds that we simultaneously inhabit. One is the world of natural entities, the other the world of moral entities that we “impose” on the world of nature “for the procuring of a decent Regularity in the Method of Life.”55 The most important of these moral entities are said to be moral persons, which constitute the substance of the moral world. They are “conceiv’d with analogy” to natural persons, who are in turn said to form the individual substance of rational nature.56 The connection between natural and moral persons arises from the fact that, within civil associations, natural persons play a variety of roles, in consequence of which “one and the same Man” may “sustain several Persons together,” acting as “a Householder, a Senator in Parliament, an Advocate in the Halls of Justice, and a Counsellor at Court.”57 When Pufendorf turns to the person of the state, he agrees with Hobbes that it is brought into being when a number of natural persons “are so united together, that what they will or act by virtue of that Union, is esteem’d a single Will, and a single Act,” and that this arrangement is instituted “when the particular Members submit their Wills to the Will of one Man, or of one Council, in such a manner as to acknowledge the common Act and Determination of them all.”58 Pufendorf likewise agrees with Hobbes that, when we constitute a state, it should be our aim, in the name of stability and security, to bring into existence a person with an artificial eternity of life. “For they who were the Original Founders of Commonwealths, are not supposed to have Acted with this Design, that the State should Fall and be Dissolv’d upon the Decease of all those particular Men, who at first compos’d it; but they rather proceeded upon the Hope and Prospect of lasting and perpetual Advantages, to be derived from the present Establishment, upon their Children and their whole Posterity.”59 Pufendorf thus appears at first sight to be a disciple of Hobbes, and this is how he has tended to be portrayed in recent scholarship.60 But Pufendorf disagrees with Hobbes’s analysis of personhood, and hence 55 57

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56 Pufendorf, Of the Law, I. I. III, 3, col. 1. Pufendorf, Of the Law, I. I. XVI, 10, col. 2. Pufendorf, Of the Law, I. I. XIV, 9, col 1. For a discussion, see Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 163–168. Pufendorf, Of the Law, I. I. XIII, 8, col 2. Pufendorf, Of the Law, VIII. II. XX, 481, col. 1. See especially Fiammetta Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf, discepolo di Hobbes (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990). I formerly subscribed to this view myself. See Skinner, Genealogy, 350–352. For helping me to reconsider my position I am particularly indebted to Hans Baade and Benjamin Holland.

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with his account of the person of the state. He rejects Hobbes’s central contention that the state is a person “by fiction” created by a mere union of wills. According to Pufendorf, the state is compounded out of the moral personae of all the natural persons who institute it as well as the sovereign who represents it. The right way to think about the state must therefore be to recognize it as a moral person in itself. “A Civil State,” as he explains, “is conceiv’d to exist like one Person, endued with Understanding and Will, and performing other particular Acts, distinct from those of the private Members,” as a result of which the state “hath peculiar Rights and separate Properties” of a moral as well as a coercive kind.61 “The most proper definition of a Civil State” is accordingly said to be that “it is a compound Moral Person, whose will, united and tied together by those Covenants, which before pass’d among the Multitude, is deem’d the Will of all; to the End, that it may use and apply the Strength and Riches of private persons towards maintaining the common Peace and Security.”62 If, however, we consider the will of the state and its embodiment, we find Pufendorf in strong agreement with Hobbes. Pufendorf agrees that it is by a “Submission and Union of Wills” that “we conceive a State to be but one Person.”63 He agrees that the sovereign “bears” or represents this person, and explicitly speaks of “the publick Will of the Monarch, representing the Will of the State.”64 He consequently agrees with Hobbes’s fundamental contention that the person of the state is the true seat of sovereignty. “The State in exerting and exercising its Will, makes use either of a single Person, or of a Council, according as the Supreme Command has been confer’d,” and “where the Sovereignty is lodg’d in one Man, there the State is supposed to chuse and desire whatever that one man (who is presumed to be Master of perfect Reason) shall judge convenient; in every Business or Affair, which regards the End of Civil Government.”65

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Pufendorf, Of the Law, VII. II. XIII, 475, col. 1. For a discussion, see David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 236–238. Pufendorf, Of the Law VII. II. XII, 475, col. 2. Pufendorf, Of the Law VII. II. VIII, 470, col. 1. Pufendorf, Of the Law VII. II. XIV, 476, col. 1. Pufendorf, Of the Law, VII. II. XIV, 476, col. 1. On this categorical distinction between states and governments, see James Tully, Introduction to Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xiv–xxxvii; Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, 186–191.

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We also find Pufendorf endorsing, and further developing, Hobbes’s account of why it is essential to a satisfactory analysis of public power to think of the state not merely as a person distinct from rulers and ruled, but also as endowed with an artificial eternity of life. One reason is that we need to ensure some continuity of public order beyond the lifetime of any particular regime. Pufendorf gives as an example the case of public debt, arguing that it is “Just, and for the peace of the State” to recognize that, even if such debts may have been incurred under a defunct government, “yet the Debts it has contracted are still due.”66 As with Hobbes, however, Pufendorf’s chief reason for insisting on a categorical distinction between states and governments is that this furnishes us with a means of testing the legitimacy of the actions that governments undertake. He is adamant that, because the state is the name of the united will and understanding of an entire body of people, the special obligation of those who hold the reins of power must be to act for the good of this body as a whole. This is not to concede that we may lawfully resist a sovereign who fails to act for the benefit of the state.67 But it is emphatically to affirm that any such sovereign will have failed in his basic duty toward his subjects. As he concludes, “the general Rule which Sovereigns are to proceed by” is “Let the Safety of the People be the Supreme Law.”68 A moment of still greater significance in the reception of the Hobbesian theory of the state was reached when an English version of Emer de Vattel’s treatise on the law of nations was published in London in 1760. Vattel defines the ius gentium as the law governing the relations between independent sovereign states, and accordingly begins by examining the concept of the state itself. His resulting analysis is partly critical of Hobbes’s theory of state personality. He follows Pufendorf in rejecting Hobbes’s claim that states are merely persons “by fiction,” explicitly endorsing Pufendorf’s contention that states are compounded out of the understanding as well as the will of each individual subject. The state, as Vattel puts it, is consequently “a moral person, having an understanding and a will peculiar to itself, and is susceptible of obligations and laws.”69 Vattel’s subsequent discussion, however, is fundamentally Hobbesian in character. He agrees with Hobbes that states are able to act if and only if

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Pufendorf, Of the Law, VIII, XII. II, 128, col. 1 (second pagination). Pufendorf, Of the Law VII. II. XIV, 476, col. 1. Pufendorf, Of the Law, VII. IX. III, 569, col. 1. Vattel, Law of Nations, Preliminaries, para. 2, p. 1; cf. I. IV. 40, 20.

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they are personated by sovereigns who have been authorized to act in their name, and he consequently emphasizes what he describes as “the representative character attributed to the sovereign,” who “unites in his own person all the majesty that belongs to the entire body” of the nation and state.70 He also agrees that, when sovereign representatives speak or act, their words or actions must be attributed to the state, so that the person of the state is the true seat of sovereignty.71 Most importantly, Vattel agrees that the principal duty of sovereigns is to act for the good of the state. “A wise conductor of society, ought to have his mind impressed with this great truth, that the sovereign power is solely intrusted with him for the safety of the state, and the happiness of all his people.”72 Vattel continues to speak in a Hobbesian vein when he turns to examine the relations between states. He begins by commending Hobbes as the first writer properly to understand the theory of international affairs,73 and thus to understand that relations between governments can never be properly regulated in the absence of a theory of state personality. Vattel lays down that “every nation that governs itself, under what form soever,” is “a sovereign state,” and that all such states must be recognized as “moral persons who live together in a natural society.”74 They must therefore be “considered by foreign states, as making only one whole, one single person.”75 The theory of international affairs must take as its subject matter the proper behavior of such moral persons in relation to one another.76 The implications of this argument are pursued in Vattel’s chapter on treaties, the establishment of which he takes to be the most important of the transactions that occur between states. He lays down that, in the case of what he calls real treaties, the intention is that their provisions should be perpetual in effect. Any “real alliance,” as he puts it, “is affixed to the body of the state, and subsists as long as the state.”77 But the only way in which this requirement can be met is by acknowledging that the signatories of such treaties cannot be governments; they can only be states. These moral persons are alone endowed with the essential attribute of possessing, in Hobbes’s phrase, an artificial eternity of life. This is particularly evident, Vattel believes, in the case of self-governing states. When

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71 Vattel, Law of Nations, I. IV. 40, 21. Vattel, Law of Nations, I. IV. 40, 20–21. 73 Vattel, Law of Nations, I. IV. 39, 20. Vattel, Law of Nations, Preface. 75 Vattel, Law of Nations, I. I. 4, 10. Vattel, Law of Nations, II. VII. 81, 147. Vattel, Law of Nations, Preliminaries, paras. 7–9, 2–3. Vattel, Law of Nations, II. XII, 183, 182.

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a free people concludes a treaty, “it is the state itself that contracts; and its engagements do not depend on the lives of those who were only the instruments: the members of the people or of the regency change and succeed one another; but the state is always the same.”78 By this stage the Hobbesian theory had begun to catch the attention of English legal and political commentators. Among these, none enjoyed a higher reputation than Sir William Blackstone, who incorporated the basic tenets of Hobbes’s theory of the state into his introductory essay “Of the Nature of Laws in General” in the first volume of his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765.79 Blackstone opens by arguing in a Hobbesian vein that “inasmuch as political communities are made up of many natural persons, each of whom has his particular will and inclination, these several wills cannot by any natural union be joined together” in such a way as to produce “one uniform will of the whole.”80 The only solution is to institute what Blackstone calls a “political union” of the multitude, thereby enabling them to act as a single person or (as Blackstone prefers to put it) as if they are “one man” with “one uniform will.”81 To this argument Blackstone adds, in a yet more Hobbesian passage, that the name of this political union is the state.82 “For a state is a collective body, composed of a multitude of individuals, united for their safety and convenience and intending to act together as one man.”83 The distinguishing mark of sovereignty – that of having authority to legislate – may equally well “reside” in different forms of government. But the authority itself is always part of “the natural, inherent right that

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Vattel, Law of Nations, II. XII. 184, 182. For Blackstone on law and the English state, see John W. Cairns, “Blackstone, an English Institutionalist: Legal Literature and the Rise of the Nation State,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4 (1984), 318–360; David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 31–67. Sir William Blackstone, “Of the Nature of Law in General,” in Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1: Of the Rights of Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1765), 52. Blackstone, Of the Nature, 52. Although Blackstone appears silently to quote from Hobbes, there are more complex filiations to be traced, as noted in Ernest Barker, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800, trans. Ernest Barker (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957), xliii. Blackstone’s main source appears to be Burlamaqui, who owes a clear debt to Pufendorf, whose debt to Hobbes, as we have seen, is in turn no less clear. Blackstone, Of the Nature, 52.

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belongs to the sovereignty of a state,”84 while all the members of the political union “are bound to conform themselves to the will of the state.”85 This conception of the state as the name of a distinct person eventually attained an almost hegemonic standing in the course of the Enlightenment, and subsequently became embedded in the public law of several major European countries, most notably Germany and France. Hegel’s theory of the Rechsstaat draws on it, as does Gierke’s account of the real personality of groups, while in France the image of the state as a personne morale was central to Rousseau’s political theory, and subsequently became the subject of an extensive legal literature.86 It would not be too much to say that the concept of state personality was one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment to the political theory of continental Europe in the course of the nineteenth century and beyond. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, Anglophone discussions of the state began to move in a wholly different direction,87 and a way of thinking about public power emerged in which the concept of the state as a distinct legal entity began to slip almost entirely from sight. As I noted at the outset, this eventually gave rise to a widespread sense that, when we refer to the state, we can only be speaking about an apparatus of government. The final outcome has been the present disposition to treat state and government as virtually synonymous terms. I want to end by raising two questions about this line of development. First of all, what brought about the discrediting in Anglophone political theory of the idea of state personality? An important part of the explanation appears to lie with the rise of classical utilitarianism and the influence it came to exercise over Anglophone legal and political thought. Jeremy Bentham’s first published work, his Fragment on Government of 1776, took the form of a scornful and vituperative critique of precisely those 84 86

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85 Blackstone, Of the Nature, 49. Blackstone, Of the Nature, 52–53. For this literature, see F. W. Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 71n. For this contrast, see H. F. Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). The idea of the state as a non-corporeal body can still be found in the late eighteenth century. See Pasi Ihalainen, “Towards an Immortal Political Body: The State Machine in Eighteenth-Century English Political Discourse,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009), esp. 34–35. On the subsequent loss of the concept, see Douglas C. Dow, “Decline as a Form of Conceptual Change: Some Considerations on the Loss of the Legal Person,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008), 1–26.

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sections of Blackstone’s Commentaries to which I have referred.88 Launching his tirade, Bentham announces that “the season of Fiction is now over.”89 The time has come to ground legal arguments entirely on observable facts about real individuals, and especially on their capacity for experiencing, in relation to political power, the pain of restraint and the pleasure of liberty.90 Bentham’s response to Blackstone’s description of the state of nature, the union of the multitude, and the creation of the state is accordingly to pronounce these passages completely unmeaning, a mere sequence of fictions of just the kind that legal theory must learn to avoid.91 Bentham’s purported demystification leaves him nothing to say about the state except that, if the term has any meaning at all, it can only refer to some actual body of persons in charge of some identifiable institutions of government. This is what he finally tells us toward the end of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation of 1789 when he turns to consider “offences against the state.” Here he lays down that what it means to have a state is simply to have “particular persons invested with powers to be exercised for the benefit of the rest.” If there were no such persons equipped with such powers, “there would be no such thing as a state.”92 This repudiation of legal fictions exercised an overwhelming influence on the subsequent direction of utilitarian thought. We look in vain among other early utilitarians – William Paley, William Godwin, James Mill – for any sustained discussion of the idea of the state, and insofar as we encounter such discussions in later utilitarian theory they generally echo Bentham’s reductionist account. A classic instance is provided by John Austin’s lectures on The Province of Jurisprudence Determined of 1832.93 As Austin informs us, his own understanding of the state is that the term 88

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For Bentham on Blackstone, see J. H. Burns, “Bentham and Blackstone: A Lifetime’s Dialectic,” Utilitas: A Journal of Utilitarian Studies 1 (1989), 22–40; Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51–57; Janet McLean, Searching for the State in British Legal Thought: Competing Conceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19–20. Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, introduction by Ross Harrison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53. Schofield, Utility, 32–44. Bentham, Fragment, 113. For Bentham on fictions, see Schofield, Utility, 14–27, 74–77. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, introduction by F. Rosen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17.1.18, 292. On Austin and Bentham, see Michael Lobban, A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600–1900 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 173–187.

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simply denotes “the individual person, or the body of individual persons, which bears the supreme powers in an independent political society.”94 Later we find the same view summarized – along with so much else in the utilitarian creed – by Henry Sidgwick in his Elements of Politics of 1891. Sidgwick explicitly denies that the bond of union underlying the state can be anything other than an agreement by a number of individuals to obey the same laws, and accordingly describes the state as nothing more than an apparatus of government empowered to command the exclusive allegiance of those living under it.95 With this contention the story comes full circle, for it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say, as I began by noting, that this reductionist understanding of the state has remained the orthodoxy in Anglophone political theory ever since. The other question I want to raise is whether anything of value may have been lost as a result of the widespread abandonment of the view that states must be categorically distinguished from governments and recognized as separate persons distinct from both rulers and ruled. Are there any good reasons for thinking about the state in these Hobbesian terms? A growing number of legal and political theorists have begun to answer in the affirmative.96 By way of supporting their case, I should like to end by recalling the two main reasons the original protagonists of the Hobbesian view gave for insisting on a categorical distinction between states and governments. One suggested reason was that we need to make sense of the claim that some governmental actions may have the intended effect of binding not

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John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. Wilfrid E. Rumble (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 190n. Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), 221. David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Runciman, “What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000), 268–278; David Runciman, “The Concept of the State: The Sovereignty of a Fiction,” in States and Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Sträth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28–38; Morris, An Essay; Trainor, Justice; Brian Trainor, “Back to the Future: The Emancipatory Essence of the State,” European Journal of Political Theory 4 (2005), 413–428; Janet McLean, “Government to State: Globalization, Regulation, and Governments as Legal Persons,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10 (2003), 173–197; Janet McLean, “Divergent Legal Conceptions of the State: Implications for Global Administrative Law,” Law and Contemporary Problems 68 (2005), 167–187; McLean, Searching; Patrick T. Jackson, “Hegel’s House, or ‘People Are States Too,’” Review of International Studies 30 (2004), 281–287; cf. also the discussion in Bartelson, Critique, 149–181.

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merely the body of the people but their remote posterity. As we have seen, one obvious example, according to Pufendorf and many later legal theorists, is the decision to take on a large burden of public debt.97 Unless the outcome is a default, we need to ask who becomes the debtor. We can hardly answer that the debt must be owed by the government that incurred it. Even if the government changes or falls, the debt will still remain to be paid. The only way to make sense of the situation, Pufendorf concludes, is to recognize that the debtor must be a person with an artificial eternity of life, and must therefore be the person of the state.98 We also need to take note of the analogous possibility that governmental action may affect our remote posterity in relation to other governments. Here the most obvious example was held to be that of international treaties. Any such alliance, as Vattel puts it, is “affixed to the body of the state, and subsists as long as the state.”99 But for this to be possible, the signatories will once again have to be persons with an artificial eternity of life, and will therefore have to be states. Finally, according to the Hobbesian theorists, there is a further and more important reason for wishing to make a categorical distinction between states and governments. The fundamental duty of government, in Hobbes’s words, is “to procure the common interest” by ruling in a manner “agreeable to Equity, and the Common Good.”100 “The general Rule which Sovereigns are to proceed by,” Pufendorf agrees, is “Let the Safety of the People be the Supreme Law.”101 For these and other philosophers of the state, the basic reason for wishing to draw a categorical distinction between states and governments is that this provides us with a standing test of the legitimacy of the actions that governments undertake. The conduct of government, on this view, is morally acceptable if and only if it serves to promote the safety and welfare of the person of the state. It is sometimes objected that this way of thinking about states reveals them to be distinctly sinister entities. But this anxiety reflects a straightforward misunderstanding of the theory I have been laying out. According to the Hobbesian view, to speak of the state as a distinct person is merely a way of referring to the body of the people united as equal citizens under 97

98 99 100 101

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One later legal theorist who took public debt to be of exemplary significance was F. W. Maitland. See Maitland, State, 39–45, 70–71. For further discussion, see McLean, “Government to State,” 175–176, 178–183. Vattel, “The Law of Nations,” II. XII, 183, 182. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 19, 131; ch. 24, 171. Pufendorf, Of the Law, VII. IX. III, 569, col. 1.

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an authorized form of government. When we speak about the interests of the state, this is equivalent to speaking about the interests of the people as a whole. The state is, in the end, nothing other than ourselves. When we institute states, we do not add any new material to the world; we simply reorganize and individuate ourselves in a new way. To insist that governments have a duty to act for the good of the state is simply to insist on their duty to act in the interests of us all. There are grounds for suggesting, in sum, that the abandonment of this way of thinking may have been a serious mistake.

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2 The State as a Social Relation Bob Jessop

No single theory or theoretical perspective can fully capture and explain the structural and strategic dynamic of states, state projects, state power, and, a fortiori, state formation. Furthermore, because states are structurally coupled to and coevolve with broader sets of social relations, we cannot adequately describe or explain the state without referring to its changing and differential articulation with this set of relations. To address these issues, this chapter proposes to shift state-theoretical attention from the state apparatus to state power and then elaborate the enigmatic claim that “the state is a social relation.” This can be translated for the sake of exposition into the elliptical six-part proposition that “the state” can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of (1) the exercise of state power as (2) an institutionally and discursively mediated condensation (a reflection and refraction) of (3) a changing balance of forces that (4) seek to influence the forms, purposes, and content of the polity, politics, and policy (5) in specific conjunctures marked by a variable mix of opportunities and constraints linked (6) to the wider natural and social environment.1 To show why this is an interesting way to explore states and state formation, this chapter proceeds in six steps (which do not correspond to the elements of the preceding proposition). First, it revisits the well-known difficulties in defining the state; second, it introduces the strategic-relational approach to the state; third, it examines the implications of this approach for analyzing structure and agency; fourth, it presents six dimensions of the state apparatus and state power; fifth, it

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Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 53.

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considers the state as a strategic relation; and, sixth, finally, it offers four guidelines for studying these issues.

the challenges of state theory What is the state? This question has been posed many times from many perspectives in different periods and political contexts, and different answers have been offered with different implications for studying state formation and state power.2 Many critics suggest that the state is too abstract, vapid, or ungraspable to be a valid or worthwhile theoretical object – but often they then reintroduce the concept, if not the word, via the back door after ejecting it noisily through the front door.3 Faced with these challenges, a useful entry point is the continental European tradition of general state theory (allgemeine Staatstheorie). This tradition identifies three features of the state: (1) a clearly demarcated core territory under the more or less uncontested and continuous control of the state apparatus; (2) a politically organized coercive, administrative, and symbolic apparatus endowed with both general and specific powers; and (3) a permanent or stable population that is subject to the state’s political authority, which is regarded, at least by that apparatus, if not its subjects, as binding. Similar ideas characterize several other approaches. At stake in all cases is the historically variable ensemble of technologies and practices that produce, naturalize, and manage territorial space as a bounded container within which political power is exercised with a view to achieving various, more or less well integrated, and changing policy objectives, which may include maintaining, transforming, or overthrowing the state. This definition covers premodern as well as modern states and helps to distinguish simple and complex chiefdoms from states proper. It also implies that the so-called Westphalian state system, based on a set of formally sovereign, mutually recognizing, mutually legitimating national states exercising sovereign control over large and exclusive territorial areas, is, in historical fact, only a relatively recent institutional expression of state power. Further, while some political scientists may just focus on the “internal state,” scholars of international law and international relations also examine its external dimension. 2

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Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 58–89. Jens Bartelson, A Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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the strategic-relational approach This approach (hereafter the “SRA”) considers the state not just as an institutional ensemble in the manner of general state theory but also as a social relation. It dates back at least to Marx and was elaborated by, among others, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, and Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek political theorist. Subsequent SRA theorists include Bertramsen and colleagues, Colin Hay, Christos Boukalas, and myself.4 Gramsci is significant because he was more interested in the modalities of state power than the state’s formal institutional features. He emphasized that “the general notion of the State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that the State = ‘political society + civil society’, in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.”5 Hegemony involves the “active consent” of dominated groups won by the ruling class through its political, intellectual, and moral leadership. Force mobilizes a coercive apparatus to bring the population into conformity and compliance with the needs of a specific economic regime. His approach reminds us that the state only exercises power by projecting and realizing state capacities beyond the narrow boundaries of the state; and that force and hegemony can be found on either side of any official public-private divide (e.g., unofficial paramilitary groups, state education). Poulantzas built on Marx’s claim that “capital is not a thing but a social relation, i.e., a relation between people mediated through the instrumentality of things” to assert that the state too is a social relation.6 This elliptical phrase implies that, whether viewed as a thing (or, better, an institutional ensemble) or as a subject (or, better, the repository of specific 4

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Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, V. Gerratana, ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 1975); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1979); R. B. Bertramsen, J. P. F. Thomsen, and J. Torfing, State, Economy, and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991); Colin Hay, Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Christos Boukalas, Homeland Security, Its Law and Its State. A Design of Power for the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2014); Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982); Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: State Theory and Political Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1985); Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the State in Its Place (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Jessop, The State. Gramsci, Quaderni. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1886), 537.

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political capacities and resources), the state is neither a passive instrument nor a neutral actor. It is “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form.”7 Thus state power (not the state apparatus) is a form-determined (institutionally mediated) reflection and refraction of the changing balance of forces that are seeking to advance their respective interests in, through, and in opposition to the state. A given type of state, state form, or political regime is never neutral because it is marked by immanent biases that make state institutions, capacities, and resources more accessible to some political forces, some identities, some interests, some strategies, some spatiotemporal horizons, and some actions than others. It is also more tractable for some purposes than others because of its typical modes of intervention and resources and its embedding in the wider political system and environing societal relations. How and how far this matters affects political forces’ capacity to pursue their interests and depends on the nature of their goals, strategies, and tactics. Since it is not a real subject but an institutional ensemble, the state cannot exercise power. Indeed, one should not speak of the power of the state but of the various potential structural powers (or state capacities), plural, that are inscribed in the state qua ensemble. These powers are activated by changing sets of politicians and state officials located in specific parts of the state system. It is they who activate specific powers and state capacities inscribed in particular institutions and agencies and, in doing so, they may be guided by their assessment of the strategic context and its implications for politics as “the art of the possible” in the light of their identities, interests, horizons of action, social bases, alliances, and so on. The state’s structural selectivity, specific strategic capacities and vulnerabilities, and powers are always conditional or relational. Their realization depends on the complex web of structural interdependencies and strategic networks linking the state and political system to its broader environment, the strategic links among state managers and other political forces, and the action, reaction, and interaction of specific social forces located within and beyond this ensemble. This implies that the state’s structural powers or capacities, their structural and strategic biases, and their realization do not depend solely on the nature of the state as 7

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Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 128–129, italics in original. On Poulantzas, see Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas.

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a juridico-political apparatus – even assuming its juridical and institutional boundaries could be precisely mapped and prove stable. They also depend on diverse capacities liabilities and forces that lie beyond it. If an overall strategic line is discernible in the exercise of these powers, it is due to strategic coordination enabled through the selectivity of the state system and the role of parallel power networks that crosscut and unify its formal structures.8 Such unity is improbable because the state is shot through with contradictions and class struggles and its political agents must always take account of (potential) mobilization by a wide range of forces beyond the state, engage in struggles to transform it, determine its policies, or simply resist it from afar. These forces are not confined to class relations but may include, for example, gender, ethnicity, “race,” generation, religion, political affiliation, or regional location. This provides a bridge to many and varied kinds of work on states and state power. Exploring states like this does not exclude (indeed, it presupposes) specific state-engendered and state-mediated structures and processes. The form and dynamic of political struggle is typically relatively distinct from other sites and forms of struggle. These specificities result from diverse processes of variation, selection, and retention that may produce a relatively stable political assemblage based on institutional and spatiotemporal fixes. These fixes depend in various ways on specific forms of government, governance, and metagovernance (i.e., “governance of governance”). Nonetheless they are inherently fragile and failure-prone because there are limits to how far basic contradictions and lines of conflict can be displaced elsewhere and/or deferred into the future to produce zones of relative stability within the territory governed by a state. The more strongly structured are social relations within and beyond the state, the greater their constraints on the art of the possible and potential sequences of events. This shapes the character of struggles elsewhere in relevant social formations.9 Because structures rarely entail absolute constraints, actions may overflow or circumvent the strategically specific biases associated with the form of a state or regime. Opportunities for reorganizing specific

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Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1: Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism. Jessop, State Theory; Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State; Jessop, State Power; Jessop, The State.

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structures and strategic reorientation are subject to structurally inscribed strategic selectivities; political forces may need to pursue strategies over several spatial and temporal horizons of action and to mobilize different sets of actors in different contexts to eliminate or modify specific constraints and opportunities linked to particular state structures.

structure and agency in the sra The SRA provides a dialectic reading of structure-agency relations and path-dependency and path-shaping. The referent of terms such as structural constraint, power, or interests in specific conjunctures derives from the overall articulation of elements and their relation to agency. First, structural constraints comprise those elements in a situation that cannot be altered by specific agent(s) in a given time period and they will vary with agents’ strategic location in a social formation. The potential for exercising power depends not only on structural constraints and opportunities but also on the organization, modes of calculation, and resources of relevant agents. In turn the actual balance of power is determined, post hoc, through the interaction of the strategies or actions pursued by these forces within limits imposed through the differential composition of structural constraints. The interests advanced or harmed through the exercise of power must also be assessed relationally. For interests are not absolute but depend on the conjunctural opportunities in a given period and hence on the horizons of action associated with the potential balance of power. This highlights the importance of a conjunctural, relational approach to state power. Second, agency depends on strategic capacities that vary by structure as well as the actors involved. For they always act in specific contexts that result from the asymmetrical coupling between specific institutional materialities and the interaction of other social actors and that affect their ability to pursue particular projects. The effectiveness of these capacities depends in turn on links to forces and powers that exist and operate beyond the state’s formal boundaries and that act as “force multipliers” or, conversely, serve to divert, subvert, or block such interventions. These “strategic selectivities” are reproduced through social practices and can be transformed through cumulative molecular changes and/or more deliberate attempts to transform them. Changes in the identities, interests, resources, goals, strategies, and tactics of particular forces also modify in turn the emergent constraints and opportunities associated with particular structures.

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Third, at least some agents are reflexive, able to reformulate within limits their own identities and interests, and able to engage in strategic calculation about their current situation. Moreover, as such strategies are pursued, political forces will be more or less well equipped to learn from their experiences and to adapt their conduct to changing conjunctures. Fourth, strategic analysis can be taken further if actors are (regarded as) capable of self-reflection about the identities and interests that orient their strategies, can learn from experience, and can envisage and coordinate actions over different spatiotemporal horizons with a view to changing the constraints and opportunities that currently determine the art of the possible. This may involve creating new resources, new rules and new knowledge in the light of strategic lessons learned from earlier attempts to maintain, transform, or overthrow specific sets of social relations. Interest in path-dependency and path-shaping may also provide insights into the emergence and reproduction of structured coherence (or institutional integration) characterized by the relative primacy of different institutional orders and principles of societalization.

dimensions of the state and state power Detailed strategic-relational analyses of specific political periods, stages, or conjunctures require the study of four interrelated moments. First, how is the historical and formal constitution of the state related to the dominant principle of societal organization, if any, in a given social formation? Such principles include religion, military security, economic expansion (or sustainability), the rule of law, democracy, learning, and so on. Different principles imply different state forms and dynamics. For example, states in a social formation dominated by capitalist relations of production may nonetheless crystallize around national security and nation building that coincidentally promote capital accumulation (e.g., East Asian developmental states), or, again, they could crystallize around religious beliefs, leading to more theocratic rule with a strong role for the religious police inside the state apparatus (e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia). There are other possibilities, including, of course, the dominance of capital accumulation as a principle of societal organization. Further, even when this is the case, immediate pressures (such as war) may lead to temporary shifts in priorities (reflected in states of emergency and state control of industry directed to the war effort). Second, what are the structural, discursive, and strategic biases involved in specific state forms, political regimes, forms of government

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and governance, and policy fields? This can be explored in terms of the articulation of six dimensions of the state and state power. Three of these dimensions are more formal, corresponding to what systems theorists might call inputs, withinputs, and outputs, and three are more substantive, concerned with specific discursive and social features that define the nature and purposes of the state and may lend it a certain operational coherence. (1) Modes of political representation and their articulation at various sites and scales – including informal as well as formal institutions and those beyond as well as inside the state; (2) The vertical, horizontal, and transversal organization of the state as an institutional ensemble and its demarcation from and relation to other institutional orders, “civil society,” and other states. This aspect concerns the relations among the branches, institutions, departments, and offices of the state, their spatial, scalar, and temporal division of labor, and the temporalities of policy formation, decision-making, and implementation. (3) The set of state resources, capacities, modes of intervention, and vulnerabilities that shape the possibilities of effective action, whether the state acts alone or with other forces. These capacities are always relational, i.e., states are never omnicompetent, even without resistance. (4) The social bases of the state that are grounded in institutionalized social compromise and reflected in an uneven distribution of material and symbolic concessions to the “population” to secure its support for the state, state projects, specific policy sets, and hegemonic visions. (5) The prevailing state project with its raison d’état and statecraft advanced by different forces within and beyond the state system to define its nature and purposes. The coherence of state power depends on broad acceptance of state projects that provide a framework for individual agents and organs of the state to coordinate and judiciously balance their actions in and across its different sites, scales, and fields of action. The challenges involved in achieving this also explain why state crises often appear as crises of institutional integration and coherence of state action. (6) The hegemonic visions that seek to reconcile the particular and the universal by linking the state’s purposes to a broader – but always selective – political, intellectual, and moral vision of the public interest. Such visions typically rest on an “illusory” public interest that privileges some material and ideal interests, identities, spaces, temporalities, etc., over

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others and that may take an inclusionary (e.g., liberal democracies) or explicitly exclusionary form (e.g., the apartheid state). The articulation of these six institutional and social dimensions is characterized by polymorphy and a certain plasticity as different forces secure the dominance of one or another principles of societalization.10 All forms of state tend to fail due to the paradox that the state is just one part of a complex social order with limited capacities to intervene in other parts of the whole and is, at the same time, held responsible for the whole and expected to intervene in the last instance to maintain social cohesion and institutional integration. This is reflected in six basic modes of crisis corresponding to these dimensions (which are by no exhaustive, witness the discussion of fisco-financial crisis in what follows as well as the possibilities of a wide-ranging “organic crisis” affecting the state in its integral sense) are (1) the breakdown of established channels of representation; (2) a loss of coherence as the state breaks into competing branches, departments, and tiers; (3) a loss of effectiveness of past and present modes of intervention; (4) a crisis in the social bases of the state, reflected in the disunity of the power bloc and/or in the decomposition of the institutionalized compromise that underpinned state power; (5) the loss of legitimacy, perhaps because the state fails in some undertaking on which it had staked its reputation, such as a war or the promise of economic prosperity; and (6) a crisis of hegemony.11 Third, the historical and substantive organization and configuration of political forces in specific conjunctures and their strategies and tactics, including their capacity to reflect on and respond to the strategic selectivities inscribed in the state apparatus as a whole. This raises interesting issues about the extent, pattern, and “policing” of the formal, institutional separation between the state apparatus(es) and other institutional orders, and about the degree of organizational or interpersonal overlap among them. Prevailing forms of governance that connect different institutional and organizational orders are especially important here. Fourth, the interaction of these forces on this strategically selective terrain and/or at a distance therefrom as they pursue immediate goals or seek to alter the balance of forces and/or transform the state and its strategic selectivities. 10

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Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On the first, fourth, and six, see Gramsci, Quaderni; on the third and fifth, see Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1975); on state failure more generally, see Andrew Taylor, State Failure (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).

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the state as a strategic social relation The strategic-relational approach suggests that the state is strategically selective, the site where strategies are elaborated and codified, and the path-dependent product of path-shaping political strategies. 1. The state system can be analyzed as a strategic terrain with structural, discursive, and strategic biases with asymmetrical effects on the capacities of different social forces to pursue their interests over given spatiotemporal horizons – capacities that depend in turn on their ability to read conjunctures and develop appropriate strategies. This terrain shapes the “art of the possible” and helps to distinguish strategies that are “arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed” from those could become “organic” and help to consolidate a new state form or political regime with its typical modes of power.12 2. The state is also a site where strategies are elaborated and codified.13 One cannot understand the unity of the state system without referring to political strategies; nor can one understand how its powers are exercised without referring to political strategies. Even the formal coherence of state structures (whether achieved through formal isomorphism or institutional complementarity) cannot guarantee their substantive operational unity because the state is shot through with struggles and rivalries among its branches and pervaded by the repercussions of more general structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and societal conflicts. The ability to act as if it is a unified political force and pursue politics and policies (including non-decisions as well as decisions) is secured by creating institutional and operational autonomy vis-à-vis the “constitutive outside” of the state and its encompassing political system. This raises important questions about the sources of state projects, strategies, and tactics and the practices and processes that maintain the boundaries that facilitate such autonomy. 3. The structure and modus operandi of the state system can be understood in terms of their production in and through past political strategies and struggles. The current strategic selectivity of the state is in part the emergent effect of the interaction between its past patterns of strategic selectivity and the strategies adopted for its transformation. A similar dialectic, mediated through learning, shapes the calculating subjects that

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Gramsci, Quaderni, Q7, §19: 868. Foucault, History of Sexuality; Foucault, Security.

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operate on this strategic terrain, their identities and interests, and their strategies and tactics. These observations reinforce the importance of strategic concepts in providing “middle-range” mediations between the state form and state power. Politicians, career officials and other state managers are important here, but they typically act in relation to a wider balance of forces; indeed, state projects are often formulated by intellectuals located beyond the state considered as a juridico-political apparatus (but not the state in its Gramscian, integral sense). Relevant strategic concepts for the analysis of the state in capitalist societies include state-sponsored accumulation strategies oriented to economic development and growth, state projects oriented to state building and the internal unity of the state, and hegemonic visions that define the nature and purposes of government for the wider society. These can be defined initially in relation to specific economic, political, and social imaginaries and then related to the deeper structure and logics of a given social formation and its insertion into the world market, interstate system, and world society. Such strategies, projects, and visions are most likely to succeed where they take account of the constraints imposed by existing forms of class domination as well as the prevailing balance of forces and the prospects for their transformation through new alliances, strategies, spatiotemporal horizons of action, and so on. A state’s current strategic selectivity is in part the result of interaction between its past patterns of strategic selectivity and the strategies (successful or not) adopted for its transformation. In turn the calculating subjects that operate on the strategic terrain constituted by the state are in part constituted by the current strategic selectivity of the state system (its forms of representation, its internal structure, and its forms of intervention) as well as by past state interventions.

§ § § § § The SRA to the state and state power recognizes different patterns of institutionally mediated condensations of the changing balance of political forces and this is reflected in a wide range of polymorphous crystallizations of state power. But comparative institutional and historical analysis also requires a common set of orienting concepts to facilitate description and explanation and these can be found in the strategicrelational approach to the state and state power. On this basis, I present four strategic-relational guidelines for analyzing the state: (1) the state is a set of institutions that cannot, qua institutional

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ensemble, exercise power; (2) political forces do not exist independently of the state: they are shaped in part through its forms of representation, its internal structure, and its forms of intervention; (3) state power is a complex social relation that reflects the changing balance of social forces in a determinate conjuncture as reflected and refracted through the institutional ensemble of the state; and (4) state power is capitalist to the extent that it creates, maintains, or restores the conditions required for capital accumulation in a given situation and it is non-capitalist to the extent that these conditions are not realized.14 Some fundamental substantive concepts for analyzing the state’s institutional architecture, its social bases, state projects, and the organization of hegemony can be elaborated on the basis of these guidelines. The first and third guidelines are often misunderstood. They rest on the strategic-relational arguments that (a) the state is neither a unified subject nor a neutral instrument but an asymmetrical institutional terrain on which various political forces (including state managers) contest control over the state apparatus and its distinctive capacities; and (b) class power depends less on the class background of those nominally in charge of the state or their subjective class identities and projects than on the differential class relevance of the effects of the exercise of state capacities in a complex and changing conjuncture, a view that does not reduce state power to class power. Nor does it exclude the influence of the core executive, the military, parliamentary deputies, or other political categories, in all their complexity, in the exercise of state power or the determination of its effects. Nor again does it exclude that the state’s role as a system of political class domination could sometimes be secondary to its role as a system of official domination over “popular-democratic forces” or, indeed, secondary to its institutional mediation of the relative dominance of another principle of societalization (such as theocracy, “racial” apartheid, or genocide). But such issues can be adequately explored only by refusing a radical distinction between state power and class power. This often involves hegemonic imaginaries and institutional and spatiotemporal fixes that together produce zones of relative stability based on active or, more likely, passive consent and structured coherence. Such zones of relative stability typically depend on spatiotemporal fixes, that is, arrangements that enable threats to be displaced elsewhere and/or into the future. Imaginaries are most powerful where they operate across many sites and scales and can establish and connect local discourses and 14

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practices into more encompassing hegemonic (or societal) projects. This excludes many other meanings and possible social worlds. There are, of course, competing imaginaries for different fields of social action and, indeed, rival principles of societal organization. Further, in a world of exploitation, oppression, and exclusion, there are many possible standpoints for construing the world as well as many sources of disruption. Finally, an adequate theory of the state can be produced only as part of a wider theory of society. But this is precisely where we find many of the unresolved problems of state theory. For the state is the site of a paradox. For it is simultaneously just one institutional ensemble among others within a social formation and peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for securing the cohesion of the formation of which it is a part. As both part and whole of society, it is continually asked by diverse social forces to resolve society’s problems and equally continually doomed to generate “state failure” since many problems lie well beyond its control and may even be aggravated by intervention. Many differences among state theories are rooted in contrary approaches to various structural and strategic moments of this paradox. Trying to comprehend the overall logic (or, perhaps, “illogic”) of this paradox could provide a productive entry point for resolving some of these differences and providing a more comprehensive analysis of the strategic-relational character of the state in a polycentric social formation. This approach is intended as a heuristic and many analyses of the state can be easily reinterpreted in strategic-relational terms even if they do not explicitly adopt them or equivalent terms. But then a strategic-relational research program requires detailed comparative historical analyses to reintroduce the specific selectivities in different types of state, state forms, political regimes, and particular conjunctures.

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3 Was There Any Such Thing as a Nonmodern State? Greg Anderson

As Quentin Skinner has persuasively shown, the state was effectively invented as an object of thought in early modern Europe, when thinkers from Machiavelli to Hobbes progressively detached the idea of a more or less free-standing rule-making agency from the persons of flesh-and-blood rulers, the persons who happened to embody such agencies at any given time.1 If so, states presumably could not have been experienced as real phenomena in worlds that knew nothing of post-Renaissance Western political philosophy. Yet, when one then surveys standard studies of the formation of complex societies by archaeologists, anthropologists, historical sociologists, and others, one finds it widely taken for granted that states have materialized in numerous premodern and non-Western settings, from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the pre-Columbian Americas and imperial China.2 So just how meaningful is it to speak of “states” in nonmodern worlds? This chapter makes a very preliminary case, both theoretical and historical, for seeing the state as an essentially modern phenomenon. As I show in what follows, the state makes sense as a social object only in the anomalous metaphysical environment of our own capitalist modernity. Its use as a universal category of historical analysis should therefore

1

2

See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 3–26. Seminal works in this tradition include: Morton Fried, On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960); Robert Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970), 733–738; Elman Service, Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975).

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be questioned. To begin the case, we should first consider the essential quiddity of the state as an entity.

what we talk about when we talk about “the state” If there is an “orthodox” account of the state as an entity in contemporary social science, it would probably be the Weberian proposition that states are complex, rational forms of “political organization.” Specifically, they are “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.”3 More specifically, the state is “a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated, by an executive authority.”4 Which is to say, the Weberian state is presumed to be an objectively observable material entity, one that is rationally detached from the corresponding “society” that it rules, thereby possessing its own distinct subjectivity, will, and interest as an agency. As such, this entity could in principle be found in almost any complex human lifeworld, wherever one can identify something like a coercion-monopolizing rule-making apparatus that appears to be somehow disaggregated from the “households,” the “kinship groups,” and other societal structures that it governs. Dominant as it may still be in certain fields, this account of the quiddity of the state has nonetheless been quite widely questioned. For example, many mainstream political scientists who subscribe to a rigorous methodological individualism have simply dismissed the state altogether as a “mythical” or purely “metaphysical” entity, an object thus unworthy of serious scientific analysis. According to this view, to speak of the state as a unitary intentional actor, as if it were a composite person, is to “reify” a mere “government” or “political system,” a realm where outcomes will always in the end be reducible to the thoughts and actions of selfinterested individuals.5 According to another widely cited account, the state is actually two fundamentally distinct phenomena. Effective analysis must begin by distinguishing a real, concrete “system” of state actors and institutions from the wholly unreal “idea” of the state as a neutral, 3

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Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 1. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 29. See, e.g., David Easton, The Political System: An Enquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953).

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legitimate ruling agency. One can then better appreciate how this prevailing “state-idea” serves the real ideological purpose of “masking” the often partial and illegitimate actions of the “state-system.”6 Then again, arguably the most intriguing recent account insists that the state cannot be reduced either to mind-independent materialities or to a purely subjective idea. It is altogether better seen as a “structural effect,” whereby a particular idea of the state is actively produced and reproduced by its visible material practices. According to Timothy Mitchell, the primary proponent of this view, the state phenomenon “arises” from characteristically modern “techniques” of rule, techniques that “enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, non-material form.”7 Such mundane governmental practices would include, for example, the “precise specification of space and function,” the “coordination of these functions into hierarchical arrangements,” the “organization of supervision and surveillance,” and the “marking out of time into schedules and programs.”8 And the net result of such practices is a particular state effect, the effect of a wholly autonomous, homeostatic agency, a machine-like structure that always already possesses its own distinctive identity, interest, and intentionality. In short, modernity’s highly impersonal, routinized techniques of rule help to “create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society,” a world dichotomized between two mutually exclusive objects.9 And this theoretically satisfying understanding of the state’s quiddity as an entity would seem to offer considerable advantages over the more mainstream accounts discussed earlier. Perhaps above all, as Mitchell himself notes, seeing the state as a complex structural effect, a phenomenon that is made up of both cultural and material components, allows us to “acknowledge the power of the political arrangements we call the state” while at the same accounting for the state’s “elusiveness” as an entity.10 If so, this alternative understanding of the state would also significantly alter the way we might go about addressing the larger historical issue that 6

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See Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 58–89. Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 77. 9 Mitchell, “Society, Economy,” 89. Mitchell, “Society, Economy,” 95. Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991), 94–95.

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is the subject of this chapter. After all, to claim the presence in a nonmodern lifeworld of a purely material entity, an empirically observable ensemble of state-like institutions, is a relatively straightforward business. But identifying the prevalence in nonmodern experience of a state effect, an altogether more complex, more specific, yet more “elusive” entanglement of thought with materiality, is significantly more challenging, not least because it requires us to think more rigorously about the broader environmental conditions that must be present if such an effect is to be materialized in real, lived historical experience. For Mitchell, as noted, the essential preconditions for this effect would be certain “techniques” of rule, which together sustain the impression of an autonomous intentional actor that governs a society of subjects as if from without. But I think we can go further. As I will now try to show, the realness of this state effect in modern experience is in fact contingent upon a much wider circumstantial conjuncture. Indeed, one might say that it presupposes an entire metaphysical environment, one where humans share a very particular set of ontological commitments about themselves and their world.

the state in its metaphysical environment As Mitchell notes, the state is in the end just one of modernity’s many “structural effects,” one of many interconnected, machine-like authorities or systems that work to align the lives of subjects with scientifically formulated norms of health, morality, and productivity, thereby equipping them to flourish as self-directing individuals in a competitive, capitalist environment.11 But to understand more precisely why modern rule assumes this historically anomalous form, one must also consider its historically anomalous metaphysical underpinnings. As I have argued elsewhere, four of modernity’s commonsense metaphysical commitments, in particular, set our capitalist lifeworld apart from all others.12 First and foremost, our modern social being is founded upon an uncompromising commitment to materialism. According to our prevailing standards of truth and realness, the only truly real phenomena are

11

12

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Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 135–159; The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 1–73. See Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn,” American Historical Review 120 (2015), 787–810.

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those materially self-evident, objectively observable entities, relations, and processes that conform to scientifically established “laws” of nature and physics. Within the parameters of our lifeworld, it is simply axiomatic that health and vitality, wealth and value, life and being itself are all in the end reducible to such materialities. And our preferred political, economic, and social systems are all duly designed to operate on this principle. As a result, they allow no role for gods, demons, ancestral spirits, immortal souls, unseen vital forces, or any of the myriad other “supernatural” or purely “imaginary” phenomena that have variously governed, nurtured, energized, and terrorized all other historical realities for millennia.13 Second, a modern capitalist lifeworld is predicated on an anthropocentrism that ordains that all material phenomena must resolve themselves into one of two mutually exclusive experiential orders: a human order, the locus of all the world’s reason, agency, and subjectivity, and a nonhuman order of “nature,” which tends to be objectified as a self-reproducing “environment” of inert “resources,” subject-less “processes,” and enclosable “property,” a subordinate order that we humans are duly entitled to control and exploit as we will.14 In short, our anthropocentrism encourages us to believe that we are masters of our world, not just another of its incidental products. It thereby distances us perhaps irrevocably from most if not all nonmodern peoples, from peoples whose modes of being were governed by unchanging annual rhythms of seasons and heavenly bodies, from peoples whose very subsistence was synchronized with the life cycles of animals and plants, from peoples who knew the lands that nurtured them in some sense as their parents or ancestors, from peoples who took for granted that mysterious nonhuman forces were always out there, immanent in earth, sky, rivers, and seas, making all human life possible.15 Much the same could be said of the third foundation of modern being, which is our lifeworld’s general commitment to secularism. By pursuing life in a disenchanted, anthropocentrist environment, one that is always already governed by what we have ourselves determined to be “laws” of science, we obviously rule out the possibility of any immediate coexistence with autonomous, all-powerful superhuman actors. Insofar as our science 13

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This “Newtonian” materialism has of course long been challenged by quantum physics. See, e.g., Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). On the social production of nature, see, e.g., Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On nature-less nonmodern lifeworlds, see, e.g., Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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can recognize the possibility of divinity at all, it would objectify gods as purely cultural constructs, as artifacts of that discrete realm of human thought and practice that we call “religion,” not as independently existing, “magical” agencies in their own right. And this idea of confining deities within a disaggregated, non-secular realm of human thought and practice would have made no sense at all in most nonmodern lifeworlds, where a purely secular realm was unimaginable because divinity was somehow immanent in all life’s processes, where life itself would have ceased altogether if the gods who self-evidently controlled it were somehow relieved of their responsibilities. “Religion” is a category that makes sense only in our modern, Western world, a world that is already secular, a world where gods have been turned from subjects into objects, because humans already presume they have the know-how and the wherewithal to take charge of life itself.16 And no less alien to nonmodern peoples would be the fourth and last of the core metaphysical commitments that sustain our liberal capitalist reality, namely our commonsense presupposition that humans always and everywhere are natural presocial individuals. We alone in the modern capitalist West, it seems, regard individuality as the true, primordial estate of the human person. We alone believe that humans are always already unitary, integrated selves, all born with a natural, presocial disposition to pursue a rationally calculated self-interest and act competitively upon our natural, presocial rights to life, liberty, and private property. And we alone believe that social being exists to serve individual being, rather than the other way around. Because we alone imagine that individual humans are freestanding units in the first place, “unsocially sociable” beings who ontologically precede whatever “society” our self-interest prompts us to form at any given time.17 According to its original liberal logic, our individualism thus mandates a separation between this self-sustaining “(civil) society” of free, selfactualizing subjects and any corresponding state. While “government” may be necessary to protect rights, especially the right to accumulate 16

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See especially Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). See, e.g., John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 52–65. On humanity’s “unsocial sociability,” see, e.g., Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 31–32.

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property, it is also by definition a “necessary evil,” since it entails alienating one’s natural freedom to rule oneself to other self-interested individuals, who will inevitably rule for themselves.18 Hence government’s powers must be expressly constrained by mechanisms like elections and term limits. Hence too, because the “wealth of nations” ultimately depends on the unencumbered liberty of individuals to act on their innate dispositions to “improve” themselves, a free realm of “private” life must be protected from the realm of “public” power by devices like bills of rights.19 And hence in our modern world alone it seems entirely natural that rulers should not manage the basic means of existence, that what we call the “market forces” of our “economy” should be free from direct governmental control. In our world alone, it seems, human individuals are presumed to possess the capacity to secure all of life’s basic necessities for themselves.20 Returning then to the issue at hand, we can now see better how these anomalous foundations of modern being condition the production of a state effect in modern experience. Doubtless, as Mitchell suggests, this effect is actively encouraged by the depersonalized, quasi-mechanical operations of political institutions themselves. But the effect seems all the more real and natural when it is experienced within the broader confines of modernity’s peculiarly disenchanted, functionally compartmentalized metaphysical environment. In a world where authorities are exclusively human and secular, where life is essentially a material process, and where this life is routinely managed through specialist systems and other such technocratic automata, it seems all but inevitable that the business of making and enforcing rules would likewise be assigned to an autonomous, secular, quasi-mechanical entity. Moreover, our specific perception of the state as a unitary, intentional actor, one that rules society as if from without, is directly informed by our commonsense ontological commitments, which have already predisposed us to see the state in precisely these same terms. This state effect makes intuitive sense to us as modern subjects, as naturally free individuals who inhabit a free private 18

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E.g., Thomas Paine, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. On the protection of property rights as the primary purpose of government, e.g., Locke, Second Treatise, 29. On how the individual disposition to accumulate (the proverbial “invisible hand”) produces national wealth, see, e.g., Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 446. On the invention of “the economy” as a metrological device in the 1930s, see Timothy Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” Geoforum 39 (2008), 1116–1121.

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space of a society, a realm from which the public power of “government” is and should be by definition excluded. Our a priori knowledge of the state as an entity thus seems to be independently confirmed a posteriori by our lived experience of the political regularities that Mitchell so well describes. And from this complex, inextricable entanglement of the state’s materiality with its ideality arises the apparent truth of its self-evidence as a real object. But this then raises a question: would this state effect make any sense as a phenomenon in a nonmodern metaphysical environment? To help answer this question, we can now turn to look briefly at the management of life in two nonmodern worlds, one non-Western and one Western, both of which are conventionally regarded as “statebased societies.”

two nonmodern modes of rule If one thinks of states as essentially material entities, as empirically observable institutional assemblages, it would be relatively straightforward to make a case that Ming China (1368–1644) was governed by a form of state. After all, by the time that Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), the first Ming emperor, had established stable institutional foundations for his new dynasty, an extraordinarily complex and extensive apparatus of rule seemed to radiate out of his new capital at Nanjing. Most immediately, this apparatus included the by now traditional Six Ministries (liubu) of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Justice, and Works, which between them oversaw all governmental business. It included a new Grand Secretariat (neige), whose members served as coordinators between the activities of the ministries and the emperor himself. It included a remarkably sophisticated and far-reaching network of administrative offices that extended not just into all of the empire’s thirteen provinces, but also into every provincial prefecture, every provincial subprefecture, and even every provincial county. And it included a vast army of trained scholar-bureaucrats, all schooled in the venerable Confucian classics, who together filled every one of the multiple levels, central and peripheral, in the intricately hierarchical edifice of Zhu’s imperial apparatus. Now if this colossal, self-managing apparatus were somehow transposed to a modern metaphysical environment and experienced through the subjectivities of modern individuals, one could well imagine the net result being something like a modern state effect. But when we try to

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understand it on its own ontological terms in its own time, it begins to look profoundly different, in at least three ways. First and foremost, this apparatus did not function as a supreme, autonomous rule-maker in a disenchanted, anthropocentrist, metaphysical terrain. As contemporary documents like the Great Ming Code (Da Ming lü) attest, it was rather an instrument with which the emperor, as the “Son of Heaven” (tianzi), sought to realize his divinely bestowed mandate (tianming) to mediate between the heavenly realm of the gods and the human realm of “all under heaven” (tianxi), aligning conduct in the latter with the timeless “way” (dao) of the former by effecting a kind of ethical “transformation” (jiaohua) in his subjects.21 In other words, Ming government, like so many of its predecessors, was predicated upon a distinctly nonmodern ontology, one that took for granted “an orderly system of correspondence among various domains of reality in the universe, correlating categories of the human world, such as the human body, behavior, morality, the sociopolitical order, and historical changes, with categories of the cosmos, including time, space, the heavenly bodies, seasonal movement, and natural phenomena.”22 So unlike a modern state, the Ming imperial apparatus was ultimately subordinate to a higher authority. The order that it produced and maintained was not entirely one of its own making. Second, this apparatus was not understood or experienced as a freestanding, impersonal, machine-like “system.” In the prevailing thought of the time, it appeared to be more like a highly intricate skein of interpersonal relations between a particular ruler and his myriad officials. Indeed, some early Ming texts suggest that officials, as persons, were all but ontologically indistinguishable from the person of the ruler himself. In the essential, lifesustaining tasks of realizing the Mandate of Heaven in the human realm, mediating between gods and mortals, and harmonizing the empire perfectly with the cosmos as a whole, officials and other imperial servants functioned in effect as extensions of the emperor’s body or self. In a common figure of the time, they were seen as the limbs and organs of a unitary, all-inclusive body whose head was the emperor himself: The ruler was the head (yuanshou); his officials were the legs and arms (gonggu); his surveillance and transmission officials were respectively his ears and eyes 21

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See Yonglin Jiang, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), esp. 58–67. Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.

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(ermu) and throats and tongues (houshe), corresponding to the law-enforcing stars (zhifa) in Heaven; and his guards and soldiers were his talons, teeth, armpits, and elbows (zhaoya, yezhou). Together these parts shared one heart and constituted a single governmental body. In order for the body to be healthy, the ruler and officials must live with a single heart and mind (tongxin yide). Together they served as a cosmic unit mediating between the spiritual and human realms.23

Third, as this passage suggests, Ming rule presupposed a fundamentally nonmodern account of human personhood and subjectivity. To begin with, far from being natural, self-interested individuals, persons in imperial China were understood to be merely particular manifestations of a continuous family being or personhood, sharing the same essential breath, pulse, and blood as their ancestors. Hence the extraordinary emphasis in traditional Confucian ethics on “filial piety” (xiao) as a foundation of general vitality. For if all children perpetuate the great chain of their family being by supporting and serving their parents, both during and after their lifetimes, “morality will be promoted and the social order stabilized, people’s livelihoods will be guaranteed and consequently, the government’s financial burdens will be reduced.”24 Indeed, such was the appeal of this ethic that Zhu Yuanzhang actively encouraged his subjects to apply it to their various other interpersonal relations, like those between husband and wife, friend and friend, official and commoner, ruler and ruled, apparently aiming to realize a grand Confucian vision whereby an entire people becomes, as it were, a family writ large.25 In short, the Ming imperial apparatus could not and did not act in the world as an impersonal, secular, superordinate system of rule-making. And its subjects simply could not have imagined themselves as inhabitants of a free “private” space of “society” that such a system might have somehow ruled from elsewhere. In other words, a state effect would have made little if any sense as a phenomenon in this particular metaphysical environment. But lest we think that the impossibility of a “Ming state” is in some way a function of peculiarly non-Western conditions, we can now turn to consider the case of classical Athens (ca. 480–320 bc), a proverbially Western lifeworld. Again, if one is content to analyze the practices of Athenian demokratia in conventional materialist terms, it would be quite possible to make a case for the existence of a secular state-like apparatus in the classical 23 24

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Jiang, Mandate of Heaven, 145, 174, with references to contemporary sources. 25 Jiang, Mandate of Heaven, 61–62. Jiang, Mandate of Heaven, 157.

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era. After all, during the period in question, all major issues of policy and legislation were determined by regular, routinized assemblies (ekklesiai) of “the People” (Demos), whose activities were institutionally supported by a council of 500 (boule), law courts (dikasteria), and hundreds of different governmental officials. True, there is some debate among Greek historians about whether this apparatus technically qualifies for full statehood, given that all institutional roles in Athens were performed by nonspecialist male volunteers.26 But all would nevertheless agree that the polis was ultimately governed by a discrete, bounded “political system,” a kind of command center that can fairly be called “democracy.” Again, however, this putative state-like entity looks very different when it is analyzed on its own ontological terms.27 For a start, the Athenians did not objectify their polis as a disenchanted societal terrain that was functionally divisible into fields of the political, the social, the economic, and so forth. They thought of it as something more like a cosmic ecology, a kind of primordial symbiosis between a pantheon of gods who loved Athens, an ancestral land whose fruits sustained all human and superhuman life in Attica, and a People who worked continually to perpetuate the favor of their gods and the fecundity of their land. And within this metaphysical environment, the supreme rulers were obviously gods, not humans. Between them, dozens of divinities ultimately governed all life’s essential conditions, processes, and outcomes, from weather patterns and crop yields to human health and reproduction to lawmaking, commercial activities, and battlefield fortunes. Thus, the principal human contribution to the management of life in the polis was not the business transacted in assemblies or courts. It was rather the constant traffic of gifts of all kinds that were offered at shrines and sanctuaries all over Attica by all inhabitants, whether male or female, Athenian or non-Athenian.28 Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, the Demos of the Athenians was not a mere aggregate of natural individuals, a congeries of all the male “citizens” who participated in “democracy.” Rather, it was a unitary, corporate self, a kind of ageless human superorganism that was 26

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For the debate, see, e.g., Mogens Hansen, “Was the Polis a State or a Stateless Society?” in Even More Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, ed. T. H. Nielsen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002), 17–47. For a more detailed statement of the account that follows, see Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds,” 794–810. For the contributions of different gods to Athenian life, see Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 387–451.

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ontologically distinct from the particular Athenians who happened to embody it at any given time. Indeed, the primary components of this social body were not persons at all, but all the households (oikoi) that shared in the land of Attica and produced all true-born Athenians. Like the cells of a human body, these oikoi were seen as self-sustaining productive units that existed in a symbiotic relationship with the compound organism that they all collectively comprised. Hence, each Athenian was in a sense a “dividual” person, being simultaneously both a polites, a constituent or expression of Demos, the human essence of the polis, and an idiotes, a constituent or expression of a particular oikos. Their particular polis and their particular oikos was the essence of who they were, the very stuff they were made of. In this environment, the very possibility of standing merely for oneself as a generic human individual, born with various universal rights and species dispositions, was simply unthinkable.29 Accordingly, Athenian demokratia had nothing to do with liberal democracy as we know it today. It referred to an all-inclusive politeia or “way of life,” not to a specialist “political system.” As such, demokratia encompassed whatever was done to secure the vitality of the polis by members of Demos, whether they were acting as the unitary totality of the social body itself or as sundry interdependent parts of this whole. Most immediately, since oikoi were the basic mechanisms for sustaining and reproducing the life of Demos, it encompassed the management of households, a task assigned largely to females. It encompassed essential matters like the recognition of marriages, admissions to polis membership, everyday police work, and ritual engagements with superhuman patrons of neighborhoods and extended families, all of which were routinely administered by self-organizing groups of households, whether bound by ties of blood, locality, or friendship. And it also encompassed matters that households could not administer for themselves, either individually or collectively, matters that concerned the polis as a whole, such as the worship of major Attic divinities, warfare, diplomacy, and the production and enforcement of polis-wide rules. Only these latter life concerns were managed by the unitary totality of Demos itself, when Athenians would voluntarily convene to act in its name and adopt their personae as politai. And even then, this Demos was nothing like the panoptic, purposive, interventionist state of the modern imagination. In the end, it was little more than a consultative body, one that merely produced binding votes on issues 29

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See Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds,” 795–797.

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raised by its constituents, whether these were self-appointed assembly “advisors” or litigants in the courts.30 In sum, in this particular metaphysical environment, where gods were the supreme rulers, where human social being took the form of a primordial body of interdependent households, and where all members of this body, male and female, were continually responsible for reproducing its existence, whether acting as its constituent parts or as the whole, there was no possibility of any secular public-private or state-society divide. Indeed, we might say again that a state-like entity would have made no sense there at all.

implications For now, I hope that these two nonmodern cases will suffice to suggest that the phenomenon we call the state presupposes a peculiarly modern way of being human. Accordingly, to deploy the state as a universal category of historical analysis is not just to risk misrepresenting the lived experience of nonmodern rule-making practices. It is to risk imposing on past worlds the uniquely modern metaphysical conditions that would make such an entity imaginable in the first place. I would therefore recommend that we instead try to understand each nonmodern mode of rule on its own ontological terms, in its own particular metaphysical environment.31 Rather than naturalizing the state as the telos of some universal process of societal development, we should see it for what it is, as a historically anomalous modern phenomenon, as just one of the countless different mechanisms that humans have devised over time to make and enforce binding rules.

30 31

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See Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds,” 806–810. Ethical, philosophical, and historical arguments for an ontological turn in historical practice are presented in summary form in Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds.” A full statement of these arguments, using Athens as the primary case study, will appear in my forthcoming book, The Realness of Things Past. For similar recent calls for an ontological turn in anthropology, see, e.g., Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998), 469–488; Amiria Henare et al., eds., Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); cf. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture.

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part ii FOUNDINGS

4 Comparative Perspectives and Early States Revisited Rita P. Wright

The early understandings of the founding of the world’s first states posited that key technical advances served as catalysts for the bureaucratic control of essential resources.1 Two of the most prominent theorists were V. Gordon Childe, an archaeologist, who viewed the domestication of plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia as an opportunity to develop a surplus that would lead to advances in the economy and social differences. A population shift into geographical regions with low precipitation levels and large river systems in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus, and China was a second factor. Looking worldwide, but largely in the Old World, Karl Wittfogel envisioned that political control of technically complex water management systems would be necessary for the large-scale construction of irrigation canals and the causative factor in state development. A basic assumption was that the introduction of complex technologies would inevitably establish hierarchically bounded societies that served the ambitions of powerful individuals, what will be called here “exclusionary” polities. Their bureaucratic rule would bypass the knowledge base of ordinary farmers, producers, and other members of the society. Although 1

My thanks to John Brooke, Julia Strauss, and Greg Anderson for inviting me to participate in the workshops and to present my ideas to graduate students and colleagues at OSU. Philip Kohl and Vernon Scarborough read two drafts of much longer versions of this chapter, and I thank them for their close readings, commentary, and advice. Sneh Patel assisted me in a close reading in its final stages. Deborah Nichols was generous in sending me many of her publications, but especially her then unpublished paper, coauthored with Susan Evans, on water temples at Teotihuacan. My never-ending thanks to each. All errors are mine alone.

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their commitment to Marxism differed, they borrowed his concepts. Childe emphasized the primacy of the social relations of production over superstructure, while Wittfogel drew on the concept of Oriental Despotism, a society dominated by despotic rule that led to a stagnant society and slow evolution.2 In this chapter, I challenge these assumptions and interpretations based on the results of recent archaeological discoveries, decipherments of ancient texts, and new theories. Investigations in the Old and New Worlds have identified a spectrum of human actors at different social and economic levels in early states. Current research probes widely into the societal infrastructure and has identified independent production, private property, merchants, and craft producers, contra Childe’s belief that they would be controlled by the state. When it comes to water management, in many early states, a variety of inventive strategies were employed and managed for several hundred years by local farmers, while in others, there was a balanced control by exclusionary and corporate groups. The reliance on state-level control of water systems varied, and when it did occur, it took hold during periods of expansion due to a complex of factors.3

counterweights to exclusionary rule of early states The expansion of archaeological research on early states, beyond the evidence known to Childe and Wittfogel in the mid-1950s, has led to the examination of the degree to which state rule was exclusionary.

2

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Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Marx actually originated the idea that control of irrigation systems and Asiatic societies would result in the concentration of state power. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publications, 1977); Vernon L. Scarborough, “Water Management in the Southern Maya Lowlands: An Accretive Model for the Engineered Landscape,” in Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic New World. [Research in Economic Anthropology], Vernon L. Scarborough and Barry L. Isaac, eds. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993), 17–69. For example, see Robert McC. Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), who argued against the hydraulic hypothesis in southern Mesopotamia. The earliest settlements were clustered in diverse ecological zones. The exchange of products from these zones was the stimulus to the later development of social complexity. It was only then that major canal systems were constructed (See figures in Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Robert L. Carneiro, “Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970), 733–738.

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Prominent among these was the introduction of dual processual theory by Richard Blanton and his colleagues based on a series of comparative studies of early civilizations. The theory distinguished between two forms of power that can coexist and change over time: one built on earlier exclusionary models in which leaders monopolized resources and labor, and the other, a more collective and multilayered approach referred to as a corporate strategy. A corporate political strategy is one in which power is shared among different groups and sectors of the society. Unlike the control of power by a single individual or group that restricts political behaviors by others, collective action creates social spaces, social relationships, and domains that establish ties of sufficient political and economic import that limit exclusionary rule. The two forms can coexist in a single society.4 There are numerous examples of early states in which corporate political strategies have been identified based on their material production and water management. For material production, a range of specialist producers, merchants, and interest groups at mid- to lower-level ranks have been identified at Teotihuacan and the Maya in Mesoamerica, Jenne-Jeno in Mali, Cahokia in the United States, the Yoruba of Benin in West Africa, and southern Mesopotamia.5 Although Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis was embraced in the 1940s, perhaps due to its association with Marxism, interest diminished.6 Among archaeologists, especially in the New World, 4

5

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See Richard Blanton et al., “A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization,” Current, Anthropology 37 (1996), 1–14; Elizabeth Brumfiel, “Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem: Gender, Class and Faction Steal the Show,” American Anthropologist 94 (1992), 551–567; John Janusek, Ancient Tiawanaku (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For details of material production, corporate groups, and self-organizing landscapes, see Susan K. McIntosh, “Pathways to Complexity: An African Perspective,” in Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, Susan K. McIntosh, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–30; Roderick McIntosh, Ancient Middle Niger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Timothy Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky, The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Maskhan-shapir (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004); Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Rita Wright, “Cognitive Codes and Collective Action at Mari and the Indus,” in Alternative Pathways to Complexity, Lars Fargher, Gary Feinman, and Timothy Earl, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 225–238. See Barry L. Isaac, “AMP, HH & OD: Some Comments,” in Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic New World. [Research in Economic Anthropology], Vernon L. Scarborough and Barry L. Isaac, eds. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993), 429–471 for the theory’s influence on Mexican anthropologists. In the United States,

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renewed interest has been focused on the influence of local environments, different forms of landscape engineering in early states, and exclusionary and corporate strategies.7 The remainder of this chapter examines the evidence from the Indus civilization and the balance between exclusionary and corporate strategies at different centers and periods in its history. A New Approach to the Indus Civilization The new approaches, theories, and concepts introduced in the general anthropological literature have changed earlier assumptions about the early Indus state. First, studies of the Indus landscape, remote sensing data, and agropastoral studies have called attention to the civilization’s ecological diversity. Its river system was not restricted to the Indus Valley in Pakistan, but extended into northwest India, from which the GhaggarHakra flowed into the Lower Indus and ran parallel to a major Indus channel. Settlements situated on these river systems were landlocked while others were located along the coast of the Arabian Sea and the gateway to the Persian Gulf and trading partners on the Arabian Peninsula and inland cultures. Second, there is less uniformity in the structure of city planning than suggested in the early literature and significant variation in the organization and planning of Indus centers. At regional settlements, construction techniques, planning, and amenities such as water and waste control vary. Third, the new theories and concepts stand as a ready comparative base from which to examine questions of hierarchy and

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Julian Steward showed a strong interest in the hydraulic hypothesis and virtually scooped Wittfogel. In a major article in the American Anthropologist, Julian Steward discussed the ecological significance of irrigation technology and state development (“Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations,” American Anthropologist 51 [1949], 1–27). He identified the major civilizations worldwide that had been influenced. by it. Later he published the results of a conference in which the hydraulic hypothesis was discussed (Julian Steward, Irrigation Civilization: A Comparative Study, Social Science Monograph No. 1. [Washington, DC: Greenwood Press, 1981]). Wittfogel published Oriental Despotism in 1957. Steward did not address the topic in later publications: see Virginia Kerns, Scenes from the High Desert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). For conflicting interpretations of the significance of water temples in Bali, see Steven J. Lansing, “Balinese ‘Water Temples’ and Management of Irrigation,” American Anthropologist 89 (1987), 316–334. Also Clifford Geertz, “The Wet and the Dry: Traditional Irrigation in Bali and Morocco,” Human Ecology 1 (1972), 23–39, and Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Balinese Theatre State in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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map 4.1 The ancient Indus drainage. Copyright Rita P. Wright.

heterarchy (ranked and unranked groups),8 exclusionary versus corporate strategies, diversity of specializations and economies, consensual and 8

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See Carol Crumley, “Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies,” in Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, R. M. Ehrenreich, Carol L. Crumley, and Janet E. Levy, eds. (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Society, 1995), 1–4, for extended discussion of the concept of heterarchy.

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cooperative networked decision-making, and self-organized political and economic infrastructures that were connected through collective action and social and economic networks that contributed to state building. In the Indus civilization, we enter a world of multilayered contexts of institutions, communities, and kin. Rather than approaching the problem from the perspective of exclusive control of specialists and centralization of the economy, I focus primarily on its less well-known social and economic infrastructure of mid- and lower-level contributors that Childe and Wittfogel overlooked. Although there are some differences at individual centers, the Indus evidence shows that productive activities were carried out by corporate groups engaged in independent production. The state’s involvement in water management, initially at least, did not involve irrigation. Hydraulic modifications entailed the construction of wells and drainage systems that were both exclusionary and corporate at different times in the history of the two cities for which we have evidence. Here I discuss the evidence for exclusionary and corporate polities found in the archaeology of craft economies and irrigation systems in three regions of the ancient Indus. The Indus Craft Economies Two artifact categories demonstrate the multiple types of specialist producers and the limited evidence for state control.9 At Harappa and other Indus cities, we have identified specialist producers of ceramics based on differences in the technologies employed and the spatial contexts of their production. Most potters were not attached to a statesponsored bureaucracy but produced vessels in their households, while others produced high-fired stoneware ornaments that built a stronger, more durable, finished product than the household wares in separate workshops. Based on the current evidence, long-distance trading technologies are an example of production and use by autonomous corporate groups. A trading “package” included seals, their impressions, and stone weights. Like the household pottery, we lack evidence for state control. The styles of seals are sufficiently distinctive to identify the work of regional artisans that differentiates them from those in other Indus cities. In addition to their use for internal transactions in Indus cities, the seals were carried by 9

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For an extensive discussion, see Rita Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 145–214.

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merchants when they interacted independently with traders in distant cultures on the Arabian Peninsula.10 Indus Hydraulics, Irrigation, and Water Management There is no evidence for irrigation as a causative agent in state development in the Indus civilization, contrary to Wittfogel’s hydraulic irrigation theory. A significant factor is the environmental conditions that make it difficult to identify canals. This difficulty is due to the significant soil overburden generated by the shifting of the natural flow of the river and deposition of sediment. However, the ancient Indus developed in arid and semiarid zones, and there was a strong need to establish reliable water sources to provision people living in its cities. These systems were well known during the period in which Wittfogel developed his theory, but he did not show any interest in them. In the following I review the evidence for modifications to the landscape to develop reliable water supplies. Whether the water systems were centralized (exclusionary) or locally controlled (collective, corporate control) is discussed in some detail. My discussion of Indus hydraulics is restricted to the river systems and amenities in the Upper and Lower Indus and the newly discovered evidence for waterworks at the site of Dholavira in Gujarat. The Upper Indus, Harappa, and the Beas Settlements The Indus River Valley, for which the civilization was named, is located in present-day Pakistan. The Indus and its tributaries, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej, flow from the Himalayas. The origin of a fifth river, the Beas, is currently under study. After branching in their upper reaches, they come together in a single flow of the Indus River at the Panjnad. The Beas is now a dry riverbed. A second system, the Ghaggar-Hakra, is dependent on melting snows in the Himalayas. The hyphenated name reflects the present-day political boundary between Pakistan and India. The Ghaggar is located in northwest India and becomes the Hakra as it flows across the

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Stefan T. Laursen, “The Westward Transmission of Indus Valley Sealing Technology: Origin and Development of the ‘Gulf Type’ Seal and Other Administrative Technologies in Early Dilmun, c. 2100–2000 BC,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 21 (2010), 1–39. See also Adam Green, “Finding Harappan Seal Carvers,” Journal of Archaeological Science 72 (2016), 128–141.

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border into the Lower Indus Valley. Studies of these two systems have been less concerned, if at all, with Wittfogel’s hypothesis, but more directly with the distinctive qualities of water systems in the five major Indus cities.11 The conditions in the Upper Indus offer challenges in reconstructing the ancient water system and efforts to control the Indus and its branching courses. The principal city in the Upper Indus is Harappa, which is located on the Ravi River. The environment offered especially suitable conditions for early agriculture, since precipitation levels were sufficiently high to carry out a double-cropping system. The earliest settlement at the site was on a landform within a meander channel that became an oxbow lake and through natural processes evolved into a terraced river plain overlooking the lake.12 A second river, the now dry bed of the Beas, ran parallel to the Ravi and was an active stream in Indus times. Eighteen Indus sites flank the inner and outer banks of the Beas and were essential to its regional economy and agriculture.13 Settlements contemporary with Harappa 11

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For publications about Indus hydraulics, see D. P. Agrawal and R. K. Sood, “Ecological Factors and the Harappan Civilization,” in Harappan Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective, G. Posehl, ed. (Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1982), 223–231; H. T. Lambrick, “The Indus Floodplain and the ‘Indus Civilization,’” Geographical Journal 133 (1967), 493–494; Rafique M. Mughal, “The Decline of the Indus Civilization and the Late Harappan Period in the Indus Valley,” Lahore Museum Journal 3 (1990), 1–22; R. L. Raikes, “The End of the Ancient Cities of the Indus,” American Anthropologist 66 (1964), 284–299; R. L. Raikes and R. Dyson, “The Prehistoric Climate of Baluchistan and the Indus Valley,” American Anthropologist 63 (1961), 265–281; R. L. Raikes and G. Dales, “Reposte to Wasson’s Sedimentological Basis of the Mohenjo-daro Flood Hypothesis,” Man and Environment 10 (1986), 33–44; Herbert Wilhemy, “Das Urstromatal an Ostrand der Indusebns und dar Sarasvati-Problem,” Zeitschrift for Geomorphologie N. F. Supplement 8 (1969), 76–93. William R. Belcher and Wayne R. Belcher. “Geologic Constraints on the Harappan Archaeological Site,” Geoarchaeology 15 (2000), 679–713. Joseph Schuldenrein, Rita Wright, and Mohammed Afzal Khan, “Harappan Geoarchaeology Reconsidered: Holocene Landscapes and Environments of the Greater Indus Plain,” in Settlement and Society. Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams, Elizabeth C. Stone, ed. (Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2004), 83–116; Rita Wright, “Origins of Cities,” in Encyclopedia of Urban Cultures: Cities and Cultures around the World, Melvin Ember and Carol Ember, eds. (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 2002), Vol. 1:3–11; Rita Wright et al., “The Emergence of Satellite Communities along the Beas Drainage: Preliminary Results from Lahoma Lal Tibba and Chak Purbane Syal,” in South Asia Archaeology 2001, C. Jarrige and V. Lefevre, eds. (Paris: Editions Recherce sur les Civilisations, 2005), 327–335; Wright et al., “The Beas River Landscape and Settlement Survey: Preliminary Results from the Site of Vainiwal,” in South Asian Archaeology 2001, U. Franke-Vogt and H.-J. Weisshaar, eds. (Aachen: Linden Soft, 2005), 101–111; Wright, Ancient Indus.

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were distributed along this landscape and built on or at the confluence of migrating streams that discharged sediments on these higher surfaces. Referred to as doabs, this higher ground provided a natural refuge from channel sedimentation and lateral migration of the river.14 In a preliminary study that I carried out with Carrie Hritz, we utilized satellite and corona imagery in an attempt to identify landscape features that were not visible in our ground survey.15 The results provided a more nuanced picture than our surveys of the river system and archaeological sites that were located outside of the city in the rural areas. At its most basic level, a number of previously unidentified archaeological sites and Beas channels were noted. All of this new material needs to be groundtruthed. A Corona Atlas may soon be available for more intensive study that will enhance detection beyond ground survey. Thus far, we have not identified canals or any other forms of water management on the Beas or the Ravi. The Lower Indus and Mohenjo-daro The situation in the Lower Indus, where Mohenjo-daro is located, presents a different set of problems. The separation of the Upper and Lower Indus Basins is a function of a major structural geological fault. A long-term study of the geomorphology of the Lower Indus was conducted by geologists, geomorphologists, and archaeologists in an effort to identify evidence for water control.16 For our purposes, I focus on the period between 2,600 bc and 1,900 bc, when Mohenjo-daro was occupied. In spite of extensive geomorphic surveys, Landsat and serial photographic mapping, and historical data, no evidence has been found for canals or embankments, although the overburden of geological events in subsequent periods may have

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Schuldenrein, Wright, and Khan, “Harappan Geoarchaeology.” Rita Wright and Carrie Hirtz, “Satellite Remote Sensing Imagery: New Evidence for Sites and Ecologies in the Upper Indus,” in South Asian Archaeology 2007, D. Frenez, M. Tosi, C. Jarrige, and V. Lefevre, eds. (London: BAR International Series, 2013), 315–321. Louis Flam, “Recent Exploration in Sind: Paleogeography, Regional Ecology, and Prehistoric Settlement Patterns (c. 4000–2000 B.C.),” in Jerome Jacobson, Studies in the Archaeology of India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing, 1986), 65–89; “Fluvial Geomorphology of the Lower Indus Basin (Sindh, Pakistan) and the Indus Civilization,” in Himalaya to the Sea: Geology, Geomorphology and the Quaternary, John F. Shroder Jr., ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 265–287; “Ecology and Population Mobility in the Prehistoric Settlement of the Lower Indus Valley, Sindh, Pakistan,” in The Indus River: Biodiversity, Resources, Humankind, A. Meadows and P. S. Meadows, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 313–323.

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obscured the evidence. The system was dynamic and aggrading. Sediments built up, altered the contours of the plain, and affected river channels. Louis Flam, an archaeologist who has surveyed large portions of the Lower Indus, believes that cultivation was timed to coincide with flooding cycles and shifts in the location of its flow. A second course, the Nara Nadi, entered the basin from the northeast. The Hakra River, to its north, may have flowed into the Nara Nadi. These shifts in floodplain contours would need to be monitored in order to plan locations of fields for cultivation.17 The situation was sufficiently dynamic that the city may have been abandoned when the river shifted its course, either because it put the city in a potentially hazardous position or the floods shifted away from the city.18 These interpretations support geoarchaeological investigations of the depositional characteristics of the alluvium in the city of Mohenjo-daro itself. An important aspect of city planning was the construction of massive platforms of mud brick that elevated certain areas of the city. It included 4 million cubic meters of clay and sediment plus millions of bricks to construct two of the platforms. These “founding platforms” probably had two purposes, one of which was protection against flooding in view of the “overbank deposits” that resulted from cutting the natural flows of the river and dispersing water over widely flooded areas.19 A second proposal was the integration of astronomical data of the sun and fixed stars into elements of the physical landscape.20 These observations likely had a symbolic value that evoked the Kirthar ranges to the north of the city. The entire city was well engineered and planned. Its major north-south streets were orientation points early in city planning, although side streets may have been added later. Visible on a walk through the city are brick17

18 19

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Flam uncovered evidence for irrigation systems for which the dating is uncertain; they may be contemporary with the Indus civilization, but are in areas to the west that are not on the alluvial plain. Flam, Fluvial Geomorphology, 287; Jorgensen et al., “Morphology and Dynamics,” 326. Claudio Balista, “Evaluation of Alluvial and Architectural Sequences at Moenjodaro through Core-Drilling,” in Moenjodaro: From Surface Evaluation to Ground Testing. German Research Project Mohenjo-daro, Giovanni Leonardi, ed. (Rome: RWTH Aachen and Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1988), 130. See also Michael Jansen, Mohenjo-daro: Water Splendour 4500 Years Ago (Berlin: Vertrieb, Wirtschafts- und Verlagsgesellschaft Gas und Wasser, 1993). H. Wanke, “Axis Systems and Orientation at Mohenjo-daro,” in Interim Reports Vol. 2. Reports on Field Work Carried out at Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan, 1983–84 by the IsMEOAachen University Mission, M. Jansen and G. Urban, eds., Forschungsprojekt “Mohenjo-daro (Aachen, 1984), 23–32.

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lined drains, wells built with specially designed bricks, platforms specifically designed for bathing, sewage outlets, and sump pits. These public amenities are widespread throughout the city and although they are present in most neighborhoods, there were significant differences in the placement of sump pits or other types of sewage that most likely emitted natural odors that were unpleasant.21 Where sewage outlets were not available, people improvised by placing large ceramic pots at the edges of courtyards for disposal of household and perhaps personal waste. It was a technically sophisticated system that required extensive planning and maintenance. In many locations, retaining walls and platforms were built to stabilize foundations against groundwater that was only five meters below the surface. The more than 700 wells in the city constituted a major supply of potable water. At least one large-scale project was not part of the original city plan. The Great Bath, referred to by Jansen as a “technical masterpiece,” is the signature image of public structures at Mohenjo-daro, which entailed a significant modification to the landscape. Its central courtyard, pillared hall, wells, massive drain with a corbelled vault, effluent outlets, and large rectangular tank are entered by steps that lead into a 1.35 meter inner shell comprised of uniform bricks bonded with gypsum mortar and layers of bitumen for waterproofing.22 Some scholars have interpreted the structure as evidence for water veneration.23 A close examination of the structure, however, showed that it was “sunken into older building foundations,” indicating that it was not part of the original vision of its city plan but a later innovation.24 An adjacent large building, thought by some to be a granary and by others a hot-air bath or serving a religious function, was built at the same time as the Great Bath.25 What can we conclude from the evidence at Mohenjo-daro? Some aspects of the city appear to have been built during the earliest phase of settlement. They included founding platforms, north-south street plans, lining of its streets with residential dwellings, wells that served as storage and water sources, and control of waterborne waste throughout the entire city. Not surprisingly, based on the construction details of the Great Bath and the adjacent “granary,” major building projects in the city took place in stages as it expanded. 21 23 25

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22 Jansen, Mohenjo-daro; Wright, Ancient Indus. Jansen, Mohenjo-daro, 44. 24 Jansen, Mohenjo-daro. Jansen, Mohenjo-daro, 37. Jansen, Mohenjo-daro, 51.

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The suddenness of the establishment of Mohenjo-daro does not speak directly to Wittfogel’s hydraulic irrigation theory. But the monumental investment in hydraulic amenities cannot be dismissed as one of the significant variables in its founding. However, it was not a “prime mover” in the sense of Wittfogel. It was only one aspect of a major form of centralized planning and conscious alteration of the landscape that required a complex infrastructure for planning and execution. Along with other variables, it was clearly the vision of a powerful elite. A System of Reservoirs and Dams at Dholavira A second and less well-known water system at the city of Dholavira was constructed by founders of the settlement and was later expanded in a construction phase that included a complex system of reservoirs and dams. R. S. Bisht, the director of the research, investigated the reservoirs and dams in some detail, although he appears not to have been interested in the system’s management and Wittfogel’s hydraulic theory.26 Dholavira is located on an island in the Rann of Kutch, where rainfall is exceedingly low and the landscape lacks a major river system.27 Better monsoon conditions existed at 3,000 bc when the first settlers came to the region, but even then precipitation was marginal.28 At its peak, in spite of the challenges of low rainfall and a harsh environment, Dholavira covered around 100 hectares. The city thrived as a result of an innovative engineering system that included more than sixteen reservoirs and a number of dams built to conserve and dispense water. Bisht speculates that the water system was derived from gabarbunds found in nearby southern Baluchistan.29 Gabarbunds are constructed of stone rubble that is set across hill gaps at the juncture of ephemeral streams in order to hold back water and conserve soil and moisture. They either predated or were

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R. S. Bisht, “Paradigms of the Harappan Engineering at Dholavira,” Issues and Themes in Anthropology (2009), 39–70. See also R. S. Bisht, “Secrets of the Water Fort,” Down to Earth, May 15, 1994, 25–31; and R. S. Bisht, “The Water Structures and Engineering at Dholavira,” in South Asia 2001, C. Jarrige and V. Lefevre, eds. (Paris: Editions sur les civilization, 2005), 11–25. In a widely circulated video production of the archaeology at Dholavira, a narrator speaks of a river system. In publications, Bisht is explicit that the water drained off from a “runnel.” D. P. Agrawal, Harappan Technology and Its Legacy (New Delhi: Rupa, 2009). Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering”; R. S. Bisht, Excavations at Dholavira (1984–1985 and 1987–2004) (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 2015).

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contemporary with the early stages of reservoir construction by the first settlers at Dholavira. Bisht reconstructed six stages of construction, based on their stratigraphy and diagnostic artifacts associated with modifications in order to establish the sequence of production.30 Stages I and II are the earliest levels; Stages III, IV, and V mark the expansion of the water system and the city plan. Sometime in late Stage V, the system began to deteriorate and in Stage VI, the city and reservoirs were in disrepair. They were abandoned in the Late Harappan (Stage VI). At its peak in Stages III, IV, and early V, the water system comprised 20 percent of the total size of the city. Whether the earliest settlers at Dholavira were aware of gabarbund technology has not been proven, although there are similarities. The two earliest constructions in the pre-urban (Stages I and II, which correspond to the Early Harappan period [3200–2600 bc], pre-urban levels) are of special importance in the context of Wittfogel’s causative hydraulic hypothesis. The Dholavira water system is in time and space a long way from the Mesoamerican cities of Tikal and Caracol and the systems are not identical.31 But like the latter, their initial construction was small in scale and suggestive of a collective, corporate strategy built and maintained by individuals who possessed the knowledge of the seasonal requirements of an agricultural community. The technology involved “removing alluvium and raising bunds” in order to carve out reservoirs. A firm date for the establishment of building levels was established based on a probe into “water-scored bedrock” in which diagnostic pottery from Stages I and II were found “sticking to the bedrock.” In distinction, the subsequent, more complex construction phases were embedded in waterborne sand and made of large boulders that differed from local geological formations, obviously brought in from some distance to better fortify structures. They were found lying “helter skelter” in the bed of a check dam in the final days of occupation of the city (around 1900 bc).32 Construction of the first reservoir in the pre-urban period began north of the village on high ground to take maximum advantage of gravity flow and a storm water stream (the Manhar torrent) that was brought about by summer monsoons. The reservoir was built at the side of the torrent and

30 31

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Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering.” Arlen Chase and Vernon Scarborough, “Diversity, Resilience and IHOPE-Maya: Using the Past to Inform the Present,” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 24 (2014). Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering,” 42, 44.

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included three check dams that were built upstream to reduce the stream’s velocity.33 Later, the system was expanded to include a second reservoir that drew from the Mansar torrent to the north. It included two check dams. The same principles used in the construction of gabarbunds in Baluchistan were employed in constructing the reservoirs at Dholavira. However the extensive use of check dams to monitor gravity flow appears to have been a local innovation. This low-level technology employed by the individuals who constructed the earliest reservoir system is a classic example of what Elinor Ostrom refers to as a Common Pool of Resources where there is a practical need for engineering and agricultural skills that are better carried out among interdependent members of, in this case, an agricultural community.34 Construction and maintenance at this level are based on collective action in which a group maintains the water source without intervention from outsiders who lack their knowledge base. The potential for an elaborate system was realized during an expansion of the city. The major construction phases of the water system were sufficiently more complex than the system built in the pre-urban stage to propose more centralized control, but it could have been built and maintained by the same corporate groups that constructed the first reservoirs. The new structures were formed from the massive boulders noted earlier. They were interspersed with small stones. Then, at its peak (Stages III, IV, V), the system required some sixteen reservoirs capable of carrying water throughout the city in a well-engineered plan comprised of check dams, steps leading into reservoirs, storm water channels, embankments, and modifications to the landscape designed to increase the volume of water, which extended out to agricultural fields. The system, therefore, had a dual function, unlike the amenities at Mohenjo-daro. They served the needs of people in the city by providing potable water at its highest levels (which, by the way, is where a large building that Bisht refers to as the “castle” was located). And as water cascaded through the city and passed through the community, it was used for domestic purposes before it was channeled to the agricultural fields. A similar system has been described at the Mesoamerican city of Tikal.35

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Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering,” 42. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Vernon L. Lucero and Lisa Lucero, “The Non-hierarchical Development of Complexity in the Semitropics: Water and Cooperation,” Water History 2 (2010), Fig. 4.

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At its peak, the system of reservoirs and dams created in the urban stages was a major engineering achievement. Aesthetically, it would have rivaled most cities in the ancient world. Situated on a commanding slope, with its major buildings on the north and residential areas to the south, where a gateway led into the interior of the city, at certain times of year visitors would have witnessed a system of reservoirs and dams in action. The display would have included cascades of water from a series of reservoirs separated from each other by broad bunds, and in a good year when all the reservoirs were full, would have provided a spectacular view and drawn people to the city. In some ways the reservoirs (or tanks) built in the urban period at Dholavira possess similarities with the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro, but at least some of its watered spaces were not used for ritual purposes. Bisht describes a tank that was sufficiently large for a person to walk through in which past activities are represented by archaeological remains: [I]n the centre of the tank, there was built a miniature tank having length, width and depth of 80 cm each. On the floor, there are found marks which could be caused only when one descended into the tank and made use of the floor for grinding, polishing and sharpening tools in addition to pounding something. How and when that was done is quite inexplicable. It might be a quite regular practice perhaps. Some of the steps too wore circular depressions caused for placing water jars. At the floor level was observed a hole which should most plausibly, be connected to a drain for flushing out the water from time to time.36

The water system at Dholavira uniquely integrated amenities that included drinking water, bathing platforms, house drains, sanitary jars, and tanks “in all divisions and subdivisions of the city” with an irrigation system in which the management of water served a dual purpose.37 Some of the small and large tanks at Dholavira carried potable water (not sewage or other waste) and was unlike the system engineered and envisioned at other Indus cities, where the drainage network was designed solely to dispose of domestic effluent. In addition, this is the first evidence in the Indus for an engineering system that watered agricultural fields. These hydraulic constructions implemented after the stages of the founding settlers and implementation of the city’s plan coincided with an expansion that was on a scale that matched peak periods at the Mesoamerican cities of Teotihuacan, Tikal, and Caracol in Mesoamerica. It may have surpassed the collective activities initiated by the founding settlers. 36 37

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Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering,” 62. Bisht, “Paradigms of Harappan Engineering,” 63.

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The evidence for the corporate nature of the city’s initial founding, however, and the presence of an established population, more likely involved coexisting exclusionary and corporate political strategies. Assumptions Laid to Rest I began with a discussion of Childe and Wittfogel, who viewed the development and control of certain technologies as primary vehicles that would lead to the social control and centralization of political economies. The theories and attribute lists developed by V. Gordon Childe are enduring legacies that continue to influence archaeological studies, and Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis has led us to a broadened view of the influence of environments and alternate forms of water systems. However, the weight of their interpretations has persisted too long throughout the twentieth century and even today, in spite of contestations to the contrary. Many textbooks maintain a view of early states as powerful machines that drove self-aggrandizing leaders to consolidate political organization at the expense of mid- and lower-level contributors that moved civilizations forward and sustained them. This static and unrelenting repetition of the past presents a false view. I have only touched on two aspects of this problem in the literature on early states. The examples of water management and production specialization are just the tip of the iceberg for which we now have a better understanding. To be sure, there are many differences between the “West and the rest,” but the underlying implication of stagnation of early states can be put aside. The recognition of agency of all human actors beyond ruling bodies has brought to light the whole spectrum of early societies. The sole use of textual sources from early states tended to skew interpretations toward the top, in spite of persistent attempts to dig more deeply into its substrate.38 Of equal importance have been worldwide comparative analyses that have revealed the sheer variety of early states and management strategies and prompted the reevaluation of theories of dominance and for purposes of this chapter, the introduction of the corporate concept. These

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Robert McC. Adams, “The Mesopotamian Landscape: A View from the Frontier,” in C. B. Moore, ed., Reconstructing Complex Societies: An Archaeological Colloquium. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplementary Studies 20 (1974),1–22; Robert McC. Adams, “Ancient Mesopotamian Urbanism and Blurred Disciplinary Boundaries,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012), 1–20.

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and other concepts have helped uncover “negotiation between positioned social agents.”39 Given the limitations of this short chapter, the cross-cultural approach brought to this discussion argues that the control of rulers of state bureaucracies were but one aspect of the base from which independent, autonomous groups carved out social spaces and established ties of sufficient political and economic import that limited exclusionary rule. The archaeological evidence for the Indus civilization brought to this text is the result of recent investigations at three of the major Indus centers. When taken together, the archaeological evidence for the Indus civilization presented here shows the presence of both exclusionary and corporate strategies. At Harappa, careful excavation throughout the ancient city exposed the corporate nature of its productive activities. Situated in ordinary households, the variety of innovative technologies present and the absence of indications of centralized control of local production was suggestive of autonomous craftsmen. At Mohenjo-daro, the meticulously planned arrangement of amenities that made the city livable may have been the inspiration of a single genius that was collectively engineered by knowledgeable corporate groups. However, the grandness of the undertaking argues for the leadership of a powerful elite. At Dholavira, the early development of a water system based on the modest restructuring of an ancient runnel to provide potable water speaks directly to a collective, corporate enterprise.40 It is only the later expansion of the system and the timing of its cascading system of water flowing from its reservoirs and dams that the question of a centralized system of water management arises. It is possible that local groups in Dholavira’s neighborhoods managed the timing and maintenance of the flow of water, but given the hierarchically ordered residential areas on the landscape with major buildings at its apex where fresh water was available, the exclusionary management of the system seems plausible.41 In sum, the evidence suggests that there were multiple pathways toward state formation in the ancient Indus Valley.

39 40

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Brumfiel, Breaking and Entering, 551. The research of Scarborough and other Mesoamerican archaeologists provides a model for my understanding of human and environment relationships with respect to water that was not considered by Wittfogel. As proposed in Lansing, “Balinese ‘Water Temples,’” 326–341, Balinese “Water Temples” were a symbolically charged adaptation to a local ideology.

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5 (Re)Introducing the State on the Medieval Swahili Coast Chapurukha M. Kusimba

One of the most significant transitions in history was the emergence and institutionalization of the state.1 This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate on the emergence of the state, a debate that has not yet fully incorporated the rich data from sub-Saharan Africa. I focus on the Swahili coast and address the factors that contributed to development of the state: trade, extractive technology, and the elite monopolization of wealth-creating resources. The state represents a structural transformation from more simple formations – bands, tribes, and chiefdoms – and incorporates a qualitatively different set of integrative principles. All states, irrespective of temporal or spatial location, display a recognizable group of diagnostic features related to distinctive integrative principles and reflected in aspects of material culture. These features include urbanism, social stratification, political organization, production, specialization and exchange, and long-distance interactions.2 The state may emerge when scale outgrows the ability of chiefs to regulate political unity. As it emerges, the state’s continued survival and significance requires the invention and legitimation of new administrative, technological, economic, and ideological systems and strategies. Both voluntarist, “peaceful” and coercive, “violent” strategies have been employed to create the state.3 Once 1

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See Gary Feinman, “The Emergence of Inequality: A Focus on Strategies and Processes,” in Foundations of Social Inequality, T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman, eds. (New York: Springer, 1995), 225. Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 81. Seminal works in this tradition include Robert Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970), 733–738; Robert Carneiro, “War and Peace: Alternating

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the state has been created, legitimation of the power and place of the emergent leadership takes a central role. Even as the jury is still out on the causal factors for the foundation of the state, there is wide agreement that mobilization of resources necessary for state sustenance is dependent on employment and regulation of economic activities such as trade. Trade is a vital means of distributing risks, establishing flexible social ties, and mediating local scarcity and seasonal resource crises. I have argued with Rahul Oka that “trade is a necessity [and is] ever-present in any system of exchange and is the material basis of the relational network of exchange. As a handmaiden of our complexity, trade has accompanied and abetted humanity through the Upper Paleolithic, the emergence of agriculture/social complexity and the rise and decline of chiefdoms, states and nations.”4 In many ancient societies, appointed or royal elite traders/trade specialists engaged in diplomatic missions to other polities or settlements on behalf of the political rulers, facilitated gift exchanges, and secured military, marital, and other trade alliances. This trade was administered through controlled neutral zones called “ports of trade” that helped both political and economic elites. Contrary to Karl Polanyi, these ports were profitable mainly because the political elite gained revenue by offering protection and autonomy to traders. For example, Kenneth Hirth has shown that the presence of “gateway communities” in Mesoamerica functioned as zones where trade could be facilitated, creating conditions that favored elite control and regulation of long-distance exchange by centralizing and regularizing infrastructures5. Bennett Bronson elaborated Polanyi’s gateway communities hypothesis by proposing a dendritic model for understanding how a partnership or alliance of economic and political elites could exploit strategic locations to gain access to overseas traders while ensuring the flow of high-demand

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Realities in Human History,” in Studying War: Anthropological Perspectives, Steven P. Reyna and R. E. Downs, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3–27. Robert Carneiro, “A Clarification, Amplification, and Reformulation,” Social Evolution and History 11 (2012), 5–30; Morton Fried, On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960); Richard P. Schaedel and David G. Robinson, “The Pristine Myth of the Pristine State,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues, L. E. Grinin et al., eds. (Volgograd: Uchitel Publishing House, 2012), 262–277; Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 18. See our recent survey of how trading systems and societies emerge: Rahul Oka and Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “Archaeology of Trading Systems 1: A Theoretical Survey,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16 (2008), 339. See also Chapters 3 and 6 by Greg Anderson and Michael Martoccio, respectively, in this volume.

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products upstream.6 His model illustrated elite strategies for monopolizing exotic and prestige materiality and use for alliance building and gift exchange with their hinterlands counterparts to ensure the free flow of highly desirable wealth-creating products. He also showed how urban areas attracted skilled craftspeople and would inevitably control manufacturing by producing bulk that rural areas would not competitively produce. Thus as states consolidate power, merchants find themselves in more stable political environments. Gradually their foci shift from risk aversion to profit and entrepreneurialism. As they prosper, economic elites use their enormous wealth to buy the political patronage necessary to influence and direct state fiscal policies. Normalization of political stability and tradefriendliness disproportionately benefit economic elites, who use their privilege to maximize profits and lobby for greater freedoms. Relationships that were once adversarial between economic and political elites increasingly become cozy because both are united by a shared set of interests.7 In our time, the notion that individuals use wealth acquired through networks to gain power is widely acknowledged.8 In this perspective, motivated by self-interest, elites aspire to control wealth-creating resources and the means to do so. These include (1) control of raw material sources, (2) the successful drawing of economically important sectors of the population into labor-intensive group activities, (3) control of information, and (4) orchestration of networks of interdependence that restrict power within the small circle.9 What circumstances favor elite 6

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Arguably one of the most important theoretical renderings of how to think about and operationalize city and rural interactions is by Bennett Bronson, “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes towards a Functional Model of the Coastal State in Southeast Asia,” in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, Vol. 13, Karl L. Hutterer, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), 42. A detailed elaboration of this hypothesis is fully discussed in Rahul Oka and Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part I,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16 (2008), 339–395, and Rahul Oka, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, and Vishwas Gogte, “Where Others Fear to Trade: Modelling Adaptive Resilience in Ethnic Trading Networks to Famines, Maritime Warfare, and Imperial Stability in the Growing Indian Ocean Economy,” in The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters, Eric C. Jones and Arthur D. Murphy, eds. (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2009), 201–240. See Chapter 3 in this volume. Jean Arnold has hypothesized that the adoption of seagoing vessels allowed Chumash coastal hunters to access distant resources and obtain more biomass per increment in travel time, a technological change that would have enhanced production while increasing social inequality. Jean E. Arnold, “Transportation, Innovation and Social Complexity among Maritime Hunter-Gatherers,” American Anthropologist 97 (1995), 733–747.

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application of network or corporate strategies to gain control over resources? Blanton and colleagues saw “a loose association of the corporate strategy with environmental situations providing the potential for substantial agricultural development and of the network strategy with the marginal environments.”10 Thus, in marginal contexts, trade in prestige goods may be a more feasible power strategy than those dependent on appropriating the surplus production of staples. Once they assume and legitimize political authority in marginal contexts, the elites use their position to control trade infrastructure and social networks with their trading partners. They maintain trade and ensure a continuous flow of prestige trade items through the institutionalization of various peer strategies including trust, reputation, personalities and contacts, and goodwill. Trust can be expressed in networks of alliance including marriage and inherited friendship. Networks of trade and gift exchange help individuals directly involved in managing exchange systems to build local power bases and loyal factions that enable them to create and extend networks of power beyond local boundaries. The goods, ideas, and alliances provided by trade are fundamental in forming and maintaining new patterns of centralized control over labor and surplus production. Trade in rare, highly desirable prestige goods almost inevitably requires control and management of exchange networks and infrastructure. Elites may aspire to conquer zones of desirable resources – arable land, cattle, precious metals, obsidian, or ivory, for example – and bring them under political control. If successful, they inevitably gain control of the region’s resources but also its labor to help exploit them. For example, European colonies in Africa and the Americas were not only exploited for raw materials but for cheap human labor as well.11 However, political control also requires the development and deployment of infrastructure and skilled and loyal administrators to ensure that the resources reach state capitals. This is often an expensive option and was in fact not regularly employed in the past. At the core of elite strategies is negotiation with their counterparts to secure access and protection of trade routes and free trade and to minimize unnecessary and potentially expensive coercive strategies.12 They 10

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The seminal paper on this topic remains Richard Blanton, Gary Feinman, Steven Kowalewski, and Peter Peregrine, “A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization,” Current Anthropology 37 (1996), 7. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1971). Nam Kim and Chapurukha Kusimba, “Pathways to Social Complexity and State Formation in the Southern Zambezian Region,” African Archaeological Review 25

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develop networks of alliance and friendship formalized through elite marriages, gift exchange, and ritualized kin networks.13 How did elites in the medieval Swahili state gain, monopolize, and retain power?

trade and the medieval swahili state The pathways through which complex chiefdoms and polities emerged on the African coast has been a central theoretical debate in the study of later African prehistory. Three generations of archaeological investigation have each reached contrasting conclusions regarding the founding of these states. The first generation delegitimized native Africans whose ancestors have lived in East Africa for nearly 6 million years and characterized the medieval polities as colonial outposts founded by Asian mariners, migrants, and merchants. The second generation promoted native African agency, often silencing any external Asian influences. The third generation recognizes the core contributions of interactions between East Africans and other communities who included Asians in the evolution of the state. It recognizes that trade, technology, and migration were crucial in their development, but these interlocked upon processes that were homegrown.14 East Africans were known to first-millennium Greco-Romans, who included several towns in their global map.15 Although the locations of these emerging citystates remain elusive, archaeological evidence in the form of Roman-era beads and amphorae point to early interactions with the Mediterranean world.16 By the mid-first millennium ad, the citizens of the East African coast were nominally Islamic, a consequence of centuries of economic interactions with the wider Indian Ocean communities. Yet despite these connections, it was a culture that remained essentially African in

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(2008), 131–152, and Nam Kim, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, and Lawrence Keeley, “The Role of Warfare in Shaping the Development of Social Complexity in Southern Zambezia,” African Archaeological Review 32 (2015), 1–34. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, Zapotec Civilization: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 105; but see also Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Chapurukha Kusimba, “Early African Cities: Their Role in the Shaping of Urban and Rural Interaction Spheres,” in The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World, Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff, eds. (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 229. Lionel Casson, The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Juma, Unguja Ukuu (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004).

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nature.17 Africa and Asia have been economically and technologically linked for millennia. The numerous archaeological remains recovered at many sites across eastern and southern Africa bear witness to these connections.18 Indo-Pacific beads and glass, Middle Eastern glazed pottery and jewelry, and Chinese stoneware and porcelain have been recovered at nearly all medium to large settlements along the eastern and southern African subcontinent from the early first millennium ad to the present. The introduction and adoption of numerous Asian domesticates into the African cuisine, and many other non-African materials too numerous to mention bear witness to the global connections, contributions, and complexity of Africa’s past and dismantle the long-held narrative that Africa was isolated from Eurasia and contributed precious little to global civilization.19 Akin Mabogunje pointed out in his study of Yoruba urbanism that cities do not exist on their own, but are tied to their hinterlands. He demonstrated that Yoruba cities performed specialized functions in the context of a largely agricultural and undifferentiated hinterland.20 Nevertheless, cities are often of markedly different character from their hinterlands, including greater ethnic diversity, a higher degree of social complexity and status differentiation, and more diverse economic and subsistence activities.21 City-states and states have tended to exert economic, social, or ideological power with regard to their hinterlands. The intensity of the relationship was often determined by many factors, including terrain, productivity, and transportability. In fact, city-state polities never truly controlled their hinterlands, but were dependent

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See James de Vere Allen, Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993); John Middleton, African Merchants of the Indian Ocean: Swahili of the East African Coast (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004); Peter Mitchell, African Connections: Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005). Shadreck Chirikure and Innocent Pikirayi, “Inside and outside the Dry Stone Walls: Revisiting the Material Culture of Great Zimbabwe,” Antiquity 82 (2008), 976–993. Mitchell, African Connections, 39. Akin Mabogunje, Yoruba Cities (Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1962), 3–4. Archaeologists have erroneously credited late Africanist Bruce Trigger for this revelatory observation. Adria LaViolette, “Swahili Cosmopolitanism in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, ad 600–1500,” Archaeologies 4 (2008), 24–49; Adria LaViolette, “The Swahili World,” in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 901–914; Adria LaViolette and Jeffrey Fleischer, “The Swahili,” in African Archaeology, Ann B. Stahl, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 392–419.

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upon and often were held hostage by their leadership, who might choose to “vote with their feet,” offering their allegiance to rival cities.22 Ongoing research on the medieval period on the Swahili coast and southern Africa documents a continuous, nearly unbreakable, bidirectional interaction in the form of trade that predates the introduction of Islam and Christianity in Africa. Emerging data from southeast Africa, in the Rufiji Delta and Pangani,23 and our own work on the coast and inland Kenya show the existence of regular, continuous interaction and crossfertilization of ideas, goods, and services. That coastal, hinterland, and interior networks involved the bidirectional movement of trade has been amply demonstrated in these studies (Table 5.1). On the other hand, transoceanic connections are equally strong and gain prominence – especially beginning from ad 800 onward, after nearly a 400-year hiatus – following a general decline of empires during this period that caused a drawdown of transoceanic trade between 400 ad and 700 ad. As interest in African products gained prominence in Eurasian markets, the Swahili coast and its emergent managerial and economic elite would increasingly serve as a conduit through which goods, ideas, and services would move bidirectionally into and out of Africa. Both connections were vital and would bring prosperity to the participants in this transoceanic trading system. The strategic location of the coast as a gateway in and out of Africa created opportunities for local elites to manipulate their social ties and networks. On the other hand, their positioning had a built-in disadvantage: their prosperity depended on the willingness and compliance of their inland and transoceanic trade partners.

structuring swahili networks Today nearly 400 medieval settlement sites dot the medieval coastal landscape from present-day Somalia to Mozambique. Similarly, nearly double that number of settlements has been recovered primarily in inland Kenya, 22

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But territorial states and centralized polities do exert such control as they have large armies that can ensure provincial polities comply. See Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 240–263. Matthew Pawlowicz, “Modelling the Swahili Past: The Archaeology of Mikindani in Southern Coastal Tanzania,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 47 (2012), 488–508; Matthew Pawlowicz, “Finding Their Place in the Swahili World: An Archaeological Exploration of Southern Tanzania,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa (2012), 247–248; Jonathan R. Walz, “Route to a Regional Past: An Archaeology of the Lower Pangani (Ruvu) Basin, Tanzania, 500–1900 ce.” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2010.

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ad 1250–1500 Stylistically diverse pottery, spindle whorls, coins, chlorite schist, Islamic monochromes, Chinese Longquan and Tongan ware, Indonesian Sawankholok jars, Indo-Pacific beads and Egyptian glass

ad 1000–1250 Stylistically diverse pottery, rock crystal, spindle Regular coastal, regional, and interregional whorls, copper and silver coins, Islamic sgraffiato, Chinese Qing Bai, Cizhou ware, Bronze mirrors, Indo-Pacific beads

Period IIIb

Period IIIa

ad 300–600

100 bc–ad 300 Local early Iron Age pottery iron and iron slag

Period IIa

Period I

Local and person to person

Azanian pottery; triangular oblique, and double Regular coastal and zigzag patterns predominate; Sassanian Islamic, regional glass, and carnelian beads and Roman Amphora

ad 600–1000

Period IIb

No evidence

Some trade

Zanjian Pottery: red barnished and hagshaped Regular coastal, regional, Egypt, Persian Gulf and Indian Subcontinent cooking pots, graphite finish and trellis patterns; and interregional Partho-Sassanian Islamic, white-glazed, Chinese Dusun Yue, Guangdong Coastal Green, and Egyptian glass, carnelian beads, iron

Regular regional and international trade with Persian Gulf, Egypt, India, and possibly China

Regular coastal, regional, Regular regional and and interregional international trade with China, Southeast Asia, India, Persian Gulf

Regular coastal, regional, Regular regional and and interregional international trade

ad 1500–1750 Stylistically diverse pottery, Indian pottery, European peasant floral wares

International Trade

Regular coastal, regional, Trade continued but in and interregional a different way

Hinterland Trade

Period IV

Archaeological Finds in Cities

ad 1750–1950 Indo-Pacific beads, glass bangles, Chinese blue on white, Japanese Karatzu ware, European floral ware, Islamic monochrome pottery, iron

Time

Period V

Period

table 5.1 Summary of relationships between the East African coast, the hinterland, and the Indian Ocean, 300 bc–ad 1950

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Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. Both coastal and inland settlements were diverse, ranging from hamlets to large city-state and state capitals. Similarities exhibited in material culture in the form of pottery, as well as trade ceramics and beads, show local, regional, and extra-regional trade networks. Within these settlements are clear distinctions based upon differential access to wealth. The emergent elite seem to have enjoyed greater access to resources. The coastal elite exploited the abundant, easily available coral while their inland counterparts such as those in Zimbabwe used dry stone architecture to construct their homes. Both techniques of erecting elite residences demanded intense investment in architectural expertise, labor, time, and resources. Elites’ investment extended beyond building permanent homes for themselves and their families. Investment in local agrarian and other extractive industries such as ironworking is visible in all contexts. On the coast, coral mining and lime manufacturing, bead making, boat construction, weaving, and commercialized fishing gained importance, while in the interior, ironworking, goldmining, mining for rock crystal and other precious stones, professional hunting of big game for ivory, horns, skins, and meat products, and agrarian and livestock farming became important activities.24 The consequences of these changes meant that on the coast, the stone house increasingly became a symbol of elite power and prosperity. In the interior, occupying the stone house on the hill or a successful farm with many wives and children, owning large herds of cattle or camels, or being a successful and revered hunter served a similar purpose. Access to some trade items, like Chinese porcelain and Islamic monochromes, was limited by availability and affordability. However, other trade items like beads and cloth due primarily to their portability, transportability, and desirability were distributed and consumed in the entire region.25 The hundreds of spindle whorls and bead grinders that abound at virtually all sites excavated on the coast show the importance of these industries in the regional economy. Thus, the interaction 24

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John A. Calabrese, The Emergence of Social and Political Complexity in the ShashiLimpopo Valley of Southern Africa, ad 900 to 1300 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 38; Munyaradzi Manyanga, “Resilient Landscapes: Socio-environmental Dynamics in the Shashi-Limpopo Basin, Southern Zimbabwe c. ad 800 to the Present,” Studies in Global Archaeology 11 (2006), 21. It is also possible that the inland and coastal elites were responding to different trends in tastes and preferences, especially in the Indian Ocean world, hence (some of) the coastal elites’ preferences converged with those of their counterparts in India, the Middle East, etc., and other preferences evolved in line with regional preferences as calculated by cattle, cloth, and beads.

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spheres that are visible here are the ones in which specialization and monopolization of specific tasks by region and availability became normalized (Table 5.1). As illustrated in Table 5.1, the medieval Swahili city-state exhibits three scales of interaction that were crucial for its rise and sustenance: first, there was the state’s relationship with nearby rural fishing and farming villages; second, the coast’s partnership with inland communities; and third, the relationship with various trading partners via Indian Ocean networks.26 On each of these three scales, material evidence connects the state with economic and social interactions that give us clues to the evolution, character, and constellation of Swahili civilization. Like any other state, the medieval Swahili state was characterized by inequality in access to crucial resources, such as labor, arable land, fishing areas, and mangrove forests, that were important factors underlining its emergence. As Indian Ocean trade networks overlay these local inequalities, regional and international trade goods were incorporated into elite-controlled social and economic networks. These three scales or levels do not have a necessary chronological relationship, and each of them could be paramount in any particular region at any particular time. The question of the relative importance and the nature of interactions at these three scales is an empirical one. Paul Sinclair proposed that the coastal trading centers were linked together in urban clusters where different locations had specializations in production and trade based on different product availability and specializations in the inland groups.27 More recently, Sinclair, Ekblom, and Wood show that similar interaction spheres we have found in Kenya also existed in southeast Africa, linking Mozambique to Great Zimbabwe. Their study illustrates the importance of regional multiscalar approaches toward understanding early interactions and exchange. They show that Chibuene’s strategic location provided its residents with exclusive access to long-distance networks. As a port of entry for trade goods found in the interior regions of southern Africa from ad 750 until circa ad 1000, Chibuene was “a nodal point connecting individual traders from at least three networks: the southern

26

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Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Sibel B. Kusimba, and Laure Dussubieux, “Beyond the Coastalscapes: Preindustrial Social and Political Networks in East Africa,” African Archaeological Review 30 (2013), 399–426. Paul Sinclair, “Chibuene – an Early Trading Site in Southern Mozambique,” Paideuma (1982), 149–164.

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African interior, the northern coastal trade network and the transoceanic trade network.”28 Similarly, our research on the Kenyan coast revealed that Mtwapa, like other ports on the coastal mainland, played a significant role in linking the interior with the coast and beyond. A regional perspective brings to light the Swahili coast’s connection to diverse ethnic and economic mosaics of the interior and to the importance, not just of Chinese porcelains, Indian cloth, and Islam, but of iron, honey, buttermilk, ostrich eggshell beads, and poison. Trade beads and marine shells are found in coastal contexts and in rock shelter sites in the immediate hinterland that have been occupied since the later Stone Age demonstrate millennia-old contact between the coastal and inland communities. The interconnectedness of the region is thus predicated upon the presumption that major transformations in one of the nodes will have ramifications for the whole system, including causing system collapse, as happened in the seventeenth century following the effects of the Little Ice Age and the introduction of predatory commerce by Asian merchant firms or Asian empires and peripheries in the sixteenth century. Data drawn from archaeological surveys and excavations at different nodes on the coast and inland show remarkable uniformity in economic investments after the eleventh century, when both regions undergo extremely rapid transformations.29 A second example is drawn from the sixteenth century, when the entire region began to experience gradual decline, insecurity, warfare, and settlement abandonment. Changes in one area, in response to local competition, might result in a shift in allegiance and power dynamics that does not necessarily affect the entire system. For example, the decline of Mapungubwe in southern Zambezia in the thirteenth century saw power shift to Great Zimbabwe without affecting the whole region. The resilience of the interaction sphere prior to 1600 was based on the decentralized nature of the exchange and hence the loss of one node such as Mapungubwe or Kilwa did not affect the overall system. The post-1600 decline was an effect of global interactions, and came from heavily centralized systems of financial and capital control, hence changes in the primary nodes would ripple out across Afrasia and the Mediterranean.

28

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Paul J. J. Sinclair, Anne Ekblom, and Marilee Wood, “Trade and Society on the South-East African Coast in the Later First Millennium ad: The Case of Chibuene,” Antiquity 86 (2012), 735. Kusimba et al., “Beyond the Coastalscapes.”

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By using complementary data drawn from historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sources, we can reconstruct the founding of the medieval Swahili city-states from egalitarian to centralized, ranked systems of leadership. Before ad 800, itinerant traders – ritual and technical experts who regularly traveled between settlements selling their services and merchandise – dominated regional trade. Emergent political leadership held sway in certain spheres of knowledge as ritual experts, healers and herbalists, rainmakers, iron smelters and smiths, well diggers, big game hunters, pearl divers, canoe and boat makers, and itinerant hawkers and traders. These spheres of knowledge increasingly became restricted to small family or extended family networks and were thus highly desirable and complementary.30 It suffices to say that leadership was in place, but it was not sufficiently integrated. It was from these ranks that leaders and rulers would emerge. Demand for African products increased, leading to the intensification of regional and transoceanic trade. The economic boom enabled engagement in trade on a full-time rather than a part-time basis. For example, with increased demand for ivory, hunters became more specialized, demanding better weapons and poisons for killing elephants. They experimented and developed more potent poisons to efficiently procure their prey. As more people migrated to the trading centers for longer periods, the need for more lodges and houses and wells grew. These developments required management and planning. Due to their knowledge, the local leadership consisting of ritual and technical experts was more likely to emerge as the ones who financed, managed, and controlled local, regional, and interregional trade and communications along the African seaboard.31 Innovations in ironworking aided agricultural intensification and specialization in hunting, fishing, and herding. These changes improved the quality of life and precipitated population growth and economic prosperity for some 200 years. 30 31

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Kusimba et al., “Beyond the Coastalscapes.” Calabrese, Emergence of Social and Political Complexity, 211–216; Shadreck Chirikure, Munyaradzi Manyanga, Innocent Pikirayi, and Mark Pollard, “New Pathways of Sociopolitical Complexity in Southern Africa,” African Archaeological Review 30 (2013), 358. See also Kim and Kusimba, “Pathways to Social Complexity,” and Kim, Kusimba, and Keeley, “The Role of Warfare,” disputing Fleisher and colleagues, who argue that this is when they became maritime: Jeffrey Fleisher et al., “When Did the Swahili Become Maritime?” American Anthropologist 117 (2015), 100–115; see also Elgidius B. Ichumbaki, “When Did the Swahili Become Maritime? A Reply to Jeffrey Fleisher et al. (2015),” in Sea Ports and Sea Power: African Maritime Cultural Landscapes, Lynn Harris, ed. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 1–11.

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In the late fifteenth century, however, the coast became embroiled in long-standing conflict between Portuguese and Omani Arab mercantile interests for control of Indian Ocean commerce.32 By ad 1500, the Portuguese appearance in Africa and Asia challenged the interregional elite hegemony based upon networks of interaction that extended from Mozambique through Mombasa, Kenya, Cairo, Aden, Surat, Bombay, Siraf, Iran, and their outlying hinterlands. By ad 1600, the Portuguese were being challenged in India by the Siddis, the Marathas, and the Mughals, while the English and Dutch did not become powerful until the 1680s and 1690s, most of them bankrolled by their Asian trade partners. Thus, it was not so much that the Afrasian states lost their power, but that there was a new divide and détente between the maritime and territorial powers, mainly kept because of the growing demand for goods across the world in the seventeenth century. This new divide, along with climatic and disease factors, precipitated the decline and collapse of states and polities, including those along the coast, by the eighteenth century.

the emergence of leadership on the swahili coast To fully comprehend the emergence of the state, we must consider the mechanisms of resource organization, distribution, and exploitation. These include but are not limited to water, arable land, grazing land, and fishing areas. For the medieval Swahili state(s), these included the highly desirable mangrove poles, ivory and rhinoceros horn, pearls, ambergris, iron, and gold. How and in what ways was the distribution of these resources managed? By what means did the political and economic elite emerge? Archaeological data supported by ethnographic research with local ethno-historians suggest that after ad 1000, power became dominated by few lineages.33 Resources with high economic potential became 32

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Neither the Omani nor the Portuguese had the military or financial heft to control the Indian Ocean commercial world; what they did manage to do, was to change ways of distribution and interaction, through attacks on shipping. Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Rahul Oka, “Trade and Polity in East Africa: Re-examining Elite Strategies for Acquiring Power,” in The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa, T. Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009), 43. John Middleton, The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 89; Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “The Rise of Elites among the Pre-colonial Swahili of the East African Coast,” in Material Symbols in Prehistory, John Robb, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999),

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monopolized. The council of elders manipulated rules of collective clan ownership of land in favor of specific families – those who had power at the council. Economic prosperity attracted migration and settlement on the coast, creating the necessity for controlling residential patterns. The emergence of a planned Swahili city points to the council promulgating rules governing citizenship and belonging. These rules included restrictions on where recent immigrants could live and could be buried. In doing so, the council disenfranchised new residents, ensuring that only the “original” residents owned the land and that others had only use rights. The rule was simple: ownership of land was held communally among patrilineally related kin who were descended from the first ancestor who cleared a patch of virgin land and enclosed it with a perimeter wall. Nonpatrilineally related kin could lease the land from wenyeji asili, the original owners or their descendants, by paying a tax called moshi, smoke, in the form of a share of the harvest, often assessed at 20 percent of the total crop.34 The new system of land tenure established a landowning elite among the “original residents” and their descendants, enabling them to control vast tracts of land, labor, and goods through the political offices of the council of elders. More recent residents from other coastal towns, inland, and abroad presented opportunities for revenue collection and cheaper labor.35 The landowning gentry maintained tight control of basic resources through a complex system of patronage and clientship. They forged mutually beneficial alliances and friendships with the hinterland and other coastal communities, guaranteeing a peaceful environment, providing an adequate supply of labor power to exploit resources (such as fishing, mangrove cutting, hunting, portage), and ensuring commercial interdependence. Through the council, the landowning gentry promulgated more restrictions: commoners were forbidden from direct economic interaction with inland or foreign merchants. As seen in the restriction of prestige ceramics to stone houses in the walled cities, those became the domain of the chief and his council. The wenyeji asili, who now referred to themselves as waungwana, or patricians, also appropriated certain material and structural

34

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318–341; S. Wynne-Jones A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a further discussion of state-forming implications of patriliny in Islamic societies, see Chapter 19 by Diane King in this volume. Mathew Pawlowicz, “Modeling the Swahili Past: The Archaeology of Mikindani in Southern Coastal Tanzania,” Azania 47 (2012), 489.

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elements as symbols of their power and legitimacy. Membership into the uungwana could be claimed through length of residence, wealth, and maternal descent. Ownership of stone houses, large tracts of fertile land, fishing areas, cattle, and exotica including jewelry, imported ceramics, and clothing became synonymous with elite identity.36

sources of elite power and authority The elite invested in stone houses built at great expense, which as symbols and manifestation of their status were a basis for manipulating the existing sociopolitical and economic order. The stone house became one of the main material and social symbols of uungwana. The stone house symbolized permanence, creditworthiness trustworthiness, and economic power. The Swahili stone house’s permanence was a symbol of nativity, citizenship, and credibility. At the same time, however, the architecture of the stone house contained “exotic” Islamic stylistic elements such as niches and arches. These foreign elements conveyed elite access to rare cultural and socioeconomic knowledge. Cemeteries at many Swahili sites show distinct levels of wealth indicated by size, decorative motifs, and forms. Specific areas, particularly close to the main congregation mosques of the towns, were set aside for the exclusive burial of patrician clans and served to maintain identify and legitimate power. Tombs were the tangible manifestations of ancestry that reinforced prestige and validated family and/or authority, and strengthened the kin group’s hold on social, religious, or political power. The tombs were symbols of hereditary succession and supernatural authority, the foundations upon which rested their leadership. Tombs were also places where individuals would display their wealth by decorating them with exotic ceramics, offering sacrifices to ancestors in a public display of generosity. The patricians also appropriated formal Islamic religious regalia for their exclusive use during Friday prayers. The model dress included a long white robe, the kanzu, a sword and dagger, a turban, and sandals made of hide skin. Handles of swords and daggers were often made of ebony and inlaid with ivory.37 This public display of exotica and devotion to one

36

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Adriann H. J. Prins, The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of the East African Coast (London: International African Institute, 1967), 103. Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society 800–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 83.

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God, Allah, linked the patricians to a wider pan-Islamic identity. Literacy became a desirable norm among the patricians, who not only read and wrote in Arabic but also (and often) claimed direct ancestry to the centers of such knowledge and power. Commoners and other non-patricians were prohibited from literacy. The association of exotic and powerful knowledge with the wealthy symbolized and encapsulated the elites’ divinity and legitimacy. Nonlocal trade items and other exotica also became status symbols. These included expensive clothing, jewelry, beadwork, and glass and bronze mirrors, among others. These were displayed in special niches called zidaka in the inner sections of the houses, for the consumption of inner core family members and for display during weddings and funerals.38 Through cunning manipulation of technical and social power, the patricians successfully legitimized their position as leaders of the coast, monopolizing all the means of production after ad 1200.39 The rise of urbanism on the coast of East Africa is closely allied to the distributor role local leaders played in international trade. Archaeological evidence shows that considerable craft production on Swahili sites indicates that while the Swahili coast was known for its trading emporia from the Early Common Era, the rise of the urban city-states after ad 1000 is in fact linked to their prowess in manufacturing goods for local, regional, and transoceanic markets. In sum, the rise of the post-ad 1000 Swahili cities was based on manufacturing and not their status as trade entrepôts. And that this manufacturing was in response to demands at all, not just overseas markets and consumers, has often been emphasized. Thus, coastal urban polities served as cores in relation to the peripheries of the hinterland, as well as peripheries in the circum-Indian Ocean interaction sphere.

§ § § § § The emergence of the Swahili states was neither unique nor different from other regions that saw the rise of secondary states. Here, a combination of factors, including local and regional trade, coupled with the development of trade pacts, provided the main push toward the emergence of the state. Favorable climatic conditions and increased

38 39

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Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany, Personal Interviews (Mombasa, Kenya, March 1996). Martin Hall, Farmers, Kings and Traders: The Peoples of Southern Africa, 200–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 94; Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2001), 252.

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interaction among communities pursuing different but complementary subsistence strategies made possible the sharing and exchange of ideas and systems of knowledge that once held sway within specific ethnic and subsistence groups. Migration and settlement in what were previously a hunter-gatherer domains and the later settlement of agrarian communities, along with the incorporation of knowledge from all the groups, created a vibrant community that would elevate individuals and personalities from the groups to leadership positions. The accumulation of wealth and investment in craft specialization is indicative of societal efficiency in subsistence production and higher levels of investment. Food surplus means food security, which frees people to engage in other forms of labor on a part-time and full-time basis, for example, elephant hunting, iron- and gold working, ivory and stone carving, masonry, basketry, pottery making, and trade. Food security and increasing sedentism, especially among previously forager and pastoral communities, improved quality of life and inevitably led to demographic changes. The location of settlements in resource-rich areas with good water as well as arable and grazing land availed greater opportunities that attracted settlement aggregation, which inevitably required management of resources and people, thus creating opportunities for investment in more highly specialized crafts, local and interregional trade, and the accumulation of wealth, power, and status. The ability to control access to resources or trade routes is an important element of emergent complexity and political centralization. Embedded in this proposition is power of a physical and military nature, a power that can restrict access to wealthcreating resources and production. For instance, control over iron production was quite important for rulers, and the physical force needed to monopolize access to iron resources that were beyond the political control of the state capital was probably a necessity. Once asymmetries in power are established, what strategies do leaders use to stay in power and accumulate more wealth, status, and power? The pathways and mechanisms through which power is centralized will differ from case to case. Archaeologists have long argued that both peaceful and coercive means were used to extend elite power to the frontier chiefdoms and minor states.40 Ideology and coercion played just as

40

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Seminal works in this tradition include Carneiro, “A Theory”; Morton Fried, On the Evolution; Elman Service, Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975). But see also Chapters 3 and 6 by Anderson and Martoccio, respectively, in this volume.

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important a role as did agriculture, long-distance trade, livestock production, and metalworking. We need to recognize the possibility of internal conflicts, coercion, and exploitation between classes and social segments within emergent complex societies. By the end of the first millennium ad, the East African coast had become a regular partner in the millennia-old long-distance exchanges that reached as far as the Arabian Peninsula, India, Sri Lanka, and China. By the thirteenth century, an African urban elite had emerged that financed, managed, and controlled local, regional, and interregional trade and communications along the East African seaboard. Innovations in ironworking aided agricultural intensification and specialization in hunting, fishing, and herding. These changes improved the quality of life and precipitated population growth, and the economic prosperity that culminated in the flourishing of urbanism in the region. In the late fifteenth century, however, Africa became embroiled in a violent encounter with Europe and Asia (which has not ended), whose details are best known by history, not archaeology. Hence began the slow but steady decline in African cities and hinterlands, visible even today. In sum, the evidence discussed in this chapter illustrates control over political economies in the medieval Swahili state(s) was gained through alliance building and not warfare. Here, economic and political elites manipulated peaceful but cunning strategies to restrict access to wealth-creating resources to a select few.

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6 Renaissance States of Mind Michael Martoccio

Any discussion of the foundation of the Renaissance Italian state must begin with Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt’s assertion in his 1860 essay The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Italian politicians, jurists, and thinkers through “reflection and calculation” created a new sort of polity – “the State as a work of art.”1 In making this claim, Burckhardt personified the Renaissance state as “a collective moral person” akin to the people he believed inhabited these polities.2 For Burckhardt, Florence, Milan, and other Italian states were the first modern states – autonomous, person-like beings not unlike the “spiritual individuals” he so adored. Like artistic virtuosi, Burckhardt believed, Renaissance states possessed a newfound energy and creativity, enumerating their peoples through vast tax surveys, dragging up new ports from feculent marshland, and marching ever-larger armies into battle. Yet scholars today are doubtful of the existence of a BurckhardtianIndividual state in Renaissance Italy. Countless studies have shown Renaissance republics and principalities less as willful protagonists and more as imperfect beings – “stalled states” made up of interwoven merchant networks whose selfish factional violence and capitalexploiting economies lead Renaissance Italians to ignite their peninsula in that mad act of self-immolation known as the Italian Wars

1

2

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Swan Sonnenschein (New York: Macmillan 1904), 4. Quentin Skinner, Chapter 1 in this volume, quoting Harold Laski, The Authority of the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 26, 66.

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(1494–1559).3 In this sense, the selfhood of the Renaissance state has come to resemble less a modern individual and more Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of the postmodern, self-fashioned person – a self unable to break free from surrounding familial and societal bonds to attain full state personality. In this chapter, I approach the foundation of the Renaissance state as a problem akin to that of the Renaissance self – as a question of whether north-central Italians from 1100 to 1500 gave birth to Burckhardt’s modern, individualized state or founded postmodern states unable to break free from their underlying social, economic, or political irons. I contend that the Renaissance state possessed neither a singular nor a fragmented self, but multiple identities.4 The leaders of Renaissance Italy never enjoyed a clearly bounded sense of a singular “state,” but, by drawing upon multiple classical traditions, forged polities possessing relational, diverse selves – what I describe in greater detail in what follows as a divisible state. The remainder of this chapter will survey how Italian elites constituted this relational, multiple sense of statehood through territorial expansion, that most state-like of behaviors. In Italy, the century from 1350 to 1450 witnessed the formation of a few strong, regional states (Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples) whose extension came at the expense of surrounding autonomous cities and lordships. In particular, I will explore one foundational moment in the history of one Renaissance state’s territorial expansion: the Florentine purchase of Arezzo in 1384. Centering on this moment is particularly apt. Numerous historians have debated the larger relevance of the purchase of Arezzo, with some seeing it as a key turning point in an “Italian Hundred Years’ War” that spurred the growth of Florence’s centralized fiscal apparatus, its Burckhardtian-Individual state, while others have observed how individual Florentine families, the Medici foremost of all, treated Arezzo as 3

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Paul D. McClean, “Patronage, Citizenship, and the Stalled Emergence of the Modern State in Renaissance Florence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005), 638–664. A summary of these debates can be found in Julius Kirshner, ed., The Origins of the State in Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi, eds., Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini, eds., The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). I owe this approach to the Renaissance self to the work of John Jeffries. Martin. John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

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a private, exploitive patrimony.5 But scholars have paid little to no attention on what the Florentines actually bought when purchasing Arezzo and how they paid for the town. As I argue in this chapter, paying closer attention to the acquisition and payment of Arezzo exposes how Renaissance states were neither Burckhardtian-Individual nor Greenblattian-Self-fashioned, but possessive of a divisible, multiple, and relational form of personhood.

the discursive constitution of the divisible state Locating a singular founding moment for the multiple identities of the approximately 300 polities (often anachronistically called city-states) in late medieval/Renaissance north-central Italy is a difficult task. If, as Andrea Zorzi noted, the “material constitution” of north-central Italian governance lay in the High Medieval population boom, long-distance trade, and the concentration of capital, its discursive foundations rested in the revival and imitation of the cultural forms of the ancient Greek and Roman world, in particular the tripartite revival of Aristotelian ideals of city governance, Roman law, and Ciceronian civic humanism.6 As a consequence of these multiple ancient revivals, by the midfourteenth century, Florentines came to speak of their city as “the daughter of Rome” or “a little Rome.”7 Yet the widespread dissemination of classical texts and modes of thinking did not provide a singular cultural heritage to be adapted into a unified territorially sovereign entity. Instead, Rome offered Renaissance Italians numerous legitimating narratives of physical space, socially valid behavior, and subservience/superiority. In particular, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, Italians built upon the foundations of this ancient heritage

5

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Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162–166. For a general overview of these debates, see, among many others, Giorgio Chittolini, “La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado: richerche sull’ordinamento territoriale del dominio Fiorentino agli inizi del secolo XV,” in Egemonia Fiorentina e autonomie locali nella Toscana Nord-Occidentale del primo Rinascimento: vita, arte, cultura, ed. G. Chittolini (Pistoia: Centro Italiano di Studi di Storia e d’Arte, 1975–1977), 17–77; Andrea Zorzi, La trasformazione di un quadro politico (Florence, 2008); Lorenzo Tanzini, “Tuscan States: Florence and Siena,” in The Italian Renaissance State, 90–111. Andrea Zorzi, “The ‘Material Constitution’ of the Florentine Dominion,” in Florentine Tuscany, 15. Nicolai Rubinstein, “The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 201, 212, 217.

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a complex terminological landscape containing the city (civitas), the selfgoverning commune (comunitas/comune), the socially valid members of society (popolo/popolani), and the delegation of imperial/papal sovereignty (vicariato). It is to these many forms of state selfhood we now turn. A continuation of the Roman municipia, the civitas was the first site of coordination to emerge from the fragmentation of post-Carolingian rule in the tenth and eleventh centuries, often through the office of the bishop.8 Because the civitas existed as a physical space imbued with special civil and ecclesiastical rights passed down from Rome, the number of civitates remained fixed and new towns, despite population or productivity, never attained the rank.9 As a result, when the fourteenth-century chronicler Dino Compagni surveyed Tuscany in the opening of his Cronica, he envisioned a region populated by only a limited number of civitates (“Pisa is forty miles from Florence, Lucca is forty miles, Pistoia twenty miles . . . etc.”) and expressed these places not as governments (the commune of Pistoia) nor peoples (the Pistoiese), but as physical localities in possession of specific, actionable rights descendent from Rome.10 The second site Renaissance Italians imbued with personhood was the comune, a sworn corporation (universitas) of mutual defense. At one time, scholars viewed the Italian comune as analogous to the autonomous state – that is to say, a freestanding body of offices wielding a monopoly of violence. Viewed, for instance, in the eyes of Dino Compagni, the comune dampened the “pride and ill will and competition for office” that had “undone so noble a city and abused its laws.”11 But historians in the past few decades have corrected this orderly vision.12 For one, the late medieval Italian comune never attained a monopoly of violence within the walls of the civitas, competing instead with other universitas including guilds, political parties, and ecclesiastical and confraternal bodies of urban governance.13 At the same time, the novelty of the 8

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Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1981). Giorgio Chittolini, “Cities, ‘City-States,’ and Reginal States in North-Central Italy,” Theory and Society 18 (1989), 691–692. Dino Compagni, Chronicle of Florence, trans. Daniel Bornstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 5. Compagni, Chronicle of Florence, 6. For a summary of these debates, see Mario Ascheri, “Beyond the Comune: The Italian City-State and Its Inheritance,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London: Routledge, 2001), 451–468. Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities: Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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comune overlooks its classical exemplars: the Ciceronian ideal of conspirato ordinum (harmony between the ranks) manifest in randomized elections, Aristotelian concepts of republicanism motivated medieval thinkers like Albert the Great and Ptolemy of Lucca, and civic humanists such as Leonardo Bruni celebrated the short terms of communal civic offices for hearkening back to similar temporary posts under the Roman Republic.14 Yet such ideas about the physical civitas and the governing comune tell us nothing about who could legitimately rule such a state. For this, northcentral Italians (and Florentines in particular) promoted a third constitutive state-like entity: the Guelf popolo. Documents at the time speak not only of the city and commune of Florence, but of its people, its popolo, as a conscious, competent self, as the “popular, Guelf, and free state” (stato popolare, Guelfo e libero).15 In Florence the Guelf popolo constituted not a material social class, but a pattern of behavior and an “ideological constellation” envisioned at the time as urban and mercantile in direct refutation of another configuration of dress, manner, and other forms of conduct perceived as aristocratic or (at its most metastasized) despotic.16 Urban Italians enforced a litany of social controls including proscription from public office, physical exile, and the demolition of noble forts as a means to punish those who they deemed non-popolani.17 Again, Roman precedent helped justify such measures, with Florentines claiming that their affinity for liberty and aversion to the tyranny of despotism owed to a fictive Roman past. Yet there was a complication. Because the urban population required an ever-widening countryside to feed itself, the popolo continued to engage and negotiate with social actors outside its walls who displayed noble, courtly norms of conduct. Returning to Compagni’s Chronicle, he noted how “on all sides [of Florence] there are many noblemen, counts and captains, who love the city more in times of discord than in peacetime, and obey it more from fear than love.”18 14

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Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 117–135. Nicolai Rubinstein, “Florence and the Despots: Some Aspects of Florentine Diplomacy in the Fourteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1952), 31. For the study of magnate violence, see Carol Lansing, “Magnate Violence Revisited,” in Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. John Law and Bernadette Paton (Surrey: Routledge, 2010), 35–48. On Guelfism, see Serena Ferente,“Guelphs! Factions, Liberty, and Sovereignty: Inquiries about the Quattrocento,” History of Political Thought 28 (2007), 571–598. Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Compagni, Chronicle of Florence, 5.

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These men – often called Ghibellines, magnates, or nobles – thus could exist within the civitas and even serve the comune, but never joined the body of the popolo. In laying claim to lands outside of the city itself, however, urban Italians were careful not to encroach upon the rights of those political actors who possessed within medieval Roman jurisprudence the only true claim to universal sovereignty: the pope and holy roman emperor. Although both powers were frequently absent from Italy in these centuries, the emperor and pope maintained symbolic power in the peninsula, and Italians presented their states as deputies of universal authorities. The importance of the pope and holy roman emperor is instanced in the Florentine’s extravagant spending on decrees of vicariate, legal letters approving deputized authority, for which they paid many hundreds of thousands of florins during the expeditions of emperors Charles IV (1355/ 1368) and Sigismund (1433) as well as the aborted trips of Wenceslaus and Rupert (1380/1401, respectively).19 Beyond financial commitments, these universal authorities shown bright in the minds of Italians. To bring his Chronicle to a close, Dino Compagni exhorted that with the coming of Emperor Henry VII in 1311 the days of the “wicked citizens” of Florence were numbered.20 While Henry would die soon after, Compagni expressed here an important truism about all political actors who populated the land between the Alps and Rome in these centuries: it was neither the presence of the emperor/pope that worried Italians nor their absence that emboldened them, but the very impermanence of emperors, monarchs, popes, and the soldiers they brought with them that shaped statemaking.

building a divisible state: the case of arezzo, 1384 It would be one of these northern invasions that set in motion the tangled events that led in 1384 to the Florentine purchase of the neighboring city of Arezzo. An ancient Etruscan civitas situated near the watersheds of both the Arno and Tiber Rivers, the city of Arezzo followed the overall pattern of divisible, relational state building as other cities, with its comune dating back to 1098. Yet unlike many neighbors, Aretine communal institutions never fully broke free from the control of nearby rural 19

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Nicolai Rubinstein, “The Place of the Empire in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Political Opinion and Diplomacy,” Historical Research 30 (1957), 125–135. Compagni, Chronicle of Florence, 101.

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lords, and as a consequence Arezzo was subjected to centuries of internecine conflict between wealthy popolani and an opposing non-popolo nobility led by semirural magnate families, particularly the Ghibelline Tarlati family.21 Repeated rebellions and expulsions often worried neighboring cities, and throughout the middle decades of the fourteenth century a pattern of violence/intervention took place whereby outsiders attempted to bring peace to an often-fractious Arezzo. When violence flared in 1343–1345, for instance, a Florentine-Perugian-Sienese coalition imposed a “supervised liberty” upon Arezzo, enforcing a factional peace, imprisoning members of the Tarlati family a few years later, and using the city as a meeting place for regional, Guelf city-leagues.22 Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV played a similar role, intervening directly in city politics and conceding a new right of vicariato during a sojourn south in 1355.23 Beyond their shattering economic/material consequences, these years of violence and reconciliation brought about a discursive delegitimation of the multiple personhoods of the Aretine state so that midcentury contemporaries came to see the town as a source of regional disorder, what a politician today would maybe call a “failed state.” “Arezzo always hinders the welfare of (the rest of) Italy,” bemoaned one Florentine chronicler.24 In spite of such complaints, outside attempts at reconciliation brought no peace, and Arezzo’s last decade of autonomy from 1375 to 1385 saw a wave of “wretched calamities” including seven changes in regime, three rebellions, two sacks by mercenary troops, and near-continuous famine.25 Matters worsened sharply in the fall of 1384 when a mercenary captain,

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On the history of medieval Arezzo, see the essays in Arezzo nel medioevo, ed. Giovanni Cherubini (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 2012) as well as Franco Paturzo, Arezzo medievale: la città e il suo territorio dalla fine del mondo antico al 1384 (Cortona: Calosci, 2002). Paturzo, Arezzo medievale, 352. On these leagues, see Michael Paul Martoccio, “Trust Thy Neighbor: International Cooperation and the Renaissance State” (PhD Diss., Northwestern University, 2015), 189–239. On the imprisonment of the Tarlati, see Alarico Barbagli, “La detenzione di Marco Tarlati da Pietramala a Firenze tra equilibri diplomatici e conflitti di giurisdizione (1360–1369), Annali Aretini 22 (2014), 83–114. A copy can be found in Ubaldo Pasqui, Documenti per la storia della città di Arezzo nel medio evo. Raccolti per cura di U. Pasqui (Florence: R. Deputazione di storia patria, 1937), Vol. 3, 127–129 (Doc 821). Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronaca fiorentina, ed. Niccolò. Rodlico in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (RIS), Vol. 30, part I (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1903–1913), Rub. 907. Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, Vol. 3, ed. and trans. J. Hankins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 37.

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Enguerrand de Coucy, in the pay of a claimant to the then-contested crown of Naples and encouraged by members of the Tarlati family, clandestinely scaled the walls of Arezzo and took over the city on the night of September 28. While Coucy’s exact objective in seizing Arezzo remains unclear, whatever plan he had at first quickly unraveled when news reached him that his patron, Louis of Anjou, had died suddenly a few days earlier. Isolated, fearing encirclement, and with the castle of Arezzo still in the hands of the town’s defenders led by their commander, Iacopo Caracciolo, Coucy opted to cut his losses, abandon the town, and sell it to the highest bidder. The next month was spent in a flurry of activity, with the Sienese taking the initiative with an offer of 20,000 fl.26 Fearful of the Sienese, their archrivals, the rulers of Florence on October 3 formed an emergency commission “to buy, pledge, or pawn the city of Arezzo . . . spending whatever they felt was appropriate,” resulting in the Florentines doubling the Sienese offer.27 After it became clear that the Sienese could not pay his next demand of 50,000 fl., Coucy, Florence, and Caracciolo (still trapped in the Arezzo’s castle) signed on November 5 a series of treaties ceding Arezzo in perpetuity to Florence, an achievement none other than Machiavelli would recall more than a century later brought to the Florentines “as joyous a celebration as any other city might have done for a proper (military) victory.”28 In buying Arezzo, the Florentines were taking part in a vast, although often overlooked, practice, what I call the “market for sovereignty.”29 From 1300 to 1800, this market for sovereignty stretched the length of Europe, with public authorities from the Baltic to the Balkans buying, selling, swapping, and mortgaging towns, castles, counties, abbeys, and all other manner of sovereign assets. Italian cities were some of the most important buyers, with Florence buying or attempting to buy Lucca (1341), Prato (1351), Pisa (1405), Cortona (1411), Forlì (1411), and Livorno (1421). And because these purchases often could be quite costly, numbering hundreds of thousands of florins, it was common practice for the parties involved to establish a multiyear schedule of payments, or bill of sale. A close look at these bills of sale alongside an even longer paper 26

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Cronache senesi, eds. Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti, in RIS, Vol. 15, Pt. VI (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1931), 704. Anthony Molho and Franek Sznura, eds., Alle bocche della piazza: Diario di Anonimo Fiorentino (1382–1401) (Florence: Olschki, 1986), 50. Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. L. Banfield and H. Mansfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 136. A notable exception is Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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table 6.1 Florentine payments for Arezzo, 1384–139030 Date

Asset

November 15–17, 1384

Cost [Seller/Location]

Keys to Arezzo Civitas 30,000 fl. [Coucy, in Arezzo] Keys to Arezzo Cassero 11,040 fl. [Caracciolo, in (Castle) Arezzo] Personal Bribes

7,500 fl. [Coucy etc., in Arezzo]

~ Early December

Reliquary of San Donato

Price Unknown [Unknown French Soldier, in Forlì]

December 25, 1384

Keys to Arezzo Civitas 10,000 fl. [Coucy, in Bologna]

7,617 fl. [Caracciolo, in January 30–April 28, 1385 Five Sigils, Arezzo Castiglione Fiorentino] Comune; Letter of Confirmation; Two Copies of Vicariato March 1385–March 1390

Personal Bribes

2,000 fl. [Caracciolo, in Naples] | Total 67,157

trail of monetary disbursements can illuminate what the Florentines believed they bought in Arezzo (see Table 6.1). The payments began ten days after Coucy, Caracciolo, and the Florentines signed the bill of sale. From November 15–17, an unnamed Florentine secretary handed 30,000 fl. to Coucy, three-quarters of the total owed, and approximately the same percentage, 11,040 fl., to his

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Archivio di Stato (ASF), Capitoli Registri (CR), Reg. 7, fols. 1r–5v, 8r–10v, 38r–41r, 42v–45r. Copies of these documents may be found in ASF, CR, Reg. 45, fols. 93r–113v; ASF, Carte Strozziane (CS), Series II, filza 91, fols. 42–50; Cesare Guasti, I Capitoli del comune di Firenze. Inventario e registro I (Florence: Cellini, 1866), 371–396; Pasqui, Documenti, Vol. 2, 191–217 (Docs 845–850). For general information on the sale, see the documents in Giovanni Grazzini, ed. “Ricordo della compra di Arezzo fatta dai Fiorentini, tratto del libro segreto di Guccio Benvenuti, del popolo di Santa Maria sopra Porta di Firenze (Nov 1383),” in RIS, Vol. 24 (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1909), 87–103. See also Paul Durrieu, “La prise d’Arezzo par Enguerrand VII, sire de Coucy, en 1384,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 4 (1880), 161–194; Gene A. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 104–107.

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counterpart Caracciolo in exchange for the physical possession of the city and castle, respectively. While on the surface a simple exchange of money for land, buried within the records are a variety of other payments not officially listed – 5,000 fl. to Coucy personally, 2,300 fl. to members of Coucy’s retinue, 500 fl. to the notary who drafted the bill of sale – that speak to how Coucy saw this exchange as little more than a personal bribe for himself and his army of freebooters.31 Yet the physical transfer of Arezzo’s walls and public places did not end the exchange, and over the next few months the paper trail leads us in two directions: one north, following Coucy’s army back to France; another south, with Caracciolo’s troops toward Naples. Records show that Coucy’s army chose not to make its return journey through the direct route that would have taken it near Florence, but instead made its way north via the coastal road in Romagna. This change of course had to do partially with the conditions the Florentines placed on the Picard commander. In order to receive his final payment of 10,000 fl., Coucy and his men had promised when signing the bill of sale to “neither damage, burn, nor devastate” the Florentine countryside on their return journey to France.32 It did not help matters that Coucy’s army had departed Arezzo in something of scandal, looting the town as they left, a fact evidenced by a seedy story recorded in an anonymous Florentine diary of how a French soldier had sold in Forlì the bejeweled, gilded reliquary of the head of Saint Donatus, the patron saint of Arezzo, which had sat in the cathedral of Arezzo.33 Slowed by their treasure, Coucy’s army only reached Bologna on Christmas Day 1384, where he received his final payment of 10,000 fl. paid in the shop of two Bolognese, Francesco Foscherari and Filippo de Guidotti, scions of Bologna’s two largest and most powerful international banking families.34 From here Coucy left the peninsula. Looking the other direction, along the southern route, we can follow Caracciolo’s men doing much the same as Coucy, selling parts of Arezzo as they went. A receipt paid on February 7 in Castilgione Fiorentina, a small castle south of Arezzo, lists the Florentine’s agreeing to pay Caracciolo 6,617 fl. over the next few months in exchange for a number of goods that he had carried with him from Arezzo – a notarized letter validating the Florentine’s purchase, five sigils of Arezzo, and two copies 31 33

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ASF, CR, Reg. 7, fols. 1r–2v, 4r–5v, 8r–10v. 32 ASF, CR, Reg. 7, 3r. Diario d’Anonimo Fiorentino dall’anno 1358 al 1389, in Cronache dei secoli XIII e XIV, ed. Alessandro Gherardi (Florence: Deputazione di Storia, 1876), p. 463, n. 3. ASF, CR, Reg. 7, 5v.

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of the 1355 vicariate authorized by Emperor Charles IV. At the same meeting, the two parties appeared to have further agreed to a payment of 2,000 fl. over the next five years on the threat of seizing Florentine merchant’s goods in Naples, something not included in the original bill of sale, but that Caracciolo requested for the damages he and his men had suffered at the hands of Coucy.35 And indeed for the next half-decade, the records show that every year in March, 400 fl. arrived from Florence to Naples delivered to the bank of Donato Acciaioli, a member of an important Neapolitan-Florentine banking family.36 All told, the Florentines paid 67,157 fl. over around five years for the city, countryside, castles, rights, and people of Arezzo. What can following this paper trail from Arezzo to Florence to Forlì to Bologna to Naples over five years tell us about the personality of the Renaissance Italian state? Three conclusions come to mind. The first is that the documents make clear that Arezzo existed in the minds of contemporaries not as a unified state, but multiple physical spaces, governing institutions, types of socially valid/invalid behavior, and legal claims of superiority/subservience. The sheer number of parts required to actually buy all of what comprised the divisible state made it difficult even for contemporaries to calculate the true cost the Florentines paid for Arezzo. Chronicler accounts from Tuscany over the next two centuries vastly differ on the cost; chroniclers list the price at 36,000, 40,000, 50,000, 56,000, 57,000, 60,000, and 70,000 fl.37 But more than co-constituting a divisible state in Arezzo, the multiple personalities of the city played a critical role in allowing a state like Florence to expand its administrative territory. Consider again how the payments to Iacopo Caracciolo place: an initial exchange of 11,040 fl. at the handover of the physical fortress, another of 6,617 fl. three months later when Caracciolo’s representatives gave away a raft of legal documents, and 35 36

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Ibid., 34r–38r, 38r–45r. The family had assisted in the earlier Florentine purchase of Prato in 1350. Ida G. Rao, “Il Gran siniscalco Nicola Acciaioli e la vendita di Prato ai Fiorentini,” in Studi in onore di Arnaldo d’Addario, ed. Luigi Borgia (Lecce: Conte, 1995), 799–808. (36,000 fl.) Giovanni Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, ed. Salvatore Bongi (Lucca: Tipografia Giusti, 1892), Vol. 1, p. 227 (CCLXX); (40,000 fl.) Diario d’Anonimo Fiorentino, 456; (50,000) Cronache senesi, Vol. 2, 704; (56,000 fl.) Alle bocche della piazza, 54; (57,000 fl.) “Memorie storiche cavate da un libro di ricordi scritto da Naddo di Ser Nepo di Ser Gallo da Montecatini,” in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. Ildefonso il San Luigi, Vol. 18 (Florence: Cambiagi, 1784), 72; (60,000 fl.) Cronica dei fatti d’Arezzo di Ser Bartolomeo di Ser Gorello, eds. Arturo Bini and Giovanni Grazzini, in RIS, Vol. 15, Pt. I (Bologna, 1917–1921), 191; (70,000 fl.) Stefani, Crònica fiorentina, Rub. 965.

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a final payment of 2,000 fl. over a five-year period on threat of economic sanction.38 This sort of elongated monetary exchange over many years and miles is my second point. Pioneering research on the tax regimes and sovereign debts of Italian cities by historians and social scientists like Marvin Becker, S. R. Epstein, Anthony Molho, Luciano Pezzolo, and David Stasavage, to name only a few, have shown the Italian cities to be the most fiscally innovative and precocious polities in all of premodern Latin Christendom.39 Yet they have universally ignored the fiscal impact of the market for sovereignty examined here. Purchasing a city was an inherently risky venture for the Florentines and others. Neighboring cities, such as Siena and Pisa, often disputed the Florentine claim, and some Florentine elites disliked the practice. The contemporary Baldassare Bonaiuti complained about, rather than championed, the acquisition of Arezzo, lamenting how the “great expense spent on the acquisition (of Arezzo)” added up to “nearly nothing.”40 As a consequence, the market for sovereignty was too uncertain, too strategically important, and too normatively transgressive to rely on taxation or debt alone. To raise lots of money, quickly, and at great distances, the Florentines therefore turned not inward but outward, to a vast peninsular network of financers, men like Francesco Foscherari and Filippo de Guidotti in Bologna and the Florentine-Neapolitan family of the Acciaioli in Naples. Put a slightly different way, the multiple personalities of Arezzo and this vast banking network served a critical role in fostering the dynamics of the purchase itself, helping the parties involved overcome what scholars who work on market exchange in the premodern world identify as lack of third-party mediators to validate contracts.41

38 39

40 41

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ASF, CR, 7, 34r–38r; Guasti and Gherardi, Vol. 1, 390–395. Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition, Vol. 2: Studies in the Rise of the Territorial State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); Anthony Molho, Florentine Public Finance, 1400–1433 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Molho, “The State and Public Finance: A Hypothesis Based on the History of Late Medieval Florence,” in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago, 1996), 97–135; S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (London: Routledge, 2000); David Stasavage, States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Luciano Pezzolo, “Sovereign Debts, Political Structure, and Institutional Commitments in Italy,” in Questioning Credible Commitment, ed. D’Maris Coffman et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169–197. Stefani, Crònica fiorentina, Rub. 965. See, among many, Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Finally, the role that multiple, relational identities played in the market for sovereignty should make us reflect more broadly on the complex place of capital in promoting/suppressing the personhood of the Renaissance state. Charles Tilly and others see the “capital-intensive” nature of social relations within these cities as hindering the formation of a Burckhardtian-Individual state, with greedy mercantile elite reluctant to hand over authority to a nascent state and thus corroding the possibility of separating “state” from “society.”42 Yet the role capital played in relations among cities, between social actors, and outside the region remains understudied. Italian communes entered into all manner of monetary relationships with other social actors from sureties with nearby lords, mercenary bribes, and grants of vicariate that, collectively, made Renaissance Italian states form a divisible, relational form of statehood.

governing a divisible state But money alone could not legitimate a Renaissance state. Remember, that at a foundational level the Florentines possessed neither a discursive nor a legal capacity to explain their rule over Arezzo. As a civitas imbued from its Roman heritage with a sense of personhood, governed by a centuries-old comune, populated with rights-holding popolani, and existing within the realm of the universally sovereign emperor, Arezzo could not be made Florentine. It was, simply, impossible. Consequently, the Florentines set about governing Arezzo in the same way they bought it, as a divisible state, building upon the four relational categories explored above to govern their new subjects. Following their purchase of the city, the Florentines ordered that all Aretines over the age of fifteen return home for registration, and, soon after, held a parliament (parliamento) of all previously enfranchised males at which a Florentine representative clucked about how the Florentines had rescued their “misfortunate and miserable city” for a cost of 200,000 fl., a clear fabrication.43 42

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Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); John F. Padgett and Paul D. McLean, “Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence,” The Journal of Modern History 83 (2001), 1–47; Richard Lachmann, “Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003), 346–372; Sidney Tarrow, “From Comparative Historical Analysis to ‘Local Theory’: The Italian City-State Route to the Modern State,” Theory and Society 33 (2004), 443–471. ASF, CP, 7, fols. 24r–30v, 56r–60v.

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Propaganda aside, the parliamento had deep symbolic meaning, recalling the foundational moment centuries before whereby the city’s inhabitants had pledged allegiance to its medieval comune, a tradition strengthened further with the return later that year of the bust of San Donato to the city. The same can be said of the forced recall of citizens, an implicit recognition that the civitas of Arezzo could not be filled with Florentines nor outsiders, but a corporate body of Aretines. Other legislation outlawing the Ubertini and Tarlati families from living in Arezzo sought to preserve the purity of this citizenry, shielding the Guelf popolo from the socially disruptive pollution of Ghibellinism, while a new imperial diploma issued by Rupert in 1401 codified Florence’s right to rule as the de jure vicar of the universal emperor.44 Yet Renaissance Italians were also capable of novelty. Within months of acquiring Arezzo, Florentine jurists and propagandists set out in search of generative examples from the Roman past to communicate to the rest of Italy how the multiple selfhoods of the Aretine state could be turned into subjecthood. The solution the Florentines arrived at was not to replace previous ideas of state, but to create a wholly original one: the distretto or dominium. At its core, the distretto was a new category of state identity whereby an individual agreement of subordination brought together a superior (Florence) with an inferior (Arezzo).45 Within this new zone, the Florentines adopted, as Alison Brown calls it, the “administrative vocabulary” of the Roman world: Florentine officials exercised the merum et mixtum imperium of Roman generals and civic humanists spoke of Florence’s “hereditary right [of] dominium” over Arezzo as the “paternal legacy” of Rome.46 Thus in founding a new sense of territorial statehood in the distretto while preserving earlier notions of statehood in a highly regulated fashion, the Florentines built their territorial state not through a singular, dominant discourse, but many, while the residents of Arezzo came to live as (to borrow Greg Anderson’s phrase) “dividual” subjects.47

§ § § § § Speaking of the Renaissance self, the French philosopher Montaigne wrote in his Essays that “we are all patchwork . . . and there is as much 44

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See, for instance, the agreement with Azzone degli Ubertini. ASF, CR, Reg. 8, fols. 80r–86r. A copy of the diploma may be found in Deutsche Reichstagsakten, ed. Julius Weizsäcker, Vol. 4 (Gotha: Perthes, 1882), 430–433. Martoccio, “Trust Thy Neighbor,” 62–123. Alison Brown, “The Language of Empire,” in Florentine Tuscany, 32–47. Greg Anderson, Chapter 3, this volume.

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difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”48 Certainly, the same could be said of the Renaissance state. From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, north-central Italians founded neither autonomous and fully modern Burckhardtian-Individual states nor Greenblattian-Self-fashioned fictions of their underlying merchant networks, but divisible states of many relational concepts of space (civitas), governance (comune), population (popolo), delegation (vicariato), and, in the fifteenth century, subordination (dominium) drawn from the Roman past. It was this divisible state that manifest most clearly when Renaissance Italians grappled with that most foundational of state actions – the acquisition of another people and place – materially assisting such changes of authority through the exchange of physical spaces, ritual objects, and legal documents. By means of conclusion, it is worth raising one final issue: where can the divisible states of Renaissance Italy fit in the context of this volume as a whole? This is a difficult question primarily because we scholars of early modern European politics labor under the burden that somewhere in the time and place we study the notion of the freestanding state was born, and that this idea came to inhabit in later centuries the other places examined in this volume, either through the physical, violent colonization of future non-European peoples or (nearly as onerous) through the mental annexation by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of ancient Rome, Athens, and Mesopotamia. But I want to suggest here that seeing the divisible state as the primary political project of not only Renaissance Italy, but all of Latin Christendom from the breakdown of the universal medieval dualism of church and empire to the emergence of the nation-state in the nineteenth century can be particularly helpful. We must not forget that the autonomous state thinkers like Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Vattel described was not a real object in early modern Europe, but more a prescription. In this sense, the process of early modern state personification Quentin Skinner traces in his chapter in this volume was just one potential solution, among many, to the problems (imagined or real) that these men saw in the relational multiplicity of early modern European statehood. Indeed, over the past two decades, scholars have come to realize that singular, sovereign states did not populate early modern Europe, but a far more fragmented political geography of diverse legal cultures, overlapping and 48

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Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 244.

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divisible jurisdictions, and enclaves of self-governing peoples, what J. H. Elliott called “a Europe of composite monarchies.”49 It would be a mistake, however, to see the historical exceptionalism of early modern Latin Christians as their composition into a few large, composite states, each possessing its own Burckhardtian-Individual identity as dukedoms, counties, free cities, etc. Rather, what I have argued here was that it was Europeans’ distinct mental and discursive capacity to imagine divisible forms of statehood – for one state to be many different things to many different people all at once – that made Europe so special. Such a divisible mentality allowed Europeans, once they did set out upon the world’s oceans, to adapt into many different types of polities. From the spatial variations these empires imposed upon islands, rivers, and seas in North America to the adoption of old Roman symbols through the “Imperial Renaissance” to the transformation of the British East India Company into a sarkā r, Europeans owed their mental adaptability to their particular Renaissance state of mind.50

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H. G. Keonigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions, and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62 (1989), 135–153; J. H. Eliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992), 48–71; Harald Gustafsson, “The Conglomerate State: A Perspective on State Formation in Early Modern Europe,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 3–4 (1998), 189–213. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thomas Dandelot, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Nicholas Abbott, Chapter 7, this volume.

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7 Bringing the Sarkā r Back In Translating Patrimonialism and the State in Early Modern and Early Colonial India Nicholas J. Abbott

In a seminal article for The Journal of Asian Studies, Stephen Blake provocatively applied Weberian typologies of the state to India’s Mughal empire (1526–1858).1 Categorizing the regime as a “patrimonial-bureaucratic empire,” Blake argued that the Mughal state was an extension of the imperial household, its administrative appendages and personnel remaining often undifferentiated and connected to household offices. In so doing, Blake effectively challenged the predominant view of both colonial and Marxist historians, who had characterized the regime as a highly centralized bureaucracy and, frequently, as a precursor to the British colonial state. In this regard, Blake’s article and his later monograph on the imperial capital of Shahjahanabad were early and significant contributions to revisionist interpretations of the Mughal state advanced in the 1980s and 1990s.2 Nevertheless, his formulation was not without its critics. Even among fellow revisionists, some faulted his model for overemphasizing the agency and personality of the emperor, for being schematic and historically static, and for once again imposing European analytic categories

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Stephen P. Blake, “The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals,” The Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1979), 77–94; reprinted in Hermann. Kulke, ed., The State in India, 1000–1700 (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 278–303. For a recent revision of the concept, see Stephen P. Blake, “Returning the Household to the Tributary Model: Gender, Succession, and Ritual in Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid Empires,” in Peter F. Bang and Christopher A. Bayly, eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 214–226. Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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upon Indian society.3 Others have seen it as overlooking the empire’s institutional heterogeneity and the unevenness of Mughal governance.4 Certainly, Blake’s reliance upon on the late sixteenth-century Aʾīn-i akbarī (The Regulations of Akbar) obscured the limited and negotiated nature of the emperor’s patriarchal authority, the multiplicity of imperial, subimperial, and aristocratic households that constituted the empire, and the extent to which the Mughal regime continued to evolve throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In other aspects, however, this criticism seems overstated. In recent years, scholars have consistently illustrated the importance of patrimonial and patriarchal authority to Mughal imperial norms and Indo-Islamic theories of governance.5 Moreover, as several studies have recently demonstrated, processes of household formation were integral both to the expansion and to the subsequent disintegration of the empire.6 Last, as this chapter contends, Blake’s notion of the “patrimonialbureaucratic state” may not be such an alien imposition after all. Indeed, an emic equivalent might be located in the Indo-Persian term sarkā r, a word that, unlike much of the Mughals’ Perso-Arabic political lexicon, had both specific institutional connotations and distinctly Timurid origins.7 A once quotidian word meaning “supervisor” or “superintendent” (literally, the 3

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Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Mughal State – Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 29 (1992), 291–321; “Introduction,” in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mug̲ h̲ al State, 1526–1750 (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 56–57. Karen Barkey, “The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), The Bureaucratization of Patrimonial Authority,” in Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 118. See, for example, “Shari’ia, Akhlaq and Governance,” in Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India: 1200–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 26–80, and Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Kingdom, Household and Body History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar,” Modern Asian Studies 41 (2007), 889–923. Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Munis D. Faruqui, Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The word sarkā r may have been used among pre-Mughal sultanates to refer to local territorial divisions. However, as Upendra N. Day points out, many histories of these regimes were written after the advent of the Mughal empire and were likely colored by Mughal usage. Upendra N. Day, The Government of the Sultanate (Delhi: Kumar Brother, 1972), 102. Moreover, the presence of the term in fifteenth-century Timurid sources, as well as parallels to Mughal usage in Safavid Iran, seems to suggest a Timurid provenance. For examples, see Maria Subtelny, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007) and Sussan Babbaie et al., Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002).

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“head of work”), sarkā r began to be used in the fifteenth-century Timurid conquest state in Iran and Central Asia to denote both a division of territory and the household or collectivity of officials who administered it. Following the Timurid invasion of North India by the emperor Babur (r. 1518–1530), this expanded definition of sarkā r was subsequently introduced into IndoPersian usage. The word’s meaning, however, did not remain fixed. It was continually reformulated, not only during the empire’s zenith in the seventeenth century but also during its eighteenth-century decline. Following its ascendancy, the British East India Company (Company) adopted and adapted the word for its own emergent state and, from the early nineteenth century onward, sarkā r became the primary indigenous term by which the British colonial regime represented itself. Today, the word continues to denote in many Indian languages national- or state-level government and the modern bureaucratic state. The remainder of this chapter surveys changes in the meaning of the word sarkā r, paying particular attention to the term’s transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In so doing, it posits sarkā r not merely as a possible analogue to the patrimonial-bureaucratic state. It also suggests that keywords like sarkā r may offer useful opportunities for historicizing and indigenizing Weberian ideal types without rejecting their analytic and comparative utility.8 Most important, it argues that, through the lens of the sarkā r, we may be better able to contextualize recent histories of Mughal and British imperial ideology and to lay the groundwork for new conceptual histories of the state in South Asia.

the mughal sarka¯ r(s) Unfortunately, locating explicit definitions of sarkā r is hardly straightforward. Although used in Mughal imperial narratives and administrative documents since the early sixteenth century, the term did not find its way into Indo-Persian dictionaries until the mid-eighteenth century.9 Among 8

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Here, I follow Raymond Williams’s formulation: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also “(The) State,” in Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss, Keywords for Modern India (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166–168. I am grateful to Johan Mathew for suggesting this approach. For a more recent, if somewhat limited, definition of the term sarkā r, see M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, rev. edn. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 161–162. For an insightful discussion of Indo-Persian and Urdu lexicography, see Walter Hakala, “Diction and Dictionaries: Language, Literature, and Learning in Persianate South Asia” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010).

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lexicons of this period, two prominent works included entries for sarkā r: the Mirʾā t-ul-iṣt ̣ilā ḥ (The Mirror of Terms [1744]) of Anand Ram “Mukhlis” and the Chirā gh-i hidā yat (The Guiding Lantern [ca. 1747]) of Siraj-ud-din Khan “Arzu.” Mukhlis glossed the word somewhat vaguely, stating that it was used correctly when “attributed to people of rank (mansūb ba-ahl-i jā h), as in the sarkā r of such-and-such nobleman or so-and-so wealthy person (yaʿnī sarkā r-i falā n amīr yā falā n daulatmand).”10 Arzu, however, offered a much more comprehensive definition. According to him, the word had two meanings. The first was “someone charged with the management of a task [i.e., a superintendent] (ṣā ḥib-i ihtimā m-i kā rī).” The second (echoing Mukhlis) was “that which one attributes to a person out of respect (ā nki dar hangā m-i intisā b-i chīzī bar shakhṣī gūyand az rā h-i buzurgī).” Unlike Mukhlis, however, Arzu provided illustrative examples of such attributes, listing the kinds of workshops and offices (kā rkhā na-hā ) that constituted elite households, as well as the servants (naukarā n) who staffed them. If we were still in doubt that a sarkā r for Arzu is a large household establishment, a quotation from the poet “Ashraf” puts the matter to rest: In father’s sarkā r you were always a servant instead of the paymaster ba-sarkā r-i pidar budī hamesha ba-jā -yi bakhshī shā girdpesha11

Significantly, Siraj-ud-din Khan’s use of this couplet gives the sarkā r a distinctly political valence, as elsewhere in the work he describes the terms shā girdpesha (servant) and bakhshī (paymaster) as “usages of the offices and courts of the kings of India (mustʿamil-i dafā tar wa darbā r-i salā t ̣īn-i hindūstā n).”12 From the works of Mukhlis and Arzu it seems clear, then, that, at least among the Persian-speaking literati of mid-eighteenth-century Delhi, the word sarkā r connoted an elite, organizationally sophisticated household possessing at least some degree of political authority, an institution at once “patrimonial” in orientation and “bureaucratic” in 10

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Anand Ram “Mukhlis,” Mirʾā t-ul-iṣt ̣ilā ḥ, ed. by Chander Shekhar, Hamid Reza Ghelichkhani, and Human Yousefdahi (Delhi: Kitab Ghar, 2013), Vol. 2, 443. Siraj-ud-din Khan “Arzu,” Chirā gh-i hidā yat, in Ghiyā s-ul-lughā t ma’a chirā gh-i hidā yat (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1900), 63. Ibid., 69.

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organization.13 Yet from a closer examination of the term’s usage in what Arzu elsewhere describes as “the records and histories of the kings of India (dafā tar wa tawā rikh-i salā t ̣īn-i hind),” it is also apparent that the word held additional tensions and connotations only superficially alluded to by Indo-Persian lexicographers, who, in any case, were largely uninterested in administrative terminology as such.14 A survey of some notable Mughal dynastic narratives of the sixteenth,15 seventeenth,16 and eighteenth centuries,17 as well as of an examination of several administrative manuals (dastūr-ul-ʿamal)18 and published document collections,19 permits a few additional observations to be made regarding precolonial usage of the word sarkā r in Mughal imperial discourse. 13

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For a similar entry for sarkā r in an important contemporary work, see Lala Tekchand “Bahar,” and Kazim Dizfuliyan, ed., Bahā r-i ʿajam: farhang-i lughā t, tarkubā t, kinā yā t, wa ams̤ ā l-i farsī (Tehran: Talayah, 1380 AH/2001–2002), Vol. 2, 1281. Siraj-ud-din Khan “Arzu,” 63. Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak, Akbarnā ma, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. by Abd-ur-rahim (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1876–1877), and Ā ʾīn-i akbarī, ed. by Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Aligarh: Sir Syed Academy, 2005); Gulbadan Banu Begum, Humā yūn-nā ma, ed. and tr. by Annette Beveridge as The History of Humayun (Humayun-nama) (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1900); Babur, Bā burnā ma: Chaghatay Turkish Text with Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan’s Persian Translation, 3 Vols., ed. and tr. by Wheeler M. Thackston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1993). Jahangir, Tūzuk-i jahā ngīrī, ed. by Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1914); Mutamad Khan, Iqbā lnā ma, ed. by Abd-ul-hayy and Ahmad Ali (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1865); Muhammad Salih Kamboh, ʿAmal-i ṣā liḥ al-mausum ba-shā hjahā n-nā ma, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. by Ghulam Yazdani and Vahid Quraishi (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi Adab, 1967–1972); Abd-ul-hamid Lahori, Bā dshā hnā ma, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. by Kabir-ud-din Ahmad and Abd-ur-rahim (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1867–1868); Muhammad Saqi Mustaid Khan, Mā ʾs̤ ir-i ʿā lamgīrī, ed. by Agha Ahmad Ali (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1871); Muhammad Kazim, ʿĀ lamgīrnā ma, ed. by Khadim Hussain and Abd-ul-hayy (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868). Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-lubā b, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. by Kabir-ud-din Ahmad (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1869–1874); Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, Tazkira-ussalā t ̣īn-i chaghtā ’ī, ed. by Muzaffar Alam (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1980). Nand Ram, Siyā qnā ma (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1879); Document Forms for Official Orders of Appointment in the Mughal Empire, ed. and tr. by John F. Richards (Cambridge: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1986). Sayyid Akbarali Ibrahimali Tirmizi, Edicts from the Mughal Harem (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1979); M. Ziauddin Ahmed Shakeb, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Batala Collection of Mughal Documents, 1527–1757 ad (London: The British Library, 1990); Andhra Pradesh Archives et al., Mughal Documents: Catalogue of Aurangzeb’s Reign (Hyderabad: State Archives, Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, 1980– 2007), 6 Vols.

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Generally speaking, the term was used in three distinct, if overlapping, registers. In the broadest sense, the word could be used to designate any elite household that could and did offer sources of patronage and employment. Unsurprisingly, such usage occurs most frequently in accounts of service under imperial noblemen,20 discussions of artists, poets, and their patrons,21 and in collections of belles lettres offering examples of how to solicit employment from or recommend employees to potential patrons.22 The next register encompassed those sub-imperial households considered legitimate participants in succession struggles and the larger arena of imperial politics. In the sixteenth century, this could include multiple branches of the Timurid dynasty, but by the seventeenth century, as the field of potential successors was limited to the lineal descendants of the emperor Babur, it designated primarily the households of Mughal princes.23 Within this register, however, it could also refer to the establishments of the emperors’ widowed mothers, their wives, and their unmarried daughters, who were unable to assume the throne themselves but were nevertheless integral to succession struggles and imperial politics more generally. The final, uppermost register consisted of the emperor’s ruling household and the households of rival rulers, both past and present. Thus, the term could be used to narrate pre-Mughal history and the Mughal conquest of Indian sultanates,24 or it could be used to identify contemporary rivals, such as when the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1628) referred to “the sarkā r of [his] brother” (sarkā r-i barā dar-am), Emperor Shah Abbas of Safavid Iran (r. 1588–1629).25 It should also be noted, however, that neither these registers nor particular uses of the word sarkā r remained static. In sixteenthcentury texts, the term was used relatively infrequently and rather indifferently. In his well-known memoir, the Bā burnā ma, the emperor 20

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Abd-ul-baqi Nahavandi, Mā ʾs̤ ir-i raḥīmī, Vols. 1–3, ed. by M. Hidayat Hosain (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1910–1931); Shahnawaz Khan Aurangabadi, Mā ʾs̤ ir-ulumarā ʾ, Vols. 1–3, ed. by Abd-ur-rahim and Ashraf Ali (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1888–1891). Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqaʿa-i dillī: Fā rsī matan aur urdū tarjama, ed. and tr. by Khaliq Anjum (Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi Urdu, 1993), 61, 70, 76. Chandar Bhan “Brahman,” Munshaʾā t-i brahman, ed. by Sharif Hussain Qasimi and W. H. Siddiqi (Rampur: Kitabkhana-i Raza Rampur, 2005), 47, 118. For the consolidation of the Baburid lineage, see, among others, André Wink, Akbar (Oxford: One World, 2009), 45–63. For the use of the term sarkā r for princely, subimperial households, see Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719, 67. For example, Mā ʾs̤ ir-i raḥīmī, Vol. 1, 176 and Nizam-ud-din Ahmad ibn Muhammad Muqim, Ṭabaqā t-i-akbarī (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1875), 503 and 583. Jahangir, Tūzuk-i jahā ngīrī, 288.

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Babur employed the term largely in accordance with earlier Timurid usage, using the word occasionally to refer to territorial divisions and the administrators governing them, although never in reference to his own household.26 Babur’s daughter, Gulbadan Banu Begum, used the term only once in her own memoir to refer to the household of Mirza Kamran, brother and perpetual irritant to the beleaguered emperor Humayun (r. 1526–1556).27 In his celebrated Akbarnā ma, Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak (d. 1602) used the term far more often to describe the establishments of imperial nobles and the emperor’s fraternal rivals than he did for the text’s namesake, the emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). In this regard, the three registers are largely indistinguishable from one another. By the early seventeenth century, however, following the contraction of dynastic legitimacy and the formation of more formalized and hierarchical household structures during the reign of Akbar, the word was used with increasing frequency and exclusivity.28 In this context, “non-imperial” sarkā rs virtually disappeared from the pages of seventeenth-century dynastic narratives. As a result, the term became in court chronicles a privileged designation for the households of the reigning emperor, politically viable princes, and powerful women within the ruling family. Indeed, only in the eighteenth century, when the center of political gravity shifted from princely households to those of influential vazīrs and provincial governors, did imperial historians again apply the moniker to such nonimperial establishments. At the same time, the sarkā r of the reigning emperor was also differentiated from other sub-imperial households in the seventeenth century through more regularized and elevated titles. Since the late sixteenth century, the household of the reigning sovereign had been typically designated as the “imperial sarkā r” (sarkā r-i bā dshā hī) or the “noble sarkā r” (sarkā r-i khā ṣṣa[-yi sharīfa]). While both formulations continued to be used into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were largely supplanted by other titles, such as the “sublime sarkā r (sarkā r-i wā lā ),” the “exalted sarkā r (sarkā r-i ʿā lī[-yi mutaʿā lī]),” the “sarkā r of the axis of the dynasty/world/universe (sarkā r-i daulat/jahā n/ʿā lam-madā r),” and – most 26

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Bā burnā ma, 62–63, 480–481, 542–543, and 776–777. The word sarkā r is used in both the Chaghata’i Turkish original and Abd-ur-rahim Khan-i Khanan’s seventeenth-century Persian translation. Humā yūn-nā ma, 79. For the formation of the imperial household under Akbar, see Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, especially pages 140–175.

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simply and most significantly – “[the] sarkā r.”29 These new uses, moreover, were not limited to dynastic narratives but occurred in administrative manuals and official documents as well.30 Coinciding with increasingly formalized court ritual and expanding documentary regimes under Shah Jahan (r. 1626–1658) and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), the new titles, particularly the appellation of “[the] sarkā r,” recast the imperial household in two opposing ways. On the one hand, by drawing on the ordinary meaning of sarkā r as an individual superintendent, the titles more closely linked the household (and, by extension, the empire) with the person of the emperor. On the other hand, by removing overt reference to the emperor himself, these usages effectively de-personalized the sarkā r, framing the household – and its martial and administrative appendages – in increasingly autonomous, institutional terms. Represented in this fashion, the imperial sarkā r occupied a liminal and perhaps transitional space, taking on the artificial life and institutional continuities Skinner locates in the Hobbesian state but remaining, per Anderson, ontologically undifferentiated from the society in which it was embedded.31 Nevertheless, both its patrimonial and autonomous valences underscored the primacy of the imperial sarkā r, and as the next section shows, it was this notion of the sarkā r – as a unitary institutional body wielding exclusive sovereignty through a sophisticated bureaucracy – that particularly appealed to Company officials and translators. This sarkā r, however, was a narrative and – as Michael Paul Martoccio notes of “the state” for early modern European theorists – a prescriptive fiction. While the imperial household’s financial, documentary, and organizational technologies undoubtedly grew more complex and far-reaching by the end of the seventeenth century, as Blake points out, it is difficult to sustain the view that the “sublime sarkā r” was in fact a precursor to the modern bureaucratic state. While some have seen the emergence of an increasingly specialized, “bureaucratic” mentality among imperial scribes and clerks in the seventeenth century,32 the period’s normative literature for courtly comportment continued to stress the cultivation of martial prowess, 29

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Persian does not have a definite article. Without an indefinite marker, or a possessive or qualitative attribute, sarkā r would be read with an implied “the.” Batala Collection, 31, 57; Document Forms, 217a, 218a, etc. See the contributions of Quentin Skinner and Greg Anderson in this volume. John F. Richards, “Norms of Comportment among Mughal Imperial Officers,” in Power, Administration, and Finance in Mughal India (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1993); and Kumkum Chatterjee, “Scribal Elites in Sultanate and Mughal Bengal,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 47 (2010), 445–472.

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aesthetic refinement, and ecumenical “civility,” an ethos that lent itself well to the sarkā r’s nebulously defined and overlapping offices and to frequent transfers of service between households.33 Moreover, it is clear that the imperial sarkā r could hardly substantiate its discursive claims to exclusive, universal sovereignty. Historians of early modern India have long noted the layered, limited, and negotiated nature of Mughal imperial authority. Even at the summit of the imperial hierarchy, the Mughal state was in practice multipolar, as rival princely households jockeyed with the imperial sarkā r and with one another in anticipation of open-ended succession conflicts. In spite of the emergence of an increasingly autonomous and bureaucratizing imperial sarkā r in the late seventeenth century, the Mughal emperors were ultimately unable to centralize their authority effectively. Indeed, as one recent study has argued convincingly, the emperor Aurangzeb’s attempts to exert greater control over the households of his sons and grandsons may have merely shifted power away from the imperial family to the households of influential nobles, thus providing the latter with the means to dismantle and further decentralize the empire in the eighteenth century.34 If, then, the Mughal “patrimonial-bureaucratic” state is to be located in the sarkā r, it may be more productive to envision the regime less in terms of a stable, bureaucratized imperial household than a loose network of households undergoing a variable process of bureaucratization. Put differently, through the lens of the sarkā r, it is evident that the patrimonial-bureaucratic state was not, as Blake’s critics have rightfully noted, created fully formed at the end of the sixteenth century, but rather was an institution that remained in perpetual tension between practical patrimonialism and incipient bureaucratization. Moreover, the “state” (patrimonial, bureaucratic, or otherwise) was not a unitary entity, even at its center, where it collided with deeper Timurid traditions of shared dynastic sovereignty. The notion of an autonomous institutional sovereign – the sarkā r – remained a discursive illusion, one that the Mughal successor states and the Company pursued as a prescriptive ideal into the nineteenth century.

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Aziz Ahmad, “The British Museum Mīrzā nā ma and the Seventeenth Century Mīrzā in India,” Iran 13 (1975), 99–110; and Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Faruqui, Princes of the Mughal Empire, especially pages 274–326.

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sarka¯ r or “the state”? successor regimes and the company The constellation of interlocking sarkā rs that constituted the Mughal “state” (re)appeared in imperial discourse and dynastic narratives in the early eighteenth century, as power shifted from the imperial household into the hands of high-ranking officials and provincial governors. Although the erasure of non-imperial sarkā rs had been incomplete even at the empire’s height in the mid-seventeenth century, by the 1730s and 1740s, the loss of imperial power could not be ignored; accordingly, the sarkā rs of prominent noblemen became much more prominent in dynastic narratives and travel accounts of the early-to-mid eighteenth century. Indeed, this was the context in which Mukhlis offered his own definition of sarkā r and hinted at its seeming ubiquity (“the sarkā r of so-and-so”). Unsurprisingly, elsewhere Mukhlis juxtaposed comfortably the “sublime sarkā r” of the emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748) with those of the powerful vazīr Qamar-ud-din Khan and Safdar Jang, the second de facto independent ruler of the North Indian province of Awadh.35 At the same time, the tensions implicit in this formulation of the sarkā r – between the emergent ideal of a sovereign, autonomous, institutional body and the reality of multiple interlocking and often competing households – were reproduced among the so-called Mughal successor states, that is, the provincial governorships-turned-autonomous satrapies that had emerged by the mid-eighteenth century. Unlike the Mughal emperors, who claimed universal sovereignty, the authority of de facto independent dynasts in Awadh, Hyderabad, Bengal, and Arcot was tied to particular imperial offices in specific provinces. As a result, provincial rulers represented themselves and their households, particularly in their correspondence with the Company, as the sarkā r within their respective provinces.36 This view, however, contrasted sharply with the reality documented by the crumbling empire’s scribal class. Following Anand Ram “Mukhlis,” munshīs like Harcharan Das (who served both imperial officials in Delhi and the rulers of Awadh) portrayed a complex political landscape comprising not only the sarkā rs of imperial elites and provincial governors but 35

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Anand Ram “Mukhlis,” Safarnā ma-yi mukhliṣ, ed. and tr. by Sayyid Ali Azhar (Rampur: Hindustan Press, 1946), 13, 55, 68. For numerous examples throughout, see Imperial Record Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence, Being Letters, Referring Mainly to Affairs in Bengal, Which Passed between Some of the Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1911), Vol. 1, 1759–1767.

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also those of their wives and widowed mothers, their affine and consanguine kin, and their various subordinates, both enslaved and free. Moreover, as perceived by Harcharan Das and others, this matrix of households was not fixed or territorially defined but frequently reconfigured across porous provincial boundaries.37 Nevertheless, through the intercession of the Company, it was the provincial dynasts’ prescriptive view of the sarkā r that prevailed discursively. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, viewing Indian politics through the lens of European interstate relations, Company officials understood the sarkā rs of regional rulers to constitute the “governments” of effectively independent, territorially defined states. Consequently, following its own emergence as a territorial power in the late 1750s, Company officials regularly glossed sarkā r for the British public as “a general name for government, or persons concerned in administration.”38 The conflation of “state” and sarkā r would grow even more entrenched as the Company developed a pedagogical apparatus for instructing its officers in Persian and other Indian vernaculars. In composing new instructional materials, the authors of Company textbooks drew heavily from seventeenth-century works like Inshā ʾ-yi harkaran (The Epistles of Har Karan) and Chahā r chaman-i brahman (The Four Meadows of “Brahman”).39 As a result, the depersonalized, autonomous sarkā r of high imperial discourse became synonymous with “the state,” not only in these works but also in official translations of Persian correspondence. In turn, the equivalence of “state” and sarkā r informed the Company’s representation of itself in Persian and other Indian languages. After its acquisition of the Bengal dīwā nī in 1765 (if not earlier), the Company 37

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Harcharan Das, Chahā r gulzā r-i shujā ʿī: British Library [BL], OMS Or. 1732. For munshīs and late-imperial historiography, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Eighteenth-Century Historiography and the World of the Mughal Munshi,” in Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 396–428. See, for example, Robert Cambridge, An Account of the War in India, between the English and French, on the Coast of Coromandel, from the Year 1750 to the Year 1760 (London, 1761), 14, and Henry Vansittart, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, from the Year 1760 to the Year 1764, during the Government of Mr. Henry Vansittart (London, 1766), xxix. Francis Balfour, Insha-yi Harkaran, or The Forms of Herkern Corrected from a Variety of Manuscripts, Supplied with the Distinguishing Marks of Construction, and Translated into English: With an Index of Arabic Words Explained, and Arranged under their Proper Roots (Calcutta, 1781); Francis Gladwin, The Persian Moonshee (Calcutta: Chronicle Press, 1795).

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began to represent itself as another territorially defined sarkā r, a move that bolstered its short-lived support of the “Mughal constitution” and membership within a confederacy of imperial states that included itself, the nā z ̣im of Bengal, the nawwā b-vazīr of Awadh, and Emperor Shah Alam in Allahabad.40 By the late 1780s, the Company went further still in appropriating the language of the sarkā r state, using as its official Persian title “the Government of the [Hon’ble] English Company” (sarkā r-i kampanī angrez bahā dur). Through the addition of the PersoTurkish bahā dur (a designation long appended to the titles of individual imperial nobleman), the Company embraced the same contradictory vision of sarkā r as man and autonomous institution that had characterized high-Mughal and successor-state discourse. Of course, these gestures toward institutional and conceptual commensurability did not mean that the Company intended its own sarkā r to be a mirror of its contemporaries. Indeed, the ostensible equivalence between the Company state and the ruling households of the successor regimes permitted British officials to press for reforms that aimed at remaking local sarkā rs along “universal” principles of enlightened European governance. In the case of regimes like Awadh, which had become a client of the Company in 1765, this meant delegitimating the sarkā rs of familial rivals, removing offices and documents from the ruler’s residence, prohibiting simultaneous appointments in the household and “the government,” and separating the “private” finances of the household from the “public” fiduciary obligations of “the state.” In other words, if the sarkā r had remained in perpetual tension between practical patrimonialism and incipient bureaucratization, the Company now sought to shift its client regimes decisively toward the latter, leaving their rulers the nominal, patriarchal figureheads of bureaucratic governments supervised by British officials. 40

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From Robert Clive’s Persian correspondence, it is clear that Indian officials in the Company’s service had begun referring to the Company sarkā r (sarkā r-i kampanī) not long after the victory at Plassey. See National Library of Wales, Robert Clive Papers, Original Correspondence, Letters in Persian, CR9/1–30. However, it is unclear when exactly Company officials themselves embraced the designation, particularly in diplomatic contexts. For the earliest examples I have been able to locate, see the 1765 treaty with nawwā b-vazīr Shuja-ud-daula: BL, Richard Johnson Papers, OMS I.O. Islamic 4753/b, ff. 20a–22a; and Henry Vansittart, A Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, from Mr. Henry Vansittart, Occasioned by a Late Anonymous Pamphlet, and by the East-India Observer, No. VI (London, 1767), 91. For the notion of the “Mughal constitution” in the political thought of Company officials, see Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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In Awadh and elsewhere, this process was halting and haphazard, undercut by regional rulers’ deep ambivalence toward the Company project, fierce resistance from rival household heads, and the Company’s own limited powers of coercion. Well into the 1830s, the Company was not able to erase the multiplicity of sarkā rs even from its own Persian intelligence reports, which depicted relations not only between the “two governments” of the Company and the rulers of Awadh, but also between the households of ruling family members and local officials, in addition to the “establishment” of the local British resident (sarkā r-i ṣā ḥib kalā n).41 Moreover, following the Rebellion of 1857/8, the conservative Crown regime re-embraced forms of limited patrimonialism, providing the rulers of India’s “princely states” with greater freedom to participate in local governance as dynastic patriarchs and heads of state.42 Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the sarkā r had been discursively severed from the household and decisively recast as the modern bureaucratic state, first for the colonial and princely states and later for the nation-states of postcolonial South Asia.

§ § § § § This chapter has argued that in the Indo-Persian term sarkā r, we might locate an emic equivalent to Stephen Blake’s Weberian neologism, the “patrimonial-bureaucratic state.” Moreover, it has proposed that by attending to the term’s etymology and long-term semantic shifts, we may be able to avoid ahistorical and overly schematic typologies of the state without jettisoning the broad comparative utility of Weberian analytic categories. However, whether or not revised modes of Weberian analysis prove useful to scholars of the state in South Asia, it might also be suggested that by tracing the evolution of keywords like sarkā r, we may better elucidate changing notions of pre- and early colonial statehood and more fully harmonize recent work on kingship and imperial ideology in the Mughal empire and on the transnational conceptual foundations of 41

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For examples, see: National Archives of India, Foreign Department-Persian Branch, Copies of Letters Received, Vol. 38 (Jul.–Dec. 1812), No. 89; Andhra Pradesh State Archives, Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, Persian MS Tarikh-702, Akhbā r-i darbā r-i ghā zī-ud-dīn ḥaidar bā dshā h-i awadh; and BL, OMS Add. 22,624, Reports on Occurrences at the Court of Delhi, 1830. For a broader discussion of ruling households and “the state” in Awadh, see Nicholas J. Abbott, “Household, Family, and State: Negotiating Sovereignty and Sarkā r in the Awadh Nawā bī, c. 1775–1840” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2017). Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 170–205.

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the British empire in Asia.43 In turn, such an approach may help lay the groundwork for new conceptual histories of the state that attend to the fluid, multivalent, and often contradictory representations of statehood in precolonial discourse, as well as the ways in which the colonial regime itself was formulated through indigenous political concepts. This is not to suggest, however, that sarkā r (or any other term, for that matter) can serve as a master concept for unpacking the history of statehood in South Asia. Rather, it is to remind us that, as greater attention is once again paid to the specific institutions, practices, and documentary regimes that constituted the Mughal and early colonial states, we must remain sensitive to the shifting and contingent nature of the vocabulary used to theorize them.44 In so doing, we may recognize more fully the complex interplay between the ideation and the practice of the state, across time and across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

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For examples of the former, see Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (New York: Routledge, 2009); Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal India: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); and A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For the latter, see Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India; and Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Important recent studies include: Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Faruqui, Princes of the Mughal Empire; Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire.

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8 Revolutionary State Formation The Origins of the Strong American State William J. Novak and Steven Pincus

In his undelivered first inaugural address, George Washington outlined a remarkable vision for a powerful American state. At the beginning of the conflict with Britain, Washington recalled, “money, the nerve of war was wanting.” The “sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity” – “the treasury to be created from nothing.” Against all odds, the Americans did create a treasury and prevailed in the bloody conflict. Along with peace came the realization that the war had left the new American state with “a load of debt.” It was Congress’s inability to find means to repay this debt that led America’s first president to lament “the impotence of Congress under the former confederation.” He therefore called on the new Congress “to raise the supplies for discharging the interest on the national debt.” Washington was not, however, merely interested in balancing the books. Instead he proposed an ambitious program for government-supported development at both the national and state levels. He called for the creation of “a grand provision of warlike stores, arsenals, and dockyards.” “While the individual states shall be occupied in facilitating the means of transportation by opening canals and improving roads,” Washington continued, “you will not forget that the purposes of business and society may be vastly promoted by giving cheapness, dispatch and security to communications through the regular posts.” Washington knew that the United States was not yet prepared to become a manufacturing nation on the scale of Britain. Nevertheless he thought that “many articles . . . may be fabricated at home with great advantage.” To that end, he hoped Congress would offer “encouragement” to their manufacture. Above

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all, Washington concluded, Congress should “take measures for promoting the general welfare.”1 This was not the first time that Washington had called for the creation of a powerful American state. On July 9, 1776, George Washington read to his troops a document that would radically alter the course of history. As soon as he received the newly penned Declaration of Independence, Washington had it “proclaimed before all the army under my immediate command.” His troops were enthusiastic, Washington implied, because the Declaration “will secure us that freedom and those privileges which have been and are refused us.”2 The privileges to which Washington was referring were a large swath of bounties to support the development of agricultural products, state-sponsored infrastructure projects, and support for the development of civil government. All of these had been severely restricted in the wake of the transformation of British imperial administration in the 1760s. Washington was calling for a strong American state to replace the strong British state that had been emasculated by the policies of George Grenville and Frederick Lord North. America’s first president’s vision of a strong and activist state stands in stark contrast to the conventional scholarly consensus. For historians and social scientists have been as one in proclaiming the revolutionary state to have been weak and even anti-statist. Progressive historian Merrill Jensen, for example, interpreted America’s Declaration as basically the manifesto of a “a revolt against the centralized coercive power of Great Britain.”3 Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who understood more than most that the American Revolution itself launched a successful project of state formation, also read the Declaration as a document that fundamentally “abolished the authority and power of crown and Parliament.” If the revolution did create a state, it was a state that had very limited social and developmental aims.4 The authors of the Declaration were committed to a concept of negative liberty, according to legal scholar John Philip Reid, by which they meant “freedom from a number of social and political 1

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George Washington, “Undelivered First Inaugural Address,” April 30, 1789, Theodore J. Crackel, ed., The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), Presidential Series, Vol. 2, 158–173. George Washington (New York) to John Hancock, July 10, 1776, Theodore J. Crackel, ed., The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), Revolutionary War Series, Vol. 5, 258; Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 46, September 1776, 434. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 163. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 149.

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evils, including arbitrary government power.” America’s Founders, chimes in Gordon Wood, especially those who penned the Declaration, “tended to see society as beneficial and government as malevolent.” Jack Greene agrees in this regard: the American revolutionaries drew on a legal tradition that was wholly committed to “limited government.”5 Countless commentators and politicians have drawn on this scholarly tradition in their insistence that the Declaration of Independence enshrined the American commitment to small government. The weak state ideology of America’s Founders makes sense in this story because these scholars all believed too in the fundamental weakness of the British imperial state prior to the 1760s. “The overall structure of the English government” in this early period, Bernard Bailyn notes, “had been too weak, too flexible and manipulable, to sustain ultimate confrontations.”6 Jack Rakove has emphasized “the weakness of authority” in colonial America that was intimately associated with “the inability of colonial governors to buttress their exaggerated claims of formal power.”7 Prior to 1760, Jack Greene agrees, the imperial government was characterized by “lax administration.” When a more powerful imperial state did emerge after 1760, Greene argues, “suspicion and fear of central power” was already deeply imbedded in American public consciousness.8 This view is now inscribed at the heart of the field. The eighteenth-century empire, Josh Piker insists, was characterized by “colonial autonomy and localized agency” necessitated by the weakness created by a composite monarchy.9 This account of a weak imperial state was based on what was once the most up-to-date British historical scholarship. Indeed, two remarkable scholars shaped much early Americanist thinking about the state: Sir John Plumb and Peter Laslett. Plumb had in his Ford Lectures of 1965 described 5

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John Philip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10; Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xiii. Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 64. This weakness of state was true on an Atlantic scale: Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 81. Jack Rakove, “’How Else Could It End?’,” in James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds., The Transformation of Early American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 57. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 45, 161. Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 40–41.

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the growth of the British executive in the early eighteenth century.10 But the new British executive that Plumb traced was not a large and activist state, but rather a svelte organization characterized by “efficiency.” Plumb was interested in the state to be sure. But his interests were not in what the state could do to promote the public good, but rather in what the state could do to consolidate political power.11 Peter Laslett, whose intellectual creativity inspired both the new social history and the Cambridge-based vision of the history of political thought, had little time for work on state formation. In the final chapter of his seminal The World We Have Lost – a work pleading with historians to become more sociological – Laslett denounced what he saw as a Marxist-inspired sociology of the state.12 The mid-century British historiography that early American historians relied upon was uniformly hostile to sociological conceptions of the state. We now know, however, that far from having a weak state that was capable only of dispensing patronage on a broad scale, Britain after the Revolution of 1688–1689 developed an extremely strong state. England’s revolution had created a new kind of state: a powerful one capable of defeating the world’s greatest power in a series of wars fought on an increasingly global scale, but a state that was at the same time responsive to the needs and desires of its subjects. Britain’s revolutionaries of 1688–1689, uniquely in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had created a strong and participatory state.13 The British Parliament, it turns out, spent far more heavily than their European rivals in the eighteenth century on developing social and economic infrastructure in their colonies and in Scotland and Ireland. It was this imperial state that provided infrastructure and subsidies for American development that America’s founders looked back to wistfully in the 1770s.

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Bailyn calls the second era of Atlantic development the era of “stability and development,” for example: Atlantic History, 81. John H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967), xv, 126. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1971), 253; Peter Laslett, “Market Society and Political Theory,” Historical Journal, 7 No. 1 (1964), 150–154. Skinner has himself been similarly hostile to this Marxist tradition: “Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method,” in The Art of Theory: Conversations in Political Philosophy. Online journal, www.artoftheory.com/quentin-skinner-onmeaning-and-method/ (accessed October 12, 2012). John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

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In this chapter we claim that early Americans sought to recreate the robust British imperial state of the mid-eighteenth century in North America. By shifting the discussion away from issues of sovereignty and power and focusing instead on questions of infrastructure and police – in short on the sociology rather than the narrowly conceived political theory of the state – it becomes possible to appreciate that the Founders from early 1776 on were intent on creating a state at both the national and local levels that would not only be able to defend the new republic but also promote the welfare of its citizens. The Declaration of Independence was a clarion call, not to separate from Britain, but to make an American state. The Articles of Confederation were intended to create a stronger confederal state than its European antecedents, the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation. The early American state, it turns out, generated strength by effectively mapping activist state governments onto an activist federal center to create a potent entity devoted to promoting the public welfare.

a declaration of state formation By the autumn of 1775 no one doubted that America was in fact independent. Royal governors had virtually no authority over their provinces. The provinces themselves had established shadow governments. Anarchy and civil war prevailed throughout North America. The British imperial state had ceased to function on the continent. Independence, many members of Congress claimed in June 1776, was “a fact which already exists.”14 Why, then, did the Second Continental Congress feel compelled to issue the Declaration of Independence? Why did a group of statesmen feel the need to divert their energies from an all-consuming war effort to frame a document declaring what all sides already knew to be true? The answer, John Adams made clear in his eloquent Thoughts on Government, was precisely because the Americans had been “discharged” from their “allegiance,” and it had become necessary “to assume government for our immediate security.”15 The Declaration, John Hancock knew, was “the ground and foundation of a future 14

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Thomas Jefferson’s Notes of Proceedings in Congress, June 8, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 4, p. 161; Francis Lightfoot Lee (Philadelphia) to Landon Carter, March 19, 1776, Smith, Letters to Delegates of Congress, Vol. 3, p. 407; Richard Henry Lee (Philadelphia) to Landon Carter, April 1, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 3, p. 470; Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant (Princeton) to John Adams, April 11, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 3, p. 508. John Adams, Thoughts on Government (Philadelphia, PA: John Dunlap, 1776), 16–17.

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government.”16 The Americans declared independence in July 1776 not because they loathed governmental oppression, but because they desperately needed a state. The Declaration of Independence was a call to state formation. What kind of state did the American Founders want to create? America’s Founders developed their answers to that question in the context of the century-long debate about the best form of imperial governance. The framers of the Declaration of Independence advanced the arguments for a strong state in the Patriot tradition. Like previous generations of Patriots, they insisted that consumers provided the key to a growing economy and that state activity was essential to create a dynamic consumer-driven economy. Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic emphasized the centrality of colonial consumption to economic development. The Patriots maintained that the massive and growing demand of North Americans for British manufactured goods contributed significantly to both the British economy and state revenue. There was an “immense trade” between Britain and her colonies, argued Alexander Hamilton.17 “It is a plain and incontestable fact,” thundered Patriot and future prime minister William Petty, second Earl of Shelburne, in the House of Lords, “that the commerce of America is the vital stream of this great empire.”18 “Two thirds in the colonies are clothed in British manufactures,” noted John Adams.19 In Britain and in North America, Patriots emphasized that the remarkable growth of North American consumption of British manufactures created thousands of jobs and raised the value of British landed property. The “almost unlimited demand” of North Americans for British manufactures, reasoned Virginian Richard Henry Lee, “produced employment for several hundred sail of ships and many thousand seamen,” increased the value of lands in Britain,” and “entirely supported” the employment of “multitudes of people.”20 Moreover, the Patriots insisted that prior to the accession of George III the British imperial government had done a great deal to stimulate

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John Hancock (Philadelphia) to New Jersey Convention, July 5, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 4, p. 392. Hamilton, A Full Vindication, 1774, p. 12. William Petty, second Earl of Shelburne, October 26, 1775, Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, Vol. 6, p. 85. John Adams, Notes of Debates, September 26–27, 1774, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 1, p. 103. Richard Henry Lee, Draft Address to the People of Great Britain and Ireland, October 11–18, 1774, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 1, p. 175.

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colonial economic development. Financial support and physical protection, not salutary neglect, characterized the British Empire prior to the fall of William Pitt’s ministry. This was “the beautiful system of empire our ancestors have been raising with so much pains and glory,” described by former colonial governor George Johnstone, that was being destroyed in “a mad career” by misguided statesmen.21 This was the “beautiful fabric” of the British imperial constitution that Mercy Otis Warren wished to see “repaired and re-established” in 1774.22 Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and the members of the Second Continental Congress recalled wistfully “the mutual benefits” of the British imperial union in July 1775.23 It was this policy of state support for the Americans, rather than the new policy of extracting revenue, that the Patriots thought should be expanded. The bottom line for Patriots was that the North ministry had pursued misguided economic policies. The best way to pay down the massive British debt was to stimulate increases in colonial consumption that would indirectly generate huge sums for the British revenue. The taxation policies adopted by the Grenville and North ministries had the effect of suppressing American consumption. The consequences were dire indeed. Patriots were pleased, no doubt, to witness the diminishing power of the Grenville/North extractive and tyrannical state. But they knew all too well that the old British imperial state provided the infrastructure and capital that made possible British America’s remarkable and dynamic prosperity. North American Patriots understood they had to replace the British imperial state with a new state structure. As British Americans discussed the adoption of resolutions endorsing nonimportation, nonconsumption, and non-exportation in 1774, they began at the same time to discuss the necessity for state support for the North American economy. The Committee of Fairfax County, chaired by George Washington, called for “subscriptions and premiums to the improvements of arts and manufactures in America.”24 John Adams proposed a resolution to the First Continental Congress recommending 21

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George Johnstone, October 26, 1775, Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, Vol. 6, p. 106. Mercy Otis Warren (Plimouth) to Abigail Adams, January 19, 1774, Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 1, p. 91. Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, July 6, 1775, Oberg and Looney, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, Vol. 1, p. 214. Resolves of Fairfax County, July 18, 1774, Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia, Vol. 1, 130–131.

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that all colonies “encourage arts, manufactures, and agriculture by all means in their power.”25 The Association ultimately adopted by that Congress called on Americans to do all in their power to “promote agriculture, the arts, and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool.”26 By the time the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in May 1775, state support of American economic development had gone from a desideratum to a necessity. The time had come for “an entirely new colony police,” Ezra Stiles explained to Dr. Richard Price.27 In February 1776 John Adams jotted down an urgent list of statebuilding measures to be pursued by Congress, ranging from concluding foreign alliances and treaties of commerce, to regulating currency, to manufacturing gunpowder and saltpeter.28 Why, then, did the members of the Second Continental Congress feel the necessity to declare independence in 1776? Until they formally declared independence, the delegates knew, they could not raise the money necessary to pursue their essential state-building initiatives. The Americans needed much more than state recognition; they needed commerce to support their state-building projects. It was precisely for this reason that immediately upon signing the Declaration the Continental Congress ordered that copies be sent to the courts of Europe, had it translated into French, and ordered it to be “published” in European newspapers.29 The Declaration of Independence was less about unmaking the British Empire in North America than it was about announcing to the world the creation of a new American state. From the first, the Founders intended a state that would have all of the virtues but none of the vices of the British imperial state. Knowing that the Declaration of Independence was a call to state formation in the Patriot mode, it becomes possible to reexamine the most cited and well-known lines of the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are 25

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John Adams, Proposed Resolutions, September 30, 1774, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 1, p. 132. The Association, October 20, 1774, Oberg and Looney, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, Vol. 1, p. 151. Ezra Stiles (Newport) to Dr. Richard Price, April 10, 1775, Beinecke, MS Vault Stiles, Correspondence Box 12. John Adams, Memorandum of Measures to be Pursued in Congress, February 9–23, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 3, p. 218. Committee of Secret Correspondence (Philadelphia) to Silas Deane, July 8, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 4, p. 405.

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endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” That governments were “instituted among men” to protect not only life and liberty but “the pursuit of happiness” had become a commonplace in eighteenth-century political argument. For precisely that reason “the pursuit of happiness” had many potential meanings. But Patriots, by and large, interpreted the pursuit of happiness to mean the promotion of the public good or welfare. States, they believed, were instituted to do much more than merely provide security, were much more than a necessary evil. Patriots believed passionately that states had a responsibility positively to promote the happiness of their populations. This had long been the view of those revered by the American Patriots. Statesmen, argued John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letters, were responsible for the “wealth, security and happiness of kingdoms.”30 Joseph Priestley was certain “that the happiness of the whole community is the ultimate end of government can never be doubted.”31 American Patriots made clear that they shared this perception. Because “every individual is to seek and find his happiness in the welfare of the whole,” preached Connecticut Patriot Levi Watson, all governments “must tend to promote the general welfare, this is the test by which they must be tried.”32 The Declaration, John Adams proudly proclaimed, “completes a Revolution which will make as good a figure in the history of mankind as any that has preceded it.”33 Benjamin Rush thought it inaugurated “a new era.”34 Both men knew that the Declaration had inaugurated a new era of state-making in North America. Independence from Britain had existed for more than a year in July 1776. America’s Founders issued their Declaration to kick-start the creation of a Patriot state. They made their intentions clear by drawing on almost a century of Patriot economic thinking. Like the British Patriots who had governed the empire prior to 1760, America’s Patriots believed in state-supported trade with Spanish

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Ronald Hamowy, ed., Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1995) Vol. 1, No. 12, p. 67. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (Dublin: James Williams, 1768), p. 64. Watson, Liberty Described, 1775, p. 11. John Adams (Philadelphia) to Mary Palmer, July 5, 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 4, p. 389. Benjamin Rush (Philadelphia) to General Charles Lee, July 23, 1776, Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin Rush, Vol. 1, p. 103.

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America, in state-supported immigration, and in state-supported efforts to diversify the economy that began with an assault on the slave trade. The American Patriots began and ended their manifesto with paeans to the state.

revolutionary state legislatures and state formation As the first part of this chapter makes clear, long-held ideological presuppositions about the weakness of the American state have crept into and distorted interpretation of even such basic primary documents and historical events as the Declaration of Independence. In contrast to conventional renderings of that historic document highlighting a simple liberty against tyranny, most of the Declaration’s words (signed onto by fifty-six American Patriots) actually described failures of British statecraft – i.e., a state doing too little – and aspired to create an alternative postrevolutionary state that would do better and far more. George III had obstructed the passage of legislation both in Britain and in America that would have improved the lives of the colonists, and he had failed to use the power of the British state to promote American “trade with all parts of the world.” The Declaration was thus not so much an attack on a government grown too big, but a call for a “new Government” and a system of rule that involved a strong polity – a polity that would promote immigration, support the manufacturing sector, and promote egalitarian economic development and trade (all while also limiting the role of the military in civilian life). What is true for the Declaration holds as well for conventional historical interpretation of much of subsequent Revolutionary- and Confederation-era politics and policy making. In terms of public welfare, public power, public policy, and the state, the tale of the road through the Articles of Confederation has been traditionally told as primarily a liberty or rights narrative highlighting an imminent and growing weakness in the nascent American state. “Since 1750,” Oscar Handlin noted, “from the pulpit, through the press, and in a flood of pamphlets, the colonists pointed their discussions by way of the immediate issues . . . at the ultimate issue of rights.”35 Handlin’s student Bernard Bailyn, who originally charted the extraordinary powers of colonial 35

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Oscar Handlin, The Americans: A New History of the People of the United States (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), 139.

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legislatures in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, noted the important shift circa 1760 toward what he dubbed the “Alienation of the State.”36 As Jack Rakove (Bailyn’s student) put it, “Explaining how this situation came to pass – why established authority had grown so weak in colonial and Revolutionary America . . . is the great issue that Bailyn’s writings collectively and cumulatively strive to resolve.” Rakove elaborated in terms that resonated as well with Gordon Wood’s notion of the “Radicalism of the American Revolution”: “This sapping of the status and power of elites finds a parallel in the weakening of the authority of the state itself, in its inability to define and advance transcendent notions of the public good distinct from those sought by particular interests within the society.”37 In contrast to this fairly long and distinguished tradition in the historical and social science literature highlighting an original American revolutionary rights orientation and an emergent hostility to positive governance (perhaps even anti-statism), we contend that the entirety of American independence and early state-formation was worked out against a background assumption of a strong state and interventionist efforts in social and economic policy making. Now, of course, for a while now, revisionist historians like Max Edling have been charting an alternative interpretation of the American Revolution “In Favor of Government.” But for the most part, this trend, inspired by Max Weber and John Brewer, is primarily focused on the central government and the fiscal-military imperatives of modern nation-states.38 In the rest of this chapter, we suggest that, beyond the Declaration of Independence, the other place to look for a strong revolutionary American state tradition is the state legislatures.39 36

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Bernard Bailyn, “The Alienation of the State,” in Bailyn et al., eds., The Great Republic: A History of the American People (Lexington, MA: DC Heath and Co., 1992), I:193–198; Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (1997), 347–380. Jack Rakove, “‘How Else Could It End?’: Bernard Bailyn and the Problem of Authority in Early America,” in James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley Katz, eds., The Transformation of Early American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991): 51–69, 54–55; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 81, 85. Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). The two great exceptions to the conventional view of late colonial and revolutionary-era states as weak and enervated are Allan Nevins, The American States during and after the Revolution, 1775–1789 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), viii; and Henry

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Now, the revolutionary state legislatures might strike many as an unusual choice for an initial investigation of the power of early American statecraft. After all, unlike the original colonial legislatures that have been extolled for their controlled state political economy and assertive public governance in times of necessity,40 the general verdict on America’s founding-era legislatures has not been nearly as flattering. On the contrary, rather than a solution, the early state legislatures (from the Revolution to the Constitution) are typically seen as key parts of the problem – one of the central reasons for the “weakness” of the Confederation and a faltering early American state. “Drifting toward Anarchy” was John Fiske’s original appraisal of the “Critical Period” in American history before the emergence of the “germs of national sovereignty,” featuring state reprisals, quarrels, retaliatory measures, failures, financial distress, rag-money, insurrection, and Barbary pirates.41 Gordon Wood maintained Fiske’s general portrait of the “Critical Period,” emphasizing the “vices of the system” and the “abuses of legislative power.” Here, James Madison rose to special prominence in what Jack Rakove ultimately dubbed a “Madisonian [rather than Machiavellian] Moment.”42 Indeed, something of the climax of the entire era is reached in Madison’s “remarkable” memorandum on “The Vices of the Political System of the United States” – prelude to Catherine Drinker Bowen’s “Miracle at Philadelphia.”43 The core of Madison’s memo on the eve of that famous gathering was essentially a screed aimed directly at the state legislatures and the “multiplicity and mutability” of state laws. Without presenting much at all in terms of empirical evidence or investigation, Madison excoriated the state legislatures and their collective output in the most extreme terms imaginable: “evils,” “malady,” “a nuisance,”

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W. Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1938). Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 102. John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789 (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 134–186. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), part IV: The Critical Period, chapter X: Vices of the System; Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), chapter III: The Madisonian Moment. Rakove refers to the “Vices” of the previous regime more than twenty times. James Madison, “The Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in The Papers of James Madison, IX, 345–357. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1966).

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“pestilent,” “vicious,” “a snare,” “injustice,” “defect,” “alarming,” and the list of strained adjectives goes on. Madison’s thoroughgoing critique of the founding-era state legislatures condemned them to a status of censure, neglect, and political vilification from which they have never fully recovered. Despite the fact that most histories of the founding since Madison’s memo have disparaged the policy-making output of the early American states, there is perhaps reason to question the empirical bases of (as well as ideological and interpretive reasons for) this common historical judgment. And while it is beyond the scope of this short chapter to fully engage an empirical task that consumed 700 pages for Allan Nevins and twenty years for Henry Farnam, there is one previous historical survey of state legislative action that is especially illuminating for quickly taking a shorthand measure of the early American legislative state in this period.44 Without question, one of the most important episodes in the growth of the modern American state took place on Woodrow Wilson’s watch. During World War I, Wilson launched an extraordinary program of executive, administrative, legislative, and central state action that included such expansive initiatives as conscription, espionage and sedition acts, national prohibition, and the extraordinary experiment in domestic price controls known as the Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917. As one contemporary critic put it, “The power demanded is greater than has ever been exercised by any king or potentate of earth; it is broader than that which is exercised by the Kaiser of the Germans. It is a power such as no Caesar ever employed over a conquered province in the bloodiest days of Rome’s bloody despotism.”45 Of special interest to students of the American state, however, is the question of where the Wilson administration turned for precedents for this unprecedented ramping up of American statecraft. Of course, one would expect the actions of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to receive extensive attention. What is unexpected, however, is the degree to which the Wilson administration relied instead on the extraordinary record of American state legislatures in the American Revolution – the very legislatures that Madison and generations of historians have condemned to ignominious ineffectiveness. 44

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Nevins, The American States during and after the Revolution; Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation. Senator James A. Reed, Congressional Record, 55 (1917), 3597.

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In 1918, J. Reuben Clark Jr., under the direction of the attorney general of the United States, issued his report on historic American “Emergency Legislation” dealing especially with regulation “for the public use, benefit, or welfare.”46 The volume included more than 1,000 pages of historic American statutes. Civil War legislation consumed about fifty of those pages, but most of the rest of the volume – some 800 pages – cataloged the extraordinary legislative activities of the Continental Congress and especially the laws of the individual states from Connecticut to Virginia. This historical statutory survey is perhaps a good place to quickly begin a reassessment of the strength, power, and dexterity of the early American states and legislatures. The legislative and regulatory tradition that Bernard Bailyn designated as the “colonial origins” of American politics showed no signs of abating or alienating during the Revolution. And even a quick perusal of the legislative record during the Revolution betrays Gordon Wood’s sense that the American state was late to the party – still enthralled by the privatized ethos of premodern or even medieval governance.47 On the contrary, as the Wilson administration appreciated, the early American state legislatures were active, engaged, proactive, inventive, and powerful. Indeed, even Griffith McRee understood as early as 1857 the heroic tasks undertaken by the revolutionary state legislatures. McRee describes an admittedly harried North Carolina assembly working under the most extreme and adverse conditions – working during a difficult time in the war, with a governor in whom they lost faith, and in severe economic crisis and social turmoil. Yet, according to McRee, the legislature levied a public tax, emitted bills of credit, established a Board of Commission to attempt to redress the difficulties of obtaining salt and other foreign commodities, authorized the governor to send up to 8,000 men to the relief of South Carolina and to fill the ranks of the Continental battalions, and passed acts to limit counterfeiting and “to protect Quakers, Moravians, Menonists, and Dunkards against persons who had taken possession of their lands.”48 46

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J. Reuben Clark Jr., Emergency Legislation Passed Prior to December, 1917 Dealing with the Control and Taking of Private Property for the Public Use, Benefit, or Welfare (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918). Wood, Radicalism, 82–83; For the alternative perspective, see Nicholas Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). McRee, Iredell, 443–444, 449.

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The 800 pages of statutes in the Wilson administration report further bears out McRee’s early assessment of extraordinary legislative activity under extremely dire and difficult conditions. In almost all the states, the legislatures began by taking control of state trade and political economy and aggressively policing fraud and wartime opportunism. Connecticut early passed an “Act to Encourage Fair Dealing, and to Restrain and Punish Sharpers and Oppressors” that required a license to purchase any of the following products (except in small quantities for domestic consumption and use): “Rum, Sugar, Molasses, Tea, Wine, Coffee, Salt, Tow-Cloth or any kind of linen or woolen Cloths, Stockings, Shoes, raw Hides, Leather, Wool, Flax, Cotton, Cotton and Wool Cards, Butter, Cheese, Wheat, Rye, Indian Corn, Beans, Peas, Meal or Flour of any Kind, Beef, Pork, Cyder, Tobacco, Neat-Cattle, Sheep, or other live Stock.” Licenses were to be controlled by town officials and only granted to individuals “of good Character for Probity, public Spirit, and Friends of the Freedom and Independence of the American States.”49 In 1778, at the urging of an actively engaged Continental Congress, Commissioners from seven states met at New Haven and agreed to more aggressively regulate the price of labor, manufactures, internal produce, and imported commodities. The Connecticut legislature ordered prices returned to 1774 levels across an encyclopedic list of commodities from “Good merchantable Wheat, Peas, and white Beans” at “Nine shillings and nine pence per bushel” to “common Steel made in America” at “One shilling and four pence per Pound.”50 Beyond such basic economic and price controls (which further extended common law prohibitions against monopoly, forestalling, engrossing, and regrating), all of the revolutionary states aggressively legislated to provide adequately for the militia and the armed services. Maryland, for example, passed ample and detailed statutes for “The Quartering of Soldiers” (which notably included the power to “enter, quarter, and billet, such Officers, Soldiers, and Troopers, in the Houses of the Other Inhabitants . . . in Proportion to their Number, Ability, and Convenience); “To Procure Cloathing for . . . the American Army,” “To Secure (or Impress) Vessels and Carriages,” “To Procure a Supply of Salt Meat for the Use of the Army,” and to provide “For the

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“An Act to Encourage Fair Dealing, and to Restrain and Punish Sharpers and Oppressors,” Acts and Laws of Connecticut (1777), 476. “An Act for the Regulation of the Prices of Labour, Produce, Manufactures, and Commodities within this State,” Acts and Laws of Connecticut (1778), 485.

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Service of the United States.”51 The Maryland legislature also frequently and extensively expanded the powers of the governor and council, prohibited the distillation of grain into spirits, and regulated auctions. Other states followed suit with equally aggressive legislative measures distinguished primarily by peculiar local customs and habits. Georgia, for example, passed a law requiring “Negro Slaves to work on the several Forts, Batteries, or other public Works” within the state.”52 The catalog of early legislation could continue ad nauseam. The detail and elaboration of each of these statutes continues for hundreds of pages. Against conventional charges of “weakness” and “ineffectiveness,” the early American state legislative record was replete with powerful statutes regulating almost every necessary aspect of state economic and social life in time of war and transition. The public powers exercised in the name of wartime necessity, public safety, and public welfare were as extensive as imaginable – from fixed prices to forced labor to the expropriation of needed resources (shelter, food, clothing, and transportation). In a period when historians have tended to emphasize primarily rights and liberties, the state legislatures passed laws requiring the quartering of soldiers, the disarming of loyalists, and new definitions of treason for the punishment of traitors.53 The empirical record is one of emergency, necessity, strength, and power – a power strong enough to defeat British imperial authority at one of the heights of its force. The socioeconomic policing of the early American state legislatures was a key element in the American organization of society and economy to defeat the British and to build a robust and positive modern American state for the future.

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“An Act for Quartering Soldiers,” Laws of Maryland (1777); “An Act to Procure Cloathing for the Quota of this State of the American Army,” Laws of Maryland (1777); “A Supplementary Act to the Act, Entitled, An Act to Regulate the Militia,” Laws of Maryland (1777); “An Act to Procure a Supply of Salt Meat for the Use of the Army,” Laws of Maryland (1780); “An Act for the Service of the United States,” Laws of Maryland (1778). “An Act for the Better Security of this State by Obliging and Making Liable Negro Slaves to Work on the Several Forts, Batteries, or other Public Works Within the Same,” Laws of Georgia (1777). “An Ordinance Respecting the Arms of Non-Associators,” The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1776), ch. 729; “An Ordinance of the State of Pennsylvania Declaring What Shall be Treason and for Punishing the Same and Other Crimes and Practices Against the State,” The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1776), ch. 732; “An Ordinance for Punishing Persons Guilty of Certain Offenses Therein Mentioned Against the United States of America,” Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1776), ch. 733.

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This chapter has offered two test cases – the Declaration of Independence and the record of the revolutionary state legislatures – for reassessing conventional wisdom about the “original meaning” of the founding period and the power of the early American state. In both cases, we have found such conventional wisdom wanting. In place of conventional portraits of a simple rights orientation, negative liberty, and limitations on state power, we have uncovered but the tip of a fairly large but submerged empirical record dedicated to the positive use of state power, interventionist socioeconomic policy making, public rights, and social welfare (including, but pushing beyond, public health and public safety). But, of course, there are so many other places to look. In this chapter, for example, we have said little about the extraordinary record of the Continental Congress itself. So, we conclude with a final example from the Congress at end of this crucial period of American history that reinforces our key theme. One of the most significant constitutional moments in the history of the American republic occurred in the Continental Congress on September 26 and 27, 1787. On those dates, the handiwork of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was “laid before the United States in Congress assembled” – i.e., the Continental Congress. And the question for the only official body of U.S. governance at that time was what to do with what could only be officially thought of as something like a committee report. Under Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation, any alteration of the Articles had to be agreed to by Congress and confirmed by the legislatures of every state. Notably, the Philadelphia Convention had already decided upon a different and perhaps extralegal mode of ratification via conventions in only nine of the original states (contravening the very Article upon which Congress officially recommended a Philadelphia convention in the first place). So, what could/ should Congress do with this document so “laid before” it? Could it amend the document? Should it vote to approve or disapprove the document? So precarious was this moment and so vulnerable was the nascent Constitution at this time that the Journals of the Continental Congress contain very little record of the formal (and important) debates that ensued. Consequently, scholars have substantively relied upon the more detailed notes of Melancton Smith.54

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The two best discussions of this pivotal moment are Julius Goebel Jr., “Melancton Smith’s Minutes of Debates on the New Constitution,” Columbia Law Review, 64 (1964), 26–43; and Bruce Ackerman and Neal Katyal, “Our Unconventional Founding,” University of Chicago Law Review, 62 (1995), 475–573.

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Though there is much worth discussing in this momentous constitutional debate at the end of the historical period we are examining, one important aspect has been overlooked by scholar after scholar. For at the very center of the crucial debate that Smith is noting, there is an almost constant reference by the founders to “salus populi” as the primary substantive rationale through which the U.S. Constitution would pass through Congress to the state ratification conventions. Salus populi – the safety of the people, the welfare of the people – came from the common law maxim “salus populi suprema lex est” (“the welfare of the people is the highest law”). Salus populi was mentioned four times in Smith’s notes, including a last mention that “the salus populi much talked of.”55 Salus populi and its grounds of necessity, public welfare, public spirit, and the health and well-being of the populace would go on to become a major principle of American common law and one of the key bases of U.S. police power – a foundation for modern American state power in general.56 One of its key legal-constitutional consequences was the idea that public right was always supreme to private right. In an early American historiography centered on notions of private rights (e.g., contract and property) and limited governance, it is perhaps not surprising that historians have missed the central place of salus populi in the creation of the new republic. But we are suggesting that they shouldn’t have, or at least, that they shouldn’t any longer.

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Melancton Smith, “Notes of Debates,” Letters of Delegates to Congress, 24 (September 27, 1787), 439–444. For a fuller elaboration of the role of salus populi and police power in nineteenth-century statecraft, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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9 The Founding of Nondemocratic States Richard Bensel

In all modern foundings, the new state has been dedicated to a clearly articulated transcendent social purpose.1 In most cases, the announcement of this purpose prominently appears in the text of a new constitution. In liberal democratic foundings, the purpose is considered to be something that the people thoroughly comprehend in the sense that they: (a) fully understand what it is; (b) easily envision its collective realization; and, perhaps most importantly, (c) willingly embrace it because they themselves articulate the purpose through elections. As a result, the will of the people is believed to fundamentally determine the translation of the transcendent social purpose into the design of state institutions and principles. The founding elites of these democratic polities do little more than record and translate the popular will that is revealed in a free and open democratic process. Conceptions of the popular will and an attendant social purpose have also shaped nondemocratic foundings. However, in these foundings, the transcendent social purpose has been viewed as vulnerable to misrecognition if it is legislated in what is conventionally regarded as free and open democratic politics. For that reason, the revolutionary elite has directed 1

All states must justify their right to rule in some way. This justification invariably involves an assertion that the state is the agent or vehicle for attaining some collective end or goal. The attainment of that end or goal thereby becomes the state’s social purpose. Because that social purpose always transcends the mere survival of the state (i.e., a state never cites its own self-preservation as the only justification for a right to rule), the exercise of state authority must be dedicated to some purpose outside of itself. That goal or end thus becomes the state’s “transcendent social purpose.” “Valor and Valkyries: Why the State Needs Valhalla,” Polity 40:3 (July 2008), 386–393.

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a complex process in which the people are viewed as generally aware of what it is that they should (and do) will as the purpose of the new state, but they are not, for whatever reason, competent to carry out the founding without the intervention of that revolutionary elite. While the revolutionary elite has still utilized the form of a legislative assembly to craft a constitution, the elite itself claims to manifest the popular will and thus, as political agent, has overseen the melding of sovereignty, social purpose, and the will of the people when the new state is founded. Three nondemocratic foundings are briefly examined here: the instantiation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Russian Revolution; the creation of an Islamic theocracy in the Iranian Revolution; and the emergence of the Third Reich as the enabler of the historical destiny of the German people.2 In modern foundings, misrecognition of the transcendent social purpose is possible for at least two different reasons: (a) the will of the people may be not be correctly manifested because either (i) the identity of the people is not appropriately specified or (ii) social relations within the political community somehow distort the people’s apprehension of what they must do; or (b) the will of the people must be refined and shaped after the state is created.3 The possibility of misrecognition in the first sense is the primary justification for political regulations in democratic societies. In the United States, for example, the federal and state governments regulate campaign contributions, require registration of voters at the polls, guarantee minority representation through the construction of district boundaries, certify candidates who may stand for election, set age and residency requirements for suffrage, and so forth. These regulations operate on the popular will by regulating its formation (such as restrictions on campaign contributions), policing its expression (such as suffrage 2

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This chapter is a summary of a much longer section on the founding of nondemocratic states that is part of a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Founding of Modern States. That book manuscript will, among other things, contain a parallel analytical description of the founding of three democratic states (Great Britain, France, and the United States). The popular will is always imperfect in that something invariably impairs its natural expression in majority rule. This imperfection means that there is always a disjunction between the conception of the people (a) as imbricated in the social purpose to which a state’s sovereignty is dedicated and (b) as revealed in unregulated majority voting. For that reason, both democratic and nondemocratic states “refine” the popular will. In both cases, this refinement assumes that the people could not accurately identify or effectively realize the transcendent social purpose to which the state is dedicated – even after its recognition at the founding – in the absence of state intervention. From this perspective, the major distinction between nondemocratic and democratic states rests upon the degree to which the state intervenes in the revelation and construction of the popular will.

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requirements), restricting the alternatives from which the people may choose (such as outlawing party organizations, disqualifying individuals as candidates, or determining which issues might be the subject of a referendum), or compensating for deep-seated but improper opinions (such as the design of legislative districts as partial correction for racial and ethnic bias in the electorate). While there is no question that these things have a substantive impact on what is manifested as the will of the people (e.g., in the outcome of elections), the declared purpose is to purify the popular will from contaminating influence without otherwise influencing what the popular will might express. In this case, the concept of misrecognition thus presumes the existence of a pristine popular will that can be revealed if the political community eliminates or compensates for factors that would otherwise distort its manifestation. In theory, the will of the people is left undisturbed by these eliminations and adjustments; the content of that popular will is merely announced to the community. The transcendent social purpose in such states is thus dedicated to the identification and realization of the purified will of the people, along with those values and guarantees – such as freedom of the press – that facilitate the democratic process and make its reproduction through time possible.4 In nondemocratic states, misrecognition of the transcendent social purpose occurs when the people have a broad but imperfect understanding of what it is they should (and thus do) will. Here the problem directly concerns content and only indirectly involves process. The content of what should be (and thus is) the will of the people can be (and is) revealed to those who are either particularly trained, skilled, or gifted in its comprehension. In practice, the latter become the revolutionary elite whose role in the founding is to utilize the people’s largely instinctual understanding of what they should (and thus do) will to mobilize them against the ancien regime. The grounding for the revolutionary elite’s privileged understanding of the will of the people is primarily historical, arising from a superior comprehension of an unfolding pattern in which the people as 4

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The primary transcendent social purpose of democratic foundings is the dedication of the state to the continued and (largely) unfiltered will of the people. Thus the regulations described in the text apply to both the founding (when the popular will creates the state) and politics after the founding (when the popular will directs state policy). Misrecognition of the will of the people originates, for the most part, in the same potentially distorting influences both before and after the founding. The major difference is that, after the founding, the state itself can become a self-interested (and thus potentially distorting) influence.

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both object and participant play a central role. It is this role that the people can misrecognize even as they are instinctually summoned to realize their destiny. The primary task of the revolutionary elite is thus, in the first instance, to mobilize the people’s instinctual understanding of their historical destiny in order to found the new state and then to ensure that this destiny is forcefully and efficiently realized. That realization necessarily includes the education and refinement of the people’s understanding of their historical destiny in a process that is not consultative (in the manner of democratic states) but, instead, involves doctrinal instruction.

the founding of the soviet union, the iranian theocracy, and the third reich In the Russian Revolution, for example, Bolsheviks held that politically conscious workers could broadly recognize the historical role that their class must play but were nevertheless imperfectly aware of the proper political strategies and tactics that would realize their historical destiny. The actual content of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was thus the responsibility of the vanguard party that acted not as representatives of or in the name of the workers but as agents of their correctly informed political consciousness. The Bolsheviks thus knew what it was that the workers should (and thus did) will even if the workers themselves might misrecognize the transcendent social purpose of the revolution (i.e., the historical destiny that should be imbricated in the state during the founding). At the founding of the Soviet state, this transcendent social purpose (the realization of the communist revolution as the next and final historical stage) was thus a technical matter whose theoretical preconditions and practical actualization were perfectly known only to the vanguard party. As a result, the founding of the Soviet state primarily involved the installation of the political consciousness of the working class as the elemental guide in realizing the communist revolution. And that political consciousness necessarily resided, in its perfected and thus practical form, in the vanguard party. Thus, in the first instance, the founding involved the inhabitation of the Russian state by the Bolshevik Party. Following the founding, one of the most pressing tasks was the instruction of the people in a proper understanding of and alignment with party doctrine (and thus what was really their own political consciousness). In the Iranian Revolution, the Shi’ite clergy held that even the most devout among the Iranian people could never become as enlightened (with respect to God’s will and purpose) as the ulama (religious scholars).

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However, the devout could nonetheless recognize the spiritual merit and accomplishments of the ulama in connection with the major historical Shi’ite project: proper preparation of the religious community for the return of the Hidden Imam. Although the people should (and thus did) will this proper preparation, their lack of training and imperfect spiritual enlightenment made misrecognition of what they actually willed inevitable. Here the problem took two forms. On the one hand, the people were inadequately trained as Islamic scholars and thus might very well make mistakes in religious interpretation. This could be partially but not completely corrected through religious training. On the other hand, this religious training could never transform the people into the anointed representative of the Hidden Imam on earth. Only the ulama could aspire to such a role and, even for them, their role was only to recognize the one among them who might be so anointed. The founding of the Islamic Republic thus created a theocratic state, ruled by the ulama, that would prepare the religious community for the return of the Hidden Imam. Just as there was no doubt that the Iranian people devoutly wished that their community would be so prepared, there was also no doubt that this was not a task that they could undertake themselves in all its fullness. The ulama thus constituted the spiritual consciousness of the people, inseparable from them within the religious community but also uniquely gifted in discerning the spiritual direction their community should take. After the founding, the people were to be further instructed in religious doctrine in order to refine and purify their understanding. But the people were also, within very strict limits, to be consulted with respect to the relative sanctity of individual members of the ulama. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Shi’ite clergy insisted on a periodic demonstration of the people’s instinctual awareness of their leaders’ piety. The people, again within very strict limits, could detect sanctity, but they were not competent to direct religious policy. The founding of the Third Reich enacted the people’s recognition of the Leader as the physical embodiment of the will of the German people. Like much of Volkisch thought, Nazi doctrine postulated a historical destiny for the German people.5 The German people should (and thus did) will 5

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When the Nazi Party took power, the German people, race, and nation did not coincide: the German people was composed of all those who recognized and were willing to pursue their historical destiny; the German race was composed of all those who were genetically Aryan; and the German nation was composed of all those who resided within the political boundaries of Germany. In order to realize the historical destiny of the German people, the Nazi Party wanted to bring these three groups into alignment by: politically indoctrinating

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this destiny, but alien political doctrines and cultural influence had distracted them from their purpose. The task of the Nazi Party and Hitler, as Leader, was, in the first instance, to cultivate a proper awareness among the people of this destiny and to eliminate those social and political elements that frustrated its realization. This awareness was inseparably connected to popular recognition of Hitler as Leader because the purification of the German people, race, and nation would, inevitably, bring about the unification of people and Leader (in much the same way that the proletariat and the vanguard party became unified in the founding of the Soviet Union and, only slightly less so, the Iranian religious community and Khomeini became one under the Islamic Republic). Politics, for the Nazis, was a process through which the Leader was revealed to the people who, in turn, manifested that revelation through increasingly enthusiastic public demonstrations and rising electoral support for the National Socialist Party. The founding of the Third Reich marked the point at which politics came to an end because the unification of the Leader and the will of the people under the auspices of and within the German state transformed realization of the German historical destiny into a technical matter. The economy of purpose and the clarity of vision that the Leader could mobilize in pursuit of that destiny, along with the certainty that the Leader would himself will everything that the people should (and did) will, made further consultation (but not communion) with the people superfluous. In all three foundings, the transcendent social purpose to which the state was dedicated was identical with the will of the people, as interpreted, realized, and later refined by the revolutionary elite. In each case, the authentic will of the people resided in a particular segment of the population defined by class, faith, or race: the proletariat in the case of the Soviet Union, devout Shi’a in Iran, and those of German “blood” in the Third Reich. These conceptions of the people excluded sizable portions of the population then living within national boundaries, respectively the bourgeoisie, those belonging to other religious faiths, and those whose ethnic identities were not German. In that sense, the will of the people was not a “national” will as we ordinarily understand it because there were also transnational extensions in these conceptions of the people

those Germans who had not yet recognized their historical destiny, by eliminating those who were not genetically pure, and by extending the political boundaries of Germany so that the nation incorporated those Germans and other Aryans who did not then live in the country.

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in each case: the international proletariat, devout Shi’a residing outside the political boundaries of Iran, and German communities located in nations other than Germany. These transnational extensions affected both the way in which the state was founded by making the will of the people practically inaccessible (e.g., because people in other nations could not participate in referenda or elections) and by conferring upon the state a transcendent social purpose that extended beyond the nation’s boundaries. Thus, the Soviet state was dedicated to the promotion of worldwide proletarian revolution in a founding in which workers in other nations could not directly participate. The Islamic Republic was similarly dedicated at the founding to the preparation of the Shi’ite religious community (and Muslim communities generally) for the return of the Hidden Imam. And the Third Reich was dedicated, in the first instance, to the incorporation of German communities then located outside Germany and, subsequently, to an expansion of German settlement in Eastern Europe. These internal exclusions and external inclusions in the conception of the people made the nation-state itself an imperfect vehicle for registering and actualizing the popular will because the political community and physical boundaries of the state were misaligned.6 However, since the revolutionary elite could (and did) recognize and enact the popular will without formal consultation with the people, the primary effect of this misalignment was to reinforce the subordination of the state to the revolutionary elite, both in the design of the new state and in its subsequent operation. These three foundings are thus similar in that they melded together: (a) the revolutionary party as the correct and full expression of the will of the people, (b) the transcendent social purpose that the people willed and to which the state was then dedicated, and (c) sovereignty (the right to rule in the name of that transcendent social purpose). During the competition for power that preceded the founding, the most important elements were: (a) the way in which the revolutionary elite competed with other parties (e.g., how those parties were conceived as opponents, in particular their respective relations to the historical destiny of the people); (b) the ideological explanations that the revolutionary elite constructed as they made

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One of the central distinctions between nondemocratic and democratic states is that the latter allow the people to decide, within limits, who should be included within the political community (i.e., as rights-bearing and participating members). Nondemocratic states, particularly the three examined in this chapter, are founded upon a particular conception of the people that is unalterable precisely because it grounds their claim on sovereignty.

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(what would otherwise be considered) tactical concessions in the competition for power; and (c) the manner in which the revolutionary party was positioned as both the embodiment of the will of the people and an infallible agent of their historical destiny.

comparison of the three nondemocratic foundings The Soviet state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Third Reich all arose from nondemocratic foundings. But each of them nonetheless involved representations of the will of the people as legitimations for their creation. Each of these three foundings can be traced back to particular conceptions of the will of the people: what it is that they should, must, and did will. The leader of the revolutionary elite determines much of the relationship between the elite and the transcendent social purpose instantiated at the founding (see Table 9.1). The most pertinent dimensions upon which the three leaders can be compared are their relative fallibility and their relation to the revolutionary elite as a whole. Lenin, for example, was certainly regarded as the preeminent leader of the Bolshevik Party, but he was not considered an infallible guide in either the making of tactical decisions or doctrinal interpretation. In part but not entirely, his relation to the party was his own doing in that he insisted that the vanguard (Bolshevik) party was the collective repository of “correct understanding” of Marxist doctrine. Individuals (including Lenin himself) could err, but the party, as a collective, could not. Once the party had made a decision, individuals must conform or leave the party. At the founding, it was thus the Bolshevik (soon the Communist) Party that was melded into the Soviet state. Lenin, as first among equals, was simply a member of that party. The Ayatollah Khomeini on the other hand, was infallible because he was chosen by the Hidden Imam as the latter’s emissary on earth. However, Khomeini’s infallibility was theoretically limited to those policies that directly affected the spiritual health and purity of the religious community. Other matters, such as the placement of sewer lines or management of the financial system, were considered technical questions that could, however competently decided, involve error and, in any case, were beneath the dignity of the Ayatollah. On spiritual questions, however, Khomeini was infallible. The Ayatollah’s relations to the revolutionary elite were complex. On the one hand, the clerics who supported the Iranian Revolution were

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Vladimir Lenin

Leading Figure

Adolf Hitler

Leader of the Volk

Shi’ite cleric closest to the Hidden Imam

Leader of the vanguard party of the proletarian revolution

Unify and mobilize the German people, race, and nation in pursuit of their historical destiny

Enemies of the Founding

Support in rallies and elections for the National Socialist Party and Hitler, in particular

Jews, Communists (and Marxists generally), those who wish to create a liberal democracy

Atheists, heretics, those who advocate modernization of Iranian society (e.g., intelligentsia)

Support in the streets Bourgeoisie and the and the barracks for capitalist class generally, Russian the vanguard party nobility and tsar

Prepare the religious Support in the streets for Khomeini and an community for the return of the Hidden Islamic Republic Imam

Carry out the transition from capitalism to communism

Transcendent Social Manner in Which the Popular Will Purpose of the New Is Evidenced State

Notes: This chart depicts the characteristics of each founding from the perspective of the founders (e.g., from the perspective of the National Socialist Party in the founding of the Third Reich).

Third Reich

Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Iran Khomeini

Soviet Union

Founding

Role in the Revolution

table 9.1 Characteristics of the foundings of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Third Reich

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themselves “experts” on spiritual matters (as they were labeled in the constitutional assembly). When they wrote the constitution for the Islamic Republic, they, in fact, cited that expertise when they assigned themselves primary responsibility for selecting the next Supreme Leader (a selection conditioned by the possibility that God and the Hidden Imam had, in fact, identified one among them for that role). On the other hand, once a Supreme Leader had been identified, there could be no justification for opposing him on spiritual matters because he willed only that which God willed. The Ayatollah’s relations with the revolutionary elite were further complicated by the fact that many clerics joined the revolution without fully subscribing to the entirety of Khomeini’s doctrinal interpretation of his role in the new Islamic Republic. Some of these dissidents were purged from the clergy and the others were silenced. But the absence of either a consensus among the clergy on doctrinal questions or a commitment to conform with Khomeini’s interpretation (once it became known) meant that there was much more ideological variation among clerics than among Bolsheviks. From that perspective, the founding of the Islamic Republic instantiated the Ayatollah Khomeini personally (as opposed to a loosely defined revolutionary elite) as the interpreter of the will of the people (or, what amounted to the same thing, the will of God). Those clerics who were loyal to Khomeini were incorporated largely in the form of an abnormally large personal retinue.7 In rather sharp contrast to both Lenin and Khomeini, Adolf Hitler was regarded as an infallible authority on all aspects of German social, economic, and political life. Because he embodied the historical destiny of the German people, race, and nation (and thus the popular will of the German people), Hitler could only will what the German people should, must, and did will. However, as Leader, Hitler could see more clearly how the historical destiny of the German people could be realized than the people themselves. His unerring capacity underpinned both the organic unification of the Leader and his people and the Leader’s relationship to the revolutionary elite. That elite, embedded in the National Socialist Party, simply became the extension of the Leader, facilitating, in the first instance, his rise to

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In this respect the constitution of the Islamic Republic anticipated the routinization of what necessarily began as Khomeini’s charismatic rule, almost as if the clerics had read Max Weber’s discussion of the transformation of charismatic leadership into rational bureaucratic forms. Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

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power and, subsequently, his management of state operations (which also became an extension of the Leader). This organic unification of Leader, party, people, and state was so complete that, unlike the Islamic Republic, the Third Reich never contemplated how Hitler’s charismatic authority might either be transferred to another person upon his death or transformed into rational, routinized bureaucratic structures. At the founding, the Leader, party, and people were, as an organic whole, simultaneously imbricated into the state (which, itself, became part of that organic unification under the direction of the Leader). In all three instances, a core revolutionary cadre was drawn to the movement by its founding principles: class (Russian), religion (Iran), and race (Germany). The mass public was integrated into the founding first and foremost by this cadre and its leaders. However, for many, if not most of the mass public, other interests and other beliefs were just as important as those proffered by the cadre and its leaders. Their adherence to the revolutionary party was thus far more conditional than that of the cadre and, in the end, while the mass public brought the regime into power and thus enabled the founding of a new state, this outcome was not exactly what the “democratic will” (as far as the mass public was concerned) had in mind. At the founding, it was the beliefs most concretely and fervently held by the cadre and leaders of the revolutionary party that became the transcendent social purpose to which the new state was dedicated. The revolutionary tasks were to, on the one hand, attract a mass following by any means possible (including misrepresentation of the intended political program and the construction of proposals that appealed only to narrow segments of the public) and, on the other hand, to interpret that mass following as an expression of a popular will that endorsed, indeed compelled, adoption and instantiation of its principles in the founding of a new state. The inevitable tension between these two tasks meant that each founding was thus always slightly off-center and had to be “purified” once the revolutionary party had taken power. In each case, the transcendent social purpose to which the new state was to be and was in fact dedicated involved the realization of a specific historical destiny. In what became the Soviet Union, this destiny was the historically inevitable communist revolution, ultimately global in scope, in which proletarians would capture the state, abolish bourgeois/capitalist social relations, and then dissolve as a class in what would, in the end, become an ungoverned (in the sense of formal political processes) society. The agent for realizing this destiny was the Bolshevik Party, which both embodied, as a vanguard, the historical impulse to revolution and

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strengthened that impulse by promoting a proper understanding of Marxist doctrine.8 Since this understanding was necessarily incomplete when the revolutionary opportunity arose, the party acted in advance, as it were, of the will of the people. In terms of evidence of the existence of that will, all that was needed were popular demonstrations of the revolutionary impulse in a form that recognized the leadership of the vanguard party. Because they were a bourgeois device that could only fragment and distort that impulse, democratic elections were a sham. In practice, the sufficiency of the popular will (in terms of the strength and integrity of the revolutionary impulse) was the primary and exclusive concern of the vanguard party: the test was in the pudding (i.e., whether the revolution succeeded). Once the new state was founded, the people would be taught what it was they should, must, and did will when they revolted against the old order. In the Iranian Revolution, the historical destiny of the Shi’ite religious community was a devout embrace of the impending return of the Hidden Imam. The transcendent social purpose of the new state was thus the purification of the religious community in preparation for that return. While this purification was the duty and responsibility of all devout Shi’ites (and thus was what the religious community should, must, and did will as a people), only the clergy and, above all others, the Ayatollah Khomeini knew precisely how this purification was to be effected. Here, too, the people knew instinctually (e.g., in their feelings of revulsion when confronted with “modern” or “Western” social mores) what had to be done. However, unlike the Bolsheviks, the clergy could not wait for the revolutionary impulse to mature because God’s will was already manifest. While the focus was on the religious community’s recognition of the Ayatollah Khomeini as the emissary of the Hidden Imam, this recognition was not something that could be manifested through democratic elections (in part because such elections allowed the irreligious and infidel to participate and in part because, as a political process, they diverted and fragmented the attention of the religious community with “modernist” issues and forms). In the place of elections, massive street demonstrations both established Ayatollah Khomeini’s preeminent spiritual authority by

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“Impulse” here refers to the almost instinctual rejection of the capitalist order and the erection of a socialist society in its stead. As such, it involves little more than a complete repudiation of the existing social and order along with enthusiastic acceptance of the leadership of the vanguard party.

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acclamation and thus underpinned the founding of the Islamic Republic. By the time the Assembly of Experts was elected, popular acceptance and recognition of this spiritual authority was already radically shaping the terms of what might have been democratic political competition. The constitution they then wrote only consolidated and routinized the inhabitation of the Iranian state by the clergy. Once the Islamic Republic was founded, purification of the religious community commenced, including religious instruction, the suppression of impure elements, and reformulation of relations between the devout and the clergy.9 The founding of the Third Reich was more complicated in that revelation of the will of the people required a longer and more intense engagement with democratic elections. From the Nazi perspective, political campaigns and elections both demonstrated growing acceptance of Adolf Hitler as Leader (as evidenced in the ever-increasing share of votes garnered by the National Socialist Party) and, separately, occasioned the huge displays of emotional feeling that manifested the voluntary subordination of individual identity to the collective destiny of the German people, race, and nation. While elections placed growing numbers of uniformed Nazis in legislative halls throughout Germany, including the Reichstag, Nazis did not play the parliamentary game of compromise and coalition-building that continuously weaves the fabric of democratic governance. Their presence in legislative chambers was, instead, used to demonstrate the contempt of the German people for democracy as a process, a process that, in their eyes, weakened, diverted, and otherwise frustrated the collective unity of the German people, race, and nation. Elections were primarily a venue in which the people could manifest their will, thus preparing the nation for the assumption of power by the Leader. They were, for that reason, emphatically not an instrumental means of achieving substantive goals before the Leader assumed power. After the founding, the Leader presided over a purification of the German people that, while emphasizing race in the place of religion, is otherwise remarkably similar to the Iranian Revolution in its rejection of “modernist” social mores and beliefs. All three foundings thus rested on a profound conception of the will of the people as an instinctual recognition of historical destiny, and yet imperfect in both its expression and understanding of what it is that 9

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To some extent, these things actually preceded the founding of the Islamic Republic because clerics viewed purification as a religious duty regardless of whether or not it was carried out under state auspices.

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should, must, and will be done. In each founding, the revolutionary elite had a perfect understanding of that historical destiny and proceeded to meld that understanding into the forms and content of the new state. In each instance, the people (i.e., proletarians, Germans, or Shi’ites) had to be purified of impure elements (e.g., the bourgeoisie, Jews, or nonbelievers) as a step toward enhancing the expression of the popular will.10 Doctrinal education was also a step in that direction in that, once properly trained, the people were expected to recognize and willingly subscribe to the historical destiny as prescribed in Marxist thought, Khomeini’s scholarly writings, or Volkisch theory (as refined in Hitler’s Mein Kampf). However, the understanding of the people of their own historical destiny could never be brought up to the level of the revolutionary elite as long as the historical destiny had not been realized (i.e., worldwide proletarian revolution, the return of the Hidden Imam, or the global triumph of the German race). It is this subordination of the people to the revolutionary elite that makes each of these a nondemocratic founding. In all three foundings, the new states and the states they replace were more or less necessary incidentals of history because the “people” spanned national boundaries and because there were those who resided within those national boundaries who were not of the people. The historical destiny attending each founding recognized this incidental nature by prescribing a transcendent social purpose in which the state-as-nation-state 10

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In each case, the unity of the revolutionary coalition (to which the founding revolutionary elite belonged) originally rested on unmitigated rejection of the existing regime (i.e., the Tsar, the Shah, or the Weimar Republic). After the founding (in a process that was already under way), the revolutionary elite progressively eliminated the other parties in the coalition (starting with those on the right in Russia and on the left in Iran and Germany). In all three instances, the revolutionary party eliminated competing parties one by one, beginning with those parties furthest from the revolutionary elite and then encompassing those that had earlier been allies. In one sense, this was a profoundly instrumental strategy of “divide and conquer” that necessarily began with those party organizations whose goals most diverged from those of the revolutionary elite. If the process of elimination had started with groups inside the revolutionary coalition, other groups allied with the revolutionary elite would have readily seen the implications with respect to their own fate and resisted repression. In another sense, however, this strategy was also profoundly ideological in that purification of the people should necessarily begin with a purging of the most impure elements and influences among them. As Martin Niemoller, a pastor who was himself imprisoned by the Nazis, painfully reminisced, “First they took the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they took the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then it was the trade unionists’ turn, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they took the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came and took me, there was no one left who could have stood up for me.” Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 232–233.

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was clearly an imperfect instrument: the world revolution of the proletariat, the absorption of all Shi’ites (and Muslims) in one religious community, and Pan-German unification and expansion. In each case, national boundaries were no more than arbitrary, plastic conventions, if not irrelevancies imposed by a hostile world order.11 In democratic foundings, the state becomes the content of the social contract between the people (as individuals) and the political community they create. In nondemocratic foundings, there has been no social contract because the people (as individuals) are completely folded into the political community as a historically destined collective (see Table 9.2). The founding of the state is merely the formal recognition of that collective and the revolutionary elite that bears, perfects, and will realize the historical destiny of the people. Nondemocratic foundings thus do not mark the transition from a state of nature (a pre-political society of individuals) into a political community organized and governed by a state. The political community has always existed as an historically authorized and destined collective. The erection of a state at the founding is merely an incidental step in realizing that historical destiny.12 11

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There were, of course, differences in the way that each founding regarded these boundaries as potentially encompassing a people. For the Bolsheviks, every nation would ultimately (if it did not now) contain a proletariat that would revolt and overthrow the capitalist order. National boundaries would thus disappear when the communist historical destiny had been realized. For Shi’ites, the religious community was spatially concentrated in but a few nations. The community could expand through religious conversion and jihad but, although expansion by these means was a religious duty of the faithful, political boundaries demarcating the limits of the religious community were not necessarily destined to disappear until the return of the Hidden Imam (when they would become utterly irrelevant). For Nazis, the German people, race, and nation were biologically grounded in the blood. Conversion (say from a Pole to a German) was thus ruled out as impossible. While this ineradicable racial identity, along with the spatial concentration of Germans in Central Europe, would appear to make national boundaries both relevant and useful, Nazi ideology posited a German racial superiority so supremely dominant that recognition of national boundaries would have been the idle parlor game of weaker races and their nations. The German people, for their part, would have taken whatever lands and resources that they needed regardless of where they were located. Put another way, national boundaries require a mutual recognition of those residing on both sides of the perimeter. The Nazis would never have participated in that mutual recognition because they were emphatically opposed to a world order in which national boundaries set limits on the destiny of the German people. As an incidental step, all the elements that would otherwise pose questions at a democratic constitutional convention were already well-settled facts: (a) the identity of the people and who is authorized to represent their will; (b) the identity of the leader who is authorized to recognize proposals and place them before the founding assembly; and (c) the rules through which the leader is selected and the members of the assembly are recognized as representatives of the people. In fact, the legislative assembly that enacts a nondemocratic founding is almost a ritual formality because all these elements have already been prescribed in the historical destiny of the people (as interpreted and presented by the revolutionary elite).

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Conferred all legislative authority on the Leader

Melded the popular will (as embodied in the Reichstag election), the Leader (Adolf Hitler), and the transcendent social purpose (realizing the historical destiny of the German people, race, and nation) in the new Third Reich

Notes: In each case, several other events could be considered as “constituting” the founding. The ones chosen for inclusion in this chart marked the turning points after which the respective revolutionary elites no longer believed that eliciting further demonstrations of the will of the people was necessary in order to consolidate the new state. Since they considered the new state to have been properly founded, the will of the people was henceforth organically represented in the new state, making further consultation of the popular will (as something distinct from the state) superfluous.

Third Reich: Passage in the Reichstag of the Enabling Act

Melded the popular will (as embodied in the Iranian electorate), Shi’ite clerics (followers of Ayatollah Khomeini), and the transcendent social purpose (purification of the religious community in preparation for the return of the Hidden Imam) in the new Islamic Republic

Created the Islamic state

Islamic Republic: Ratification of the new constitution by national referendum

Content of the Founding Melded the popular will (as embodied in the Congress of Soviets), the vanguard party of the proletariat (Bolsheviks), and the transcendent social purpose (realizing the historical destiny of the proletariat by carrying out the communist revolution) in the new Soviet state

Significance of the Event

Soviet Union: The endorsement of the Confirmed the validity of the Bolshevist overthrow of the Provisional revolution led by the vanguard party Government by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets

Constituting Event

table 9.2 The constituting events in the foundings of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Third Reich

part iii AGENDAS

10 Empire as State The Roman Case Clifford Ando

Late twentieth-century social theory operated to distinguish premodern from modern and empire from state in several ways. Modern states seek to extend metropolitan norms uniformly throughout their territory and down through their populations.1 Such efforts require the elaboration and coordination of institutional structures for policing, education, and communication (among other things). An analytic premium was thereby set on the temporality of communication and the direct interpellation of individuals by government.2 Theories of state formation, including those focused on non-state forms of social power that lurked in the unreformed shadows of emergent state power (like banditry), exhibit similar priorities.3 The best work in this vein connected transformations in political culture, the history of subjectivity, and the ambitions of government with specific developments in the forms of knowledge and technologies of knowledge production that have subtended governmental power.4 In this

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). Clifford Ando, “Empire, State and Communicative Action,” in Christine Kuhn, ed., Politische Kommunikation und öffentliche Meinung in der antiken Welt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), 219–229. Brent Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire,” Past & Present 105 (1984), 5–52; Shaw, “Bandit Highlands and Lowland Peace: The Mountains of Isauria-Cilicia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 33 (1990), 199–233, 237–270. Foucault’s great influence in this field derived initially from the extraordinary essay, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. It was only in 2004 that the lectures from the Collège de France of 1977–1978, whence that essay derived, were published in French, and in 2007 in

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body of literature, transformations in systems of knowledge correlate with changes in technologies of communication, modes of production, and the centralization of both control of capital and state power in such a way as to enable strong distinctions to be drawn between the modern state – in respect of its ambitions, effects, and infrastructural power – and all comparable political formations that existed before.5 Nor is all this inaccurate or unilluminating. If one views most ancient imperial states through lenses formed according to the priorities of this scholarship, it would be difficult to overstate the differences between the ideal-typical modern state, on the one hand, and ancient empires on the other. Perhaps most importantly, ancient empires largely conceived themselves as aggregations of subordinate populations and developed sophisticated normative resources by which to describe and explain themselves as internally heterogeneous.6 In modern judgment, the ambitions of rule among such states were narrowly extractive, and this could be accomplished by delivering local control into the hands of parties and institutions who were granted considerable autonomy in the incidence of taxation and writing of civil legislation. Whatever the ideological gloss placed on such systems in antiquity, modern scholars might justifiably explain the formal qualities of these systems as deriving from the very factors that theorists have used to distinguish ancient (imperial) states from modern (national) states.

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English: Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to ad 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; second edition 2012); James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Among theoretical and comparative literatures, see Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 130; Thomas Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Susan Alcock et al., eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29; Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5–7, 29–36. For detailed case studies, see Bruce Lincoln, “Happiness for Mankind”: Achaemenian Religion and the Imperial Project (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 46–50, 105–144; Clifford Ando, “La forme canonique de l’empire antique: le cas de l’empire romain,” Ius Politicum 14 (2015), http://juspoliticum.com/article/La-forme-canonique-de-l-empireantique-le-cas-de-l-empire-romain-972.html (accessed February 25, 2017), updated in Penser juridiquement l’Empire? (Paris: Dalloz, 2017), 17–37; Clifford Ando, Roman Social Imaginaries: Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

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In short, overall infrastructural weakness, the very limited capacities of metropolitan bureaucracies, and the crippling slowness of communication practically forced ancient empires to devolve power from the metropole to macro-regional representatives of the center, and thence to indigenous elites. This was so even in the case of Rome, whose vaunted network of roads truly did surpass, in extent and quality, anything the European world had known before, and yet the speed of communication and volume of overland trade enabled by those roads should not be overestimated.7 Theories of the modern state such as those I have described thus have powerful correlates in empirical and comparative literatures on ancient empire that stress, in one way or another, the constrained ambitions of ancient government. In the case of historical literatures on ancient Mesopotamia, for example, recent work has pushed back against the credence granted by earlier generations to the loud proclamations of sovereign power enacted by archaic monarchs, or the similar claims implicit in their promulgations of norms, as, for example, in the code of Hammurabi. In its place, this work has foregrounded the tentative nature of early state ideologies, and the surpluses of authority and social power that must be created, communicated, and institutionalized to sustain them.8 It has likewise stressed the long-term constitutive role of the presumptive claims that states made for authority in specific domains of social life. According to this literature, it is not that states have always already had monopolistic power over the authorization of violence or codification of norms via legislation or the control of weights and measures, for example; rather, claiming those rights was a principal means of bringing such monopolistic power into being.9 In the case of the Roman empire, by contrast, a generation’s work in the last quarter of the twentieth century chose to see Roman government as essentially 7

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On Roman roads and imperial communication, see Anne Kolb, Transport und Nachrichtentransfer im Römischen Reich (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). On speeds of communication, see the data summarized in Clifford Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 121. Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States and Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 22–41; Seth Richardson, “Before Things Worked: A ‘Low-Power’ Model of Early Mesopotamia,” in Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson, eds., Ancient States and Infrastructural Power. Europe, Asia and America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 17–62. Seth Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State,” Past & Present 215 (2012), 3–49; see also Richardson, “Mesopotamian Political History: The Perversities,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 1 (2014), 61–93.

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reactive: uninterested and, indeed, largely incapable of formulating and proactively actualizing policy. The institutional structure by which the government received petitions, and the formal structures of the system of communication that we denominate petition-and-response, were thereby situated in hermeneutic, even synecdochic relation to the totality of the Roman imperial government’s activity.10 One aspect of these diverse literatures deserves stress in the context of the present volume. Although it is possible to extract significant alignments in both theory and politics from the literatures that I have surveyed, this can only be done at a high level of abstraction. The chapters in this collection exhibit a similar diversity of first-order theoretical commitments. To a point, this strikes me as an honest reflection of the historian’s craft. The theoretical constructs that achieve explanatory salience in particular fields, for particular generations, must needs be elaborated in an Aristotelian fashion, from consideration of particulars, which is to say, through investigation of the rhetorical and material means by which social and state power was claimed, concretized, and contested in a given culture. But there is also a pressing need for the expansion of historical imagination that takes place when one considers the materials and theoretical constructs of other fields, and returns to one’s own domain thereby enriched. This volume is a welcome contribution to this endeavor. This chapter proposes another way to interpret the canonical structures of ancient empire. Having described the conceptual and lexical means by which Roman authorities delivered delegated power into the hands of local governments, and the measures that they took to form and sustain local elites, I suggest that, within certain interpretive frameworks, the exploitation of local institutions by imperial authorities is usefully understood as a principal means for the extension of the infrastructural power of the central state. To a point, the picture here advanced displays deliberate theoretical affinities with select literatures on the nature of modern federal states, not least William J. Novak’s use of the concept of infrastructural power to bracket, for the purposes of analysis, distinctions between federal and state power in the United States, in order to expose to scrutiny “the myth of the ‘weak’ American state.”11 So viewed, ancient 10

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For an overview and critique of historiography in this field, see Clifford Ando, “Petition and Response, Order and Obey: Contemporary Models of Roman Government,” in Michael Jursa and Stephan Prochazka, eds., Governing Ancient Empires (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, forthcoming). William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008), 752–772. For further reflection on the relationship between empire

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empires as a whole can be seen as penetrating far more fully into the structures of local social and economic conduct than they had heretofore been seen to do. What is more, such a lens allows us to bypass moralizing judgments on the actions of local elites (who are often described as either resisting or being coopted by “Roman power”). Instead, we may focus on the extent to which local institutions were mobilized in the service of an overall intensification of governmentality.

sovereignty over territory in roman thought Despite its position as cultural archetype of European empire, and the dominance of its languages of power in later European law and theory, the Roman empire was late to develop a conceptual and linguistic apparatus with which to describe itself as a unified political space or articulate claims to sovereignty over a unified territory and unitary population. John Richardson, for example, has demonstrated that the term imperium, which originally meant the power of command exercised by legitimately appointed magistrates, came to mean “empire” only at the very end of the first century bc, hundreds of years after the Romans had embarked on the wars of aggrandizement that brought the empire into being.12 Nor had they had some other term prior to imperium by which to designate the congeries of subject populations, forcibly incorporated peoples and allies that we denominate the Roman empire. So, for example, in the earliest extant Roman text that lays down a regulation for all peoples in Italy subject to Roman rule, a decree of the Roman senate of 186 bc, the Romans insist on the heterogeneity of the communities of the Italian peninsula as a public law matter and the diversities of its population at the level of citizenship: the extant version is addressed to “those allied with the Roman people” and identifies as subject to its jurisdiction “Roman citizens, persons of the Latin name, or those among our allies.” Nevertheless, all persons, whatever their citizenship and whatever the public law status of their polity, are directed to repair to the senate of Rome if they wish permission to continue to

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and federation as political forms, see Ando, “Forme canonique,” op. cit. n. 6, comparing Rome and Achaemenian Persia, as well as Clifford Ando, “Pluralism and Empire, from Rome to Robert Cover,” Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review 1 (2014), 1–22, available at http://cal.library.utoronto .ca/index.php/cal/article/view/20917 (accessed February 25, 2017). John Richardson, The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century bc to the Second Century ad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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perform Bacchic rites.13 What is more, Myles Lavan has shown the extent to which Romans continued to construe the communities that constituted the empire using the language of alliance into the third century ad. In other words, there was a persistent tendency to figure the empire not as a unified space governed by a hegemon (of whatever theoretical status), but as an international space constructed through myriad, purely bilateral instruments.14 Inquiry into this Roman construal of the subordinate polities of the empire as autonomous reveals further aspects of Roman thought about sovereignty over peoples and territory. Notably, it is in a law regulating jurisdiction in conquered territory – indeed, in the first such territory conceived as a “province” – that we first encounter a conceptual map of political terrain whose entirety is conceived as governed by law and, correspondingly, in which law is understood to penetrate uniformly through a space comprising multiple constituent polities. The territory in question is the island of Sicily (that it is an island is surely not irrelevant). Sicily was taken by Rome, and made its first province, in the settlement that ended the First Punic War in 241 bc. A law governing jurisdiction there was passed in 132 bc and paraphrased by Cicero in a speech in 70 bc: The Sicilians are subjects of law as follows: actions of a citizen with a fellow citizen are tried at home, according to their own laws. To adjudicate actions of a Sicilian with a Sicilian not of the same citizenship, the praetor should appoint a judge by lot, in accordance with the decree of Publius Rupilius, which he fixed on the recommendation of the ten legates (sent to advise him at the formal organization of the province), which decree the Sicilians call the Rupilian Law. To adjudicate suits brought by an individual against a community, or by a community against an individual, the senate of another civitas should be assigned, granting the possibility that a civitas might be rejected by each side.15

Cicero’s account of the legal landscape of Roman Sicily deserves attention on at least two grounds. First, the Rupilian law tessellates the territory into jurisdictions, in each of which a different system of civil law is understood to obtain. Those jurisdictions are termed civitates, juridically constituted political communities, whose norms are authorized via mechanisms of democratic legislation. Second, this network of political 13

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Hermann Dessau, ed., Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892), text no. 18. Myles Lavan, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25–72. Cicero, In Verrem 2.2.32.

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communities was understood in its totality as embracing all lands and peoples – and thus all justiciable actions – in the province. Extant sources make perfectly clear that contemporaneous witnesses within and without the governing class recognized that there remained even under the emperor Augustus spaces – even on islands, whence it was difficult to escape – beyond the reach of state power, often in highlands unsuited to cereal agriculture and Roman-style warfare alike.16 Similarly, there were numerous regions in which the Romans could neither create nor implant, nor augment nor simply elevate, a network of communities under the rubrics of civitates or poleis, so as to employ them to account for the totality of political space, as in Sicily. Their deficiencies in respect of legal development, monumental architecture, or what have you, simply rendered them insusceptible to recognition by Roman authorities as proper (Greco-Roman) political communities.17 Nevertheless, it remained essential to establish some such network, and significant scholarly effort has been devoted to tracing the borders of both cities and superordinate villages in Syria, for example, on the assumption – in my view, correct – that Rome must have employed some network of this kind in order to account for the totality of territory under its rule.18

the politics of local autonomy What does it mean that the empire “construed local polities as autonomous”? To answer this question, it is first necessary to recall that neither Greek nor Roman thought on international law had a unitary concept of

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For a brief list of relevant sources, see Fergus Millar, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Vol. 1: The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution, edited by Hannah M. Cotton and Guy M. Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 222. For a regional study on the classification of communities in Asia Minor, see Christoph Schuler, Ländliche Siedlungen und Gemeinden im hellenistischen und römischen Kleinasien (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998). Regarding the practicalities and political economy of using marginal communities as well as villages where cities were not available, see Clifford Ando, “City, Village, Sacrifice: The Political Economy of Religion in the Early Roman Empire,” in Richard Evans, ed., Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman World: From Sparta to Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2017), 118–136. Henry MacAdam, “Epigraphy and Village Life in Southern Syria during the Roman and Early Byzantine Periods,” Berytus 31 (1983), 103–115; Stephen Moors, “The Decapolis: City Territories, Villages and Bouleutai,” in Willem Jongman and Marc Kleijwegt, eds., After the Past: Essays in Ancient History in Honour of H. W. Pleket (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 157–207.

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sovereignty. In both traditions, freedom of action in foreign affairs was capable of radical disaggregation from the right to regulate social and economic relations among community members according to locally generated norms: the etymology of the Greek term autonomía points in this direction (it means quite narrowly, “using one’s own law”), and Roman grants of so-called autonomy uniformly employ the periphrasis utere suis legibus, “to use one’s own laws.”19 The next section considers a fuller range of the powers delivered to local civic elites, largely part and parcel with grants of autonomy. But it is worth dwelling over the distinctly imperial dynamic at work in the exchanges by which grants of autonomy were won, for exchanges they were. The political communities elevated into and sustained in superordinate status over other communities and territories in their hinterland – those communities that numbered among the civitates whose laws collectively accounted for Roman Sicily, for example – negotiated their privileges and powers in diplomatic exchange with the governor of their province and, often, at least nominally directly with the emperor. The right to use one’s own laws was one of the most regularly sought privileges in such exchanges.20 When cities secured a grant of autonomy, it was common to erect a memorial, recording gratitude both to the emperor in question and the ambassadors who conducted the negotiation. Such texts almost invariably recall the wording of the civic decree that called for the erection of the monument in the first place, and likewise the wording of the letters to and from the emperor by which the privilege was secured. Here, for example, is the text of a monumental inscription honoring the emperor Claudius (r. 41–54) for a grant of autonomy to the Lycians: (1) To Tiberius Claudius, son of Drusus, Caesar Augustus Germanicus, pontifex maximus, in the fifth year of tribunician power, acclaimed imperator 11 times, father of the fatherland, consul designate for the fourth time, the savior of their nation: (13) the Rome-loving and Caesar-loving Lycians, faithful allies, (16) having been freed from faction, lawlessness and brigandage though his divine foresight, (20) having recovered concord, the fair administration of justice (or “equitable jurisdiction”) and the ancestral laws,

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Clifford Ando, Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 70–71. On diplomacy between cities and empire in negotiation of privileges, see Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 410–434, with specific remarks on the seeking of autonomy on 343, 376, 415.

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(25) the conduct of affairs having been entrusted to councilors drawn from among superior people by the incompetent majority, (30) in return for the many benefits they have received from him through Quintus Veranius, delegate at the rank of praetor of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus.21

In this text, the term “ancestral laws” flags the recovery of the right to use their own laws. This is, of course, framed as a privilege. But it was not only that, for it was a truism of Roman administration that local social orders were best secured through the sustaining of locally generated norms; and, as a corollary, the right to use Roman private law was largely restricted to Roman citizens, according to a rule of personality.22 In other words, the selfsame privilege sought by subordinate communities was understood by the empire to conduce its own interests. That it was received locally as a privilege, and that the grant performed political work, is here announced by the fact that the Lycians name themselves “Rome-loving and Caesar-loving.” The culture of loyalism induced by this structure of bilateral negotiation over privileges between particularized communities and metropolitan center had further effects that merit consideration in this context. For one thing, the tessellation of colonial landscapes into jurisdictions, each with its own separate code of law, effectively disjoined subordinate communities, each from the rest, and so blocked the realization of solidarity between such communities, on grounds of their mutual subjugation to Rome. Texts that even imagine such a possibility are exceedingly rare. The historian Tacitus depicts Calgacus as exhorting his soldiers that the allied Gallic troops serving in the Roman army will realize common cause with the Britons and join them mid-battle, but the hope is not remotely realized.23 The outcome in narrative evacuates the claim of political principle of any meaning. Instead, what one finds, in the incessant rhythms of public communication between periphery and center, is competition among local communities for the privilege of advertising most loudly their loyalty to emperor and empire.24 21

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The stadiasmus provinciae Lyciae, 45/46 CE, SEG LI 1832, face A, translation after Christopher P. Jones, “The Claudian Monument at Patara,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 137 (2001), 161–168. Ando, “Pluralism and Empire,” op. cit. n. 11; see also Ando, “The Rites of Others,” in Jonathan Edmondson and Alison Keith, eds., Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 254–277. Tacitus, Agricola 32.3. Clifford Ando, Imperial ideology, op. cit. n. 7, 131–135; see also Louis Robert, “La titulature de Nicée et de Nicomédie: la gloire et la haine,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977), 1–39.

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If I might digress, this structure of political conduct and public law, which both disjoins and unites the communities ruled by Rome as constituents of empire, has an important correlate in the practice of religion. In that domain, too, Rome developed early a theoretical apparatus and a practice that encouraged subject communities to sustain religious customs after conquest as they had been performed theretofore.25 In this area as well, Rome therefore yielded to local aspirations, conducing an order that sustained the local as local and so supported empire too. The imbrication into this landscape of imperial cult – the equivalent in religious practice of the identification of “Rome-loving” with “Caesarloving” – had the effect of endowing the myriad distinct religious communities of the empire with a single shared deity, and punctuating local calendars with momentary points of liturgical unison.26 To resume, devoting such extraordinary material resources to negotiations over long-settled issues had a further effect that deserves reflection. Substantively, endlessly organizing embassies to Roman authorities to confirm a prior grant of autonomy effectively ceded to Rome the right to give or deny such grants, in exchange, of course, for the grant itself. But this practice had an immensely important further effect, which was the advancing of an ostensive claim about the substance and limits of the political. The performance of politics according to these lights – the performance of contestation between cities for privileges from Rome, the organization of domestic politics around the sufferance of Roman authorities – appears, in the public record, at least, nearly to have monopolized public speech. Cui bono? What questions regarding the political economy of this system were not asked – being not legitimately political – and who benefited from the silence?

the political economy of democratic domination Outside the army, the total number of personnel operating in the provinces of the empire directly representing metropolitan authority was exceedingly small. In an empire of perhaps fifty million inhabitants, the number of Roman officials exercising legitimate powers of command and jurisdiction (however delegated) might have reached a few hundred at most; if one includes in the count their staff, both free and slave, the count might be a few thousand. Fergus Millar once attempted to demonstrate 25 26

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Ando, “The Rites of Others,” op. cit. n. 22. Ando, Imperial Ideology, op. cit. n. 7, 385–398, 407.

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the significance of this fact in a reading of a famed novel of the high imperial period, observing how rarely officials of the central government impinge even on the imagination of characters, let alone on the action of the plot.27 Even the mere extraction of wealth must have been phenomenally inefficient, had the infrastructure of the state in fact been so minimal. But of course the archetypal status of Rome in the Western historical imagination more generally, and ideologies of empire more narrowly, derives from the long-standing sense that Roman government, however the phrase be construed, had transformed the landscapes over which it ruled and effected a revolution in urbanism throughout the length and breadth of its extraordinary territory.28 In other words, far from failing in wealth extraction, the Roman empire is perceived (rightly) as having motivated vast changes in the material conditions of existence. For this, the active collaboration of indigenous elites, who were often enough creole populations residual after earlier waves of colonialism and imperial violence, was absolutely essential. What were the practices and powers that made them the willing accomplices of empire? The question demands an answer not least because so many modern scholars have been induced by ancient talk of freedom, or modern ideologies of local or ethnic self-determination, into misrecognizing the political economics of civic domination in the Roman empire. The so-called cities of the empire – the much-celebrated sites of urban life – remained, to the end, city-states, governing villages and rural expanses in their various hinterlands. Very few of these could have achieved remotely the size and prosperity that they did under Rome, had their own extractive power visà-vis the populations in their hinterlands not been backstopped by the empire. In this sense, the notionally autonomous cities of the empire, populated in the classical period largely by aliens in respect of Rome, served as essential nodal points for the extension of metropolitan institutions and the amplification of governmentality.29 27

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Fergus Millar, “The World of the Golden Ass,” Journal of Roman Studies 71 (1981), 63–75. On the transformation of landscape, see the now classic essay, Nicholas Purcell, “The Creation of Provincial Landscape: The Roman Impact on Cisalpine Gaul,” in Thomas Blagg and Martin Millett, eds., The Early Roman Empire in the West (Oxford: Oxbow, 1990), 6–29. On Roman urbanism, see W. L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Vol. II: An Urban Appraisal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Pierre Gros, L’architecture romaine, t. 1: Les monuments publics (Paris: Picard, 1996). On the political economy of cities under Greco-Roman empires, see Ando, “City, Village,” op. cit. n. 17; and Ando, “The Political Economy of the Hellenistic Polis:

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The extraordinary cultural, institutional, and ecological diversity of the empire, and the uneven survival of documentation, renders generalization about the practices and effects of government extremely hazardous. Nevertheless, a general sketch of the role of cities in governing on behalf of empire is possible. To begin with, like many ancient empires, Rome had a pronounced preference that city-states should be organized along democratic lines.30 Effectively, of course, this meant rule by an oligarchic elite: not only was the population of the ruling city only a percentage of the population of the territory over which it exercised sovereignty but the number of citizens was always a small percentage even of the population of the city. The insistence that affairs within that elite should be organized along democratic lines – albeit with property qualifications for office – amounted to an effort to harness the legitimacy generated by democratic procedures, so that those who governed, and made norms, on behalf of the empire were ultimately those selected according to local principles of social differentiation.31 It is in light of these structural facts about the constitution of city-state elites that the political significance of the powers delivered to them by the empire can truly be understood. The most important were four. First, in collecting taxes on behalf of the imperial state, city-state governments were given enormous latitude to control their incidence. They were, in other words, largely free beyond mere practical constraints to make the incidence of imperial taxation as regressive as they wished.32 Second, they could restrict market activity to state-controlled spaces in the city itself and sought to disallow any in the subordinate villages in the citystate’s territory. In this way, even inter- and intra-village economic activity might be exposed to the fiscal sovereignty of city-state authorities.33 Third, all persons within the territory of city-states were

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Comparative and Modern Perspectives,” in Henning Börm and Nino Luraghi, eds., The Polis in the Hellenistic World (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, forthcoming). Clifford Ando, “The Administration of the Provinces,” in David S. Potter, ed., A Companion to the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 177–192 at 181–182. Clifford Ando, “Making Romans: Democracy and Social Differentiation under Rome,” in Myles Lavan, Richard Payne, and John Weisweiler, eds., Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 169–185. Michael Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, second edition revised by Peter M. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 388–392. As I and others have observed, extant applications to Roman authorities for the right to hold a periodic market spring overwhelmingly from villages and other forms of subordinate community (“City, Village,” op. cit. n. 17). No such application from a polis or

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expected to employ their institutions of private law and dispute resolution.34 Fourth, in Greek city-states in particular, rights of ownership of land were often restricted to (Greek) citizens.35 In this way, ownership of the most significant form of capital in an ancient economy was, in such cities, restricted to a colonial elite. What is more, because arrears in rent were counted as assets at law and tenants remained liable for failure to pay, while tenant farmers themselves suffered losses in years of bad harvest, elite property owners were comparatively insulated to risk and loss when agricultural yields fell.36 This was an extraordinary arsenal, which delivered very considerable power to the democratically constituted oligarchic elites who ruled both their own urban centers and the landscapes of agricultural and village production in their hinterlands. The participation of those elites in the form of imperial politics outlined in the previous section should thus be understood not as an effect of false consciousness or grim acquiescence to some ideological operation. Rather, a considerable alignment of interest existed between civic and imperial elites. However, the effects of these collaborations were not felt solely at a material or an economic level. Rather, continuous interaction at the levels of both diplomacy and institutions reshaped local life, bringing into being within local communities conceptual and institutional structures that responded to, and indeed, corresponded to the supervisory and regulatory structures of the imperial state. In this way, the legal and institutional structures of local city-states came to exist in a relation of fractal subordination to the structures, priorities, and pursuits of the empire at large.

§ § § § § This chapter has revealed an alignment of interest between indigenous elites and metropolitan authorities in the spread and sustaining of imperial government. Elsewhere I have suggested that the ongoing operation of

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civitas survives: the right to centralize, supervise, and tax economic activity was entailed by the status of autonomous polity. A complex problem. See for now Clifford Ando, “Law and the Landscape of Empire,” in Stéphane Benoist, Anne Daguey-Gagey, and Christine Hoët-van Cauwenberghe, eds., Figures d’empire, fragments de mémoire. Pouvoirs et identités dans le monde romain impérial (IIe s. av. n.è. – VIe s. de n.è.) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2011), 25–47. Lisa Eberle, Law, Land and Territories: The Roman Diaspora and the Making of Provincial Administration (Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2014). Ando, “Political Economy,” op. cit. n. 27.

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imperial institutions in superordination to local ones will have encouraged a gradual refashioning of the latter in mimetic relation to the former. The result, in short, was an homology at the level of ordering principles and a homeomorphy at the level of institutional design.37 The coming to be of this homology, in correlation with the formal alterity of the citystates themselves – nearly all remained legally alien in respect of Roman public law – allowed them to function as a constitutive outside to the imperial center, echoing back principles of legitimation in respect of both political power and social authority in very broad harmony with those resounding from Rome. In the terms employed in the introduction to this chapter, all this did not make Rome a state. In closing, therefore, I adduce two further aspects of the problem under study, one theoretical and one historical. Geoffrey Hosking once distinguished between states that have and states that are empires.38 States that have empires often observe a notional equality before the law of all persons holding metropolitan citizenship, such that those belonging to the center are equal among themselves in contradistinction to those over whom they as a collective rule. In states that are empires, by contrast, a single or unified logic of social differentiation exists, which extends uniformly through the population and establishes metropolitans and others in mutual relation in a single hierarchical scheme. This theoretical claim sheds useful interpretive light on an historical transformation undergone by Rome, which gradually extended citizenship to more and more alien subjects of rule, until, in ad 212, it did so universally, to all free residents of the empire. Rome thus passed from a state that had to a state that was an empire. This transformation in public law and the law of persons also transformed the nature of the empire as state. The complex imbrication of imperial and local institutions that had served to translate imperial priorities into locally intelligible forms of social action must gradually have ceased to function in a translational or transformational relationship and become, by hook or by crook, a merely hierarchical one. This process

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Clifford Ando, “Imperial Identities,” in Tim Whitmarsh, ed., Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17–45; Ando, Imperial Rome ad 193 to 284: The Critical Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 76–99, 100–101. Geoffrey Hosking, “The Freudian Frontier,” Times Literary Supplement no. 4797 (March 10, 1995), 27.

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may, as I have urged elsewhere, ultimately robbed the imperial government of its constitutive outside and so contributed to the fragility of the late ancient state.39 But in the immediate aftermath of the universalization of citizenship, that hierarchy of institutions, reaching across the empire and down through the population, was now notionally, at least, uniformly Roman. This was a singular moment in the history of ancient empire, and an early moment in the history of the modern state.

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Ando, “Imperial Identities,” op. cit. n. 35.

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11 Weights and Measures and State Formation The View from the Early American Republic Stephen Mihm

In January 1830, a committee appointed by the Delaware House of Representatives filed a report to the larger General Assembly. The committee, created in response to a petition praying that the Delaware state government do something to establish “uniform weights and measures,” deemed it “inexpedient to make any legislative enactment upon this subject.” The committee’s argument for inaction, laid out in great detail, reveals something about the fault lines of federalism at this time. “Congress alone can remedy the evils under which we labor, for want of a uniform standard,” it observed: Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gave Congress the power to “fix the standard of weights and measures.” But Congress, while possessor of this prerogative, had declined to act, despite entreaties to do so. The committee ruefully reported that while “a great variety of useful and curious learning has been developed” as Congress grappled with the problem, “no law has yet been enacted by that body, to fix that standard.” The individual states, the committee reported, had acted, despite the questionable constitutionality of doing so. Each established its own weights and measures, driven by whatever its “particular circumstances seemed to require.” As a consequence, observed the committee, “scarcely any two States agree in their standards of weights and measures.” A small state like Delaware, overshadowed by the large commercial cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia, followed at least two – and likely many more – sets of standards, all of them at variance with each other. Delaware’s “peculiar situation,” while underscoring the need for action, could “only be removed by Congress, exercising the power secured it by

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the Constitution of the United States.”1 Yet the diminutive state of Delaware was hardly alone in its frustration; states large and small struggled with these problems in the early republic, and state legislatures and private citizens submitted petitions for action to the federal government.2 But the uncertainty plaguing weights and measures went much deeper, extending all the way down to smaller units of government: counties, townships, and municipalities. On the local level, weights and measures rarely exhibited any kind of uniformity. A bushel in one store did not equal a bushel two blocks away, despite local laws prescribing that weights and measures used by retailers be sealed and standardized. Other state and local authorities found that deviations from the standard proved remarkably resistant to reform. In recent years it has become fashionable to assail the “myth of statelessness,” the notion promulgated by an earlier generation of historians that the American state was especially “weak” in this formative era. There is much to recommend these accounts.3 But there are also dangers in pushing this line of argument too far. The endless debates over weights and measures in the nation’s states, counties, cities, and towns, points toward a more complicated story that reveals the limits as much as the latitude of state power at this time. While this may seem an extravagant claim, it is worth remembering that outside of the United States, the creation of unified systems of weights and measures – so-called metrological systems – was what one historian has described as a “constitutive element of state formation.” Though such campaigns for unification have a centuries-old pedigree, they became inseparable from the larger project

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Journal of the Senate of the State of Delaware (Dover, DE: Augustus M. Schee, 1830), 84–85; Delaware Gazette and State Watchman, January 26, 1830. See, e.g., Journal of the Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the State of New-Jersey (Elizabeth-Town, NJ: Shepard Kollock, 1807), 688; “Memorial of Edward Gilpen and Others, Respecting Weights & Measures,” January 7, 1817, in File SEN 14A-G13.5, part of the U.S. Senate Legislative Files and Petitions, RG 46, Records of the U.S. Senate, NARA, Washington, DC; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio (Columbus, OH: P. H. Olmsted, 1827), 55–56. See, e.g., William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 115 (2010), 752–772; Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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of building a powerful state from the late eighteenth century onward. In the United States, as much as in Europe, the unification of weights and measures was an integral part of a number of other state projects dedicated to creating national markets, rationalizing the collection of taxes, and cultivating a sense of shared citizenship.4 In the United States, such reforms had many powerful proponents. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, the state – whether federal, state, or local – proved comically inept at setting, never mind regulating, weights and measures. Indeed, it was well into the twentieth century before the United States achieved some semblance of standardization in its weights and measures. This troubled narrative calls into question the notion that the state was particularly powerful, effective, or pervasive in the early republic, never mind the longer nineteenth century. But the argument advanced here does not revive the simplistic claim that the American state at this time was exceptionally weak relative to other countries at this time. In fact, the governments of England, France, and many other nations found imposing standard weights and measures an equally frustrating, decades-long process.5 Instead, this chapter investigates the often vast divide between the rhetoric of a well-regulated society and the actual, on-the-ground reality that attended the implementation and enforcement of these regulations. Much could get lost in translating the legal imperatives of the state into a practical reality, and the history of weights and measures in the United States offers an object lesson in how difficult it can be to make the one mirror the other. The American state could legislate, dictate, cajole, and threaten. But compared to more familiar forms of state power, from keeping the peace to collecting taxes, imposing standard 4

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See, e.g., Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. Richard Szreter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Kenneth Alder, “A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in France,” in M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 39–71; William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 269–298; Michael D. Gordin, “Measure of All the Russians: Metrology and Governance in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (2003), 783–815. Julian Hoppit, “Reforming Britain’s Weights and Measures, 1660–1824,” English Historical Review 108 (1993), 82–104; Ken Alder, “The Metric Revolution: A Social History of the Metric System in France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 21 (1994), 95–105; Richard Sheldon, Adrian Randall, Andrew Charlesworth, and David Walsh, “Popular Protest and the Persistence of Customary Corn Measures: Resistance to the Winchester Bushel in the English West,” in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Markets, Market Culture, and Popular Protest in EighteenthCentury Britain and Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 25–45.

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weights and measures proved extraordinarily vexing and perplexing. “Custom,” mused one legislator as he contemplated resistance to new weights and measures, “has a more controlling influence than law.”6

§ § § § § When the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the Articles of Confederation declared that the national government acquired the “sole and exclusive right and power of . . . fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States.” It seems to have been considered axiomatic that the new, national government have responsibility for setting standards of weight and measures. Indeed, none of the state constitutions drafted prior to the ratification of the Articles made any mention of weights and measures, effectively ceding that power to the new, national government without controversy.7 Still, nothing concrete happened during the 1770s and 1780s. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the delegates once again gave Congress the power “to fix the standards of weights and measures” with little debate or discussion. In the ratification debates that followed, almost no one mentioned the issue. After the adoption of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson quickly emerged as the most visible proponent of a sweeping reform of the nation’s weights and measures. He advocated rationalizing the existing system of British weights and measures by arranging it into decimal divisions, much like the metric system that would come out of the French Revolution. But his many reports on the subject, which became entangled with the political struggles of the 1790s, yielded no legislation.8 6

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Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 1 (Harrisburg, PA: Henry Welsh, 1833–1834), 86–89. This argument owes a debt to the work of James Scott, particularly Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) and Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 25–33; as well as Aashish Velkar’s work, most notably Markets and Measurement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Socioconstitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 108–139; Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, Volume 16 (November 1789–July 4, 1790), 624–647, 650–675. See also C. Doris Hellman, “Jefferson’s Efforts towards the Decimalization of United States Weights and Measures,” Isis 16 (1931), 266–314.

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After this ill-fated beginning, Congress effectively abdicated its constitutional prerogatives on the question, and the diversity of weights and measures from the colonial era persisted. Inventor Benjamin Dearborn, writing James Madison in 1804, reported taking a tour from Boston to Savannah in which he “made many comparative experiments with the standard weights of different places.” Dearborn found that “it was a rare instance to find the standard of any one place, corresponding with the standard of any other; and equally so, to find in any set of standard weights, the necessary correspondence between the Unit and its Component Parts.” Most of the standard beams, Dearborn reported, “were incorrect as the weights, having one arm longer than the other, with defective construction generally.” Given what Dearborn discovered, it is not entirely surprising that individual states periodically submitted memorials to Congress, begging for attention to the matter. Rhode Island had been the first back in 1798, followed by Pennsylvania in 1804, Delaware in 1806, New Jersey in 1808, and Maryland in 1810. In some cases, these memorials grew out of statelevel assessments of laws and standards governing weights and measures. If the federal government would not act on the question, the individual states would take the lead in playing this important role of economic and social governance.9 Indeed, at first glance, the state laws in force during this time would seem to corroborate the idea that the United States was a well-regulated society. While the precise language and wording of the laws varied considerably from place to place, most of these statutes, many of them dating back to colonial times, stipulated that counties and towns appoint sealers of weights and measures, and required that merchants, grocers, and others have their own weights and measures verified by comparison to an official standard, which would be kept in a country courthouse or other public building for purposes of annual comparison and verification. While the language varied from state to state, sealers were generally appointed by local governing boards, inferior courts, justices of the peace, or other local authorities. A handful of states, including New York, appear to have 9

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Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, Secretary of State Series, Volume 6 (November 1, 1803–March 31, 1804), 551–552; Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, Presidential Series, Volume 1 (March 1–September 30, 1809), 263. For specific petitions, see, e.g., “Weights and Measures,” S. Misc. Doc. No. 175, 8th Cong., 1st Sess. (1804); ASP, Miscellaneous, Volume 1, 388; Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2nd sess., 20; Annals of Congress, 10th Cong., 1st sess., 1331; Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 2nd sess., 593; Annals of Congress, 14th Cong., 2nd sess., 436.

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elected sealers of weights and measures on the local level rather than appoint them. If counties got to choose, however, they also had to fund these offices: almost every state required that counties, cities, and towns pay for procuring sets of standard weights and measures. Most of these same laws, however, did not provide the state with much recourse if localities failed to comply, and there is scattered evidence that outside of major cities, many local governments often failed to appoint sealers, much less procure official weights and measures from a reputable source.10 Most significant, perhaps, about the statutes governing weights and measures at this time was the question of compensation. Local governments did not pay sealers a salary. Rather, most sealers, like others in the employ of government, made their money from fees. In practice this meant that a sealer made his money from approving and “sealing” weights and measures in his jurisdiction. In most states, sealers would get nothing in return if they deemed a weight or measure defective – except, possibly, the ill will of their fellow citizens. While it is difficult to know how these incentives played out on the ground, it is not unreasonable to assume that sealers found their regulatory authority circumscribed by the need to make money, never mind the desire to avoid alienating friends and neighbors in the community. As Nicholas Parillo has observed, these sorts of “facilitative payments” tended to encourage cooperation and accommodation between ambassadors of state authority and the ordinary citizens subject to that authority. What Parrillo has called the “salary revolution” – the idea that public officials should not make their money from enforcing the law, but should instead be paid a fixed income so as to dispassionately administer it – had yet to take place.11 The state of Pennsylvania offers a particularly revealing case study of the challenges that both reformers and regulators faced. In 1807, the Pennsylvania legislature undertook a review of the state’s weights and measures. As in many states at this time, Pennsylvania relied on a colonialera statute to regulate weights and measures. This law, which dated from the year 1700, had stipulated that every county and city in the colony obtain, at their expense, “standards of brass, for weights and measures, according to the king’s standards for the exchequer.” Officers in each

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See, e.g., “Communication from the Secretary of State, Relative to Furnishing the Counties with Standard Weights and Measures,” Legislative Documents of the Senate and Assembly of the State of New York, Vol. 2 (Albany, NY: E. Croswell, 1830), No. 188. Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 1–48.

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jurisdiction would then “keep the standards” and use them in order to validate all weights and measures in use throughout the said county or city; they would also collect modest fees for this service. Anyone who failed to comply would be fined, and the inspector or sealer of weights and measures was empowered to seize defective weights and measures.12 When the committee appointed by the Pennsylvania Senate looked into the matter, it turned to the most populous, well-established city in the state: Philadelphia. This was the second-largest city in the United States, highly dependent on commerce and possessing an unusually solid reputation for good government and regulatory oversight. And yet when the committee knocked on the doors of the two sealers of weights and measures in that city, they found that “the standards for regulation mentioned in the said law, are now no longer to be found, except for a few small measures of capacity.” In Philadelphia these included an “ancient” half bushel measure that was “coarsely made, the diameters and bottom unequal and irregular,” as well as “bruised and patched.” It was marked “B.N.E.” and “thought to have been brought from England by William Penn.” But this half bushel did not agree with the de facto standard of measure, the so-called Winchester bushel. Nor did some colonial-era quart and pint standards marked “W. R.” that the examiners found. Reported the committee: “the whole of the standards, as well ancient as modern now used by the officers of regulation for the city and county of Philadelphia, are in an incomplete and irregular condition.” The examiners also located a number of scattered weights, including an antiquated set that ranged from fifty-six pounds to a half ounce. But these, whether from age, wear and tear, or tampering, did not measure up. “They do not bear the due and relative proportion each to the other, especially in the smaller weights,” the report noted. In fact, when the examiners compared the pound weight to the sixteen-ounce weights, they found a discrepancy of nearly an ounce. No standards for Troy weights could be located, nor was there any evidence that they existed. Moreover, the examiners failed to find “any evidence, that any of the said weights and measures, have been regulated as is by the said law required.” In the examiners’ eyes this meant that the “persons authorized as regulators cannot know how to act for want of proper data.”

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Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 17 (Lancaster, PA: John Burnside, 1806), 442–448; Digest of the Laws of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: M’Carty and Davis, 1824), 795–796; Report of a Committee of the Senate on the Subject of Weights and Measures (Harrisburg, PA: W. C. Smythe, 1808), 1–35.

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The problems with weights and measures extended well beyond the absence of genuine standards. In the day-to-day operations of weighing and measuring, the actual method of measurement could be notoriously difficult to define. In Philadelphia, as throughout the United States, the distinction between what was known as “heaped” and “stricken” measures could moot the very idea that a standard of measurement existed in the first place. “Heaping,” the committee explained, “is generally . . . understood to be as much as can [be] piled or put on” above and beyond the actual rim of the container. A stricken measure, by contrast, was level at the rim, with nothing additional added. This distinction, the committee reported, could be used to squeeze additional profits out of retail sales, as coal or other commodities might be purchased by the heaped measure and sold by the stricken measure. Additional discrepancies plagued the weighing and measuring of dry goods. A measure that was shaken could hold more than one that was not; likewise, two containers with the same volume but made in different shapes could differ in their actual capacity, particularly if the commodity being measured was bulky or irregularly shaped. One solution was to measure goods by weight. But here too certainty was elusive: water might be added to coal, for example. And in any case, no real standard of weight existed at this time.13 The Pennsylvania committee proposed a sweeping reform of the state’s weights and measures. Its plan recommended that Philadelphia commission official, accurate weights and measures that would function as the ultimate “Original Standards.” These would be “kept in the most secure way from damage and fire” by the mayor and alderman in a special case that would have “three good locks” with different keys, each of which would be held by different people to prevent tampering; and the case itself would be held in the Bank of Pennsylvania, where it would be opened once a year and tested and retested at the exact temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. These fundamental standards would then be used to derive additional copies for the rest of the state, each of which would be officially embossed with the words “Pennsylvania Standard” and then deposited for safekeeping in each city and county. Local regulators – so-called sealers of weights and measures – could then use these to guarantee that all standards in their jurisdiction complied with these authoritative weights and measures. The proposed legislation also attempted to banish potential sources of confusion by specifying the actual shape and 13

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See also the discussion in the Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser, August 13, 1789.

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dimensions of capacity measures, as well as eliminating the practice of “heaped” measures. Nothing came of the proposal, but Pennsylvania nonetheless passed far more modest legislation in 1813 that aimed to supplement and elaborate the colonial-era statute already on the books. Similar reforms took place in other states though the focus of these reforms betrayed signs that whatever the problems with the actual standards, enforcement had run into serious difficulties. For example, in Pennsylvania the 1813 legislation now listed penalties for several impostures: counterfeit brands or marks that falsely indicated that the measure in question had been inspected; the alteration of weights and measures after they had been genuinely sealed; and the sale of weights and measures lacking the imprimatur of local authorities. But the legislation also imposed penalties on the sealer if he gave his stamp of approval to a weight or measure that he knew did not conform with the official standard; or if the sealer “shall refuse or neglect to do any thing enjoined on him” by the act of 1700, or worse, “charge more fees than is directed by said act.” Such provisions, while they can certainly be read as evidence of a well-regulated society, can more logically be taken as evidence that the enforcement of regulations had gone awry. When the Pennsylvania Senate revisited weights and measures once again in 1822, it condemned the two pieces of legislation passed in 1700 and 1813. “Both these acts are deficient in their provisions,” a committee report concluded, “and under their operation alone, it is impossible to enforce a conformity to the existing standards.” This report in turn prompted far more extensive legislation on the subject in April 1822. The new legislation went much farther than the previous acts, dividing responsibilities for oversight between a “sealer of dry measures” and a “regulator of weights and measures.” This codified what had already been an informal practice, and spelled out procedures for inspecting and verifying the weights and measures in use in Philadelphia. The legislation also called upon both officers to issue advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers summoning the owners of weights, measures, balances, and scales to have these verified and sealed. Notably, this legislation and the 1813 enactments only applied to Philadelphia, leaving the rest of the state under the more cursory, colonial-era law.14

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Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 32 (Harrisburg, PA: Charles Mowry, 1821–1822), 474–476.

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In practice, the cumulative effect of this legislation was less than impressive. In 1824, the Pennsylvania Senate once again launched an inquiry. This time it requested John Johnson, Philadelphia’s sealer of dry measures, to respond to six interrogatories. The answers are revealing. Johnson reported that in the previous year he had adjusted and sealed a little more than 4,000 separate dry measures, a rather impressive number for one person working alone, save for some part-time help. But this figure referred to new dry measures inspected prior to sale, not to the existing measures in actual use. Of the latter, Johnson reported that he had inspected approximately 1,200 additional measures in use by approximately 810 grocers and shopkeepers in the county and city of Philadelphia. When pressed as to how many measures had been found wanting, Johnson admitted that he had not kept an “exact register of the dry measures required to be altered,” but believed that the number was “at least one half of the whole of the measures brought to me,” suggesting that accurate measures remained in very short supply. What, then, of the coercive powers of the state? How many fines had Johnson collected from these errant shopkeepers? Here the sealer admitted that, in the entire city and county of Philadelphia, he had sued a rather modest 128 individuals. But this figure was undercut still further by the fact that he had only fined 10 of the 128. “The reasons why, from so many sued, so few have been convicted and fined,” he explained, had to do with the fact that “a great majority of the delinquents, from whom this penalty might have been exacted . . . did not wish to offend [and] that their delinquencies arose from inattention or negligence, without any intention to evade the requisitions of law or do the people injustice.” It is difficult to determine the truth of Johnson’s answers, but they highlight that the actual implementation of the law inevitably led representatives of the state into ambiguous, challenging situations where the subjective judgment of the sealer trumped the objective letter of the law. As Johnson noted in closing, “probably a rigid compliance with the requisitions of the law, would require the number of dry measures destroyed to be greatly increased” – something that he found himself unwilling to do. The committee submitted a similar array of questions to one Michael Baker Jr., who served as Philadelphia’s “Regulator of Weights and Measures.” Baker, who inspected scales, beams, weights, and liquid measures, offered an equally telling tale. He conceded that while he kept “a record of all transactions of my office,” this was a rough account at best. As a consequence, he was unable to state with certainty how many items he had inspected, but estimated that he had examined ninety-nine beams

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and ninety-two pairs of scales. Of these, only five had been found to be correct. Of the 935 individual weights he had tested, only one matched his own standard. Though Baker had indeed inspected a great number of weights and measures, he reported that some 622 individuals had failed to secure his imprimatur, as required by law. Of these, only 120 had actually been sued for noncompliance. More startling still, Baker noted that “I regard the authority vested in me to bring suits as given, not to exact fines, but to compel obedience to the act of assembly; therefore except in cases marked by peculiar circumstances, I pursue the provisions of the law, with as much forbearance as is consistent with their enforcement.” The consequence of this policy, admitted Baker, was “that few persons have been fined.” But the piece-de-resistance of this inquiry was not the accounts of the activities of these men, but what they reported about the fundamental standards used to verify weights and measures and, on rare occasions, impose fines. “There are in my possession three standard measures,” Johnson reported. The first, marked with the letters “B.N.E.,” was in fact the exact same half bushel that the Pennsylvania legislatures had earlier condemned as faulty and inaccurate. He also reported having two additional measures marked “W.R.” that were likely the same deficient, incomplete measures the Senate committee found in 1807. Johnson was apparently unaware of that earlier report, for he reported with no equivocation that “it is by these [three] measures that all others are regulated at this office.” Likewise, Baker reported that the weights he employed for his job were the same set of brass weights that an earlier inquiry had condemned as faulty. In short, the entire regulatory edifice governing the city’s weights and measures still rested on a flawed, irregular set of standards. The absurdity of this did not go unnoticed in Pennsylvania, much less other states, where similar problems had been detected.15 In Massachusetts, for example, the newspapers of the era captured the problem, noting that “our carpenters’ rules and squares are very imperfect, scarcely any two being alike; which together yard-sticks, gallon, quarter, pint, and other measures & weights of all kinds cannot be corrected.” Why? In an imaginary dialog, the Boston Patriot asked: “where is the standard for a foot or its parts in inches? – no known; where are the standards for Weights and Measures? – a Bostonian will say, 15

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Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 35 (Harrisburg, PA: Mowry & Cameron, 1824), 152–156, 181–183.

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in the Sealer’s Office; indeed! Well, where does this Sealer prove or correct his Weights Measures? – Oh! That I don’t know.” All of this confusion reminded the writer of the “untutored Indian” who, when pressed to explain the universe, declared that the world rested on “the back of a great elephant, to which the obvious question was: what does the elephant stand on? To this the Indian had a ready answer: “a large mud turtle.” And what did the turtle stand on? “I don’t know that,” said the Indian. Such was the progress made in modernizing the nation’s standards of weights and measures by the 1820s.

§ § § § § The history of standards in the United States during the first half century of the nation’s existence was notable less for what was accomplished than for what was left undone. Despite a clear mandate under both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, the federal government and its representatives relinquished their authority over weights and measures. In the process, the national government ceded the problem to the individual states. But if the states did pass laws in the hopes of accomplishing what the federal government could not, they took little initiative, preferring to delegate the matter to even smaller, more local institutions of government. It was here, in the everyday negotiations between the rather ordinary representatives of the state and equally ordinary citizens, that the question of how best to secure standard weights and measures would be asked but rarely answered. Absent a genuine standard, much less an effective state, is it any wonder that the citizens of the early republic turned to scripture for consolation, and to Deuteronomy in particular, lecturing one another, and their representatives in government: “Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect, a just weight; a perfect and just measure shalt thou have.” Americans would eventually lay their hands on some approximation of that perfect and just measure. But they would have to wait a century to do so.

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12 Mapping Power The Shape of the State in the Post–Civil War American South Gregory P. Downs

No event in nineteenth-century U.S. history, except for the Civil War itself, challenged, constructed, and exposed the limits of the U.S. federal state so much as the national abolition of slavery. Although the barriers to effectively ending slavery were in part ideological, economic, and jurisdictional, they also were essentially problems of statecraft, of extending sovereignty over vast internal spaces. Yet the burgeoning history of the nineteenth-century U.S. state frequently speeds past emancipation, as if the end of slavery cast light on law, racial construction, labor, ideology, or really everything else except the kind of national state that would be required to end slavery. This tendency itself arises from a broader habit of treating emancipation and abolition as policies accomplished upon their promulgation, rather than as early steps in contested processes. Separating emancipation from state building and state building from emancipation renders both literatures unable to explain how the U.S. federal state met one of its gravest challenges and why the end of slavery and construction of civil rights followed its peculiar, at times disappointing path. Ending slavery was centrally a problem of constructing a federal state strong enough to exert concrete internal sovereignty against competing local states and private actors. As slave owners and their political allies resisted the end of slavery – long after the Emancipation Proclamation, congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, and even Confederate surrender – the end of slavery and the construction of post-slavery freedom was in many respects a question of brute force. Did the federal government have the capacity through the U.S. Army to require local governments to bend to its statutes? On virtually every important 202

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question of federal policy – the literal end of slavery, the citizenship of former slaves, the bundle of rights that former slaves (and other Americans) might carry – law was a necessary but wholly inadequate instrument; these new regimes could not be established by solving problems of jurisdiction. To be efficacious, to enforce the law, the federal government would have to rely upon force to assert its alleged but unrecognized authority to be the final arbiter, the ultimate sovereign. Policy makers embarked upon an ambitious, only partly successful effort to create an ultimately unsustainable expansion of the federal government’s power over its wide territory through military power. Although this expansion did not endure, it is a crucial part of the story of the American state but one that has not been well incorporated into a literature that focuses upon the power of local states, upon other sites of enduring federal presence, or upon earlier and later nineteenth-century developments instead of the Civil War era.1 The problem of ultimate authority was not a technical, legal problem but a crucial, ongoing struggle in nineteenth-century U.S. state development. Governments in the United States competed for power in particularly fierce ways. These competitions had no preordained victor and could not be reduced to constitutional or legal questions precisely because there was little reason to believe that proper laws or constitutional victories

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Jon Teaford, Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113:3 (June 2008), 752–772; Gautham Rao, “The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Law and History Review 26:1 (January 2008), 1–56; Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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would lead to clear social outcomes. Governments fought repeatedly and bloodily over issues that might have been – but could not ultimately be – resolved in court. When, during Reconstruction, a Mississippi judge and sheriff arrested an Army officer and stashed him in jail for trying to enforce labor contracts, it was not a court decision but an Army company’s march upon the jail that freed him. The court decisions that created distinct lines between federal states and state governments did not generally define boundaries so much as recognize the lines established by struggle; they were less legal doctrines than acknowledgments of exhaustion. Abolition in the United States exposed the difficulties of achieving this type of control. Fiercely defended by slave owners and their neighbors, slavery endured beyond proclamations and even amendments. In response the federal state deployed its crucial tool, the U.S. Army, to seize control of rebellious peripheries and force them to acknowledge the federal state’s authority over slavery. On the ground, freedpeople, congressmen, and Army officers faced the broad crisis of nineteenth-century governance: in battles on the periphery, they had no reason to be confident of, much less certain about, success. Placing abolition in these terms not only helps us capture the difficult problem of ending slavery but also places U.S. governments in a broader global story. Charles Maier, Jürgen Osterhammel, and C. A. Bayly, among others, have noted the general crisis of central authority in the midnineteenth century, as nation-states faced increased demands to create homogeneity across their borders. With the creation of railroad, steamship, canal, and telegraph lines, the peripheries were newly legible to oncedistant centers, inspiring new pressures for rationalized control. The end of slavery was in many respects a piece of a broader global struggle to remove barriers between individual subjects and the ultimate authority of a central state. But these same industrial developments had also provided peripheral rebels or resisters with more weapons to fight back. Studying the U.S. abolition in this general crisis of peripheral authority might help us develop more rigorous understandings of the U.S. governments, engage the United States more clearly within global history, and further explain the conundrum Gary Gerstle has posed: for all the experimentations and expansions of the nineteenth-century U.S. federal state, it was not a precursor to the post–New Deal state. When early to mid-twentiethcentury governments remade themselves, they could not look backward to the nineteenth century, because it had left very few usable models. For these reasons, Kate Masur and I have recently advanced the notion of a “Stockade State” after the Civil War, one with significant but

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territorially constrained power, an authority that could make itself felt sporadically but not systematically.2 When antislavery Republicans gained control of the national state, they captured a state with a creaky, limited but intriguing new model of state power constructed by proslavery Democrats in the 1850s. The antebellum battle over slavery had helped to begin constructing a powerful national state that depended upon raw force. In the 1850s, a Commission State emerged as a way to solve the problem of local resistance to slavery and in the process helped drive apathetic Northerners into the Republican Party. Following the rise of state personal liberty laws, proslavery politicians claimed national supremacy over local and state laws in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They also began constructing a mechanism for enforcement through powers allocated to marshals and federal commissioners. Attorney General Caleb Cushing’s 1854 opinion granted those marshals and commissioners the power to call upon the Army to enforce national supremacy over local resistance. This represented a new, raw force for the federal government on the ground. Unsurprisingly, some antislavery thinkers turned toward opposition to central power, most notably in Wisconsin’s efforts to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act. But antislavery centralizers like Abraham Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase, and William Seward defended national sovereignty as part of a long-term strategy to eliminate slavery.3 Republicans succeeded in preserving a nationalist antislavery state because proslavery centralizers failed to construct a viable proslavery central state. Despite the claims of national sovereignty over runaway slave cases, state and local governments as well as many black and white people successfully resisted; Stanley Harold has written well about the physical battles along the border line between slavery and freedom. While slaveholders created a framework for ultimate federal authority and empowered the Army to carry out these claims, they were frightened to use these powers. Marshals might have the authority to call out the Army, 2

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C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Charles S. Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (New York: Belknap Press, 2014); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, “Echoes of War: Rethinking Post–Civil War Governance and Politics,” in Downs and Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 1–21. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

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but the explosive response to the federal rendition of fugitive Anthony Burns from Boston in 1854, and other such cases, convinced many proslavery politicians that it was politically disastrous to rely on the Army against local governments.4 Therefore the federal government entered its age of abolition and emancipation without either the bureaucratic blueprint or the nominal authority that the British and other empires used in eliminating slavery within their realms earlier in the century. It had an ill-formed and illdefined national commission state, but no evidence that this system could create real supremacy. As secession gave Northern Republicans large majorities in the newly composed (and in some ways rump) Congress, Republicans began exploring the way they could turn national sovereignty against slavery. Slaves ran to U.S. lines early in the war, in ways that reflected their own understanding of the war’s meaning. Responding to those claims by so-called contrabands, the federal government relied overwhelmingly and largely through improvisation upon the Army and war powers. If the national state aimed for supremacy, it would have to override not only local sentiment but also sectors of the local state that did not answer to the national authority. The first part of the end of slavery, the story before Appomattox, is well known. Once secession came, Republicans increasingly moved against slavery, first by supporting military officers’ judgments in the field, then by backing them with confiscation acts and the Emancipation Proclamation. War powers were the crucial means for asserting national sovereignty. Bringing reliable freedom to these plantations meant moving into the countryside itself. With the backing and encouragement of civil authorities, the military generally enforced the national government’s policies as it responded to runaway slaves, refused to return runaways to masters, extracted slaves from plantations in the Combahee River raid and other similar incidents, and replaced local and state laws with military rules, backed by martial law.5

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Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On war powers in the Civil War, see, especially, John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012) and Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The discussion that follows of the state of war after surrender is drawn from my recently published After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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Martial law and military power freed individual slaves, but the ultimate question of slavery’s survival remained unresolved. In part this was a feature of war powers. By definition war powers expired with the close of the war; thus they permitted the nation to act forcefully but without jeopardizing a constitutional order that many Northern Republicans (especially those from antislavery areas with antislavery judges and sheriffs) believed in. The very transitory nature of the state of war, however, made those powers particularly hard to abandon. If the state of war passed, so too did the most reliable forms of national state sovereignty. War powers themselves would not create a new, permanent national state. The end of battlefield fighting in April and May 1865 might have signaled the end of the wartime expansion, but in fact reliance upon the military expanded after the Confederacy collapsed. In the first years after surrender, the federal government continued to rely upon the Army to enforce federal supremacy even as it entered a period where there no longer was battlefield combat. The federal government did so by asserting that the state of war endured. Eliminating slavery turned upon continuing the state of war to keep power in the hands of the Army. Given the thorough rebelliousness of much of the white Southern leadership, federal authority could not arise from traditional rituals of powers or cooptation of elites. Even after the Confederacy collapsed, many white Southern leaders resisted the national state; white Southerners rejected not only Republicans, freedpeople, and army officers but even the allegedly mild President Andrew Johnson. Comparing him to Warren Hastings and absolute monarchs, white Southerners ignored Johnson’s relatively mild suggestions that they end slavery, repudiate rebel debts, disavow secession, and permit black testimony. In their constitutional conventions, they tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to reject national supremacy; on the ground they waged what Mark Grimsley rightly calls an insurgency against the U.S. Army, attacking active-duty personnel, veterans, white loyalists, and freedpeople to claim their authority. In areas beyond the black belt, masters still possessed sufficient social, economic, and military power to hold African Americans under their authority, sustaining patrols, whipping people who traveled, refusing to pay wages, and even selling people after the Rebel armies surrendered. As U.S. Army officers and freedpeople repeatedly stated, proclamations, amendments, and policies would

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not be sufficient to reach into the Southern countryside and end slavery everywhere.6 On the ground, freedpeople taught Army commanders about white Southerners’ refusal to acknowledge federal state authority. In the months after Appomattox, commanders reported to Washington – based upon information that ex-slaves brought to them – that slavery persisted across the rebel states in regions the Army had not occupied. At the time of surrender, perhaps 2.75 million people remained in bondage. While some planters acknowledged the end of slavery with Lee’s surrender, and many slaves ran toward U.S. lines, in many areas far from the fighting masters attempted to sustain their power, and slaves were uncertain of how to claim their rights. To end slavery, the federal government dramatically expanded the U.S. Army’s role in the defeated South and created a new template for national power. In an understudied, misunderstood, and surprisingly bold occupation, the Army sustained its powers of war to move through the countryside, bringing the federal government’s power to the plantations. Instead of returning directly home (as many units did), tens of thousands of soldiers spun into the Southern countryside, marching across plantation belts and calling together slaves and masters to hear proclamations of the government’s authority to end slavery and to proclaim a new definition of freedom. The Army, of course, did not bring news of freedom or of its virtues; many ex-slaves had been following the war carefully, had expected freedom, and had made strikes of their own. They were not passive recipients. But neither were masters passive recipients of abolition; they too had followed the trend of events and banded together to sustain what they could of slavery. The Army did not teach slaves to want to be free; it tried to teach masters that the federal state protected ex-slaves’ claims to freedom. This created extraordinary spatial demands upon the national state and the Army. For freedpeople soon reported to soldiers and to missionaries (and after their deployment in the late spring and summer of 1865, to 6

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On the white insurgency in the South, see Mark Grimsley, “Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies,” Civil War History 58 (2012), 6–36; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror; the Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Douglas R. Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Freedmen’s Bureau officers) that white Southerners did not generally accept national state authority even after these pronouncements. If soldiers simply showed up once at a plantation and marched on, white planters generally tried to sustain as much of the old system as possible; in many regions, the departure of the Army meant the departure of national sovereignty. Even if sales were no longer practicable without legal recognition of title, planters could refuse wages, prevent movement, whip workers, forestall education, and block family formation. Therefore even these measly rights – travel and family formation and wages and schooling – depended upon the continuing presence of forceful agents of the national state who could respond to complaints from freedpeople. Freedom, in a formulation that emerged from complaints freedpeople pressed upon officers, depended upon the presence of a national state proximate and powerful enough to counterbalance the enduring power of local big men, customs, and officials. Freedom did not mean escape from the state but escape to the state, not the abandonment of national state coercion but access to national state coercion to restrain violent social actors. This was what freedpeople and officers called “practical freedom.” Therefore, the Army launched a geographically ambitious occupation of the U.S. South that established a new basis for federal supremacy. From approximately 120 posts at the end of fighting in April 1865, the Army expanded its coverage to more than 750 across the former Confederacy. The Army shifted from fighting Lee to occupying places like Leesburg, holding ninety posts in Georgia alone by the fall of 1865, and in South Carolina holding forty-seven posts in small towns like Gillisonville, Pocotaligo, and McPhersonville and setting up posts in seven Lexingtons and six Franklins across the South, as well as three Fayettevilles, two Fayettes, and two LaFayettes. Clad with authority over local law and with the veneer of their battlefield victories, Army companies and detachments became central places for resisting the assertion of enduring local power against the national state. As freedpeople walked in from the countryside – traveling a dozen or more miles by foot – they carried news of the persistence of either outright slavery or of violent coercion in peripheral areas. In response, some Army officers sent detachments out into the countryside to order planters to pay wages or to stop whipping exslaves or permit them to move. Analyzing this assertion of geographical sovereignty poses deep challenges. To create some general ways of thinking about national sovereignty, Scott Nesbit and I in our digital site Mapping Occupation have

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described this geographic power in two ways. One, which we call Zones of Access, aims to map the freedpeople who lived within a long day’s walk of an Army post at any given time. These freedpeople, we argue, generally (if not always) could reach federal officials to issue complaints. Beyond that lay regions that we call Zones of Occupation, which might be too far for a freedman to walk but which the Army could reach in a half day, either by sending cavalry (where available) or by commandeering local railroad lines. These were regions where the Army, if it heard of outrages, could respond with a reasonable likelihood of success. Beyond that zone lay large regions where the Army was far less relevant to the daily lives of freedpeople and masters. In some areas with especially large ex-slave populations, especially along the eastern seaboard and the Mississippi River, freedpeople might be able to exert effective control based on their numbers; in others masters dominated; in still others there were constant local wars.7 Although any such effort at mental mapping breaks down on the granular level, thinking of federal authority in zones of effective access, of reasonable response, and of powerlessness helps capture the spatial range across the post-surrender South. For freedpeople in a town, a post might be an easily accessible spot for finding employment, housing church services or schools, or adjudicating cases local law would not recognize (or, of course, a site of oppression if the local commanders were bitterly racist). For freedpeople in a roughly fifteen-mile radius beyond town, the post might be a place for extraordinary but not impossible redress. For freedpeople along rail lines, the post might be a sight of distant, hard-to-access but potential power. For freedpeople beyond that zone of occupation, federal state authority might be nearly meaningless. This was a transformative but unsustainable way to construct national sovereignty. Most Republicans, like most Americans, embraced the general supremacy of civilian law, by which they often meant local civilian law, and had no stomach for permanent occupation.8 Nor did many Republicans, even the most radical, wish to incur the financial and human costs of 7 8

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www.mappingoccupation.org/map/static/methods.html The clearest analysis of this attachment to the principles of local law and common law among Republicans remained Michael Les Benedict, Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); La Wanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).

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sustaining such a large army. Therefore, most congressional Republicans moved over 1866 toward a short-term, distantly proximate occupation. As they brought soldiers home, they hoped they could sustain the seemingly magical power of the national state through a reduced, centralized occupation in railroad depots and major cities. At the same time, Republicans looked for ways to move away from occupation entirely by constructing sustainable, permanent peacetime powers. But they faced a set of contradictory impulses; at once they hoped to remake local law and also defend the virtue of local law, once properly restrained. Many Republicans had practiced law in states where they believed local common law worked to protect citizens’ rights. Therefore their goal was to force Southern states to remake their local laws to match those of the North, and then to rely upon the federal government to keep them within certain boundaries. In the Civil Rights Act of 1866 Republicans established national citizenship, defined the rights that accompanied this citizenship, and empowered marshals and commissioners to assist federal judges. In this way they began to turn the slaveholders’ state inside out, twisting the contours of the Fugitive Slave Act against slavery. But – as several Republicans noted during the debates – reliance upon the federal court system was futile since most Southerners lived far distant from federal courts; federal judges were irrelevant to most daily life in the rural South. Thus the act might create pockets of enforceable rights around federal courts, but little in the broad swathes of the South. Republicans recognized the inherent weakness of the slaveholders’ model as they incorporated the military into the bill, taking Cushing’s 1854 opinion as a model in which federal commissioners, marshals, and judges could call directly upon the Army (without referring the issue to the president). Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment to establish equal protect and due process. But Republicans knew this would not be enough. As the Congress adjourned, Republican congressmen kept hold of broader powers by refusing to extend peace terms to the South and therefore extended the state of war and the military’s routine power over local courts. Many saw no other way to guarantee basic forms of freedom in the countryside. Although congressional Republicans did not act as quickly as the Army wanted, they also expanded the Regular Army, called for the retention of troops in the South, and protected the Army in its reliance upon martial law.

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As word came back over 1866 of the continuing oppressions of local governments and of white Southerners, Republicans turned toward remaking local governments through the Military Reconstruction Acts in early 1867. They utilized the powers of occupation and declared a continuation of a state of war that President Johnson had tried to end in August 1866. The Army temporarily would take on sweeping new powers to run elections and regulate registration but then would turn over ultimate authority to new state governments elected partly by freedpeople. If freedpeople could claim the attention of local judges and sheriffs, Republicans hoped, national authority might not be necessary. Freedom might emerge within sustained (and forcefully reconstituted) local authority. With the return of several states in the summer of 1868 and then more in 1870, the national government withdrew the Army from the countryside. Once again the only national agents in much of the South were postmasters, paid by the national state but who were in many ways representatives of local power. Between 1868 and 1875, paramilitary groups in the South fought against both the practice and image of ultimate national sovereignty, claiming powers for local governments they put in place and for local elites whom they often represented. They challenged the allegedly permanent system the Republican had created. With the close of war – in 1866 in Tennessee, 1868 in most states, 1870 in Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, and 1871 in Georgia – the military could no longer override local law. The Army’s virtual disappearance from the Southern countryside between 1868 and 1871 meant that the federal government simply disappeared from view. Republicans struggled seriously but futilely to construct rights within an intriguing but fatally weak commissioner-based national state. Building upon this commissioner system, Republicans passed a series of civil rights laws meant to empower the federal government to intervene to protect civil and voting rights in the South. Although they did not create an extended period of wartime, these acts allowed the president to proclaim states of emergency, to utilize the military to make arrests and hold prisoners against state writs of habeas corpus, and to try offenders in federal court. Armed with this new authority, the Grant administration did manage to crush the Klan in South Carolina, and to launch other indictments in the Mississippi Valley. But these proved cumbersome, expensive, and politically unpopular tools against innovative Southern insurgents. After the Democrats’ victory in the 1874 midterm elections, Republicans in the lame duck session in the winter of 1874–1875 looked

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one more time to those relics of war powers by passing one more enforcement act granting the president the power to proclaim a state of insurrection; in the end, however, Congress turned to a civil rights bill with few enforcement provisions. Democrats recognized that these commissioner-based powers might trouble their hold over the South’s peripheries. Over the next four years, Democrats worked feverishly to sever freedpeople from the national government and to claim supremacy for local states and state governments. Between 1875 and 1877, Democrats recaptured the final state governments – thus ensuring that governors and state legislators would not call for military aid from the president, as the national laws permitted. Then, they went to work on military discretion. In 1878 and 1879, they shut down the government, forced the Army to pay its employees in scrip, slashed the Army’s size, passed the Posse Comitatus Act, and in other ways tried to limit the power of commissioners and marshals to call for military assistance. The age of a Commission State, inaugurated by proslavery Democrats in 1850 – came to a close at the hands of that same Democratic Party, now fearful that a central national state was being turned against planter power.

§ § § § § Beginning with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, first slave owners and then antislavery politicians had tried to construct national state supremacy through the agency of marshals and commissioners attached to federal courts. With the potential for a military force in peacetime – claimed by Cushing in 1854 and reaffirmed by Republican acts from 1866 onward – this vision of a commissioner-led national state might conceivably have succeeded. But the tiny and decentralized judicial system – the Department of Justice was formed only in 1870 – provided no foundation for systematic national state authority. There were few federal agents and those were primarily in a handful of cities. In much of the countryside the national state was invisible. By limiting the power of commissioners and marshals, and – even more crucially – by forcing dramatic cutbacks to the Army, Democrats ensured that the military would not be able to reach into the countryside. For these reasons, tracing the connection between nineteenth- and twentieth-century state building requires finesse. Historians have had some basis for connecting the second reconstruction of the civil rights movement to the first. Republicans scattered and buried enough of their

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civil rights acts in a reorganized national code to save some provisions from Democrats. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both invoked Reconstruction civil rights acts to justify their use of the armed forces to overwhelm local resistance in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Oxford, Mississippi. But in many respects, the construction of a powerful national state between the 1910s and 1960s was the result of the federal government’s new bureaucracies and new force. The creation of new federal rights would depend not just on new laws and new public attitudes but on a new, empowered federal state to enforce them.

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13 To Bee or Not to Bee The Coproduction of Modern Science and the Modern State John F. M. Clark

Environmental history and environmentalism have been marked by diffidence and ambivalence toward the state. Although state formation and transformation have constituted a perpetually contested field of study, green theoreticians, perhaps, confront intrinsically greater problems because their definitional difficulties are compounded by considerations of the relationships between “nature,” “the state,” and “ecology.” When Raymond Williams turned his pen to the ideas of nature, he admitted that his previous efforts to analyze ideas such as culture, society, individual, class, art, and tragedy paled in comparison to the enormity of the task that he faced. The “state of nature,” the inherent quality of particular things, constituted the earliest use of “nature.” Physical investigations of a multiplicity of things and processes were often organized around “nature” as a singularity. Reaching back to classical thought, the state of nature could also be contrasted with a constructed human state, organized around conventions and laws. This proved an enduring comparison. Depending on their positions, political theorists invested the state of nature with positive or negative attributes. It could be a barbaric, presocial existence that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” or it could be an idyllic age before man’s fall from grace and his subsequent misery within the bonds and institutions of civil society. Alternatively, it could be a society organized around the “natural” qualities of justice, peace, and stability.1

1

Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in his Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), 67, 75–76.

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Although knowledge of the state and nature may have existed long before the seventeenth century, this chapter considers the peculiarly modern relationships between the state and nature through an examination of the coproduction of the modern European state and modern science.2 The modern state was self-consciously an abstraction. From the seventeenth century, the “modern” aspect of this abstraction was the preeminence accorded to rational thought. But this was rational thought wed to a commitment to experimentation, or more broadly, “experience” as expertise. In this respect, the revolutionary aspect of the Scientific Revolution shared assumptions with those of the modern state. Peter Dear has suggested that “experience,” realized as expertise, was another manifestation of “mystery of state” or “reason of state.”3 Ineffable assumptions, often entangled in networks of trust, underpinned the authority of scientific knowledge, within what Stephen Toulmin has called the “new cosmopolis.”4 After all, how many persons read and understood the likes of Newton’s Principia? Nevertheless, rationalizing and standardizing became essential for statecraft – for rendering society and nature susceptible to measurement, control, and manipulation. Modern statecraft is associated with certain kinds of knowledge and practices. The rise of experimentalism aided in the shift from a personal conception of the state – or from a dogmatic conception of the state as residing in a sole authority – to a more communal conception, with authority resting in the experience of natural philosophical investigation or practices.5 In the twentieth century, new social movements, like modern environmentalism, undermined the mystery of state by making the contested nature of science more publicly visible. The transition from conservation to environmentalism marked a crisis of confidence in modern science and

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See Greg Anderson’s contribution to this volume for a good discussion of the close relationship between modern materialism and “the state.” Peter Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, Knowledge and Expertise in the Seventeenth Century,” in Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Coproduction of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2006), 206–224. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1990. Margaret Jacob, “Science Studies after Social Construction: The Turn towards the Comparative and the Global,” in Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Richard Biernacki, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999), 95–120. Cf. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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modern statecraft. Conservation had been part of the early modern reconfiguration of nature as natural resources, fit for scientific management – a fundamental element of modern state formation. In contrast, post–Second World War modern environmentalism, or ecologism, included a critique of instrumental rationality. Whereas state theorists grapple with relationships between society and the state, an environmental critique of the modern state contests the separation of society and nature. Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck criticize the nature/society dichotomy, which, they contend, underpins the environmentally destructive modernist project. Their critiques are not, however, anti-statist; but they address the crisis of confidence arising from the shortcomings of the modern coproduction of science and the state.6 Dating from the late seventeenth century, one of the earliest uses of conservation in the English language referred to the over-wintering of bees. Mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophers quite explicitly set out to manage the “commonwealth of bees” through institutional rationality. They called their technology “the rational’ beehive.” Their goal was to make the hive transparent, or legible. The rational beehive seems especially apposite for an examination of modern European state formation and transformation, because it perpetuated the myth of science as pure reason. The beehive was loaded with cultural and political freight – from the ancient city-state to absolute monarchy to Bernard Mandeville’s nascent capitalists.7 But natural philosophers and apiarists ostensibly deployed rational beehives in the absence of explicit metaphors or analogies: they simply sought to manage, manipulate, and control bee bodies and bee populations. The greatest impediment to bees was nature. The rational beehive could perfect bees; and experts could be trusted to provide the techno-science to

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Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated to English by Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992); and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated to English by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See, for example, Christopher Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Peter Burke, “Fables of the Bees: A Case-Study in Views of Nature and Society,” in Mikulás Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustaffson, eds., Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112–123; Jeffrey Merrick, “Royal Bees: The Gender Politics of the Beehive in Early Modern Europe,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18 (1988), 7–37; Jean-Marc Drouin, “L’image des sociétés d’insectes en France à l’époque de la Révolution,” Revue de synthèse, 4 (1992), 333–345; and M. M. Goldsmith, “Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Journal of British Studies, 17 (1977), 63–81.

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achieve this. In this way, beekeeping was a “lesson in statecraft”8 because it demonstrated the coproduction of science and the state. In contrast, recent “colony collapse” points to a collapse in trust of expertise, amidst a shift from a classical industrial to a risk society. This is significant for the relationships between the modern state and knowledge of nature. Hegel offered a vision of history in which humanity is more and more emancipated. Latour suggests that humanity has become more and more entangled. Climate, he observes, now sits heavily on humanity’s shoulders. Climate clearly demonstrates that nature has always been part of society, and society part of nature. Similarly, colony collapse offers a cautionary tale about the coproduction of science and the state. In many ways, the declensionist narrative that haunts environmental history traces its origins to state-of-nature discussions.9 Consequently, environmental historians have sought to locate a point in time at which an ecologically stable, pristine, or semi-pristine natural world was disrupted by the environmentally degrading actions of humans. Despite the diversity of opinions about the “roots of our ecological crisis,” a common thread has run through the different arguments. Many have agreed that environmental degradation and destruction have arisen from the perceived split or duality of society and nature, or “man and nature.” And as John McNeill has demonstrated so effectively, the scale and pace of ideas and of material agency may be more historically significant than the search for single origins.10 Nevertheless, the ecologically inspired critique of “modern society” warrants closer historical investigation. What role did states of nature and the nature of states play in the multiple strands of modernity that converged in the mid-seventeenth century and experienced a florescence in the nineteenth? Furthermore, is the anti-statist strand of ecologism, or modern environmentalism, misdirected? Does it assume causal preeminence for the state when greater consideration of the relations of science and state are required? As Kristin Asdal suggests, postconstructivist historians and sociologists of science can usefully provide a critical perspective on science, nature, the state, and environmental history.11 8 9

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Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter, 1989), 54. Cf. Ted Steinberg, “Down, Down, Down, No More: Environmental History Moves beyond Declension,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24:2 (2004), 260–266. John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2000). Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue, 42 (2003), 60–74.

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science and the state The seventeenth century witnessed a change in scientific thought and practice worthy of the epithet “revolution.” Principally focused on astrophysical sciences, the work of Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton led to an enduring overthrow of accepted orthodoxies on a grand scale. Furthermore, this was a self-conscious movement, which pitted “Moderns” against “Ancients” as new conceptions of nature and humans’ relation to it triumphed. A model of nature as a rationally explicable, valuefree, ordered machine may not have led to a theory and practice of science that was united in a single method; nor did it mark a radical break from the past through evident and consistent disinterestedness, which was shorn of sectarian interests. But an ideology built around a belief in the veracity of this “Modern” seventeenth-century model of nature empowered natural philosophers with the authority to manipulate and control nature. Nature became a powerful tool that legitimated the authority of natural philosophers. This had broad-ranging intellectual and cultural impacts.12 Momentous intellectual and cultural change was borne out of the convergence of the General Crisis and the Little Ice Age in the midseventeenth century.13 Amidst the coincidence of extreme weather events and politico-religious and social upheavals, seventeenth-century intellectuals and elites became convinced that the skeptical embrace of uncertainty and pluralism might lead to unending warfare. With no obvious politico-religious solution to sectarian strife, philosophers pursued a rational basis for establishing, with certainty, the validity or invalidity of philosophical, natural philosophical, and politico-religious doctrines.14 Abstract theory grounded in rational, timeless, universal principles promised stability, underpinned by an ordered hierarchy, in nature and society. Thomas Hobbes, therefore, eschewed a classical tradition for a new manifestation of “political theory.” Instead of political analyses that were built on particular historical examples, Hobbes constructed a general abstract theory, built around atomistic individuals. His Leviathan was among the first publications to articulate self-consciously the modern conception of the state – the “artificial man” whose supreme 12

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Roy Porter, “The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the Wheel?,” in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds., Revolution in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 302. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 665–666, 675–676. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 55.

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sovereign authority remained separate from the people and from the person of the ruler.15 The rationalist and experimentalist approach to knowledge production and reproduction spanned the spectrum of humanity and nature: In this respect, the world view of modern science – as it actually came into existence – won public support around 1700 for the legitimacy it apparently gave to the political system of nation-states as much as for its power to explain the motions of planets, or the rise and fall of the tides.16

The intellectual underpinnings of modernity encompassed the social, political, and natural philosophical fabric of the seventeenth century. Ostensibly, emergent modern government produced social order, while scientific experience, as expertise, produced natural order.17 In practice, politics and nature became enmeshed in a complex web of relationships between science and the state.18 Francis Bacon, the great champion of a nascent modernity, envisioned experimental natural philosophy in the service of state bureaucracy.19 In his utopian tract, New Atlantis, he describes the mythical island of Bensalem, a highly bureaucratic state that exudes stability, peace, and joy. This ideal state is achieved principally through the intellectual labor of Salomon’s House, a collective of natural philosophers who, as servants of the state, declare that “[t]he End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”20 Committed to both the expansion of natural philosophy and empire, Salomon’s House demonstrated how knowledge underpinned state power. Through experimentation and technological innovation, natural philosophers maximized the utility of natural resources: “We make them . . . by art 15

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Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 115–117. In addition, see Skinner’s contribution to this volume. 17 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 128. Dear, “Mysteries of State,” 206. Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 3–4. In addition, see Patrick Carroll, “Articulating Theories of States and State Formation,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 22 (2009), 553–603. Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1961), x–xi; and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 131–132. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Henry Neville, Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and the Isle of Pines (1627, Reprint; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 177.

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much greater than their nature.”21 Through the manipulation, control, and “perfection” of nature, all requirements of the state, including ordinances, were satisfied. As Joseph Glanvill, the great seventeenthcentury apologist for natural philosophy, proclaimed: “nature being known . . . may be mastered, managed and used in the services of human life.”22 Scientific knowledge and technology would become “increasingly significant for states”23 after the mid-seventeenth century.

bees and material cultures of the modern state Drawing on a Foucauldian conception of “governmentality,” Patrick Carroll has argued that the coproduction of science and government differentiates the modern state from any antecedent states. Moreover, he contends that the relations between science and the modern state can best be discerned from careful historical analyses of material culture because techno-science wed “moral improvement with material engineering.”24 In this respect, the shift from the use of traditional straw beehives, or “skeps,” to scientifically designed wooden box beehives captures the relationships between modern science and the state. Explicitly referred to as “rational beehives” by their seventeenth-century innovators, the changing purposes and forms of wooden hives intersected with experimental science, agricultural improvement, and urban reform. In their various manifestations, the wooden hives of William Mew, Christopher Wren, and John Gedde were natural philosophical instruments, which were discussed and observed within the circles of the Royal Society of London. Small windows in each chamber rendered the hives legible. Moreover, as analogues of human social organization, the beehive offered a window on the natural state. Samuel Hartlib’s The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees (1655) teasingly evoked the reform of the state and nature by employing “commonwealth,” one of the preferred seventeenth-century terms for the nascent modern state.25 In addition, 21 22

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Bacon, New Atlantis, 179. Joseph Glanvill, as quoted in Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 304–305. Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 34. Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 7–8. For an excellent critical engagement with Foucault, through the lens of the nineteenth-century British environment and technology, see Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Skinner, “The State,” 119.

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Hartlib embraced the managerial impulses of European statecraft by rendering the beehive legible and, thereby, “conserving” the bees. His The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees included designs for new multistoried wooden hives, which obviated the usual need for the smoking and destruction of the bees to harvest the honey. Hartlib conceived his rational beekeeping as one element of a broader agricultural reform scheme, which encompassed new methods in arable agriculture, husbandry, horticulture, and sericulture, based on empiricism rather than classical texts. Ordered nature – through manipulation and control – would alleviate human poverty and unemployment.26 By reducing transparent hives to just a single comb at the turn of the nineteenth century, François Huber increased the legibility of the beehive and demonstrated bio-power in aid of the state. Huber argued that a thorough knowledge of reproduction biology was required to manage effectively honey and wax production. In particular close observation of the hive was necessary to determine when it was populous enough to divide in half; whether the brood was of the proper age; and whether males were present and available.27 Huber managed the state of his hives through careful records of population, age, and sex of the bees at a time when European states demonstrated increasing interest in census records, civil registration of vital statistics, and imperial expansion and colonization.28 In a manner befitting Salomon’s House, Huber was perfecting nature. He, however, promoted his beehives as an end to the cruel and needless deaths of bees to obtain their honey. He thereby couched his apiarian science in the language of social and agricultural improvement. Similarly, Thomas Nutt positively embraced a managed industrial order through the promotion of his own variant on the rational beehive. He made confident claims for the rational management of populations through the deployment of his “collateral hive.” Nutt’s collateral hives demonstrated the ways in which a population could be subtly disciplined. He knowingly modified the behavior and efficiency of his “little 26

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Timothy Raylor, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,” in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds., Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 91–129. François Huber, New Observations upon Bees, translation to English by C. P. Dadant (1814, Reprint; Hamilton, IL: American Bee Journal, 1926), 8. For a good discussion of American “colonies” and bees, see Tammy Horn, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005). See, for example, the contributions of Stephen Mihm and Yannis Kotsonis in this volume.

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labourers” by engineering their material environment.29 His beehives, therefore, constituted a striking similarity to contemporary management and control of the urban poor. After the late eighteenth century, a group of Edinburgh-trained medical practitioners began to locate medical problems in a wider social context. In particular, they drew connections between disease and filth, overcrowding, and lack of ventilation. By the 1830s, Edwin Chadwick and his Benthamite fellow-travelers had subsumed this activist, environmentalist medicine within their program for state-sponsored social engineering.30 Nutt’s and Chadwick’s natural and social engineering was symptomatic of the central role of technology for mid-nineteenth-century state power.31 Bentham’s Panopticon offered a further parallel between the disciplining of bees and humans, because it adopted the architectural principles of the observation hive to achieve institutional reform. A transparent, circular structure with a high central tower made every cell visible to the observer. The Panopticon, according to Foucault, was a “mechanism of power” and a “laboratory” that did “the work of a naturalist”: “The seeing machine was at once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.”32 Similarly, Thomas Nutt described his system of bee management as “a super-structure – namely – an asylum or sanctuary for Honey-Bees.” Both Bentham and Nutt engaged in biopolitics: they sought to manage populations to maximize stability, efficiency, and economy. Bentham encouraged colonization to optimize the use of land and to strike an effective balance between production and consumption of natural resources. Nutt wished to discourage swarming in order to maximize bee production. Significantly, he asserted that he achieved his goal by extending “the territory of the Queen.”33

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Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, 4th edn. (London: Wisbech, 1837); and see Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor, translated to English by Alexander R. Tulloch (London: Reaction Books, 2000), 28. M. W. Flinn, “Introduction” to Edwin Chadwick, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 1–73. Cf. Joyce, State of Freedom, chapter 1, part ii. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated to English by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 195–228 (203, 207); see also Ramirez, Beehive Metaphor, 27. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, 65, 56–57.

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Nutt acquired his insights through the use of his observatory hive – his apiarian Panopticon. He described it as a “machine,” a term increasingly associated with rationality and efficiency in the nineteenth century.34 But he also noted that it was a model of good governance: This insect government, or government of insects, exhibits to man the most perfect pattern of devoted attachment, and of true allegiance on the part of the subject of Bees to their Sovereign, and of industry, ingenuity, prosperity, and apparently of general happiness in their well-ordered state.35

Although Nutt’s collateral hives had their roots in the rational hives of the seventeenth century, his bee management was a concomitant part of the social and intellectual circumstances of the decade of Whig reform. Nutt pursued educational, penal, agricultural, and sanitary reform of the government of bees during a decade that witnessed a move toward technocratic governmental machinery, based on expert, rational, scientific knowledge.36 He wed nature and artifice at a time when intellectuals and governing elites grappled with social and economic relations in an emergent, modern industrial society. Like “rational hives,” schools, hospitals, workhouses, and prisons were not simply architectural edifices; they were controlled spaces for the manipulation of bodies. But rational hives were also technologies of experimental natural philosophy, which became instruments of political projects. In this respect, they were like microscopes and telescopes that were deployed for mapmaking, or thermometers and barometers that became important tools of public health.37 Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern Western state, underpinned by experimental and engineering science, became institutionalized in Europe. James Scott illustrates the coproduction of modern science and the state through his examination of the rise of cameral science. Scientific forestry, which arose in Prussia and Saxony in the latter half of the eighteenth century, reduced the forest to a “onecommodity machine.” Through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, the forest became an orderly monoculture, which was theoretically easier to map, measure, and manipulate. By the mid-nineteenth century, the centralization of political authority within the modern state permitted experts 34 35 36

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Joyce, State of Freedom, chapter 1, part ii. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, ix, iv–v. Oliver MacDonagh, “The Nineteenth-Century Revolution A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52–67. Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 50–51.

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actively to manipulate and manage natural resources. Significantly, statemanaged forests employed scientific conservation to ensure continued and profitable extraction of a natural resource. Consequently, they strove to achieve “minimum diversity,” “profitability,” and “sustained yield.” Expert foresters acted on behalf of the state because wood was a valued military and economic resource. Conservation – whether of trees or bees – was firmly linked to the engineering science of the emergent modern state.38

crisis of state or crisis of expertise? Further consideration of the honey bee affords insight into perceived roles for science and the state in the wake of post-1960s environmentalism, or ecologism. Since 2006, beekeepers around the world have reported the complete disappearance of bees, a phenomenon that, in 2007, was dubbed “colony collapse disorder.” With a continuing loss of about 30 percent per year, the Obama administration opined that the disappearing bees were the “canary in the coal mine” for the degradation and destruction of the environment. About 10 million beehives have been lost in the United States since 2006, at a cost of about $2 billion. In what Peter Drucker would describe as a postmodern overreach of the modern state and science,39 “rational” box-hive beekeeping has become a vast business. The chief culprit in the bees’ demise, a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics, is part of an even vaster global business interest; and neonics are also intimately associated with genetically modified crops. A plurality of expertise has presented a variety of conflicting theories for colony collapse: insecticides; a disease-spreading mite, Varroa destructor; stress borne of industrial-scale agribusiness; or a combination of all three.40 According to Ulrich Beck, “risk society” has displaced classical industrial society. Whereas in the past, rational knowledge and practice helped to mitigate or remove “natural” hazards, such as disease and famine, science now confronts mega-hazards, such as nuclear bombs, chemicals, and genetically modified organisms. More important, these new megahazards have been generated by human design, and threaten to obliterate 38

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James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 9–52. Peter F. Drucker, The Landmarks of Tomorrow (London: Heinemann, 1959). Alex Morris, “The Bee Killers,” Rolling Stone, 1242 (August 27, 2015), 50–55, 68; and Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, A World without Bees (London: Guardian Books, 2009).

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humanity.41 The sheer scale of risks and the proliferation of often contradictory expertise has produced a crisis of faith in science. Science has increasingly defined and addressed errors and risks of its own making. This became awkward in the wake of a countercultural movement opposed to Vietnam, and other aspects of Cold War culture, which, in turn bred a plurality of expertise. New mass media, such as television, rendered publicly visible differences among experts. Clashes of expertise coalesced around new social movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, and the New Left, and activist scientists openly struggled with a perceived crisis of faith in science.42 Problematically, hazards became so vast and complex that they were no longer contained by clearly circumscribed laboratories. Instead, society became the new laboratory. The ineffable nature of the laboratory-bound “mysteries” of expertise was, therefore, subjected to public scrutiny, and in the process scientific knowledge became openly contested.43 Beck contends that this greater transparency highlighted the undemocratic underpinnings of the expertise that lay behind technocracy: unelected scientists had been making life- and planet-altering decisions. The long-held belief in science as a rational, disinterested knowledge in aid of statecraft was shattered. Modernity, claims Beck, may be unmodern in its irrational, blind faith in technoscience. Modernity defined the relationship between the environment and the dominant form of the state that emerged in the seventeenth century. Bruno Latour contends that the essence of modernity has been an artificial separation of nature and society. This mythical separation, he argues, was formalized and perpetuated by emergent modern science in the seventeenth century. This new, revolutionary systematic approach to the natural world promoted science as rationality free of subjectivity and ideology. Through science, it was argued, reason could rise above nature. Recent history has demonstrated the fallacy of this long-held belief in the separation of nature and society. Ecological crises, such as climate change, demonstrate the inseparability of human and nonhuman. Agency, Latour asserts, is not the sole possession of humans.44 “Eco-governmentality,” as 41 42

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Beck, Risk Society. Jon Agar, “What Happened in the Sixties?,” British Journal for the History of Science, 41:4 (2008), 567–600. Dear, “Mysteries of State,” 220. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; and Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated to English by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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a critique or alternative to modern statecraft, has arisen from a crisis of trust, borne of a plurality of expertise in an age of burgeoning information.45 “In matters of hazards,” declares Beck, “no one is an expert – particularly not the experts.”46 “Nature does not respect political borders” has become a minor mantra of environmental historians. The latter should, however, avoid the trap of positivist history of science. The relatively recent interest in global environmental history and governance should be situated in its relevant social and intellectual contexts. As Clark Miller shows, climate science does not possess a timeless, essentialist property that renders it incomprehensible outside of a global context. Not until the late 1980s was climate science pervasively conceived as a globally integrated system. Prior to this, it was most often understood as the aggregation of local weather.47 Green consciousness does not render the modern state – in and of itself – passé, obsolete, and environmentally destructive. Through an analysis of the Rhine Commission, Marc Cioc demonstrates that non-state, international governance does not necessarily lead to ecological success. “Thinking globally,” the international commission transformed a natural system into an “efficient” transportation network that ignored local concerns and conditions. The commission’s universalist techno-science, rather than the modern state, proved ecologically inappropriate for the river’s biota.48 In a similar vein, beehives, which were once celebrated as natural models of the state, became the rational machines of modern science. The ways in which bee populations were managed, manipulated, and controlled mirrored the project of the modern state. Colony collapse disorder highlights the destructive impact of the separation of nature and society that underpinned this project. It may, therefore, come as little surprise that some theorists have explicitly drawn on the critical perspective of constructivist

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Timothy Luke, “Environmentality as Green Governmentality,” in Eric Darier, ed., Discourses of the Environment (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 121–151. Ulrich Beck, “From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment,” Theory & Society, 9 (1992), 106. Clark Miller, “Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order,” in Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge, 46–66. For a comprehensive historical assessment of the possible agency of climate change, see John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Mark Cioc, “Europe’s River: The Rhine as Prelude to Transnational Cooperation and the Common Market,” in Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25–42.

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history and sociology of science to incorporate ecological principles into a projected “green state.”49 Sensitivity to the complexities of the coproduction of modern states and modern science is necessary to locate historically natural knowledge in the social order.

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Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2004). For a good overview of green theories of state, see Matthew Patterson, Peter Doran, and John Barry, “Green Theory,” in Colin Hay, Michael Lister, and David Marsh, eds., The State: Theories and Issues (Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 135–154.

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14 Taxes and the Two Faces of the State since the Eighteenth Century Yannis D. Kotsonis

Tax reform was part of what made the New Regime new. Since taxation came to touch everything, it is a good way to narrate the emergence of the modern state in the context of the modern polity. This chapter narrates the evolution of the state from the eighteenth century and makes sense of some of our current tax travails. It proposes that the modern state is dualistic, with a familiar capacity to coerce its population and a newer capacity to coopt its citizenry.1 In the classic rendering of the state’s evolution, the state by the end of the eighteenth century imposed itself with ever-greater willfulness on a population that was separate from power but itself atomized. Lacking the old corporate solidarities, the population was more vulnerable to the claims of the state. An enduring rendering of this narrative is Theda Skocpol’s, updated and refined in James Scott’s “muscular” state.2 But there was a second wave, partly simultaneous, partly successive, that fits less well into the classic rendering. This is harder to narrate because it lacks a dramatic moment or an aesthetic simplicity that might please the critics and admirers of “power,” by which one may mean coercion, the proverbial man with a stick pounding on a prostrate victim. For in 1

2

The arguments of this chapter are distilled from Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and the Early Soviet Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2014). Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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the later nineteenth century the state came to include the population even as it ruled over it. Its strength and inescapability related to the fact that the population comprised it. The welfare of the state was not simply dependent on the economy and the population, but encompassed it down to the last person. And the person and the economy, in their turn, reshaped themselves in relation to the state. This made for a duality that is still with us, subtly described in the works of Gramsci and Poulantzas: the state is discrete and autonomously powerful, and the state is everything.3 This duality had an early modern prehistory, with taxes at its center.4 Be it France or the Thirteen Colonies, revolutions evolved around questions of taxation and equality. Treasuries under the Old Regime knew very little about their populations. The monarchies estimated their financial needs (not particularly well) and devolved those needs onto the population as regional and estate-specific tax bills (also not very well). These bills were arbitrary, scarcely the product of calculation at all. The bills tended to land on those who were legally and traditionally liable, visible to the collectors, or easily reached. The claims were not simply coercive and extractive, but necessarily capricious, the products of ignorance and a lack of curiosity about what a payer could pay. The first revolutionary proposition was that the state leave the person alone; the second was the state know more about its population before acting on it. There was only a dim awareness that these propositions were contradictory. In fiscal terms, the first transition (roughly from 1750 to 1850) entailed establishing a new distance between the treasury and the economy, and from this distance to calculate things but not people. A new focus on properties and certain kinds of wealth ignored the person of the payer. In this manner the state avoided a notion of a coercive encounter with the payer. It involved much calculation and helped bring into being the notion of a calculable economy – the latter understood as objects, not their owners.5 All would pay something, and they would pay more or less 3

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Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (Nov. 1976), 5–78, who distinguishes between the “stato integrale” and the state “in its limited sense”; Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, translated by Patrick Camiller (London: NLB, 1978), who terms the modern state “Janus-faced.” Michael Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 295–339. On the ways distances make for “spaces of calculation,” see Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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equally, based on some knowledge of wealth. The second phase (roughly to 1918) put into focus the person but in a new way: fully visible, his or her resources calculated and documented, able to pay at varying rates. This was the era of progressive taxation and it assumed intimate knowledge of the person. State power became a function of national power, its economic capacities a function of the economy as a whole. Now it was not just an economy, but a national economy or (in German and Slavic parlance) a popular economy. With this transformation came new practices of statistics, information gathering, and economic monitoring. And with it came a new notion of citizenship: the person not only existed in relation to state power, but was also a member of the state and performed many of the functions of the bureaucracy, from tax declarations to reporting. The new system was more fair and dynamic than anything that came before, in tune with economic activity down to the incomes and expenditures of the single citizen. It allowed the state to provide services and protections as never before, and to tax with a rigor and confidence that the old regimes neither had nor sought. The new system also produced anxieties about the exposure and transparency of the payer who was now more traceable and visible than ever before, and unable to negotiate or evade. If the state is everything, where might one go to escape? Both phases of reform are liberal legacies and they remain in tension with one another. Ultimately this tension became characteristic of the modern state. The state would be superordinate and removed from the person, but the state would also be inclusive and in an intimate relationship with the citizen. The citizen would be immune and private, but the citizen also would be transparent and exposed to the state, even a member of the state, with no place to hide or even a will to do so.

fiscal revolutions: the critique of the old regime and coming of the new Even under the Old Regime in Europe and its colonies, students and servitors of the state came up with compelling critiques of how the state raised its revenue. The most damning critique at the time was that taxes were unequal, and it came from royal servitors like Turgot.6 Everywhere one’s tax bill was shaped by matters of birth and status, and some statuses 6

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Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 214.

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had no bill at all. The clergy and the nobility, and anyone who could buy their way into those statuses, buy an exemption or the right to tax farm, or secure the favor of the monarch, might be freed of all taxes as a privilege. But exemption could equally be tacit, since the state lacked the wherewithal to locate its subjects, evaluate wealth, and tax at a rate commensurate with capacities. This made taxation not simply unequal, but arbitrary and unpredictable: tax fell on those easiest to locate and reach. The state lacked sheer knowledge about who owned what and what persons could afford to pay. The initial and specific problem – How could the French state pay for armies, empire, and infrastructure when the wealthiest were exempt? – produced a larger argument about human equality. And the problem posed by the American colonials – How would they be forced to pay for the expenses of empire? – fed into a philosophical argument about liberty from political power. The problem of knowledge was profound and long term, tackled in the first instance in the age of the cadaster, an ongoing project that in Austria, for example, was started in the late eighteenth century and only half finished in 1850.7 The Russian Empire had none, all the way to 1917. Instead of seeking comprehensive knowledge of payers, the fiscal apparatuses everywhere focused on the other problems of liberty from state intrusion and the equality of all citizens. The critique reflected a new proposition in European politics, which was that all persons were equal before the monarch (later the state), and their equality should be manifest in their exactly equal contributions or their proportionate equality. It was the fiscal extension of the great political and commercial revolutions. The great questions of the day – How does a state avoid discrimination and inequality, and thereby affirm the equality of citizens? And how does the state raise revenue without coercing the person – were solved quite rapidly after the French Revolution by abandoning personal taxation altogether.8 The model was, in part, the new American republic, which banned direct assessments of persons by the federal government; the states could do all sorts of things, but the danger as the Founders understood it was Leviathan. The central state would depend on tariff rates that were decidedly indirect of any person and the least intrusive of all forms of revenue. Here the state’s inquiries ended at the borders of the republic. Britain had been practicing levies on commerce and consumption, which 7

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Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Gabriel Ardant, Histoire de l’impôt, Bk. 2, [Du] Xllle [au] XXIe siècle (Paris, 1972).

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were attuned to an exchange economy but still indirect of the person.9 Direct taxes – the controversial undertakings that implied a coercive encounter of the state with the taxable – would be focused on things. Turning attention to land, buildings, apartments, places of business, and workshops meant that the tax assessor ignored the status of the person who owned them: man or woman, nobleman or burgher, Catholic or Muslim, Protestant or Orthodox. The nobleman would pay along with all others, not in name but as “the payer,” a term that avoided the matter of status. Inspectors would observe buildings, count doorways and carriages (signs of commercial traffic), servants and laborers (symptoms of wealth), and of course windows (implied opulence and more outlays on heating), and make educated guesses about the wealth that was inside, and the capacities of a particular artisan, trader, and increasingly industrialist and financier. These taxes were “objective” in a few senses – they were on things rather than persons, assessed by methods that were impersonal, and involved a degree of distance, dispassion, and calculation. It was a liberal moment because the new approach left the person alone. It explicitly guarded (France and the United States) or tacitly recognized (Britain and Russia) the immunities of the person. Property was the extension of the person and the extension of his or her privacy. No longer would tax farmers and soldiers enter buildings to count and seize, because that was tantamount to coercing the person as such. Instead a new army of well-trained experts would calculate and estimate from the outside while carefully considering whether a given measure or practice would intrude in an unreasonable way on the life of the payer. The Englishman would have the right to be left alone, the French citizen would be fortified in a corpus of laws and immunities that protected his (and increasingly her) dignity from the rapaciousness of the treasury, and the Russian merchant would claim a traditional right to secrecy – a privilege (not a right) granted and honored by the autocrat.10 Less dramatic but of equal political meaning were the excises that began to occupy larger and larger shares of the state budgets. Here treasuries monitored not persons as such, but the movement of goods from place to place and from person to person. At that moment of transition – as an item left the hands of one person and before it entered the grasp of the next – the goods were not protected by privacy, because 9

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John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Another international debate: Kotsonis, States of Obligation, 89–95.

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trade, buying, selling, and renting were necessarily public acts, exchange and contract social in nature. Moreover, the transactions could be protected only because they were public, or the opposite of private; and these acts occurred thanks to the peace and security provided by the state. Or to look at it another way: such transactions could be protected only if they were made public and registered with the state. Making a transaction formal and registered with the state made it possible to protect it, but it also made it taxable. The British income tax of 1842 was the culmination of this era because it taxed the new kinds of wealth without quite asking about the person’s cumulative wealth.11 This was not yet a personal income tax, because it did not interrogate the person as such. The subject was the separate payments that moved from one person to another in any number of operations – banking and securities interest, large salaries and stipends, operations between businesses, and the largely hidden payments to the free professions. “Income” – now a commonplace but then a novelty in fiscal parlance – was a politically meaningful term. As money moved from the hands of one person or business, but before it reached the next set of hands, it was technically no one’s and existed in the public sphere, open to scrutiny and open to the claims of the state that guaranteed the conditions that made the transaction possible – peace, enforceable contracts, laws, and regulations. “Income” was decidedly not wealth, and income focused on the fruits of capital and labor, rather than the fact of capital and labor; it was not about a building but its rents, not the person but his or her earnings. Such a tax had been tried and would be tried in other contexts – Britain in 1799, Russia in 1810, and the United States in the 1860s, in every case to pay for a war emergency – but in every case it was abandoned, either as intrusive or as impracticable for lack of the right statistical and surveillance machinery, or both. In Britain in 1842 it was reintroduced to meet the emergency of lost tariff revenue (repeal of the Corn Laws), but it became a permanent feature of modern Britain and an unparalleled source of tax revenue that drew on a new kind of riches. Consider the contrast to the old order, where states assessed their needs and imposed them rather capriciously on a subject population. Now the sequence was reversed, as states assessed the amount of wealth in the 11

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Except in cases where income was untraceable, leading to declarations in the notorious Schedule D: Martin J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 4.

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realm and set their rates accordingly. It really was a rate rather than an impost. Henceforth, the state would measure its capacities by following the capacities of an exchange economy, fiscal demands calibrated and commensurate to the surpluses of a well-regulated and well-quantified economy.

fiscal evolutions: the return of personal taxation A secondary critique of the Old Regime had yet to be addressed in the New, certainly not before 1850: the distance between the person and the state, which made fair taxation impossible. This was the old problem of knowledge, but specifically knowledge about persons. The tax system that emerged by the 1840s in Britain and France, and Russia by the 1880s with the repeal of the soul tax, was deliberately constructed to keep power away from the person and it put this gap in knowledge on full display. As flexible and dynamic as the British system was, it was also hugely unfair in ways that only began to matter in the second half of the nineteenth century. Huge fortunes were being amassed in commerce, industry, and banks that were taxed very little because the fiscal order was geared toward real estate (property and related taxes), flat rates on transactions (excises, tariffs, and gradually income), and only rudimentary knowledge of the persons and enterprises who accumulated wealth and income. Since the rate was on individual items and transactions, it could not account for the aggregate wealth or income of a single person who would pay 5 percent on the yield from a bond and 1 percent on the value of a building; but the multimillionaire paid the same rate as the petty artisan, the owner of a metallurgical works the same as the tinker. In effect, huge fortunes went undertaxed or untaxed. As late as 1900 or so, it was estimated that half the national income of European countries was being generated in commerce and industry, but these paid only 3 percent of the taxes.12 And yet states faced new pressures in the course of that half-century: arms races as France and Russia faced a unified Germany and Germany worried over encirclement, Britain paid for its empire and the European balance, the United States paid for a civil war and later an empire and a growing bureaucracy. All began to contemplate the costs of an impending European war of which the Dreadnaught was the most impressive, the outlays for regulation and a nascent welfare state, infrastructure to suit the new economy, and the price of progressive politics. Statehood was 12

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Michael Mulhall, The Dictionary of Statistics (London: G. Routledge, 1899).

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a costly matter, but revenue was stable because it was regressive and limited to certain items of assessment. It was not enough in tune with the national economy and it lacked the flexibility to tax more and also more reasonably and confidently. How much was too much for any one person, when that person’s total income and wealth could not be calculated? Underlying the raw fact of state need were new notions of social cohesion and solidarity, where the good of the part depended on the good of the whole, and vice versa. The great tax debates from the 1890s were conducted in the new idiom of universalism, just as Durkheim was making his case about the existence and patterns of society, and the German economists were coining the terms national economy and Volkswithschaft. Like income itself, the “national economy” was a neologism.13 “National income” statistics were created in order to make the income tax possible, using data generated by the income taxes. The fiscal-philosophical extension was articulated by the British New Liberals in the buildup to the People’s Budget: the tax levied on the one person, usually a wealthy one, was not a loss to that person, insofar as she was part of an indivisible whole called society, economy, or nation. As George Harwood told outraged Conservatives in 1909, “The whole country must be regarded as one. The capital fund of the country, whether it goes to capital, or to pay wages or to food, is all one common fund, and we do not diminish it in the least by passing a portion of it to one class of the population rather than to another class.” This was new, rejoined an astute listener, in that “the social value” was now determining the justice of any individual or private claim or refusal.14 “Progression” became the word of the day and it was expressed most coherently in Prussia’s income tax of 1891. This time it really was personal, unlike the per capita taxes of the Old Regime, because it made the person the new subject of taxation, composed of information that was the measure of anyone rather than a status that pertained to only some. By now the statistical machinery of the modern state had made great strides in locating wealth and income; it remained to follow the wealth and income to the person as such. The treasury would take all the data it

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Johannes Burkhardt, “Wirtschaft,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-Sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Bruner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, band 7, 511–94 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988). Hugh V. Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy on English Party Politics before 1914,” Historical Journal 15 (1972), 125.

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had collected about properties, licensed businesses, items of income, salaries, and return on capital, and amalgamate them in single persons (or families). It would collect data on the model of the new credit-rating agencies (Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency in New York and in the United States and Schimmelpfennig in Berlin), the insurance brokers, and the mortgage banks, and indeed it would harvest that information from these institutions of civil society and the private sector. It was the birth of data mining, with treasuries using an argument that is still in use today: this was no intrusion by the state since the information was already public, gathered by and in civil society, often with the voluntary participation of the payer in question who surrendered his or her information in pursuit of a loan or an insurance policy. But rather than tax each item of income separately, the information would be aggregated in the person to produce a comprehensive profile of the person’s income, minus deductions like investments, losses, and the subsistence needs of the family members. Net income would be taxed at a progressive rate: the more the net income, the higher the rate of taxation on every additional mark, with scales and ceilings to be set by the treasury. The modest owner of a bond might pay 1 percent, the well-off wholesale merchant 5 percent.15 Alongside the emerging notion of the economy, tax reform produced new notions of personhood. This was, after all, the age of individualism, but these were not to be the immune and fortified individuals of, say, 1776 or 1789. They were to be exposed and partitive. Most treasuries proceeded cautiously, engaging in playful but consequential meditations on the personhood of a “corporation” that could be taxed progressively (Russia in 1885, the United States in 1909), and of deceased people who could be thoroughly assessed because they were, well, dead and without rights (the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia). Fiscal experts protested loudly that these progressive rates and their attendant information gathering applied because the entities were not “physical persons” – the one was dead, the other a legal convenience – but their critics were right: everywhere the taxation of “juridical persons” and dead persons became the legal precedent for the taxation of living persons. This idea of the aggregate payer was termed in the 1890s “the economic personality,” borrowed most likely from psychoanalysis. It was used in 15

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D. Eckhart Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France, and Germany,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, edited by Sidney Pollard and Peter Mathias, Vol. 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 315–494.

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fiscal circles to describe a person who was visible, and decidedly not private. Nor was this person “individual” – consider the Latin origins – with implications of indivisibility and impenetrability, since this personality was shaped in official categories and filled with public data. “Fiscal anthropometrics” was the term used by a Russian fiscal expert, with a mix of horror and fascination as he contemplated the capacity of the state to create a new kind of person.16 This too was a citizen and a liberal one, but one who belonged to the polity or even the state, not one who existed in relation to the state. If the first wave of tax reform defined the person in terms of immunities, negatively, as the list of things that the state could not do to him (think John Stuart Mill), the second wave defined the person in positive terms as observable and alterable (think Bentham). And in Hegel’s rendering, the moment of taxation was the moment when the single person became one with the state, the subject-object relationship reconciled in a single, serene whole. That part of the person that was given became part of the state.17 Practices became more important than laws, the crux of new measures to be found in the appended “instructions” sooner than in the statute itself.18 It is for this reason that the measures suited any political order. To make this system work, the treasury would rely on the citizens’ reports on their fellow citizens. There would be mandatory reporting of employers and financial institutions that would submit annual statements of the payments they made to their employees and clients. Each tax return claimed deductions that the treasuries encouraged the payers to claim: each deduction amounted to reports on money received by someone else, and became the latter’s new liability and part of the process of locating new wealth and income. Declarations were a matter of conscience. Male heads of household in Prussia (and in places like Russia, all adult persons) would complete tax returns and then swear to them, detailing such intimate facts as marital status, offspring, expenses, losses, investments, profits and capital payments, and salaries. Finally, in cases like Russia, Germany, and Britain, elected commissions of taxpayers would meet to pore over the tax returns and check them for evasion or perjury, so that each 16

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Aleksei Rafalovich, Zhelatelen li podokhodnyi nalog (St. Petersburg: V. O. Kirshbaum, 1910), 6. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by Thomas M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), arts. 323–325 (pp. 209–210). Schremmer, “Taxation,” and Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, have good appreciations for practices.

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citizen acted as a check on the other. The commissions made sense when tax districts were organized by neighborhood and the payers were likely to know each other. It deflected the criticism (which began almost immediately) that the state was practicing a new inquisition: these assessments were conducted by the citizens, on the citizens, and in the case of sworn declarations, on oneself. These provisions (save the commissions) are the standard practices of a modern government and they were hugely controversial at the time. They made fuzzy the relationship between the person and political power. They made each citizen or institution provide information on others, which to Prussian critics was “spying” and “denunciation.” They depended on norms, or the sum total of capacities for a profession and a neighborhood, based on the data provided in some returns in order to assess the truthfulness on any other – to Russian critics, “taxation by analogy.” Most controversial of all was the requirement that the citizen complete and swear to a declaration with an oath that was explicitly religious: it revolutionized the nature of state power by making each person a bureaucrat and making the process reflexive, and it elevated one’s relationship to the state to a religious act. To put it another way, the perfectly natural act of concealing, avoiding, and evading – the state after all is alien, a power outside of ourselves – was being elevated to sin, as the state and power encompassed and penetrated the person. “Blasphemy!” objected English payers. “Take what you will,” intoned a French liberal, “but do not make me swear to it!” Swearing before the government has since been secularized, replacing religion altogether. It also altered the burden of proof and disrupted the subject-object relationship between person and power. If the bill was onerous, then fingers should be pointed at one’s fellow payers who reported on them, at the commissions elected by the payers, and at the person who provided the bulk of the information and swore it was true: you. It made the idea of resistance difficult to articulate, with more recourse to the reflexive verb rather than the active one. As fair as these systems were, they were also inescapable and laden with anxiety, precisely because they were based on perfected and individualized knowledge about persons and enterprises, and because the practices and assessments were located in civil society and in every individual payer. April 15 in the United States became part civic ritual, part shared burden and duty, and part solitary angst experienced on the night of April 14.

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culmination, aftermath, and reflections on our recent tax debates These systems were in place on both sides of the Atlantic by the end of the Great War. It is remarkable that the specific measures and the larger justifications were deployed in a variety of constitutional settings, from republican France and America to parliamentary Britain and Canada to monarchial Germany to autocratic Russia – and finally to early Soviet Russia as well. What started as a liberal story and its tensions expanded into a modern paradox. It suggests that liberalism is either broader than what we usually have in mind (it is about individuation, for example, but not necessarily civil rights and immunities), or that what we associate with liberal regimes might be treated as a subset of the modern state. It was European and transatlantic war that was the catalyst for finalizing new regimes of taxation by adding the income tax to existing systems of indirect revenue and property taxation everywhere.19 Germany (the whole empire) and the United States adopted the income tax in 1913, and in the latter case it required a constitutional amendment that put to rest the last objections to the direct assessment of individuals by the federal government. Both were in preparation for war, while the United Kingdom anticipated war in the changed regulations of 1906 that required universal declarations. France adopted it in 1914, though its key provisions were postponed until 1917. In Russia the tax was proposed by the cabinet to the new State Duma in 1906 on the heels of war with Japan and passed by the legislature ten years later in the midst of the Great War. Canada joined in 1917.20 Contingency matters, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the changes were simply war measures. National emergency was the occasion for laws that were too controversial in peacetime but widely discussed since the 1890s, and the measures became permanent aspects of modern government itself. All countries ended up with more or less the same complex of measures (even the Soviet Union in the 1920s), very similar debates, and shared anxieties and tensions that became the characteristics of the modern system of revenue and government. The balances between direct and indirect taxes varied wildly, from around 1:1 in the United Kingdom to 1:4 in the Russian Empire, but the issues were quite 19

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Edwin Seligman, The Income Tax: A Study of the History, Theory, and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad, 2nd edn. (New York: MacMillan, 1914). E. A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government. A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017).

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comparable. And the provisions evolved, to be sure. Steeper rates from the 1940s, based on a sense of social unity and reconstruction, were tempered by regressive rates from the 1980s, as new economic and philosophical orthodoxies made accumulation by the very wealthy a new good. As we live these changes we attend to the local idiosyncrasies, be it loopy California libertarians, Depardieu’s clueless selfishness as he left for Russia and scoffed at the French Republic, pathologically evasive Greeks, and some confused Tea Party activists.21 Or we might cite “history” as if that settles the matter, be it a healthy American suspicion of tyranny, Greek subjugation under the Ottomans that made them suspicious of any authority, Russian hostility to the state bred by Communism, French individualism, or the right of the freeborn Englishman to be left alone. But there is a shared stability in this. It relates to the balance between laissez faire and social fairness, or the private person who exists at home and acts in the economy, and the public one who exists in the state and the society. The tendency in the past few decades to lower the upper marginal rates in Europe and North America reflects a belief, sometimes sincere, that the person resides outside the state or even the society, and as a rightful individual should be allowed to accumulate and keep untold fortunes; at the very least, an alien state should not be allowed to grasp at it. It makes Depardieu seem less narcissistic, the Orange County Republican a true philosopher. The notion that these individuals would then invest and create jobs was a useful device to persuade the not so welloff that the well-off should pay less, and many voted in agreement. A nineteenth-century callousness decried by Zola and Dickens was recast as a social argument in the late twentieth. But it is a legacy of the past that today’s arguments for greed require the social argument: the gain of the one is a gain for all. And it is worth remembering what else never went away: transparency, as all accepted that the new citizen was to be exposed, the modern fisc built on full knowledge. The new debates would have to be about rates and deductions, not the information needed to determine them, with armies of accountants and lawyers to make the effective rates go down. Mitt Romney’s rate of 14.1 percent was entirely legal, and he did have to

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All worth considering in their absurdity and seriousness: Yannis Kotsonis, “Gerard Shrugged, or the Newest New Russian,” NYU Jordan Center Blog post, January 15, 2013 (http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/gerard-shrugged-or-the-newest-new-russian/# .WBTJBNxKE6Y).

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declare like everyone else. So did Donald Trump, who reputedly paid no tax in some years. Their tax declarations provided more information, not less, which makes for some fat tax returns and is a rather absurd testament to the data-driven polity. As for property taxes, on which so many local and central governments rely, these are notoriously regressive and inexact (and still mostly apportioned), and a dynamic cadaster would be necessary to change that. But even the most conscientious citizen who demands fairness (one version of liberalism) will make that impossible when he refuses entry to the town assessor, because it is our right to be left alone (the other version). The antique notion that we are equal if we pay the same proportions is evinced in the cradle of tax evasion, today’s Greece, where decades of preparation for effective taxation was sabotaged by a collective agreement to leave the payer alone, with evading government ministers leading the way. Never mind that the millionaire secreted hundreds of thousands into a Swiss bank account and the shopkeeper thousands under her mattress: we are all in this together as we guard our privacies and resist the state or bribe the inspector. It required agreement that anything non-state is “the people” and therefore shares in a negative identity, despite reminders that government ministers and civil servants were complicit as they inhabited two spaces, that of collective good and that of individual avarice. And then there is Russia, where the post-1991 state lost all the levers necessary to monitor the economy – it had just been surrendered to a handful of private persons – and resorted to the flat tax, the sign that all owed something; real revenue came from petroleum. Payers find this arrangement congenial for its proportional equality and unintrusiveness, in contrast to the perplexing and dystopian willingness of the American payer to tell all, once a year, as if in a confessional. The Russins are right, in a sense: we do inhabit a world of disclosure and institutionalized denunciation qua reporting, deductions, and declarations, and our systems do have a whiff of robotic submission to the state that was once treated as a distant adversary, and properly so. And yet this is also the foundation of any good government (democratic or otherwise since these are shared techniques) and the precondition for a fair sharing of burdens. One wonders whether our exposure is all that pernicious, and whether the objections of a certain kind of Foucauldian or even your average libertarian to state intrusion are not vague and misdirected. We voluntarily surrender much more private information when we go online, download a program, and click “agree,” having not read what we have agreed to, because the intrusion is not coming from government

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and is therefore benign. And yet the information we provide readily to and through our credit cards, banks, mortgages, health and medical insurance, Internet providers, and software companies is mined by our governments and enterprises, a data-collecting device first used by tax collectors in the nineteenth century. In the end, we need the loan, the card, and the software, principles be damned. In the confusion that so often surrounds such issues, this one in 2009 in a wave of antigovernment rapture in rural South Carolina, a hapless man at a town hall meeting stood up before his congressman and uttered words that have surely become immortal: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”22 Where to begin? He was an easy target and an opportunity for us to show each other that we are knowledgeable: Medicare, for which we pay a special tax, is a government program. We were implying that the man was a simpleton, and more generally that he reflected an irrational hostility to government that blithely ignored its benefits.23 But there is more to it. He expressed an enduring tension, one not at all limited to his class, region of the country, or educational background. Like any good citizen, we claim a right to be left alone and have our autonomies respected, even as we demand that the state actively give us the tools necessary to be self-reliant. We demand the right to be left alone and our profiles forgotten, as well as the right to be accounted for and remembered, our specific needs accommodated. Surely the man was not alone in his confusion.

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The Washington Post, July 28, 2009. Paul Krugman in the New York Times, July 30, 2009.

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15 Regimes and Repertoires of State Building The Two Chinas and Regime Consolidation in the Early 1950s* Julia C. Strauss

thinking about states and bureaucracy States in history have occurred in many types: city-states, priestly states, agrarian empires, states of conquest, and nation-states. Despite these differences in type and scale, states nonetheless all have a set of core similarities and problems. A state requires a territory and some means by which to make claims to order the society or societies that inhabit that territory. In order to do so, the state further requires some degree of centrality, by which it makes, or at least attempts to make, its claims real. Much analysis, in a lineage from Hobbes, through Marx, Weber, and Tilly, see states as “organized domination that delivers order and public goods,” which “at a minimum [involve] centralizing the use of coercion and extracting resources.”1 How this domination is to be organized, how the society the state attempts to dominate either accepts or resists these claims, and how state makers enforce their claims are open-ended questions. States typically establish centralization by building a set of hierarchical administrative structures manned by, but at the same time separate from, the individuals occupying positions in those structures. We call these “bureaucracies” – literally, “offices of the state.” The core feature of any “bureaucratic” organization is hierarchy (so that decisions made at higher levels are incumbent and binding on lower levels). Most states face a basic conundrum: how to attract and retain a cadre of state agents that * With apologies to Charles Tilly. 1 Miguel Angel Centeno, Atul Kohli, and Deborah J. Yashar, eds., States in the Developing World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.), p. 2.

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will be loyal, competent, willing, and able to implement state directives and programs. Apart from purely conquest states, the state’s administrators of necessity come from society. But society is often fragmented along ethnic, religious, or economic lines; key elites may be hostile or only pay lip service to the state’s goals, and in many social groups make, and indeed are expected to make, patronage claims on any of their number who become state administrators. Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Max Weber suggested that modernity brought with it a particular kind of state domination: “legal rational” bureaucracy. This new type of state organizational hierarchy was defined by impersonality. Functional specialization, expertise, responsiveness to political masters, officeholders strictly separated from their offices, record keeping for institutional memory, and decision-making according to predictable, set rules were all manifestations of the core attribute of impersonality.2 In Weber’s time, a depersonalized state hierarchy seemed to offer a compelling degree of efficiency (the ratio of effort and resource commitment versus to output) and effectiveness (measured by prevailing over the competition and fulfilling the target at hand). Indeed it seemed that Weberian depersonalization offered an answer to the age-old problem of how to combine responsiveness, loyalty, and competence in the human agents of the state. Depersonalized state bureaucracy is, however, difficult to establish, slow to institutionalize, and expensive to maintain. More common is the pattern typical of early modern Europe, the nineteenth-century United States, and much of the developing world today: formal but limited state bureaucracies characterized by inadequate salaries, rampant fee taking and bribery, appointment through patronage, and only intermittent projective power into society. Given that weak state organizations, lack of resources, and divided, suspicious societies are often exactly the conditions that most new states inherit, how then are aspiring state makers to create functioning new state administrations capable and eager to take on new state agendas and implement new state programs? Are there certain kinds of new states that are more likely to grasp this nettle than others? And if so, what are the circumstances under which they might credibly do so?

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This list is adapted from Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–203.

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state agendas, repertoires, and the two chinas at mid-century I posit that regimes in “new states” come to power with different mixes of ideational and material resources. Particularly important are 1) agendas (what ought to be done), 2) repertoires (how things are to be done), and 3) resources (the means by which things can be done). State agendas are essential for what the state’s key objectives ought to be (e.g., extirpate warlords, conclude defense treaties, provide for rapid economic development, establish national health care). Repertoires are the range of ways in which the state goes about implementing its agendas, making itself intelligible and acceptable to enough sectors of society to attract support and lower resistance. Resources are what state makers have at their disposal to work with – including but not limited to the size and location of the state’s territory, its economic base, its ethnic composition, the degree to which religious establishments support the state, and the expectations of the population. Some agendas appear to be universal. As a first-order priority, states invariably do what they can to protect themselves from either extinction from invasion or domestic subversion. They also need to keep enough of their core constituents quiescent through some amount of benefit distribution and public goods provision. But when sufficient capacity to implement core state agendas is lacking, how do states overcome, or attempt to overcome, these gaps? The “revolutionary” People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Yangzi river delta region (Sunan) and the “conservative” Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan) at the mid-twentieth century offer a useful paired comparison for working through these larger issues of state agenda, repertoire, and the generation of state capacity. The PRC and ROC/Taiwan represented themselves in starkly opposing ways: the People’s Republic as a revolutionary state making a sharp break with the past, the ROC/Taiwan as a conservative state linked to the past through its propagation of law and regularity. However, closer comparison of their political structures, core agendas, and specific repertoires reveals that these rival regimes had much more in common than met the eye. The PRC and the ROC/China both were run by Leninist single-party states that arrived in Sunan and Taiwan as armies of occupation. Neither had strong social ties in the territories over which it exercised coercive control. Each needed to establish social order, make itself intelligible (and attractive) to subject populations, and build up a reservoir of social support. The conditions for so doing were dire. Years of warfare had bequeathed devastated economies, mass unemployment, near worthless

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money, armies to demobilize, populations to resettle, and hungry urban areas to feed. As a result, the domestic agendas of these two states were very similar: establishing internal security, penetrating and reorganizing society, reviving the economy as a first step in extracting sufficient surplus to launch state-led development, and socializing the young into a new order through education. Incredibly, within only a few years, the young PRC and the reinvigorated ROC/Taiwan had become successful exemplars of regime types: the Communist, revolutionary, mobilizational People’s Republic, and the Nationalist, conservative, developmentalist ROC/Taiwan. How did these two variants of the Chinese state come to generate enough capacity to implement core programs and eventually become such successful instances of their chosen ideologies? The first and most essential step was to ensure external security: each succeeded in joining a protective alliance with a superpower guarantor, which provided the relative safety within which to pursue other core agendas. External security thus assured, each of these states could turn to overcoming domestic challenges. And this was accomplished through two overlapping modalities of state action: the bureaucratic and the campaign.

bureaucratic modalities of state building: repertoires of standardization and organizational strengthening Bureaucratic and campaign modalities of state building were only partially commensurate. Each was comprised of repertoires of practices, justifications, and symbols that were bundled together and propagated as organic wholes. The bureaucratic modality was very much in the mold of a Weberian ideal type of legal-rational bureaucracy: characterized by clear hierarchy, uniform rules, separation of office from the officeholder, and expertise.3 The first order of business was to establish the size and function of different state organizations through formal systems of hierarchy and control, which stipulated specific lines of authority, the number of appointments that could be made to each government office, what each subsidiary unit in the hierarchy would be responsible for, and how its activities would be reported to higher levels.4 3 4

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Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 196–203. John P. Burns, “China’s Nomenklatura System,” Problems of Communism 36:5 (1987), 36–51.

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The revolutionary PRC and conservative ROC/Taiwan were further characterized by another feature of Weberian legal rationality: standardization. Both went into a manic state of registering, classifying, and counting the population in an “objective” standardized manner, often including rationalizing files and records inherited from the old regime. The PRC held registration drives to get “counterrevolutionaries” associated with the old regime to come forward and register: others voluntarily registered themselves as intellectuals in the hope that the new government would assign them white collar work. More lasting outcomes of the PRC’s signature program of land reform were the permanent class labels (landlord, rich-middle-poor peasant, and hired labor) assigned to each family. For its part, the ROC/Taiwan made significant efforts to sort through historical records left unrevised since the departure of the Japanese colonial administration in 1945. Its Land to the Tiller program classified and registered the farming population as landlord, freeholder, part tenant, or full tenant; the entire land cadaster was rechecked and reentered, and merchants were organized into occupational associations and compelled to register with the state. The Guomindang (GMD) Party also conducted a vigorous campaign against itself to weed out undesirables that resulted in reregistration of all GMD Party members.5 In both Sunan and Taiwan, the state also established new state bureaucracies or radically expanded preexisting ones through a process of “strengthening organizations” (jiaqiang zuzhi). While this makes sense for an explicitly revolutionary regime committed to the socialist transformation of state and society, these kinds of measures are much less obvious for a politically conservative and restorationist government. However, the GMD diehards who retreated to Taiwan in 1949–1950 were so utterly traumatized by their loss of the mainland that in August 1950 a reform commission (gaizao weiyuanhui) headed by Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, was established and given sweeping powers to thoroughly reform both the GMD Party and state.6 5

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Eddy U, “The Making of Zhishifenzi: The Critical Impact of the Registration of Unemployed Intellectuals in the Early PRC,” The China Quarterly 173 (March 2003), 100–121; Julia Strauss, “Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early People’s Republic of China: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949–1956,” The China Quarterly 188 (December 2006), 891–912; Bruce J. Dickson, “The Lessons of Defeat: The Reorganization of the Kuomintang on Taiwan, 1950–52,” The China Quarterly 133 (March 1993), 56–84. Ramon Myers, “Towards an Enlightened Authoritarian Polity: The Kuomintang Central Reform Committee on Taiwan, 1950–1952,” Journal of Contemporary China 18 (2009), 185–199.

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One example of how “strengthening organization” worked in practice in Sunan can be seen in the establishment and expansion of the Shanghai Municipal Food Bureau (Liangshi Ju), which had only a handful of staff members in June 1949. Within six months, it had created the parastatal Shanghai Grain Company (Liangshi Gongsi). By mid-1952, the Shanghai Grain Company had a formal organization with more than 1,600 employees, ten granaries, five rice mills, and a section with more than 130 cadres who administered grain transport. This formal set of state organizations engaged in grain extraction, transport, storage, and retailing first paralleled, and eventually choked off the private sector.7 For its part, the ROC reestablished its formal central state organizations in Taiwan– as if it were still on the mainland – while the Taiwan provincial government, now led by GMD ideologues from the mainland, implemented a range of policy decisions for the island. These basics – creating and radically expanding formal state organizations, establishing lines of authority, and staffing these formal institutions of state with loyal and competent state administrators – took up a good deal of the new state’s energy in these early years of regime consolidation. Establishing the administrative instruments of domination over territory was the first step in regime establishment and consolidation. Without category formation (so that it was clear which group of people would be affected by what rules) and information collection (so that the state had recorded knowledge about the population over which it presided and wished to change), reasonable decisions could not be made about which policies were best to fulfill core state agendas. Without clear communication between higher and lower levels of the state, there could be no assurance that agents further down the line would be in compliance with central state policies, nor could there be sufficient knowledge to adjust mistaken initiatives. These necessary if mundane tasks – establishing coherence, getting compliance from agents further down the hierarchy, collecting and storing information about society, reporting to higher levels on what was planned and what was accomplished – were all highly bureaucratized: formal, hierarchical, precedent oriented, and impersonal.

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Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) B111/1/61 “Ben gongsi suoshu jigou zhi chengli hebing de baogao” (“Report on the Establishment and Merger of Subsidiary Organizations of This Company”), May 22, 1952.

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the campaign breakthrough strategy: yundong Establishing formal organizational systems was a necessary preliminary for the state, but to actively pursue agendas and see through policies, the state had to both ensure the loyalty and promote the effectiveness of its staff despite chronic resource shortages. It also had to reduce resistance from society. In order to deliver key programs, both the PRC and ROC/ Taiwan turned to a very different strategy – the campaign (yundong). Campaigns stiffened the resolve of the individuals in their bureaucratic organizations, signaled which policies the central government deemed most important, and lowered potential social resistance. But what was a campaign and why did both variants of the Chinese state turn to campaigns as a state-building strategy at mid-century? Originally a loan word from Japanese denoting exercise/physical education, the meaning of yundong (campaign/movement) shifted considerably over the course of the period immediately preceding 1949. Yundong included social movements of protest from below and military campaigns from above. After 1927, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began a long process of experimentation by which yundong would come to refer to processes directed and planned from above that involved mass mobilization from below. When the CCP took power in 1949, it had well over two decades of experiences with launching campaigns that addressed such different issues as public hygiene, rent reduction, land reform, and internal party rectification. The GMD also deployed yundong, albeit with significantly less tolerance for spontaneous mass mobilization than its rival. In the mid-1930s, the GMD attempted to change the personal habits, attire, and cleanliness of the urban population from above with a much-mocked “New Life Campaign” (xin shenghuo yundong) that stressed militarized forms of discipline and order. By the late 1940s, the GMD attempted to carry out mass campaigns to simultaneously quash traitors and mobilize patriotic sentiment – objectives that perfectly foreshadowed the much more stringent campaigns against counterrevolutionaries and landlords by the young PRC in the early 1950s. Thus in the generation before 1949, the meaning of yundong shifted from physical education to the state’s extraordinary mobilization of people and resources to implement a specific program and accomplish particular goals in a defined short period of time. Campaigns did of course differ. Some began and ended within the state’s own bureaucracy, as it geared up to implement a particular program. Others mobilized the population in a defined area to tackle fixed and relatively short-term

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goals (draining a swamp, building a road). Others attempted to change the internal values and external behavior of targeted pariah groups (prostitutes, opium addicts). Still others developed into the mass mobilizational campaigns for which the revolutionary PRC is so noted.8 All campaigns, irrespective of target and type, shared three features: 1) the mobilization of the bureaucracy for the intensification of focus for implementing a particular program, 2) fixed and typically short duration, and 3) a big push to accomplish clearly defined set of targets and goals. In contrast to bureaucracy, which organized around the regular and predictable in its procedural and precedent manner of implementation, the campaign was by definition extraordinary. It sought to engage emotional commitments. Its emphasis on quick and visible results typically sidestepped or overrode regular procedures. At the same time, campaign modalities existed in ambiguous tension with bureaucratic ones. Campaigns relied on state agents with clear authority to be implemented. At the same time, state bureaucracies benefited from campaigns. The very process of implementing a focused campaign accelerated normally sequential and slow processes of preference formation, coalition creation, publicity, bureaucratic mobilization, and implementation into one overriding juggernaut of state power. Under these conditions, well-executed campaigns served to dramatically but temporarily expand state capacity and overcome social resistance by simultaneously firing up the commitments of state agents, expanding their numbers, and engaging propaganda to get buy in from key social actors.

campaign repertoires shared: mobilization, state expansion, and propaganda Because the leaders of the PRC and the ROC/Taiwan felt land reform to be critical for wider regime legitimacy, both put huge effort into conducting land reform campaigns early on. Despite their mutual ideological hostility, each deployed repertoires that converged to a surprising degree in the campaigns’ early stages, followed by sharp differences in the way in which each performed land reform for domestic audiences. The overall trajectory of these land reform campaigns was broadly similar, consisting of

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See Julia C. Strauss, “Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early People’s Republic of China: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949–1956,” in Strauss, ed., The History of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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1) a preparatory stage that involved meetings, internal information dissemination, and special training for permanent and temporary staff; 2) a propaganda blitz to educate the rural population into the necessity, desirability, and mechanics of the program; 3) intensive assessment, checking, and official recording of who owned what land; 4) the dispatch of outside leaders to guide and check on this process; 5) the state’s actual redistribution of “excess” land to those in officially designated land deficit; and 6) review and rechecking of the results. Preliminary investigations, generating and revising records, compiling and propagating large amounts of educational material, and mobilizing rural support required enormous concentrations of organizational effort and resources. In response, Sunan and Taiwan expanded state capacity significantly by recruiting and dispatching newly deputized agents to the countryside. In Sunan, an extra 11,333 cadres were trained to provide land reform assistance to local areas, while in Shanghai, more than 400 educators and more than ten times as many activists were specially trained and sent down to the countryside to conduct land reform.9 In Taiwan, the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), a rural development organization jointly run by Americans and Chinese agricultural economists, similarly gave special training to a) officials already in post in Taiwan’s local land bureaus, b) an additional 2,400 temporary field workers, and c) 3,000-odd members of local land tenancy committees and 6,537 hamlet and section chiefs.10 Land reform propaganda also drew from near-identical repertoires. Publicity was disseminated widely in the national, regional, and local press. In Sunan, pamphlets were reproduced in simple language, often with use of cartoons, laying out basic questions and answers to illustrate the exploitative nature of landlordism. Propaganda was taken straight to villages with small group meetings and entertaining songs, puppet shows, 9

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SMA (Shanghai Municipal Archive) B14/1/80, “Shanghai shi jiaoqu xunlian ganbu shu peiyang jijifenzi qingkuang”(“The Situation for Shanghai Municipal Outer District Cadre Training and the Cultivation of Activists”), and “Sheng tudi gaige qianhou xiangcun jiceng ganbu bianhua qingkuang tongjibiao” (“Statistical Form on Changes in Village Level Local Cadres before and after Land Reform”), both p. 13 of internally numbered file, dated December 31, 1951. SMA B14/1/6/ “Jiaoshi canjia tudi gaige di’yi xiaozu mingdan ji duiyuan tongjibiao” (“Instructors Participating in Land Reform: The First Small Group Name List and Statistics”) 1951, and Jiangsu Provincial Archives (JPA), 3006–3-360, “Benhui Sunan ganbu xunlian tongjibiao” (“Statistic on Sunan Cadre Training [for Sunan Village Work Committee”], n.d. 1950. Hui-sun Tang, Land Reform in Free China (Taipei: Land Reform Division, Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, 1954), 116.

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and plays that emphasized the righteousness of land reform.11 In Taiwan, the JCRR commissioned cartoons, movies, songs, and plays accessible to rural villagers. Once written and rehearsed, these dramatic performances were to be performed at the rate of one per every three villages throughout Taiwan. The JCRR also covered the island with pro–land reform leaflets that explained, exhorted, and entertained in ways very reminiscent of the PRC: cartoons, movie synopses, posters, pictures, and the texts of the locally performed plays all circulated widely alongside copies of program regulations.12

diverging repertoires: performing the campaign Land reform campaign repertoires in Sunan and Taiwan diverged sharply in how they were publicly performed. Pace, staging, dramatic register, and the sorts of popular participation solicited could not have been more different. The CCP determined that land reform performances required public forms of participatory theatre acted out in public space through mass gatherings called “struggle meetings” (douzheng hui) or “accusation meetings” (kongsu hui). If local cadres failed to “stir up the masses” (fadong qunzhong) at these mass meetings, they were severely criticized by superiors. One of the campaign’s key goals was to educate the population into a new set of practices that demonstrated public mass support for the government’s policies. In the ROC/Taiwan, land reform was equally heuristic, but its land reform performances demonstrated its preferred values of legal procedure and inclusion. In Sunan, mass yundong required the fear and anger of cathartic mass emotion to merge with the state’s desire for the graphically corporeal destruction of the “old” (feudal enemy) as a form of cleansing and public identification with the “new” (modern, progressive class). In contrast, the ROC government made every effort to only guardedly mobilize the rural population and to instead channel participation through the establishment of permanent new institutions. Land reform campaigns in Sunan and Taiwan engaged publics by putting on shows that drew on these different repertoires. In Sunan,

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Xiao Mu, Tugai Xuanchuan ju (Land Reform Propaganda Plays) (Hangzhou: Zhongguo Ertong Chuban, 1950). Guoshi Guan (Academia Historica) (GSG) 313/1285–3 FY 52, “A Preliminary Budget Estimate for the Private Land Purchase Project in Taiwan,” prepared by Taiwan Land Bureau, April 1952.

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preparatory work for the campaign (training, propaganda preparation, investigation, assignment of permanent class status labels to individual families, report writing) took months, but the visible face of the campaign – mass propaganda, small group discussion, “high tide” (gaochao) catharsis at a public accusation session, and division of excess land to the land poor – was conducted both very visibly and quickly, typically in a matter of one to two weeks.13 In contrast, land reform in Taiwan was deliberately paced to be careful, gradual, and incremental. Even the relatively speedy Land to the Tiller program was implemented over a period of three to four months. While the CCP and the GMD both presumed that drawing in the peasantry through participation from “below” was necessary, the ways in which their land reform campaigns solicited rural voices were starkly different. In Sunan, local cadres were required to follow a set repertoire that had figured prominently in its pre-1949 campaigns in north China: intensive political study followed by public mass accusation. This performative technique served to socialize the population into regime norms, break sharply with the old regime, display the penitent accused, and garner the complicity of the masses with the new government in the latter’s violence against defined state enemies. Nor did the PRC leave much to chance in the actual staging of the show. The state insisted on an enormous amount of preperformance preparation. Reports and handbooks suggested seating arrangements, the best time of day to hold public accusation meetings, and snappy pacing to avoid bored or hungry audiences. Cadres were directed to choose especially sympathetic victims (the very young, the very old, the maimed and women) for advance rehearsals so that they knew when to come forward, how to place themselves on the stage, and what accusations to make in what order. A successful public accusation show needed to conform to a preestablished script of mass drama of emotional self-transformation through a collective “high tide.” Cadres in the Sunan regional administration insisted that the wronged “mount the stage” (shang tai) to engage in direct “face-to-face” (mian dui mian) accusation, and that the accused “publicly acknowledge previous crimes [chengzui] before the masses 13

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Minhang District Archive (MDA) 13/1/37 “Shanghai xian guqu” (“Shanghai County Districts”). This map shows forty-eight districts in the county, with the dates of their first (preparatory), second (“high tide”), and third (“concluding”) phases of land reform. Of these, twenty-three completed the second stage in a week or under, and twenty-three in between one and two weeks, none in more than two weeks, and two for which there is no information.

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[as] . . . without this kind of public acknowledgement of crimes the entire [process] is fake.”14 The public nature of the staging, the unified, emotional narratives of prior suffering, and the visibly shackled representatives of evil personified were designed to override normal legal procedure and rules with a wave of anger and indignation that folded the individual into collective identification with the new regime. Although these were in fact heavily stage-managed events, the “masses” may not have understood that the outcome was foreordained and that their designated role was as the chorus: to display emotion, cheer and clap on cue, and reaffirm the moral righteousness of the regime. The state claimed to represent, reproduce, and make public the legitimate position and opinions of “the masses”; the masses in turn learned what was expected of them in new forms of direct political participation unmediated by organizations or procedures. When the show went well, mass representation was fused in a dramatic unity with the state, thus unleashing collective enthusiasm and steamrolling all opposition. In Taiwan, mass participation was equally important, but the way in which it was solicited could not have been more different. The ROC/ Taiwan channeled local participation through a series of indirect local elections to Land Tenancy Committees, to which the state delegated the adjudication of land reform disputes. Like the PRC, the ROC/Taiwan put on a performance, but this was the limited public show of competitive election, followed by the elected committee’s application of set rules behind the closed doors of the local Land Office. Everything about these elections was heavily procedural. After a list of eligible voters was compiled on the basis of rural occupational status (landlord, tenant, or freeholder), village and township offices screened the applications of prospective candidates and publicly displayed a list of eligibles. Each hamlet and village elected two tenant farmer representatives, one owner-farmer representative, and one landlord representative from this list. The process was then repeated for villages, townships, counties, prefectures and municipalities. The new Land Tenancy Committees worked very closely with regular officials in the Taiwan Land Bureau, which gave compulsory two-week training courses to electees “to acquaint them with their functions and responsibilities and the relevant laws and regulations.”15 The head and secretary of the local

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JPA 3006/3/271. Sunan tugai weiyuanhui mishuchu, “Guanyu fadong qunzhong wenti de baogao” (Sunan Land Reform Committee Secretariat, “Report on Problems Stirring up the Masses”), 1951. Hui-sun Tang, Land Reform in Free China, 59.

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Land Bureau served as ex-officio members of these committees, and its decisions and minutes became part of the state when they were reported to the Land Bureau. Difficult cases were passed up to higher-level Land Tenancy Committees, or more rarely, to the courts. A large number of elected representatives (3,032) were returned to staff these committees in the second half of 1952, and met regularly from this time on. They had the authority to directly question plaintiff and defendant in a quasi-judicial setting. They also handled a high case load. Between January 1952 and July 1956, township-level committees conciliated 31,759 disputes and referred 16,462 to the prefectural or municipal land reform committee. Of this 16,462, only 5,321 were problematic enough to have to be referred to the courts. Other evidence suggests that within a fairly short period of time, Land Tenancy Committees began to take on larger roles in local land disputes of all kinds. For example, in 1955 a border dispute between two state bodies – the local sugar factory and the agricultural school – was brought before the Yongkang Town Land Tenancy Committee for adjudication.16 In contrast to the CCP, which blurred the boundaries of state and society by sidestepping regular organizations through public collective fusion, the GMD did so by creating a new institution and privileging procedural order. After the public but procedurally delimited theatre of the initial elections, this work was done behind closed doors according to a detailed set of rules.

conclusion: bureaucratic and campaign modalities of state building This chapter suggests that state building is not merely a product of wise leaders, material resources, fortunate geography, or even hierarchical coercion through state structures. While most states in most times have relatively weak capacity in comparison to their aspirations, some, like the revolutionary PRC and the conservative ROC/Taiwan, have managed to overcome weaknesses such as low projective capacity, hostile or frightened populations, and limited resources. The example of land reform in the two Chinas at mid-century suggests that while formal state organizations (with their formal offices, lines of hierarchy and standardized rulemaking) are essential to the state, they often are not sufficient. To be anything other than minimalist, new states must go beyond the regular 16

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Yongkang Town Office, 0044/132/1/1/044. “Ge xian shi zhengfu ji ge xiangzhen gong suo gengdi zudian weiyuanhui gaixuan gongzuo jindu biao,” October 13, 1955.

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and routine with a purpose and policies that can engage wider constituencies. This in turn requires not only the mobilization of the state’s own agents to do more with the same resources, but the widespread “selling” of the state’s vision and agenda to foster at least acceptance if not enthusiastic take-up by the population. Under conditions of resource scarcity, the state’s extraordinary deployment of material, personnel, and policy focus – whether explicitly called campaign or not – does have the potential to communicate new norms, socialize populations, and even expand the formal reach of the state.

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part iv MEMBERSHIPS

16 The Mesopotamian Citizen Conceptualized Affect, Speech, and Perception* Seth Richardson

Early Mesopotamian states (ca. 2800–1600 bc) had far less capacity in law, military power, commerce, and social welfare than they claimed they did. It was their delicate art of forecasting, of putting forth claims to power in vague and unfalsifiable terms that ultimately permitted polities to conjure those powers into being presumptively.1 This required that states first establish their “voices” as generically valid – that they could credibly “speak” in the conceptual domains in which they intended to operate. The discrete authorities eventually bundled together to make up Mesopotamian “state power” emerged only gradually across long centuries.

* My thanks to Emily Baragwanath for inspiration on the topic of conceptualization, and to Monica Phillips for her helpful comments. Abbreviations: RIME 2 = D. Frayne, Sargonic and Gutian Periods (Toronto, 1993); 3/1 = D. O. Edzard, Gudea and His Dynasty (Toronto, 1997); RIME 3/2 = D. Frayne, Ur III Period (Toronto, 1997); SARI = Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions: Presargonic Inscriptions (New Haven, CT, 1986); ETCSL = Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk). Citations of SP (= Sumerian Proverbs, 6.1-.01-.28 and 6.2.1-.5) and IŠ (= Instructions of Šuruppak, 5.6.1) follow the numeration of ETCSL, with superscripted line numbers as necessary; see B. Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 2 Vols. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997) for (the many) parallels and commentary. Other text citations are abbreviated as: LaNi = Nippur Lament (ETCSL 2.2.4); LaUk = Uruk Lament (2.2.5); LaE = Eridu Lament (2.2.6); LaSUr = Lament for Sumer and Ur (2.2.3); LaUr = Lament for Ur (2.2.2). 1 Seth Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State,” Past & Present 215 (2012), 3–49; and “Before Things Worked: A ‘Low-Power’ Model of Early Mesopotamia,” in Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America, ed. C. Ando and S. Richardson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 17–62. See also Michael Martoccio’s chapter in this volume on presumption/incipience.

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Their staged appearance reveals a development toward governmentality – first, an acceptance of state authority over various spheres of activity; and only later a belief in states’ capacity to actually exercise power. In both cases, this was a process of people coming to believe in something they did not necessarily even imagine before. How were people encouraged to first accept the state’s claims to defend, collect taxes, impose laws, and regulate commerce? Ancient Near Eastern historical sources are top-heavy with royal propaganda. Yet propaganda was predicated on the supposition that persuasion was a necessary precursor to power’s exercise. Reading Mesopotamian royal literature requires the critical eye one might expect, but also attention to reception, to the audiences and infrastructure that made propaganda effective. Thus not only the content but the public circulation of texts was creative of governmentality.2 To call cuneiform literature “public” may strike the reader as tendentious, given the seeming obscurity of the writing system. This perception is often mapped onto the historical scene: that these strange and complicated texts must have circulated only within the hermetic confines of a tiny literate minority. But we know by now that access to textual information was effected through the oral recitation of edicts in cities, images on monuments, performances of cult festivals, poetic works, and royal triumphs. Messages were also disseminated through the “soft membranes” of functional literacy, court gossip, and the cultural consciousness filtering out from scribal circles to urban society. This sort of awareness about the state’s doings, then as now, does not require a personal knowledge of policies and facts, only of their tenor and implications. What has been less examined is the premise of audienceship itself: how was the good citizen – the audience for state voices – imagined to hear and to speak? With what narrative, rhetorical, and didactic models was the citizenry encouraged to accept and participate in the state community as a moral good? Or even to question its claims, since to engage with them at all accepted the premise of their conceptual jurisdiction? If we posit that the state sought particular receptions for its messages, we ought to be able to identify models for what the engagement and performance of civil

2

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See M. Liverani, “Power and Citizenship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, ed. P. Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 164–180; and “The King and His Audience,” in From Source to History: Studies on Ancient Near Eastern Worlds and Beyond, eds. S. Gaspa et al. (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2014), 373–385.

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society was supposed to look like (compare with Szonyi and Strauss, this volume, on performance and behavior). This chapter collects a range of representations of the thoughts and behaviors of the “sons” and “daughters” of early city-states,3 in affect/ emotion, direct speech, and perception. The interiority of emotions and perceptions, as well as speech models strategically mapped reader reception for state ideology. Significantly, these depictions emerge not only from official propaganda, but also from the literary canon with which scribes – which is to say most state administrators – were trained. Here we may assess the promotion of state concepts not so much to “the blackheaded people” (i.e., the unwashed masses), but to the apparatchiks who mediated between palace and populace. There are two main points worth making about state and citizen as reflected by these corpora. First, the texts contain expressions of both faith and doubt about the state’s capacity. There was not a straight acceptance of state homiletics, but a discourse of variance from and dubiety about them. Yet despite calling out its venality and inefficiency, nothing questioned the essential propriety of the state’s undertaking to act in the domains it claimed to control. This both contained and buttressed its authority. The twin tracks of state propaganda and the critiques of the literati were not isolated corpora of “state fakery” and “real opinion,” but a dialogue that was itself productive of subjectivity – skeptical, but operational. It was around the entire dynamic of proposition and criticism that the claims of the early state were organized, normalized, and internalized. Second, much modeling of the citizen-image was effected through conceptualization: through images of private household life, presentations of speech, and affective terms. Representations of beliefs, perceptions, judgements, and feelings all typified the reception of state claims. Royal literature was fairly direct in assimilating the feelings of the individual to king/city to create “state sympathy”: obeisance was happiness. But complicating this predictable strategy is that texts that deflate those expectations (e.g., proverbs) were devoid of affective language, preferring tropes of social and economic fairness to criticize state pretensions. To this extent, the text types speak past each other as much as they are complementary. Given these differences, I proceed generically rather than thematically. I survey three corpora: first, royal literature, those texts produced by, for, and about the king. Second, I turn to city laments, major compositions 3

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The denominator in all periods for political membership was “son”/“daughter” (Sumerian dumu/dumu-munus, Akkadian mā ru/mā rtu) of a home city.

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that set citizen and polity at counterpoise in the dramatic context of state collapse. Third and last, I look at Sumerian proverbs (styled as folk wisdom) and debate texts (formal, didactic forensic works), both of which attended to themes deflating the pride of the haughty. These texts, written with disparate generic conventions and institutional intentions, were nevertheless part of the same scribal curriculum. They were all memorized and reproduced by the bureaucrats who ran the state, the permeable political membrane between royal household and civil society whose role in disseminating state authority and making its project work could not have been more central.4 Though the texts produce openly contradictory messages of propaganda and criticism, the writers and readers of these texts were one and the same. As I understand this apparent paradox, the early state asserted its powers literarily, but the same apparatus permitted – yet also channeled and contained – criticism. No state can completely control ideological messaging; an important secondary function is to defuse negative feedbacks by accommodating their expression in fixed, acceptable genres.

royal literature Royal inscriptions were overtly propagandistic: monuments, inscriptions, and hymns in praise of the ruler. Here we encounter, inevitably, themes designed to assimilate state and citizen. In truth, focusing on sympathetic themes gives them more prominence than they had in a corpus that, taken as a whole, largely sounds like the entire world was run by a few kings and gods.5 Most of what few roles there were for other characters were negative: scheming enemy kings,6 the anger of the gods7 and revolts against them,8 the imputed speech of impious citizens – disloyal “evildoers” and “whisperers.”9 Yet the variety (rather than frequency/intensity) of assimilative strategies is remarkable. The earliest tropes present the king’s household as 4

5 6

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See, e.g., E. Robson, “The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur,” Revue d’Assyriologie 95 (2001), 39–66. Even affective states between gods and kings are rare: see SARI La 3.1. E.g., SARI La 4.2, 5.1; cf. La 10.1, speech of royal envoys; RIME 2 1.4.2, “insulting messages” of foreign kings to Naram-Sin’s “lords and governors,” parried by their oaths (RIME 2 1.4.2). SARI La 3.1: the god Ningirsu “angry” with the “haughty” enemy king (cf. Kiš angry with Umma); La 5.1, Umma is “arrogant”; RIME 2 1.4.6, the enemy’s “hostility.” The enemy’s proper emotion should be fear: SARI 3.5, foreign lands “tremble”; RIME 2 2.1.1, an enemy ruler “fears.” In curse formulae: SARI La 3.1, 5.1. In Sargonic curses: RIME 2 1.2.6 ll. 104–115, 1.4.5, 1.5.6; Gudea, RIME 3/1 Cyl. B vi 11f., viii 23f.

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that of any well-to-do Bürger, with wife, children, and servants, named and/or depicted on plaques and other objects, naturalizing the dynastic family.10 The king’s family was also made visible in gradually acquiring the prerogative of giving inscribed gifts to the gods.11 We find the first custodial language for private households, the kings claiming to protect the waif, widow, and pauper, restoring child to mother and mother to child.12 Royal literature also returned time and again to characterize the ruler as first among the citizenry, chosen by the gods from “out of the multitude.”13 Through such images, the rulers – elsewhere styled as categorically unique beings, with privileged connections to the gods and fundamentally unlike the ruled – invited audiences to accept their authority as paragons of everyday household and community relations. But these themes all liken ruler to people, rather than assimilating people to state; for this, there were other strategies. Royal inscriptions provided speech models for fair conduct in business and prohibitions against anger in civil life.14 Evocations of the aggrieved state of the polity, before the king’s justice resolved its ills, are dotted across the corpus: the testimony of miserable men whose fish ponds had been raided or who had been beaten by nobles for not forfeiting property;15 the grief of the penniless widow; the bewilderment of the motherless child.16 The strong no longer behaves extravagantly towards others, the mighty does not abuse the weak any more. People are not made subject to the lordly . . . I have supported the appeals of the bondsmen, waifs and widows who cry “Alas, Utu!” or “Alas, Nanna!” . . . I have kept the just on the proper track, with the wife and the little child.17

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E.g., SARI La 1.2 (Ur-Nanše’s family); also La 1.3-.5: the king styled as both dumu (lit., “son”) GN and dumu PN, i.e., citizen of Lagaš and son of his father, paralleling citizenship and householder status; RIME 3/1 1.6.10, Gudea’s family enumerated; RIME 2 1.1.20, ll. 172–175 (cf. p. 166), Ur-Namma’s family in his Laws. RIME 2, passim; RIME 3/1 1.6.10, Gudea’s wife and children. SARI La 5.4; La 9.1 (widow and waif protected from “the powerful”); RIME 3/1 1.1.7StB iv 10f. SARI La 5.18 and 9.1; Gudea, RIME 3/1 1.1.7.StB iii 6–11: chosen from among “216,000 persons” (Ibid., 1.1.7.St I iii 7-iv 7, the gods address those “within the crowd”); ETCSL 2.4.1.2 and 2.5.4.01 ll. 53f., 196f. SARI La 9.1–.2; passim, the legal authority of Uruinimgina, Lugalzagesi, Utu-ḫegal, Gudea, and Ur-Nammu. SARI La 9.1 co. x–xi and 9.3 col. ii. 16 RIME 2 13.6.4; 3/2 1.1.20. ETCSL 2.5.4.01 [200f.].

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We find didactic royal instructions for public behavior;18 models of disputation;19 contrasts between clean and unclean, righteous and evil, respectful and selfish citizens.20 Public contentment was accomplished through the ruler’s defense of the land, provision of plenty, correct performance of cult, and administration of law, but also through attention to the nomoi of civil life. King Šulgi of Ur, among many condescensions to the little people, helpfully reminded his subjects of mortality as the handmaiden to their humility: “people should consider for themselves – it is a matter to keep in one’s sights – that at the inescapable end of life, no one will be spared the bitter gall of the land of oppression.”21 If one can work past such ludicrous pomposity, what is remarkable is that the inscriptions’ attention ever descended from the plane of gods and kings to the daily affairs of people in the street, to their words, feelings, and behavior, deigning to recognize “true and false, even in people’s thoughts.”22 The most persistent theme by far in modeling the citizen is joy: his happiness, contentment, merriment, and laughter. Royal inscriptions time and again depict subjectivity in terms of gladness. Of Lugalzagesi it was written: “under him the lands rested contentedly, the people made merry, and the suzerains of Sumer and rulers of other lands conceded sovereignty to him at Uruk.”23 Public happiness was accomplished when citizens fixed their eyes on the king, when he addressed them in public speeches, when he joined them in festivals.24 In hymn after Sumerian hymn, down through the Old Babylonian period, if the ruler delivered anything, it was joy; in foreign lands, by moonlight, through even his alluring physique:25 With my kind eyes and friendly mouth, I lift people’s spirits. I have a most impressive figure, lavishly endowed with beauty. I have lips appropriate for all words. As I lift my arms, I have beautiful fingers. I am a very handsome young man, fine to admire.26

18 19

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25

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RIME 3/1 1.1.7 StB vii 29–46. ETCSL 2.4.2.15, “The convened assembly of [the city’s] numerous people is a shield!” Cf. ibid., 2.4.2.02 ll. 221–243. 21 RIME 3/1 Cyl A xiii 15f.; Cyl B v 10, vi 11f., xvii–xviii 13. ETCSL 2.4.2.02. ETCSL 2.5.5.2. SARI Um 7.1; ETCSL 2.5.3.2; for later examples, see Richardson, “Early Mesopotamia,” 42. Lugalzagesi (SARI Um 7.1), Utu-ḫegal (RIME 2 13.6.4: “He called out to the citizens of his city . . . ”), and Gudea (RIME 3/1 Cyl A xix 1–2), respectively. ETCSL 2.4.1.2; 2.4.1.3; 2.4.1.4; 2.4.2.02; 2.4.2.18; 2.4.2.24; 2.5.3.1; 2.5.6.2; 2.5.6.3; 2.6.9.2; 2.6.9.5: “May he create heart’s joy for the population”; 2.8.3.1: “Standing joyfully beside the king . . . ” ETCSL 2.5.5.1; cf. 2.5.3.2 and the hymns of Šulgi (passim).

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The cocktail of happiness, obedience, and household ethos was briskly stirred with language totalizing city, land, king, and people as “if they were one person,” “children of one mother,” with “a single voice”27 – with many prohibitions against complaining.28 This all sounds as creepy in Sumerian as in the political rhetoric of any language; but the fact that happiness was rhetorically valorized so consistently as a public good is remarkable, swaddled though it was in bombast and piety. It is unsurprising that rulers claimed their people were happy and uncomplaining, all their woes and worries solved by the king’s fatherly help. Yet it is remarkable how early, diverse, and consistent were these depictions of the citizen; that a rarified literature otherwise focused on conversations between gods and kings made so many imaginative interventions and excursions into civil society to plant the state’s claims (compare with Tally, this volume, on Gramscian ideas of hegemony).

city laments As one wades beyond the littoral shelf of royal literature out into other less openly biased genres, the state’s claims were complicated, for both readers and writers, by criticism and doubt. Let us turn to city laments, without doubt among the major products of Sumerian literature. These envisioned the departure of the tutelary god, the demise of the city-state, the upending of cosmic, political, and household orders – all in order to reassert their institutional unity through the eventual return and restoration of the god, sometimes aided by a hero-king.29 These were performed compositions, with liturgical and musical directions30 – accessible not only to their copyists, but the many people who observed them.31 Here we find an ambivalence toward the state: the poems enact the ultimate rejuvenation of the polity, but it is god and temple, not king or palace, at the center of the action. Indeed, the narratives necessarily focus – in vivid, almost gleeful detail – on the spectacular destruction of the state.

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Utu-ḫegal RIME 3/1 13.6.4; Gudea, ibid., 1.1.7StB xii 21–23; ETCSL 2.5.4.01 (a “single voice”), 2.5.4.03, 2.5.6.1. RIME 3/1 1.7.Cyl A xiii 3–5: “No mother would have words with her child, and no child would disobey its mother”; the ruler’s peace is identical to the silence of obedient children. E.g., LaNi, ll. 157f. and 310f. See nn. 33–35 on the choral antiphony of the people’s wailing in these laments. On public performance, see J. Cooper, “Genre, Gender, and the Sumerian Lamentation,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 58 (2006), esp. 41–42 and nn. 5–8.

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One encounters a profound conflict between the underlying intention to align individual and state, and the dramatic arc that showcases the fragility and mortality of king, polis, and populace. Notwithstanding, the identity of household and political orders is an explicit feature of the laments, principally where the people embody the terror and despair of the city in the grip of collapse, especially as juxtaposed to the collapse of kingship. The laments solicit the citizen’s sympathetic responses to the city’s demise through affective states, direct speech, and metaphors associating private and state spheres: The men whose wives had fallen, whose children had fallen, were singing “Oh our destroyed city!” Their city gone, their homes abandoned – as those who were singing for the brick buildings of the good city, as the lamenters of wailing, like the Foster-children of an ecstatic no longer knowing their own intelligence,32 the people were smitten, their minds thrown into disorder . . . Now my people who are overcome by hardship voice lament for me one by one! Even now the places of refuge of my people whose hearts are burning in dark distress have been made known to me! My people whose hearts have been broken on the bitter way perform the lullabies of my young ones for me in tears! (LaNi 42–49, 117–126)33 This hunger contorted people’s faces, twisted their muscles. Its people were as if drowning in a pond, they gasped for breath . . . They struck their necks with their hands and cried. They sought counsel with each other . . .: “Alas, what can we say about it? What more can we add to it? How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe? Inside Ur, there is death, outside it there is death. Inside it we are to be finished off by famine. Outside it we are to be finished off by Elamite weapons. In Ur, the enemy oppresses us, oh, we are finished.” . . . They were united in fear. (LaSUr 389–410; also ll. 68–78, 292–302, 360–370, 479–481) Who caused wailing and lamenting in those streets and . . .34 Uruk, like a loyal citizen in terror, set up an alarm: “Rise up!” . . . At Uruk, shouts rang out, screams reverberated. (LaUk 15–20, 78–88)35

The emotional atmosphere of the texts is one of intense sorrow and grief, in which the people are specifically said to share: they scream, cry, moan, and pray; they have embodied responses, trembling, unable to breathe, wilting in despair. The population is metaphorically transformed into a chorus of professional lamenters – audience transformed into performers – but also as squirming fish out of their pond, crying children lost in the street, water poured out uselessly on the ground. Most importantly, the speech of the people expresses their agony, fear, and despair. 32 33 34

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Cf. ll. 68–75, the lamenters are like “nursemaids singing a lullaby.” Also ll. 139–149, with didactic instructions (“Say:”) on how to lament properly. Cf. ll. 21–27: “mob panic.” 35 See also LaUr 369–377.

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An important trope in depicting disrupted households as mirrors of the falling city is that of inverted family relations. Conjoined to passages emphasizing the fate of temples, cities, and palaces, we find mothers who do not recognize their children, farmers forgetting their lands, the temple wrecked as if it had been nothing more than a little vegetable garden: The father turned away from his wife saying “This is not my wife!” The mother turned away from her child saying “This is not my child!” He who had a productive estate neglected his estate saying “This is not my estate!” The rich man took an unfamiliar path away from his possessions. In those days the kingship of the Land was defiled. (LaSUr 93–103; also ll. 12–21)36 The proud city of all the lands became like one who spreads havoc. The faithful cowherds themselves overturned every single cattlepen. The chief shepherds themselves burned? every sheepfold. They built them up like grain heaps, they spread them out like grain piles, they were convulsed . . . They drenched the fields with water, they turned the city into a swamp. (LaUk 10–20) The weak and the strong of Ur perished from hunger. Mothers and fathers who did not leave their houses were consumed by fire. The little ones lying in their mothers’ arms were carried off like fish by the waters. Among the nursemaids with their strong embrace, the embrace was pried open . . . The mother absconded before her child’s eyes – the people groan. The father turned away from his child – the people groan. In the city the wife was abandoned, the child was abandoned. (LaUr 218– 240; also ll. 112–122)

Another interpretive opportunity lies in locating the identities of the speakers. These are often gods, but also identifiable as allegorical figures of the city collective: they act as regular people, the suffering victims of the dying polis, models for its citizens. On this principle one can extrapolate from their affective expressions and speeches that again the image of the citizen is intended; the “person of the state” is a sympathetic actor as much as a representative one: Bau, as if she were human, also reached the end of her time: “Woe is me! Enlil has handed over the city to the storm. He has handed it over to the storm that destroys cities. He has handed it over to the storm that destroys houses.” (LaSUr 174–184; also ll. 350f.) Utu, who in human form renders judgment at the law court of heaven, set and did not rise again. (LaUk 1–9) 36

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The metaphorical “storm” afflicting the city does not have the bonds that make – or break – political community: “the storm which knows no mother / no father / no wife . . . ” (LaUr 402–410).

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My queen, your city weeps before you as its mother. Ur, like a child lost in a street, seeks a place before you. Your house, like a man who has lost everything, stretches out? its hands to you. Your brick-built righteous house, like a human being, cries “Where are you?” (LaUr 369–377; also the speech of Ningal as “a good woman,” ll. 112–122: “My house founded by the righteous was pushed over on its side like a garden fence . . . ”)

But the most remarkable passages model the behavior of explicitly mortal citizens. A first example comes in the speech of a young man questioning state and divine orders: “I, a young man whom the storm has not destroyed . . . I, not destroyed by the storm, my attractiveness not brought to an end . . . We have been struck down like beautiful boxwood trees . . . We have been struck down like statues being cast in moulds . . . What do we receive, trembling on duty during the day? What do we lose, not sleeping on duty during the night? . . . Why do they reckon us among those who have been displaced from Eridu? Why do they destroy us like palm trees which we have not tended? Why do they break us up like new boats we have not caulked?” (LaSUr 225–242)

Here, a young man’s doubt (eventually resolved by the city’s restoration) presents a poignant crisis of faith: this was the very problem propaganda aimed to allay in a world of fallen dynasties and ruined cities. The second passage, a morality play of a kind, directly addresses the doubts of the young man by juxtaposing the speeches of foolish and sensible citizens. Here, the one who belittles the city’s mortality is a cynical fool; but the man appropriately terrified of the state’s demise is a sensible citizen: The foolish shall rejoice, they shall exclaim?: “Let it come – we shall see war and battle in the city, how the sacred precinct? is destroyed, how the walls are battered down, how the city’s peace is disrupted, how among the loyal families honest men are transformed into traitors.” But the sensible shall beat their breasts and droop? their heads. At midnight they shall be afraid and tearful, and suffer insomnia. In bed, under the covers, they shall be unable to sleep soundly, they shall wander about the city. They shall be immobilised, their courage shall run out: “May our allies serving in times of war raise their forces for peace . . . ” (LaUk 21–40)

Yet as much as the citizen is sympathetically assimilated to the polity, the laments portray the king and palace as helpless, even foolish, as the gods demonstrate that dynasties are ephemeral: At the royal station? there was no food on top of the platform?. The king who used to eat marvellous food grabbed at a mere ration . . . There was no food for [the king] in his palace, it was unsuitable to live in. Grain did not fill his lofty storehouse, he could not save his life. (LaSUr 292–302; also ll. 104–106 [“The king sat immobilized (with fear) in his own palace”], 389–410, 460–474)

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And the laments conclude with rubrics celebrating the identity of city, temple, and people – but not with king or palace.37 If anything, it is the god’s “kingship” that is hymnified: That cities should be rebuilt, that people should be numerous, that in the whole universe the people should be cared for; O divine Nanna, your kingship is sweet, return to your place. May a good abundant reign be long-lasting in Ur. Let its people lie down in safe pastures . . . O mankind . . . O Nanna! O your city! O your temple! O your people! (LaSUr 505–518) If An looks kindly upon that man and at the well-built city, the place of determining fate, proclaim “Man and city! Life and well-being!” for him. (LaUk 28–38) Father Enki! O your house, O your city, O your people! (LaE 8).

Here we have a profound ambivalence: we have compositions promoting a unity of the polis in which kingship plays an important role, but where the state project is distinctly subordinated to divine plan; where any king, palace, or dynasty is transitory and replaceable. We are faced with a literature that works hard to align individual emotion, intellect, and behavior with the polis, but takes a cool view of kings and kingship as historically contingent, in favor of the more durable theocratic community.

proverbs and debates Third, we come to proverbs and debates, the wisdom texts on which scribes honed their own skills of disputation, rhetoric, and judgment. Here we find a radically altered reception of state claims, right in the heart of the professional literature of political and judicial forensics. Note that this literature already takes time to lampoon the genres discussed earlier, if obliquely. The Debate between Hoe and Plow,38 for instance, skewering haughtiness generally, clearly implicates kings and nobles, and parodies royal inscriptions.39 And the lamentation genre gets deflated with proverbs like “In those places which have not been destroyed . . . [l]et his place become like chopped-up turnips!”40 This indicates not only

37 38

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The exception is LaNi, which concludes with a paean to the king’s role in the restoration. Cf. the possibly parodic Royal Chronicle of Lagaš: J.-J. Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 144–149, 155. H. Vanstiphout, “On the Sumerian Disputation between the Hoe and the Plough,” Aula Orientalis 2 (1984), 242–243. SP 2.1; cf. the antinomian 7.1: “In those places which have been destroyed, let more places be destroyed!” SP 3.136, with deadpan irony: “After the heavens were destroyed and the earth was shaken – the people were still standing there on their own.”

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the intertextual awareness of scribes generally, but their critical reception of the texts they were asked to reproduce. And the scribes’ jaundiced, critical voice pours out in abundance in the Sumerian proverbs, among the oldest compositions in the world (dating as early as 2600 bc). At first reading, their tone seems familiar: the voice of folk wisdom, the sayings of the merchant in his stall, the housewife at her window, the farmer leaning against his plow. The proverbs reflect the conservative, dubious, thrifty mindset of the householder, as suspicious of the grand claims of institutions as they are of haughty neighbors and greedy in-laws. We seem to have the genuine outlook of the man in the street, with a rich fund of parodic speech, double entendre, and earthy humor. This impression is partly valid, but the proverbs descend to us only in heavily edited collections; the result is that what we have are the scribal reworkings of that genuine Volkssprache. Yet it is all the more significant that this arsenal of snarky humor, much of it directed at the palace’s postures and pretenses, was appropriated and burnished by its own administrators. (The proverbs, though they took to task scribes with substandard skills, did not self-critique the scribal class itself.) The proverbs cited in Appendix A hardly need explanation for any modern person who has ever been disappointed by a law court, run afoul of the taxman, or sifted fruitlessly through the text of a politician’s speech, looking for truth: the system was greedy and corrupt (1), unpredictable and dangerous (2), its propaganda full of lies (3), its halls full of opportunists (4); the best course of action for any sensible person was to simply steer clear of the government altogether (5). Space does not permit a full exploration of these maxims, some of which benefit from some parsing. Proverb 2.155, for instance, sounds innocuous enough, even laudatory: “A palace is a forest, a king is a lion . . .” But since wild places and animals were negative images in the Mesopotamian imaginary, the message is that the palace was a place of danger. Further, since the deity invoked is the prison god, and his prison called “the big house,” e´.gal – which can also mean “palace” – the speaker’s punning plea before his divine judge is to rescue him from prison/palace.41 Or Proverb 2.158, likening the palace to a mother (first birthing, then grieving), in fact pokes fun at the instability of dynasties, with the constant comings and goings of the occupants of thrones.

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Alster, Proverbs, 2:409.

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But most of the proverbs are clear enough. The palace was like a huge river that carried off wealth. The herald proclaimed the expenditure of the people’s tax money as if the king had provided that money himself. Political supplicants should offer audience gifts, but also never forget bribes. Any slave-girl, menial, or ignoramus who worked for the palace suddenly held authority over you. The income and security deriving from submission to palace rule were golden handcuffs: only a fool traded independence for a sated belly. Obedience was not virtuous; it was as seductive as death. These and dozens more bon mots indicate a broad suspicion of authority and institutions. However, where the royal inscriptions and the city laments played heavily on themes of sympathy, the proverbs depended on themes of fairness, justice, and socioeconomic parity. Their disenchantment of institutional claims was accomplished not only by challenging their objectivity, but by conceptually undercutting their affective overtures with a bracing dose of sarcasm – served up cold.

§ § § § § It is unremarkable that cultures develop jaundiced views of political masters. What is more noteworthy is that the Sumerian proverbs were elaborated and copied by the same bureaucratic class responsible for composing and broadcasting state theology and political propaganda. The meeting of these literatures in scribal households shows that political diglossia was necessary to mediate between state and subject; that sanctioned forms of criticism were part of the apparatus creating subjectivity. Significantly, the royal literature and laments did not engage the sympathetic imagination of the proverbs; attempts to naturalize the state as representative polis and theological community were not accepted at face value within the bureaucratic ranks. Yet neither did the proverbs, dubious though they were of the state’s probity and ability, directly challenge its authority to act in the capacities to which it pretended, or the premises on which it did so. To target the state’s venality and ineptitude was not to say that its intrusions into households, temples, or law courts were inherently inappropriate. If this demarcates anything, it is the categorical autonomy of Mesopotamian “state” and “civil society” – conceptually, if not yet institutionally.

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Appendix A: Selected Proverbs The palace is . . .

1. . . . greedy and corrupt 1.32–33 2.157

3.86 3.123 7.96 IŠ94–96

The herald rejoices when the estate makes expenditures. The steward rejoices when the estate increases its income. A palace cannot avoid the waste land. A barge cannot avoid straw. A freeborn man cannot avoid corvée work. A king’s daughter cannot avoid the tavern.42 “Give me!” is what the king says. “Do well!” is what the cupbearer’s son says. You should hold a kid in your right arm, and a bribe in your left arm. Don’t pile up the poured-out(?) barley. When it has been carried to your barley and piled up, it will be eaten by your lord. The palace is like a mighty river: its middle is goring bulls; what flows in is never enough to fill it, and what flows out can never be stopped.

2. . . . an unpredictable and dangerous place 2.153 2.154 2.155 2.156 14.19

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44

A palace is an ox; catch it by the tail!43 A palace is a huge river; its interior is a goring ox. A palace is a forest. The king is a lion. Nungal overwhelms men with a huge battle-net. Oh Utu, accept my prayer. A palace is a slippery place which catches those who do not know it.44 Both the palace and the Netherworld require obedience from their inhabitants.

Alster, Proverbs, 1:147, translates e´sˇ-dam as “whorehouse” rather than “tavern”; i.e., the king’s tax is as inevitable as his daughter’s sluttiness. Ibid., 2:375: 2.153–.158 characterize the palace as a place where fortunes change unpredictably, with analogies to wild places (river, forest, “slippery place,” “wasteland”). ||25.7, which adds: “Watch your step!”

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3. . . . full of lies 2.158 3.83 9a.1–.2

The palace: one day a mother giving birth, the next day a lamenting mother.45 As the sun rises, decisions are made. By the time the sun is up, kingship is conferred. Whatever the man in authority [nir-ga´l] said, it was not pleasant. Whatever the man in authority said, it was not right.

4. . . . full of jumped-up good-for-nothings 3.37

9a.9 18.8 22214–15 IŠ119–123

A slave girl is one who opens(?) the door. The slave girl from the palace offers advice? continually. The slave from the palace devours its goodwill. Ignoramuses are numerous in the palace. The quick one hid, the strong one fled; the one with the mouth got into the palace. His hand is on the table; his tongue is in the palace. If you hire a worker, he will share the bread bag with you; he eats with you from the same bag, and finishes up the bag with you. Then he will quit working with you and, saying “I have to live on something,” he will serve at the palace.

5. don’t get involved 46 1.6 22201–202 25.9 25.12

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What has submitted will exhibit resistance. When a feeding belly becomes bloated, it is lamentable; a belly made obedient by the prince.47 The palace is bound to succumb by itself. The income never suffices. The expenditure never ceases. Don’t set your eyes upon the king’s property!

Ibid., 2:375, on the instability of dynasties; with many duplicates (11.56, 14.22, 17.b9, 25.10), this was one of the most popular proverbs. Cf. IŠ 22–27: depending on royal justice only entangles one in difficulties: “You should not loiter about where there is a quarrel . . . ”; ibid., 204–207: humility before the powerful was a survival skill, not a virtue. On the connection between subjectivity and the ration system, see S. Richardson, “Obedient Bellies: Hunger and Food Security in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/5 (2016), 750–792.

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17 Military Mobilization and the Experience of Living with the Ming State Michael Szonyi

Interaction with the military recruitment systems of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) profoundly shaped the political behavior of the people who were recruited, and this in turn affected their social relations.1 Jessop reminds us in this volume of the value of thinking of the state as a social relation. In this line of thinking, explaining the operations of that social relation – what Jessop calls “strategic selectivities” – becomes a crucial analytic task. In this chapter I explore these strategic selectivities, asking how people in one time and place interacted with the state and its agents. To put this another way, I explore how the terms of state membership, that is, the reciprocal claims between the state and its subjects, were negotiated in a specific context. I ignore the question of whether the Ming was a state; the Ming ruled much of the territory that is now China for almost three centuries and meets the threshold of almost every possible definition of statehood (though it clearly does not meet the definition argued by Anderson in his contribution to this volume).2 But one part of a widely accepted minimum 1

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The argument here is a much abbreviated version of that made in Michael Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). I am grateful to John Brooke, Greg Anderson, Julia Strauss, and the Center for Historical Research for organizing the workshop on state formations and encouraging me to think comparatively, as well as to Nara Dillon and Wenkai He, who offered helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. Anderson’s argument that the Ming does not meet the definition of a state rests on the idea that the distinction between state and society was impossible in premodern societies because political authority was embedded in a religious world (his notion that this distinction is an essential criterion for the existence of a state is strongly influenced by Mitchell). But in the sources I introduce in this chapter, people make strategic political

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definition for statehood is especially useful for this chapter. As Weber recognized long ago, few states lack the capacity to exercise organized physical force. In other words, a state normally has an army.3 This nearuniversality of the military in states makes it a promising site at which to consider the human experience of statehood. The state’s monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force, to pursue Weber’s definition further, has consequences both for the army and for those who serve in it. In this chapter I focus on the latter, using the experience of living with the Ming military institution as a case study to make more general arguments about what it means to experience the state. Interaction with the state and its agents led people in Ming to develop a range of strategies, some of them highly complex and sophisticated, to negotiate the terms of their state membership. These strategies altered existing social relations and created new ones. On the basis of this argument, I suggest a model for political interaction in Ming China and beyond. The discussion here is limited to a subset of the total universe of interactions of subjects with the Ming state. I consider only one part of the Ming state: its systems of military recruitment and mobilization. But I argue that the evidence from this subsystem is more broadly applicable. Even within this subsystem, I only consider certain types of interactions. I ignore the whole category of open resistance; mutiny, rebellion, and riot do not figure in the analysis here. Nor do I look at cases of total compliance, where subjects do precisely what the state wishes them to do. Civilians who go off uncomplainingly to become soldiers, and soldiers who go off uncomplainingly to the wars are not part of my analysis. I focus instead on political behavior that lies somewhere between compliance and resistance. This limitation is less limiting than it might seem,

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choices with no reference whatsoever to the “enchantedness” of the world. Whether this is because they truly live in a disenchanted world or simply make their choices “as if” they lived in a disenchanted world, I do not know and is beside the point. Ming subjects’ accounts of their own behavior show that while Anderson’s distinction may hold at the normative or ideological or ontological levels, it simply does not apply at the level of the substantive operations of the Ming state or the conduct of its subjects. Timothy Mitchell, “Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85.1 (1991). “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, trans. and eds. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991), 78. For a typology of the methods states use to mobilize labor for the army, though with an emphasis on modern states, see Margaret Levi, “Conscription: The Price of Citizenship,” in Analytic Narratives, Robert Bates et al., eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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for it includes most political behavior by most people most of the time. In this middle ground of everyday politics people interact with state structures and regulatory regimes not simply by adhering to or resisting them but by incorporating them into their decision-making, manipulating them, appropriating them, turning them to their own purposes. “Everyday politics,” as Ben Kerkvliet writes, “is people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organized or direct.”4 Like all states the Ming state was not a unitary agent but an assemblage of individual judges, clerks, and army officers working in a network of overlapping institutions and driven by complex incentives. Unlike modern states, moreover, people in Ming could not and would not distinguish the state clearly and precisely from society. The various techniques that in modern times produce a state distinct from society, what Mitchell calls the “state effect,” were not institutionalized in Ming. In the absence of those “detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society,” the division between state and society can hardly be meaningful.5 But we can still identify certain distinctive processes of mobilization and extraction that enable the state to perform its core functions. These processes produced a sort of premodern “state effect.” That is, they generated behaviors that would not make sense in the absence of the state. Presumably people develop strategies to optimize their situations whether or not they live with a state. The “premodern state effect” therefore is to generate expressions of everyday politics and patterns of legitimacy that depend on the existence of the state for their operation. In the next section, I develop this notion of everyday politics in Ming with accounts of how families in the sixteenth century dealt with their obligation to provide military service to the Ming state. To make sense of these accounts requires some background on the institutions.6 The exact 4

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Ben Kerkvliet, “Everyday Politics in Peasant Societies (and Ours),” Journal of Peasant Studies, 36.1 (2009). Mitchell, “Limits of the State,” 95. Two recent general introductions to Ming history are Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and John Dardess, Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). The best bibliography of Ming

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size of the Ming army in this period is unknown, but it was on the order of two million men. For most of the dynasty, the core of the standing army was drawn from a special category of the population known as military households or junhu, comprising perhaps 10 percent of the total population.7 Every military household had a permanent, hereditary obligation to supply manpower to serve in the military. Not all members of military households were required to serve; rather each household had to provide one soldier at all times. Registration thus implied a permanent obligation to provide a certain amount of labor, the services of one ablebodied male. In other words, it created a fiscal obligation. Once a family was registered as a military household, the obligation persisted regardless of the social circumstances of the family. While the original intention of the policy was that in every military household the man serving as a soldier would eventually be replaced by his eldest son in an endless cycle of conscription, the reality was that families developed in different ways that complicated the basic selection algorithm. Some military households had multiple sons; others had none. Some families found it difficult even to meet the core obligation that a single family member should serve; in other families, natural increase meant that the issue became choosing a soldier from among several brothers or, with the passage of time, cousins. The historical archive is overwhelmingly dominated by this latter type, families that grew into extended families and eventually into large patrilineal descent groups, some of which produced written genealogies. One such descent group was the Tian lineage of Xiaoshan, near present-day Hangzhou. Their nineteenth-century genealogy includes documents relating to a series of lawsuits filed by members of the lineage over a period of more than a century. The original suit was brought by lineage member Tian Shezhong in 1598. He was serving as a hereditary soldier in a battalion in Taizhou about 100 miles south of the ancestral home in Hangzhou. The investigating magistrate found that the Tian

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studies is David Robinson, Ming Dynasty, in Oxford Bibliographies: Chinese Studies DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0072. For a discussion of contemporary interest in the Ming, see Michael Szonyi, “Ming Fever: The Present’s Past as the People’s Republic turns Sixty,” China Heritage Quarterly, no. 21 (2010), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org /articles.php?searchterm=021_mingfever.inc&issue=021. Households could be registered as military households in several ways. Early followers of the founding emperor and those of his defeated rivals were the first military households of the new dynasty. A second group consisted of military households conscripted in general drafts early in the dynasty. Registration was also the punishment for certain very serious crimes.

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map 17.1 Ming China locations mentioned in the text. Copyright Jeff Blossom.

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family had been first registered as a military household in the early years of the dynasty. Shezhong’s distant ancestor Guihe was conscripted in 1388 and assigned to a nearby battalion. According to Shezhong’s plaint, at the time of Guihe’s death there were six brothers in his family. They made an agreement or contract (hetongmeng) that in future the descendants of each of the six brothers would take it in turns to provide a soldier for a twentyyear term. Each group of descendants was known as a branch (fang). Once the cycle of 120 years (6 X 20 years) was over, the responsibility would return to the first branch and the rotation would begin anew. It was up to each branch to decide which of its members would actually serve. The family established a permanent estate, consisting of land and buildings, the rental income from which would go to compensate whoever was serving. They also set up a second financial arrangement whereby members of the family contributed to a fund to meet the expenses of newly conscripted soldiers. These systems, Shezhong claimed, had operated smoothly for more than 150 years. But now one of his distant cousins, a man named Yinglong, had violated the agreement by refusing to take his turn. The suits and countersuits flew, and Shezhong’s true motives emerged. He was already fifty years old, and wanted out of the army. But he was hoping that his only son, who was “weak and sickly,” would not be forced to replace him. Instead he wanted the obligation transferred to someone else, anyone else. He had seized upon Yinglong, claiming he had “violated the agreement; seeking to avoid his responsibility; harming people; throwing father and son into extreme danger.”8 A clerk compared the county records on military service with those of the family and concluded that Shezhong was pulling a fast one. The clerk could find no record, going back at least fifty years, of any member of the Tian family being conscripted in the original home back in Xiaoshan and sent to Taizhou. The 120-year cycle described in the original contract was clearly no longer functioning, if indeed it ever had been. The responsibility for fulfilling the family’s service obligation had somehow come to be concentrated on Shezhong and his immediate family alone; he was now trying to shirk that obligation. The more the magistrate dug, the worse it looked for Shezhong. He had also been selling off the estate illicitly. And he had tried to extract a payment of the expense supplement from 8

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“Tianshi shizu [The Founding Ancestor of the Tian Surname],” in Tingyao Tian et al., eds., Xiaoshan Daoyuan Tianshi zongpu [Genealogy of the Tian Lineage of Daoyuan, Xiaoshan], compiled 1837, East Asian Library Columbia University, juan 1.

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Yinglong, whose family was well off (this of course raises the possibility that the whole exercise was a ruse to blackmail Yinglong). Legal documents were typically included in a genealogy only if the results of the lawsuit were favorable to the editor; one of the challenges of reading these documents is to figure out how the interests of the editor might relate to the case. The editor of this genealogy was probably no friend of Shezhong. Indeed, if our goal were to establish right and wrong in the case, we would need to ask if some or all of the story was fabricated in order to cast Shezhong in a bad light for some reason. But fortunately we can leave this duty to the judge at the time, who dismissed Shezhong’s suit and ordered his son into the army. For our purposes, the point of the case is to illustrate the complex institutional arrangements that the family came up with in order to manage their obligations to the Ming state. These arrangements included a rotation structure to determine who should fulfill the collective military service obligation at any given time, a permanent trust to compensate whoever it was who fulfilled the obligation, and another financial arrangement to further incentivize that person to do as he ought. These arrangements were nominally independent of one another; the rotation system might collapse and the financial arrangement remain in place. Another example, this one from the other side of China: In the 1540s, a complex case worked its way through the court system of Shunqing prefecture in northeastern Sichuan. The roots of the case lay more than a century earlier, when a low-level official named Suo Mao had been found guilty of the Ming equivalent of corruption. While serving as a minor government functionary he had “caused grievous harm to the people.” He was tried, convicted, and punished by registration as a military household. Suo was conscripted and assigned to duty in Beijing. The soldier’s life evidently did not agree with him, and he deserted. His unit in Beijing duly notified local officials in Shunqing, who conscripted a replacement from among his relatives. This man too deserted. So another replacement was sought. And he deserted. On and on the cycle went for more than a century. In 1547, rising tensions along China’s northern frontier led to a renewed conscription effort to fill the depleted ranks of the army. This prompted local officials to conscript Mao’s descendant Suo Ke. But Ke refused to go. He appealed to the magistrate, producing a document that he claimed proved he was not liable for military service. The document was a contract drawn up between Suo Mao and his brother Rong in 1433, shortly after Mao’s conviction. It stated that the brothers lived under the same roof, owned their property in common, and shared a common

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Suo Rong

Suo Rong

Suo Mao

Suo Ke

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Suo Mao

Suo Ke

Suo Ke’s Contract

Suo Genealogy

serving soldiers

others

figure 17.1 Contradictory accounts of the Suo household.

registration under the name of their father. It was therefore this household that had become liable for hereditary military service. While it was Suo Mao’s crime that had led to the family being registered as a military household, both brothers were liable for the consequences. The contract was an agreement between the brothers to rotate that responsibility among their descendants. That is, the branch descended from Suo Mao and the branch descended from Suo Rong would take turns providing a soldier. In light of this contract, the magistrate found that it should be the turn of a descendant of Suo Rong to be conscripted. This let Ke, who was descended from Suo Mao, off the hook. Suo Rong, a distant cousin of Ke, was duly seized. But the relatives of this cousin then protested. Back and forth went the case, with one official rounding up all the parties, interrogating them and giving his decision, and the losing party then appealing the decision at a higher level. In a sense, the case hinged on whose name appeared at the top of the household’s entry in the official register in the state archives. If it was Suo Mao’s father’s name at the top of the archival entry, then the rotation system was genuine, and Suo Ke was in the clear. But if it was Suo Mao’s

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name at the top of the entry, then only his descendants were liable to serve, and Suo Ke was shirking. The judge did not need to refer to the archives (in far-off Nanjing) to resolve the case, for the answer lay in documents produced by the family themselves. Eventually the descendants of Suo Rong submitted their genealogy. It showed that generation after generation, the military obligation had been fulfilled by Suo Mao’s descendants, all the way down to Ke. On the basis of the new evidence, the judge concluded that the contract was a forgery. It must have been Suo Mao’s name at the top of the archival register. His descendants, and they alone, were liable to fulfill the family’s military service obligation. Suo Ke was beaten and sent off, with his wife, to Beijing.9 These two accounts, one drawn from court documents reproduced in a genealogy and the other directly from court archives, show sixteenthcentury families pursuing complex, long-term strategies to manage their obligations to the state. The two cases are not unusual; they are drawn from a much larger body of material.10 In both cases, families made use of or claimed to make use of strategies that distributed the burden of service systematically across all those liable to serve. They assigned the obligation to serve in rotation to subdivisions of the larger group that shared the obligation. The strategy increased predictability and specified obligations more precisely, making interaction with the state more predictable. The assignment was accompanied by a consideration, a payment, indicating that the logic of the labor market had infiltrated the hereditary system to some degree. In both accounts, the purpose of the rotation system was ostensibly to ensure that the obligation was met. But such a system was also open to abuse. In 1436, an official complained that families had set up such systems to facilitate evasion: Fathers, sons, and brothers are illegally arranging their own transfers. [The officers] in the guards to which they are assigned accept bribes and allow them to replace one another. Each person serves for a year, and rotates one after

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Sichuan gedi kan’an ji qita shiyi dangce [Law Cases and Related Archival Records from Various Places in Sichuan], originally compiled 1522–1566, reprinted in Beijing tushuguan guji zhenben congkan, Vol. 51 (Beijing: Shumu wenxian, 1988), irregular pagination. A modern, punctuated edition by Wu Yanhong is in Yifan Yang and Lizhi Xu, eds., Lidai panli pandu (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2005), Vol. 3. Besides Szonyi, Art of Being Governed, also see Jinkui Zhang, Mingdai weisuo junhu yanjiu [Garrisons and Military Households of the Ming Dynasty] (Beijing: Xianzhuang, 2007); Zhijia Yu, Weisuo, junhu yu junyi [Garrisons, Military Households and Military Corvée] (Beijing: Beijing daxue, 2010).

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the other. The one actually serving whiles away his time and before his term is over he deserts. Every year conscription must be implemented, but the ranks stay empty for a long time.11

Rotation systems were a solution that families devised to address the discrepancy between the state’s algorithm for conscription and the social reality that military households faced. Constrained by constitutional inertia from reforming the official system, Ming state agents had little choice but to acquiesce to these informal arrangements internal to the households. These arrangements made it possible for the state to function without generating massive overhead costs. This does not mean that all informal arrangements were valid, for officials could point out and address what they thought were abuses of the system. But it did mean that the state effectively allowed institutions within society to manage part of the core function of the state, the mobilization of manpower for the military. Moreover, we know about these two incidents because they generated lawsuits. State officials were called upon not only to allow or endorse but at times even to enforce the informal arrangements made by subjects. In this situation families were strongly inclined to make written records of their informal arrangements, and at times to submit those records to state agents. That is, they tried to formalize these informal arrangements. This required not only written records but written records in a language that was acceptable to state agents. In other words, idiomatic competence in the language of the state was a crucial part of household strategies. In both accounts, a genealogy was used as a public, legal document. The material record of the family’s ancestry became itself a strategic tool.12 The two cases examined here involve families trying to manage their obligation while still ensuring it was met. Families also tried to evade obligations while maintaining the appearance of compliance. For example, all registered households were liable for corvée labor, which in theory was allocated based on the size of the household’s landholdings and the number of adult males. Military households received a partial exemption from this general obligation, on the principle that they fulfilled their labor 11

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Tan Lun, Junzheng tiaoli [Itemized Sub-statutes of Military Governance], 1573 edition held at Toˉyoˉ bunko library, 2:8a–b. Dealing with state obligations does not invariably encourage the formation and cohesion of lineage organization (as I mistakenly argued in Practicing Kinship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). In this case, responding strategically to policy leads not to a family coming together but to it tearing itself apart, cousin against cousin.

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obligations through military service. A late fifteenth-century report notes that since the establishment of the dynasty a century earlier, many military households had grown through natural increase. “There is kind of criminal element among them, in which a single family has five or ten members but only one or two of them are registered with the local authorities.” When the local civilian government pursued the unregistered family members in order to register them, they reported that their family was serving in the army and therefore should be exempt. But when military officials tried to register them for possible future conscription, they claimed that they had registered with the civilian authorities and were fulfilling their corvée obligations. If officials threatened to expose them, they bribed clerks to confuse the situation.13 A sixteenth-century military household in Longchuan county, Guangdong, tried a different approach to reduce its tax obligations. The strategy was revealed in 1542 when a local official sought to identify the wealthiest households in the county in order to update the tax and corvée registers. “A wealthy soldier” – possibly an individual soldier but also possibly a reference to an entire military household – had acquired vast landholdings in the county. The “soldier” should have been responsible for a substantial corvée levy. But all of the lands had been registered “under the names of women,” such that there were no able-bodied male heads of household associated with the lands. Clearly the household was hoping to convince the authorities that the adult males of the household were serving in the army and therefore corvée-exempt. It sought to take advantage of the multiple regulatory systems that governed tax and labor service obligations. The magistrate, evidently frustrated, wished that the world were not so complicated. “Military households are under jurisdiction of Guard officials, and civilian households under civilian officials.” But the reality was different. Families straddled both categories, and tried to take advantage of the resulting ambiguity.14 How are we to describe these two types of strategic behaviors, informal arrangements to deal with the lack of fit between rules and reality and efforts to manipulate jurisdictional overlap and ambiguity? They cannot simply be labeled resistance, insubordination, or misconduct, though that is often how they are understood or represented in the official archive.

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Dai Jin, ed., Huangming tiaofa shilei zhuan [Categorized Substatutes of the August Ming], 1531–1533, 1057ff. Liu Wu, ed., Huizhou Fuzhi [Gazetteer of Huizhou Prefecture], 1542, reprinted in Riben Cang Zhongguo Hanjian Difangzhi Congkan (Beijing: Shumu wenxian, 1991), 5:36a–b.

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Instead I propose the term “regulatory arbitrage.” Regulatory arbitrage in economics refers to taking advantage of the difference between regulatory position and economic substance, that is between how one is perceived by the regulator and one’s actual situation, or of the difference between two or more regulatory regimes.15 The first type of regulatory arbitrage fits precisely the strategies of military households like the Suo and Tian. These households tried to address the differences between the regulatory regime and their own social reality in ways that optimized their situation – reducing the costs and risks of compliance while still securing state recognition of compliance. The second type of regulatory arbitrage, manipulating the differences between multiple regulatory systems, describes exactly the strategies of households whose members circulated between multiple institutional statuses in the hope that they would be captured by the extraction mechanisms of none of them. The various strategies deployed by military households in Ming China thus suggest an art of being governed – a set of strategies that increased predictability, reduced risk, made use of the existence of a labor market, and exploited jurisdictional overlap – that families used to optimize their relationship with the state and its agents. Military households did not seek to be invisible to the state. Rather they sought to be perceived by the state in particular ways. This implied knowledge of state patterns of recordmaking and record keeping, of the specific language used by the state. For these families it could be useful to be seen by the state, and in order to be seen by the state they needed to know how to talk like the state. The use of state forms, including state language, to frame strategies that are internal to the kinship group is evidence of the striking social efficacy of the Ming state. The sources unfortunately tell us little about the institutional antecedents to these strategies or the processes through which individuals and families devised them. But we should not assume that the core process was 15

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The basic idea behind regulatory arbitrage is simple. Arbitrage means to take advantage of differences between two or more markets. The same asset can have different value in different markets. Buying an asset in the market where it is less expensive and selling it in the market where it is more expensive, in other words “buying cheap and selling dear,” is the elementary form of arbitrage. Regulatory arbitrage simply means to engage in the same calculation with regard to multiple regulatory regimes. The term is not a new one; it has come into more frequent use recently because some scholars blame regulatory arbitrage by financial institutions for the 2008 financial crisis. See, for example, Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson, “Causes of the Financial Crisis,” Critical Review 21 (2009), 196–210.

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simply one of expanding the function of existing institutions to deal with the new challenges of interacting with the state. The subsequent history of the lineage as a solidary group oriented around ancestor worship does not mean that it was ever thus. The logic of the Ming system of household registration meant that over the long term kinship relations and fiscal obligations became mutually constitutive. Kinship structures are not simply cultural givens but political choices. The Chinese lineage, which became widespread in many parts of China in precisely this period, may be as much a premodern state effect as it is the institutionalization of timeless Chinese ideas about ancestors and agnatic relations. Membership in the state can have complex effects on social relations.16 Nor should we see the informal management structures that families devised as necessarily a challenge or limitation to the power of the state. The terms of premodern state membership were negotiated. More limited than the modern state in its capacity to penetrate society, the Ming state relied on informal management structures to ensure that its claims on its subjects were met. The nature of the obligations that military households owed to the state means that their strategies are described in great detail in our sources. But the basic patterns of political interaction were more broadly distributed. Other scholars have shown how ordinary civilian households also developed elaborate strategies to optimize their obligations to the state, and to position themselves within the more favorable of multiple overlapping regulatory regimes. Liu Zhiwei’s study of the lijia corvée labor registration system demonstrated, years before Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed, that there was another choice besides optimizing one’s interaction with the state. One could also choose, and some did, not to belong. Into the twentieth century there were people living in the territorial fringes of the Chinese state – its waterways and highlands – who declined membership. One such group, today a recognized national minority in the People’s Republic, came to be known in the Ming by the Chinese term Miao, a contraction for “mo yao,” that is “not liable for corvée labor.”17 16

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Diane King’s chapter in this volume makes a very similar point about a very different context. On kinship as political choice, James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), xi. Zhenman Zheng, Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming-Qing Fujian, Michael Szonyi trans. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001); Zhiwei Liu, Zai guojia yu shehui zhi jian [Between State and Society] (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue, 1997).

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But the vast majority of people living in what is now China made different choices. The preconditions for regulatory arbitrage of the type described here include complex state regulatory systems; information management methods that are costly and yield only a partial view of society (it would be tempting but anachronistic to call this an incomplete view); state sanctioning of informal arrangements, and an economy that makes possible at least the partial marketization of state obligations. When these factors combine, the possibility of regulatory arbitrage becomes widespread. Thus regulatory arbitrage may be particularly prevalent as a mode of politics in the large polity early modern empires that share these characteristics. Perhaps the very term “early modern” indexes the moment when it becomes beneficial to be close to the state.18 The history of regulatory arbitrage had profound consequences for China’s transition to modernity. The very informal arrangements – lineages, native-place associations, temples to name just a few – that ordinary subjects devised to deal effectively with the premodern state came to be seen by would-be builders of a modern state – of every imaginable political stripe – as obstacles to modernity that needed to be eliminated for China to succeed. One of the great tragedies of the modern era, both in China and elsewhere, has been the rejection of what had once been highly effective modes of interaction between individuals, communities, and the state in favor of a single, totalizing vision of modern state membership. The main message of this chapter is that a full analysis of the state requires looking at the experience of statehood. This does not only mean summarizing the different forms of statehood that have ever existed but rather exploring the various ways in which the state is experienced by its subjects and others. It means attention to the calculations, resources, and strategies that are deployed in everyday politics as individuals and groups calibrate, manage, and optimize their relations with the state.

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See, for example, James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20.

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18 Ethnicity and Power in Early Modern Europe and Asia Victor Lieberman

Today nationalism and democracy are the only coins of international legitimacy. With relatively few exceptions, members of the United Nations claim to be democratic nation-states. Even North Korea calls itself a Democratic People’s Republic. If political practice in North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and so forth differs dramatically from that in Western Europe, in every region official sanctification of “the nation,” “democracy,” and “the people” shows how universal such terminology has become. When and where did these now ubiquitous formulae originate? Modernist scholars like E. J. Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson have won the argument that nationalism should be seen as a uniquely post1780 European development.1 Their insistence that European political culture ruptured in the late eighteenth century is now received orthodoxy. If we define the “nation” as a population whose members claim the following features – political sovereignty, civic equality, a bounded independent territory, and a publicly celebrated secular culture – such an animal simply did not exist before the mid- or late 1700s. As an ideology promoting the unity and welfare of the nation, “nationalism” obviously was no less novel. Nor can we gainsay the modernist argument that these transformations drew sustenance from processes peculiar to industrial

1

E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, new edn. (London: Verso, 1991); John Breuilly, “Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation,” in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 69–101.

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urban society: industrial communications, military conscription, compulsory national schooling, mass consumerism. And yet if this complete constellation cohered only from the late eighteenth century, critical elements surely had a much longer history. Some European medievalists have invoked “nation” and “nationhood” to describe pre-1450 concepts of regnal loyalty. To be sure, they often fail to note the episodic, elitist nature of such patriotism and its habitual subordination to dynastic and religious themes. Yet we can readily accept that the residents of medieval realms often saw themselves as communities of distinct custom and descent.2 Moreover, in seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands, scholars have identified discursive features that, while not yet truly secular or egalitarian, anticipated yet more clearly nationalism’s insistent yoking of state and local culture. By 1650 many Dutchmen, for example, had invested the terms “state,” “people,” and “nation” with much of their modern meaning.3 To this discursive inventory I would add a centuries-long tendency, also anticipating nationalist practice, to invoke cultural traits as public symbols of political allegiance. Such traits could be secular – involving language, hairstyle, and dress, for example – or they could invoke a privileged relation to the deity. But both pre-nationalist and nationalist usages sought to draw a circle around political communities and to elevate recognizable cultural differences as signposts of inclusion. Rather than dwell exclusively on post-1750 rupture, seminal though it was, is it not more useful therefore to see nationalism as a uniquely secular, egalitarian, socially penetrating version of a considerably older European phenomenon that might be termed “political ethnicity”? “Ethnicity” I define as a set of distinctive cultural traits shared by a named population. Such traits become “political” when one or more elements proclaim membership in a state-centered collectivity eager to secure resources for its members. Continuity looms yet larger if we consider social dynamics. The modernists’ emphasis on urban industrial mobilization explains how nationalist doctrines, once formulated, rapidly spread, but fails to explain how such doctrines arose before industry itself. Nor does Benedict 2

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See, for example, Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Philip Gorski, “The Mosaic Moment,” The American Journal of Sociology 105, 5 (2000), 1428–1468; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Anderson’s oft-cited emphasis on vernacular print media as a spur to national consciousness suffice. The truth is that in many West European realms culture was being standardized and politicized through saints’ cults, royal patronage, market systems, songs, sermons, and festivals 300 years before the first printing press. Moreover, while referring to “print-capitalism,” Anderson fails to embed printing itself in broader early modern processes of commercial intensification. By increasing the range and speed with which people and ideas circulated, commodification not only enhanced the accessibility of printed materials. With growing force after 1500, it also drove peasants to the market and pulled local communities into more extended knowledge networks. Finally, a combination of rising literacy – itself a function not merely of print, but of market integration – an expansion of the middle strata, and preindustrial urbanization helped shift authority from the crown to educated public opinion, that is, the “nation.” The gradual, cumulative nature of these changes helps to explain why, although printing itself was in place by the late 1400s, nationalism per se did not develop for another three centuries. In the same way that nationalism and pre-1750 solidarities may be seen as subcategories of political ethnicity, should we not conclude that nineteenth-century industrial communications offered a remarkably powerful version of social processes under way since the late medieval era? So far as I know, despite its obvious logic, no scholar has made this claim for centuries-long processual – as opposed to intellectual – continuity. But if our understanding of political ethnicity suffers from temporal segmentation, it suffers even more obviously from geographic restriction. Such discussions of nationalist antecedents as we have focus almost entirely on Europe, to the neglect of Asia. In part, this neglect reflects the fact that, in addition to vast imperial size and ethnic heterogeneity, exposure to Inner Asian conquest rendered India, Yuan and Qing East Asia, and the Ottoman realm particularly unpromising sites for political ethnicity. In these areas, which I term Eurasia’s “exposed zone,” rulers of Inner Asian origin commonly raised barriers, both intentional and unintended, against vertical solidarity. There was, however, a second category of Asian states that had rather more in common with Europe and, along with Europe, comprised what I term Eurasia’s “protected zone,” protected, that is, by geography against Inner Asian conquerors. Principally this meant Western and Northern Europe, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, and mainland Southeast Asia. In these regions smaller territories, freedom from Inner Asian conquest, and

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a correspondingly modest cultural gap between rulers and subjects favored a stronger sense of political inclusion. The striking point is that although the protected rimlands, ranged around Eurasia’s extremities, had little or no contact with one another, political ethnicities throughout this zone showed basic similarities in chronology, dynamics, and symbolic function. What we now call Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Korea, France, Britain, Spain, and so forth became coherent cultural and political domains only between 1400 and 1800, and with particular force after 1650. In each case ethnic and religious usages associated with central elites spread down the social scale and across the landscape.4 In these ways between 1400 and 1850 political ethnicity in the rimlands of Asia and Europe prefigured those symbolic claims and that progressive incorporation that were central to European nationalism. But why should distant Eurasian realms with minimal contact have marched to the same drummer? And if Asian and European political societies resembled one another, why did Western Europe alone produce nations as defined earlier? My research, then, has three objectives. First, to identify in Europe continuities as well as cleavages between early modern and modern, that is, pre- and post-1780, political cultures. Second, to show how in terms of dynamics, timing, and ritual expression, political ethnicity in Asian rimlands resembled patterns in Western Europe. Both inquiries seek to modify an historiography of nationalism whose overwhelming focus on the post-1780 era and on European-Asian difference entails a fair degree of myopia. But third, I seek to explain why, despite similarities with other protected zone regions, nationalism and democracy arose only in Western Europe. Although, of course, no single realm typified Europe or rimland Asia, I use Britain and Burma as case studies because I am a Burma scholar, because in 1400 both realms were still broadly comparable in political geography and material endowments, because their trajectories and chronologies proved surprisingly similar, and because each polity efficiently encapsulated a regional tradition. Aspirational though they may have been, by 1850 nationalism and popular sovereignty were embedded in the cultures of Britain, its American offshoot, and other northwest European 4

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See discussion of exposed and protected zones in Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009).

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states. For its part Burma illustrates the pattern in Southeast Asia, Japan, and other parts of Asia wherein ethnicity was politicized, but popular sovereignty remained unknown. While I stop in 1850, these regional differences have contemporary resonance. Nationalism and democracy, I suggested, are now universal norms. But in much of East Asia, Russia, and across the Mideast, the Western linkage between nationalism and democracy – if it ever existed – has been severed. Advocates of modernization theory used to assume that prosperity + education + the internet would translate automatically into democracy as understood in the West. But today realms as diverse as Turkey, the PRC, Cuba, Thailand, and Iran (not to mention much of Europe itself in the 1930s) show how easily local understandings of the proper relation between the individual and the state can sustain authoritarian nationalism. As an instrument of practical power, nationalism, like electricity, is irresistible. But democracy in the sense of political choice and protected liberties, is easily dismissed. And as China’s global influence rises, the decoupling of nationalism from democracy may become more common. This is hardly to claim that by 1850 the world was permanently divided between democratic and nondemocratic cultures. There are far too many contingencies and Asian exceptions to support so essentialist a claim. My goal is less ambitious and invidious: merely to show that by the seventeenth century Western Europe, represented by Great Britain, had pioneered concepts of political community that were as distinctive as they would become historically influential. This was true even though the outer forms and chronologies of ethnic development in Britain, Burma, and a great many Eurasian states were loosely similar. If I may be permitted a biological analogy, the modernist understanding of nationalism recalls the biblical view of man’s relation to other creatures. Like Adam, nationalism is said to have arisen more or less de novo. Like Adam, who had dominion over the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the seas, European nationalism was seen as ontologically distinct from – and intrinsically superior to – all other forms. By contrast, I seek to construct a Darwinian taxonomy in which European nationalism, premodern European political ethnicity, and Asian political ethnicity were all species within a broader – but hitherto unrecognized – genus. Such a perspective allows us to recognize both the coherence of early modern Eurasia and European exceptionalism. Western Europe was ordinary. It was also unique.

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I begin, then, with Burmese-British similarities.5 Here, of course, only the most arid outline is possible, but I argue that in both realms from 1400 to 1850 political ethnicity grew more coherent through the synergy of four dynamics: a) economic expansion to the political benefit of emergent cores; b) more rapid cultural circulation that also privileged central districts; c) rising interstate warfare, which strengthened out-group exclusion; d) state efforts to define and police in-group boundaries. Notwithstanding growing discrepancies in economic organization, both Britain and Burma after circa 1500 enjoyed long-term increases in population and output that magnified the authority of densely populated cores – southeastern England and the Irrawaddy basin – over less favored areas. In both realms a drawn-out transition from labor services and land grants to cash taxes and commercial awards reinforced central powers of extraction and control. But commercial expansion also encouraged voluntary adhesion insofar as it led provincial elites to support an apparatus that could protect trade, standardize litigation, coordinate patronage, and redistribute rising revenues.6 At the same time as economic growth strengthened royal authority, it accelerated the circulation of cultural motifs, especially those of the central region. Along the frontiers English and Burmese colonists displaced alien populations. In more long-settled districts – at a popular level through the movement of clerics, migrants, peddlers, and peasant producers, and at an elite level through new schools and social networks – the dialect and customs of the capital diffused into the provinces. Economic growth lent reading greater practical value, provided the wherewithal for more schools and teachers, hence for a marked increase in literacy; and opened paths along which written materials could migrate. As polities grew more coherent, warfare, our third dynamic, became more sustained, administratively demanding, and socially encompassing. Warfare thus reinforced cultural centripetalism by strengthening royal finance and administration and by sharpening ethnic boundaries with

5

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For more complete documentation than this brief chapter can provide, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels; Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest c. 1580–1760 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Lieberman, Why Were Nationalism and Democracy European? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming); Short Oxford History of the British Isles, Paul Langford, General Editor, Vols. 2–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–2010). Victor Lieberman, “Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, c. 1350–1830, and Their Implications for State Formation,” Modern Asian Studies 25 (1992), 1–31; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Vol. 1, ch. 2; and nn. 11, 12, 19 infra.

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tales of communal danger and salvation. During the Anglo-French wars of 1689 to 1815, contrasts between Protestant truth and Catholic “superstition, servitude, and poverty” helped English, Welsh, and Scots forge an overarching British identity.7 During eighteenth-century wars, Burmese opposed their religious devotion to the infidelity and depravity of their non-Burmese foes, some of whom fell victim to racial massacres.8 Finally, each state patronized cultural norms with growing effectiveness. Such policies reflected both self-sufficient cultural sensibilities and an instrumentalist desire to strengthen identification with the throne. Less intentionally, by appealing to snobbery and ambition, the Burmese capital and London gave provincial elites an incentive to engage in what might be termed self-Burmanization and self-Anglicization. The critical element in each case was an exemplary center that could define and epitomize cultural excellence. In response, political culture in both mainland Southeast Asia and the British Isles was transformed. In Upper Burma – the most populous sector of the western mainland and thus the natural center of political gravity – after 1500 Burmese speakers assumed an ever more unified, militant, expressly Buddhist identity. A reenergized Burmese-led state subdued a variety of minority peoples, among whom the Mons of Lower Burma suffered what can only be termed rolling genocide. In 1560 in Lower Burma it was said that Mons “were as numerous as hairs on a bullock, but we Burmese as few as the horns.”9 But by 1850 perhaps 85 percent of the people in Lower Burma spoke Burmese and sported Burmese hairstyles and tattoos. Without necessarily abandoning their own ethnicities, other groups on the imperial periphery also imitated Burmese art, dress, literature, and religious practices. Burmese dominance fed on Upper Burma’s superior agrarian technique, growing trade with China and the Indian Ocean, the wider circulation of monks, pilgrims, traders, and colonists, and an expansion in Burmese-language literacy. The latter privileged both Burmese secular motifs and reformed versions of Buddhism as interpreted chiefly by Burmese monks. Thus by 1850 to a degree inconceivable in 1400, self-identified Burmese dominated the entire region. Military success bred ill-disguised xenophobia. Even common cultivators boasted that in vanquishing armies from Siam, Manipur, and China, the Burmese had proven themselves the strongest race (lu-myo) on earth.

7 8

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Linda Colley, Britons, rev. edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Victor Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 12 (1978), 455–482; Lieberman, Administrative Cycles, ch. 5. Han-tha-wadi hsin-byu-shin ayei-daw-bon (Rangoon: Sun Press, 1918), 8.

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Yet to anticipate contrasts with England, note that Burmese dominance was sanctioned in universal Buddhist terms; Burmese hegemony, it was said, reflected their greater fidelity to the Religion (tha-thana). Since the Religion was coterminous with society itself, the empire was conceived as a union of distinctive ethnicities united by allegiance to a ruler whose commitment to promote True Doctrine defied geographic constraint.10 In principle if not in practice, Burmese therefore remained but one constituent of a polyethnic domain. In the mid-1400s the British Isles were only marginally less fragmented than western mainland Southeast Asia, but from the early sixteenth century, at the same time as Upper Burma revived, southeastern England renewed its authority over the rest of the archipelago. In a word, elites across England accepted a southeastern cultural template. Those same motifs gradually modified gentry and urban life in Wales and Scotland, which between 1536 and 1707 were incorporated into an ever more powerful London-centered polity. In Ireland Anglo-Scottish assaults on Gaelic culture were no less ambitious, albeit less successful in the long term, than Burmese attacks on Mon civilization.11 By transforming one of the most Catholic countries of Europe into an expressly anti-Catholic realm, the Reformation heightened England’s sense of mission while helping to standardize written and spoken English through the Protestant Bible. One can find loose parallels after circa 1450 in the literacy-mediated spread of “purified” Theravada Buddhism. Reinforcing religious spurs to integration in Britain as in Burma were economic forces, starting in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a growth in European and Atlantic trade, 10

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Note 8 supra; Alexey Kirichenko, “From Thathanadaw to Theravada Buddhism,” in Thomas DuBois, ed., Casting Faiths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23–45; Kirichenko, “Dynamics of Monastic Mobility and Networking in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Upper Burma,” in D. Christian Lammerts, ed., Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2015), 333–372. On the progress and emotional/cultural implications of British integration, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Colley, Britons; Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? (London: Routledge, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British Consciousness and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Steven Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union (London: Longman, 1995); Tony Clayton and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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followed in the eighteenth century by agricultural improvements and a further surge in trade with North America. By the mid-1600s Britain already was moving from a network of regional economies to an integrated national economy.12 As the commercial center, home to the printing industry, and hub of a growing road network, London issued cultural judgments that radiated across English counties. But if pressures from the southeast nurtured an increasingly coherent English patriotism, after 1700 similar pressures joined the economic lures of empire and Francophobia to enfold Wales, Scotland, and the Anglo-Irish within the emergent pan-British persona. The ensuing tension between an overarching, relatively shallow imperial consciousness and older, more emotionally accessible regional loyalties recalls the general situation in Burma. Why these dynamics should have been synchronized not only between Britain and Southeast Asia, but across much of Eurasia is a problem I have sought to address elsewhere. Suffice it to say that coordination reflected synchronized recovery from a climatically influenced economic/political collapse in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, followed by the interplay between improved hemispheric climate, the arrival in Asia of European-style firearms, Japanese and New World bullion flows, and expanding maritime trade with the attendant dissemination of new crops and preindustrial technologies.13 In sum, parallel dynamics and broadly synchronized rhythms drove integration in the British Isles and mainland Southeast Asia. Moreover until about 1600, at a reasonable level of abstraction, similar assumptions animated both polities. Sovereignty resided solely in the ruler, whose authority derived from cosmic law (God or karma) and dynastic right, and to whom loyalty was personal. Insofar as each crown’s raison d’etre was soteriological, its embrace of secular cultural remained qualified and ambivalent. Social inequality, sanctioned by the cosmos, was inherently moral because it was integral to social order. As subjects rather than citizens, in both realms the vast majority lacked political agency. Yet while in Burma these beliefs survived until the colonial era, Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to introduce critical 12

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Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 3; Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Vol. 2; Lieberman and Brendan Buckley, “The Impact of Climate on Southeast Asia, c. 950–1820: New Findings,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012), 1049–1096.

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modifications. Tudor monarchs accessed noble and church wealth only by collaborating more closely with Parliament. Acting in the name of the political community – defined as those propertied interests represented in Parliament – the legislature compressed the distance between state and society and developed an ideology that was expressly English, Protestant, and anti-absolutist. This ideology proved sufficiently coherent to execute Charles I, but insufficient to yield a stable alternative to monarchy during the mid-seventeenth-century interregnum. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 addressed this tension by redefining the polity as a balanced union of royal and parliamentary power. Gradually the balance shifted in favor of Parliament by broadening the electorate, by extending rights to religious minorities and lower social groups, and by enhancing further the power of the legislature. In Paul Langford’s formulation, the eighteenth century made government parliamentary, while the nineteenth century made it democratic.14 In short, by the 1830s some of those features that Britain had shared with Burma in 1500 – exclusive royal sovereignty, rigid hierarchy, popular passivity, the crown’s soteriological mission – had been modified or rejected entirely. Likewise an end to English claims in France and efforts to imbue the British Isles with a more coherent personality produced a closer fit between culture and territory. By 1850, notwithstanding unresolved tensions between British and sub-British identities, the United Kingdom embodied a recognizable form of nationalism as defined in my opening comments. To recall, then, my earlier problematic: why were nationalism and democracy ultimately West European? In part, surely, because of distinct legal and religious traditions. Without invoking clichés of Oriental despotism, we can acknowledge that medieval British law granted individuals and collective bodies a degree of security without Southeast Asian analogue. Whereas in Burma ministerial prebends and private lands remained subject to royal confiscation, English feudal law promised protection against arbitrary seizure and fines. At first restricted to the king’s principal vassals, these rights gradually were extended to the generality of property holders. Likewise, the corporate privileges of towns, universities, and

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Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 683. See too Pincus, 1688; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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Parliament – including, most critically, Parliament’s right to approve taxes – were enshrined in law and tradition. To these notions of formal representation and protected liberties, Burma offered no parallel.15 A no less peculiar medieval legacy was Latin Christendom’s distinction between the universal church and the territorial kingdom. Early medieval realms had tended to Caesaropapism, which accorded kingship a universal sacerdotal quality. But by strengthening the division between the church and secular jurisdictions, the Papal Revolution of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries encouraged each ruler to identify more closely with a particular territory and people.16 In abandoning universal claims, Catholic polities thus diverged from Theravada Buddhist – as well as Orthodox Christian, Confucian, and Muslim – states. As I suggested, Burma never developed a secular theory, a conceptual language, to formalize or justify Burmese supremacy. Even as he decimated Mon communities, the Burmese military hero Alaung-hpaya (r. 1752–1760) proclaimed himself not king of the Burmese, but Embryo Buddha and World Ruler. Subsequently the Protestant Reformation reinforced national distinctiveness far more effectively than reformed Theravada Buddhism. By translating the Bible into the vernacular and proclaiming themselves the new Israel, English zealots pioneered anti-Catholic patriotism. Yet ironically, because the upheavals of 1534–1688 showed the toxicity of sectarian enthusiasm and because the Church of England found itself forced to cohabit with dissenters and Catholic recusants, in the long term the Reformation had the unintended effect of encouraging a degree of tolerance and state withdrawal from matters of conscience. Recoiling against religious strife, many Britons came to supplement religion by embracing commerce as a spur to harmony, the nation-state as an instrument of domestic peace, and empirical inquiry as an avenue to truth. At the same time, by promoting private Bible study, in effect by universalizing the clergy, the Reformation joined literacy and consumerism to encourage individual agency, which aided the transition from subjecthood to citizenship.17

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Jack Goldstone, Why Europe? (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2009), ch. 6; Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012); and n. 11 supra. Harold Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pt. I; Joseph Strayer, Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 20–23. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Langford, Polite and Commercial People; Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

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In sum, then, in Britain a distinct legal heritage, an early fusion of political and secular culture, and Christian fragmentation joined to nourish national and democratic orientations. Ultimately, however, discursive shifts of this sort are inexplicable without also considering material contexts. Take geography. In the early fourteenth century the British and Burmese realms both enjoyed an organic cohesion from the grouping of thinly populated upland zones around a prosperous lowland core. But Britain’s island geography was far more conducive to imagining and controlling discrete spaces than the vast highlands that march unbroken from the Irrawaddy basin into the Himalayas. By 1300 a territorialized sense of political ethnicity already seems to have been more salient in England than in Burma. In turn, the difficulty of trans-montane trade, the tiny size of Burma’s urban market, and, above all, Burma’s position off the main international trade routes meant that in 1500 Burma was less commercialized than Britain. Thereafter, as Britain came to dominate the vast Atlantic system and as British agriculture, manufacture, and marketing underwent major structural change, the gap widened dramatically. Best estimates are that the Burmese economy grew some 70 percent between 1600 and 1800, but that British national income rose 500 percent in the eighteenth century alone.18 As well as any factor, economic intensification explains the growing strength of English and British nationalism. Commercial rivalries, first with the Netherlands and then France, revolutionized state structures and catalyzed patriotism. What has been termed the fiscal/military state arose largely to prosecute civil wars and Anglo-Dutch wars in the seventeenth century, and then the global contest with France. Spurred by the French challenge, from 1680 to 1815 the British state’s share of national income rose from some 4 percent to 20–35 percent (calculations vary). Along with the rapid post-1650 expansion of the economy itself, this nurtured a vast increase in government personnel and a more bureaucratic ethos. And because parliament had to approve taxes, the crown’s chronic need for military finance in the eighteenth century underlay the rise of parliamentary supremacy. In short, by allowing the bureaucracy and Parliament to displace the royal court as the locus of power, commercial-military synergies recast national institutions. Most critical, as noted, the struggle 18

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Lieberman, “Secular Trends”; Michael Duffy, “Contested Empires, 1756–1815,” in Paul Langford, ed., Eighteenth Century 1688–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 239; n. 12 supra.

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against French “popery and tyranny” encouraged unprecedentedly inclusive, popular notions of citizenship that blended Protestant virtue, British liberties, empire, and shared island-hood.19 Again, Burma offers parallels to most of these developments, but always less sustained and intense. If the British government in 1815 obtained 20–35 percent of GDP, its Burmese counterpart probably never secured 10 percent of an economy that was less than a tenth as large and far less extensively monetized. Opportunities for administrative and popular mobilization were correspondingly modest. Besides animating warfare, commerce nurtured English and then British patriotism by accelerating cultural circulation and empowering new social groups. Already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we see the spread of a pan-English, even an island-wide, culture of gentility. But from the late 1600s internal migration, urbanization, and printing dramatically accelerated the diffusion of London and Oxbridge learning, manners, and speech. In vertical terms too the growing size and selfconfidence of intermediate social strata aided integration while broadening the base of politics. By 1770, according to some estimates, in England and Wales the so-called middling sort had swelled to 40 percent of the population.20 Their influence appeared in the arts, in wider literacy, in a consequent explosion of printed materials, and in a consumer culture that encouraged a degree of social fluidity and indeterminacy. But above all we see middle class influence in politics, where a public sphere grew more socially inclusive, institutionally secure, and intellectually voracious. The physical foundation of this new politics was a competitive urban press joined to an urban mycelium of clubs, debating societies, political associations, and coffee houses where national affairs were freely discussed. Controlling some of the most dynamic sectors of the economy, businessmen, shopkeepers, and professionals now championed a more participatory model of citizenship that let individuals appropriate and redefine patriotism. In the 1830s and 1840s spokesmen for the emergent industrial working class broadened this democratic opening.21 19

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John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pt. III; Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 702–710. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57; Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 61–65, carefully defining that status. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds.,

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As noted, Burma also saw rising literacy and cultural circulation. But whereas social categories in Britain grew more fluid and diffuse, in Burma after 1760 the new Kon-baung dynasty succeeded in strengthening hereditary distinctions. Whereas in Britain subjects became citizens, in Burma sovereignty remained exclusively royal. I find no aspiring Burmese social groups eager to expand their influence, no urban sites open to public discussion, no commentary critical of royal institutions per se. The consistent ambition of courtiers, literati, and commoners alike was not to assert individual or collective rights vis-a-vis the throne, but to find a patron whose authority derived from the throne. The traditional focus on acquiring good karma for the afterlife, itself a form of patronage-seeking, only intensified. If the search for salvation was individual, the rituals and animating assumptions of religious life were still intensely communal. To be sure, in Britain too salvationist religion remained vital. In contrast to French secularism, in England the Enlightenment developed largely within Protestantism. But insofar as Protestantism and commerce favored individual expression, they promoted not only citizen empowerment, but novel understandings of personal identity. In a broader sense, consumerism, overseas discoveries, the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, a peculiarly British empiricism, an increasingly technological and scientific public culture, a generalized weariness with religious contention – all such forces joined not to secularize society so much as to compress religious claims and undermine the authority of ancient religious texts and classical wisdom to a degree quite unknown in Southeast Asia and indeed Asia. In response to these insistent currents, Protestant scripturalism was refashioned into a more rational, private, and tolerant faith, with a more optimistic view of man’s lot and a post-Calvinist emphasis on cosmic benevolence and the pursuit of happiness in this world. To paraphrase Brad Gregory, Britons decided to eschew theology in order to go shopping.22 Popular opinion focused on Parliament and the monarchy as guarantors of social order, overseas empire, and prosperity. Thus in Britain patriotism, that is to say nationalism, filled much of the space opened by the expansion of commerce and by the transformation of religion.

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The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and English Society 1695–1855 (Harlow: Longman, 2000); Porter, Modern World, ch. 2; Owen Ashton, Robert Fryson, and Stephen Roberts, eds., The Chartist Legacy (Nr. Woodbridge, 1999). Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 243.

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In conclusion, one cannot dismiss my opening emphasis on eighteenthcentury discontinuities in Europe. Yet at the same time I believe that nationalism should be seen as a late, hypertrophic, discursively original version of substantially older, more general transformations not only in Britain, but in Burma and most of rimland Eurasia. If Britain was at all representative, without examining the growing coherence of polityspecific cultures in the centuries before 1800, we cannot understand the ease with which nationalism spread across Europe in the nineteenth century and much of Asia in the twentieth. Nor, I suspect, can we understand the idiosyncratic interpretations that Asian societies imposed on the new European import.

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19 Patriliny and Modern States in the Middle East Diane E. King

“Patriliny” is a set of ideas and practices in which only one parent, the father, bequeaths certain identity categories, social roles, and goods to his children.1 Patriliny fosters particular understandings of ancestry and individual and group ontology. I draw on theories of patrilineal kinship to argue here that patriliny is integral to conceptions of citizenship and group membership in the Middle East, and that it strongly influences ideas and practices pertaining to the state and nation there. Who belongs to the state, and on what basis is that inclusion made real? This chapter’s partial answer for a particular region relies on a particular type of descent logic and its application. The Middle East and North Africa might well be the largest contiguous area in the world in which patriliny is the chief way of organizing kin groups, with only two exceptions, the Tuareg and many Israeli Jews, who are matrilineal.2 Kinship and descent categories and relationships are strongly relevant in people’s everyday experience in the region. For some people, having a patriline carries little meaning, but some others are members of patrilines that extend back centuries and confer great prestige. The basic idea of patriliny, however, is pervasive and affects everyone at some level. In the idealized concept, everyone belongs to a corporate group that traces its origin through males to an apical ancestor who lived at least two generations prior. The dynastic principle is applied not only to a few elite groups, as is common to many parts of the world, but in 1 2

“Patrilineality” and “agnatic kinship” are synonyms. Diane E. King and Linda Stone, “Lineal Masculinity: Gendered Memory within Patriliny,” American Ethnologist 37 (2010), 323–336.

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theory is applied to everyone. Patriliny is one kind of unilineal descent reckoning; matriliny is the other.3 A “patrilineage” is a group of people who trace their ancestry through males to a common apical ancestor. Members may be male or female, but one key difference between males and females is that male members pass on lineage membership, while females do not. Membership is passed on as a whole rather than hybridized. A “patriline” is a single line of male ancestors, usually rendered as extending back in time. In this chapter I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as well as the work of other scholars on citizenship, culture, and political community in the Middle East. My purview centers on Iraq but also includes those states whose territories overlap partially or mainly with the Fertile Crescent. I have been working as an ethnographer in the Kurdistan Region since 1995. There, a significant proportion of the social categories that animate daily social relations are patrilineal. That is, they are passed on and received through biological patrilineal relationships, from fathers to their children, and category membership is based on the tracing of biological patrilineal links at least three generations deep. Indigenous practices have found support in and are reflected in the practices of the modern state, even though the state was colonial and in many cases occupied and is now postcolonial and, especially in the cases of Iraq and Syria, fragile. In the Kurdistan Region, each and every person claiming to belong to the local body politic is expected to belong to a patrilineage (‘a’ila, mal). Many people also belong to a tribe (eshiret), and tribes are patrilineal and territory-based except in the case of a few now-settled nomadic tribes. Most of the tribes spread across noncontiguous territory are those that were formerly nomadic. Becoming a full member of a tribe is not possible in one generation; in the first generation, the male founder of a new patrilineage that comes to be a part of a tribe is usually a migrant from another tribal area. He is in a liminal state and unlikely to be seen as a full member. His status as a resident within the tribal lands is contingent on his acceptance by the tribe’s chief or chiefs. If he stays and has sons, and they have sons, a new tribal patrilineage has formed that traces its origin to an “original” male settler.4 At any given time, many people may find 3

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In many settings, neither of these is found. The third most prevalent form of kinship is bilaterality, which is found in many parts of Southeast Asia, mainstream American culture, and elsewhere. In bilateral kinship, both parents are seen as conferring identity, and individuals may thus identify with a variety of different identity categories. Corporate groups based on descent generally do not form. See Chapurukha Kusimba’s chapter in this volume.

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themselves in an insecure state vis-à-vis a patrilineal and tribal ideal. A person who is living away from “their” (their patrilineage’s) territory due to violence or another compelling reason to move is usually in a vulnerable state and may be classified as an “internally displaced person.” Kurdish social life was once almost wholly centered around a village located within the territory controlled by and identified with a tribal chief (agha). The territorial aspect of a tribe usually consists of a group of villages in a given territory. As is typical throughout the Middle East, a village is simply a delineated spread of land. Residences are clustered somewhere on that land. The village is comprised of the residences and the land together. The land has borders, but the residential portion of the village does not. When villages are destroyed – and villages in the area have had, for thousands of years, a high rate of destruction by enemies from the local level to the state level – they are often rebuilt on a different site, but on the same tract of land. The rebuilt houses are thus considered to comprise the same village even though they may be positioned differently. Despite the rebuilding of thousands of village houses in the 1990s, a viable mountain economy has yet to be reestablished following the widespread attacks by the Iraqi government prior to 1991, in which more than 4,000 villages were destroyed, many multiple times. The mountains are the site of an ongoing conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), among other difficulties. Most mountain villages are not fully occupied, at least not year-round. However, people continue to adhere to identity claims developed patrilineally in mountain villages. Rebuilding a village after its destruction can constitute a powerful statement about identity. Identity is reaffirmed through the reconstruction of a village house, even if its occupants may retain their homes in the city and spend very little time in it as is often the case.

patriliny and individual gendered relations An emphasis on patrilineages leads to particular kinds of social relations, and to gender systems in which women and men’s expected roles can be quite specific. Patrilineages police their membership by controlling reproduction.5 They control reproduction by limiting female autonomy. A “seed and soil” metaphor may be used, in which a woman’s womb is imagined as nurturing soil into which a man plants a seed and a new 5

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Diane E. King, Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 122–125.

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member of his group later emerges.6 A society that places a very strong emphasis on patrilineal identities must keep women of childbearing age under control, or risk losing the assurance of paternity, which would then call into question infants’ patrilineal membership and therefore a host of features pertaining to their identity and social roles. In patriliny, men make descendants; women merely bear them. Women receive certain identity categories from their fathers, but they do not pass them on. Only men pass on particular types of identity categories, and a man can put a great deal of energy into making a life that will someday be remembered by and through his lineal descendants.7 Identity that is passed on patrilineally is ideally kept pure from one generation to the next. A child of an “Arab” father and a “Kurdish” mother is an “Arab.” Such a person does not typically say, “I am half Arab and half Kurdish,” although he or she might very well say, as I have heard from such individuals, “I am Arab, but I feel close to the Kurds because my mother is Kurdish.” Based on her work in the Balkans, Bette Denich identified a “patrilineal paradox” in which “the structure denies the formal existence of women, while at the same time group survival depends upon them. The structure requires women’s submission to group interests, but women are not by nature submissive – if they were elaborate control mechanisms would not be necessary.”8 Many of the women I know in Kurdistan embody this tension. They are called upon to produce offspring (especially sons) for their husbands’ lineages, and they chafe under a clear regime of female control. In my view, the social fact that only men pass on many of the identity categories by which the society is ordered contributes strongly to female subjugation in the Middle East. In the patrilineal logic found across the region, the male parentage of each child must be known with certainty. Male parentage is, in every human setting, less easy to prove than female parentage, and this can lead to intrigue, court cases, and so on. But in a patrilineal system, knowing with certainty which men fathered which children is of absolute, paramount importance. Fathers (and mothers)

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Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society, Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Diane E. King, “The Personal Is Patrilineal: Namus as Sovereignty,” in Middle Eastern Belongings, Diane E. King, ed. (London: Routledge, 2010), 59–84. King and Stone, “Lineal Masculinity.” Bette Denich, “Sex and Power in the Balkans,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 243–262.

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who curtail their daughters’ freedom, and brothers who assist their fathers in it, are increasing the marriageability of their daughter/sister. A potential groom may seek to know with confidence that a potential bride will bear his children, and only his. He can be reassured of this when he observes (and later sees to it as a husband) that her autonomy is restricted. As Marshall Sahlins puts it in a discussion of social constructivism and kin relationships, “A whole series of persons may be bodily instantiated in the newborn child, including lineage and clan ancestors, while the woman who gave birth is excluded.”9 Sahlins goes on in the same section to describe a phenomenon sometimes called “patrogenesis,” an idea that can accompany patriliny and that heavily privileges the male role in biological reproduction. In the furthest logical extension of this idea, a woman simply carries an infant that has been placed in her womb by a man. Conversely, the child can be seen as belonging to a rich and longstanding set of male forbears, a patrilineage. If male, that child can be seen as a possible extender of that lineage, and if female, the child can be seen as someone who will grow up and help to extend another lineage (or her own, if she reproduces with a cousin in her own lineage).

patriliny, tribal leaders, and everyday community relations The patrilineage is frequently invoked in everyday social connections in the socially stratified Kurdistan Region of Iraq. During the course of my interactions with people in and from there, I have seen many people display impressive amounts of knowledge of names, reputations, histories, and other bits of information about other people, especially those in their immediate community but often extending over a wide area. Much of this knowledge about others is not individualized, but organized according to patrilineal membership. The person with the impressive amounts of social knowledge may have learned lineage names to a much greater degree than individual names. A member of a large, influential lineage may know hundreds of names of individuals in their lineage, and hundreds more names of people in other lineages that have married into their own lineage or that have a client relationship. Someone from a smaller lineage might know far fewer of those types of names, but might know more friends and neighbors. In their evening visits to homes and 9

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Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is – And Is Not (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3.

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coffeehouses, the person from the large lineage may be more likely to spend time with lineage mates and affines, and the person from a smaller lineage might spend time with non-kin neighbors. In each case, however, the individual may have a familiarity with an impressively large number of people, categorized most basically by lineage. For example, members of the Sorchi tribe, whose territory is near the regional capital, Hewler, have a reputation as expert herders, farmers, and warriors, and for long opposing the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main nationalist groups in Kurdistan (which once functioned as rebel groups against Baghdad, but now function as political parties). Sorchi men of fighting age refused to join the peshmerga in their fight against the Iraqi government prior to 1991, and among other clashes, an affine of its chiefly lineage told me in an interview, the KDP allegedly killed two of its most prominent members in 1996. C. J. Edmonds cites data from the 1947 census noting that there were 7,300 people in the Sorchi area.10 If about half were males, and if they belonged to lineages with founders in the nineteenth century or earlier, then it is possible to see how a person well-versed in the Sorchi in the present could be able to name all of the existing Sorchi lineages, and to make a connection between those lineages and certain reputed historical events. For Kurdish Iraqis rural and urban, leadership by members of notable lineages continues to be connected to particular spaces, and the individual aghas such as the leaders of the Sorchi, are members of lineages that define, and are defined by, those spaces and remembered deeds that took place there. These spaces are in most cases rural, and have salience even in the modernizing, urbanizing twenty-first century. There is no such thing as an agha who does not have a “home” village, and there is no such thing as an agha who cannot make a claim of membership in a known patriline. Patriliny, tribal leadership, space, and identity claims are conflated in the person of the agha, and in the corporate group of the agha lineage. As Van Bruinessen has argued, a serious consideration of the state must take into account local-level leaders such as Kurdish aghas, and ask what gives them their legitimacy.11 In my observation during fieldwork, agha legitimacy is based to a great degree on claims of prestigious patrilineal descent, and on the maintenance of behavior that ensures legitimate paternity

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C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq 1919–1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 438. Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992).

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claims in the form of the control of girls and women. Until very recently paternity was the only means to citizenship claims: only men could pass citizenship on to their offspring through 2006, when some married women gained the right.

patriliny and modernizing states In the twentieth century, as the modern state developed in the Middle East, patriliny became the basis for citizenship. In Arab-majority states such as Iraq, the vast majority of states in the area, with very few exceptions only fathers can pass on citizenship.12 This is the case with Iran as well. Turkey has allowed mothers to pass on citizenship since 2001. The first male citizens to register in their respective new countries after their founding in the wake of World War I, went on to have the power to create another generation of citizens by siring children. This was a power their wives and sisters did not have, since women were not allowed to pass on citizenship (nor to vote or exercise some other rights that they later acquired in all but Saudi Arabia). Patrilineal citizenship was by no means unique to the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century; indeed, it was very common in Europe and throughout the world. British mothers, for example were only allowed to pass on citizenship starting in 1985. However, not only has it lasted longer in the Middle East region than elsewhere, but the Middle Eastern states recognized patrilineal succession in far more specific categories than citizenship: religion, sect (religious subcategory), ethnicity, and even residence itself. Since the citizenship records in most of the Arabmajority states can be traced to Ottoman record keeping before World War I, the citizenry in each country effectively comprises a “national” (without implying ethnic in this instance) patrilineage of descendants from the originally registered male citizens. This has a host of social and political ramifications for individuals in everyday life. Moreover, patriliny has served as a basis for legitimacy that is deployed in a wide variety of ways by state leaders. Many of the leaders of the Middle East whose leadership has been challenged since the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath of armed civil conflict have used patriliny to forge a narrative about themselves and their relationship to the nation. Every ruling dynasty in the Middle East and North Africa is a patrilineage, some with claims of patrilineal descent from the family of the Prophet 12

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Gianluca Paolo Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin, Religion and Nation-State (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 96–100.

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Mohammed. Other leaders such as Saddam Hussein have invented narratives about their patrilines, and many have made a claim to be their nation’s “father,” as some European colonizers did before them.13 In Ottoman Turkey, a nationalist concept of “fatherland” was promoted in the late nineteenth century.14 Invocations of fatherhood, a key component of patriliny, can therefore be an important tool in the construction of a body politic anywhere, but they are especially powerful when combined with the multigenerational concept of fatherhood that is patriliny. The late modern state was supposed to offer a new understanding of the body politic not drawn from concepts of autochthony or familial relationships, but emphasizing individual identity and rights. The idea of individual rights has been prevalent in Middle Eastern visions of modernity just as it has been in many settings. However, since the founding of the modern Middle Eastern states by European powers and local elites following World War I, Middle Eastern leaders have often drawn on, rather than turned away from, patrilineal collectivist concepts in their promotion of the modern. Despite doing so in diverse ways, patriliny is a thread through many of their practices and narratives. The twentieth-century modern Middle Eastern state fused patriliny, an idea thousands of years old and that had already been adopted by the state in the form of the millet system and in other ways, and modern conceptions of citizenship to arrive at the present system in which each person is assigned to the religious and ethnic category of his or her father. Citing the use of Ottoman genealogical lineage in the state almanacs (salname) of the late nineteenth century, Deringil notes that while “[s]uch manifest official fiction was an ancient tradition in Islamic court panegyrics . . . what is interesting here is that it should be featured in a state almanac which is a creation of bureaucratic modernization and features such mundane data as the names of various ministers, agricultural produce, and main geographical features of the area.”15 13

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Hosham Dawod, “Tribalism and Power in Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s ‘House,’” in Contesting the State: The Dynamics of Resistance and Control, Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer, eds. (Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2012), 87–123; Diane E. King, “Kinship and State: Arab States,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Suad Joseph, ed. (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 347–349; Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 27.

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All citizens of the new post-Ottoman states were expected to have nationality documents and an identity card. In a modern state, ideally every individual is “made legible” or “calculable” through documents such as a birth certificate, nationality document, or identity card.16 Newborn citizens were assigned the same confessional identity as their father. Patriliny has been shored up in the Middle East during the past century, when, because of its association with the “primordial” and “indigenous,” its erosion might have been expected instead. The Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, which was promulgated thirty years after the initiation of the Tanzimat reforms, codified Ottoman citizenship in patrilineal terms. In Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan the 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights formed the basis of Personal Status Law through the first half of the twentieth century, and further changes to the laws in each country left many of the old features in place.17 Confessional membership as codified patrilineally had a long history in the form of the Ottoman millet system and that came to be known as “sectarianism” or “confessionalism.” I see the state appropriation of categories derived from patrilineal memory, which was instated throughout the Middle East region, as deeply ironic. It categorizes individuals through documentation and law, which are both associated with modernity, but it also denies individual choice in religious identity, which challenges a modern ideal, individualism. When applied to ethnicity, it denies hybrid identities, insisting instead that people claim a unitary identity. The literature on the state and state formation in Iraq and the Middle East includes works on very recent periods and developments, such as that by Juan Cole on post-Ba’athist Iraq.18 A larger literature deals with nationalism in the twentieth century and prior, for example those works by Salame, Khalidi, and Hourani.19 Each of these contains plenty of 16

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James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Second-Year Course in the Study of Contemporary Society (Social Science II), Selected Readings, ed. University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1939), 221–238. J. N. D. Anderson, “Recent Developments In Sharï’a Law II,” The Muslim World 41 (1951), 34–48. Juan Cole, “Struggles over Personal Status and Family Law in Post-Baathist Iraq,” in Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia, Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai, eds. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 105– 125. Salame Ghassan, The Foundations of the Arab State (London: Routledge, 1987); Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, The Origins of Arab

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analysis of Middle Eastern bodies politic, mainly in the form of histories of nationalism and state building. However, in none of these works is the role of patriliny as a conceptual frame acknowledged. Ancestry and descent may be mentioned, but there is no acknowledgment that descent is traced backward in time (and forward) through males only. In these works and others, there is no acknowledgment that people are regarded as belonging to religious categories, “Muslim, “Christian,” and so on, by virtue of the category their father belonged to and not on the basis of any personal affirmation or decision. I find striking the absence of mention of this basic fact of social life in Middle Eastern sectarianism, nationalism, and state building. Of the authors who analyze the rise of the development of the modern state and its imperial past, Michael Meeker at least acknowledges the role of agnatic kinship at a local level, mentioning a number of different patrilineal groups in Turkey and acknowledging them as such.20 Even Meeker, however, does not acknowledge that a key principle of patriliny, identity and group membership through males alone, was applied to Turkish citizenship until women gained the right to pass on their citizenship in 2001.

colonial and postcolonial states upholding patriliny Twentieth-century European colonizers worked to uphold patriliny even as they decried some of its concomitants, helping to produce ironic citizenship regimes that are today facing protest and dissent. As in India, the production of the communalist system found in the postcolonial states of the Middle East can be traced both to local patrilineal values and practices and to European interventions and decisions made by early nationalist elites.21 Sarah D. Shields notes that the League of Nations promoted “a radical new ethnolinguistic definition of political identity” in which “the language of a territory’s population indicated a distinct ethnic identity that defined its political affiliation . . . a marked departure from previous notions of belonging” in both the former Ottoman lands as well as in

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Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). Michael E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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Europe; “[c]ensuses taken by the newly defeated Ottoman Empire had reflected only religious groups; linguistic groups like Turks, Kurds, and Arabs never made sense under Ottoman imperial ideology.”22 I do not disagree that the new categories marked a departure in some ways, but as time went on, it became apparent that states regarded the new categories as rightfully passing down patrilines, which represented a kind of continuity amid departure. In Iraq, British colonizers and the Hashemite dynasty that they installed after World War I codified patriliny in Law No. 42 of 1924: Ottoman citizens residing in Iraq were made into Iraqi citizens, and “a person born to an Iraqi father, regardless of the place of birth was deemed to be an Iraqi national.”23 They also lent the power of the state to the land elements of a patrilineal order of things. The British saw land as lending identity to rural people. “At the center of the British conception of Iraq and its social structures,” Toby Dodge argues, “was an unsustainable dichotomy between town dwellers and rural society built on a misinterpretation of both.”24 Dodge goes on to argue on the same page that the British overlooked recent patterns of migration from the rural “tribal” areas to the city and the ongoing connection that many people in urban areas had to rural tribal social structures. In other words, they took patrilineal structures that might otherwise have been in flux, and made them more permanent through bureaucracy. Marion FaroukSluglett and Peter Sluglett make a similar point: “[W]hile presumably intending to promote the formation of an integrated nation-state, the governments under the mandate and monarchy (1920–1958) in fact helped to reconstruct and perpetuate pre-capitalist and tribal relations through their tribal and land tenure policies.”25

§ § § § § Many people in the Middle East now live out or seek new sets of values that challenge patriliny. The age of Middle Eastern citizenries engaging in what Charles Butterworth called “quietistic acceptance of non22

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Sarah D. Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7. Hilal Abdul-Razzaq Ali Al Jedda v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [UK], heard in the Special Immigration Commission Appeals Commission, May 19–20, decided May 23, 2008; available at http://siac.decisions.tribunals.gov.uk/Documents/outcomes/ AL_JEDDA_PrelimIssuehandingdownJudgment_230508.pdf; accessed March 1, 2017. Tony Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 71. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “The Historiography of Modern Iraq,” The American Historical Review 96 (1991), 1411.

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democratic government” can be said to have ended with the 2005 Lebanese rebellion against Syrian occupation, the largest peaceful protest event in the region in at least several decades (and possibly ever), as well as the advent of the “Arab Spring” in 2011.26 Patrilineal legal structures are being questioned and overturned, whether by some demonstrators, by people making everyday choices, or by decisions taken by government actors. Civil society, sectarianism, and nationalism are themes with a long history of investigation by scholars. However, in much of this literature, patriliny, the logical frame and set of practices at the heart of identity categorization and group formation, is not acknowledged. The fragmentation of the Syrian and Iraqi states is resulting in a great deal of fear, violence, and displacement. A variety of groups representing a wide range of values are now seeking to form or influence states where authoritarian postcolonial states once dominated. Many people, especially the young, have shown an interest in more flexible citizenship regimes, agitating for changes such as allowing women to pass on citizenship to their children. Iraq loosened its restrictions on citizenship succession with a new nationality law in 2006; women can now pass Iraqi citizenship to their children if they meet other criteria, such as being married. What forms of belonging will emerge, and what types of membership regimes will ultimately characterize the twenty-first-century Middle Eastern state is very much an open questions. But this chapter has argued that a political anthropology of the modern Middle Eastern state needs to include patriliny if analytical gaps in the study of Middle Eastern state formation and state values and practices are to be rectified. 26

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Charles E. Butterworth, “State and Authority in Arabic Political Thought,” in The Foundations of the Arab State, Ghassan Salame, ed. (London: Routledge, 1987), 91–111.

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20 Social Service, Convivialismo, and Hegemony in Colombia Rebecca Tally

Flour prices rose dramatically at the end of the 1950s in Colombia. Scarcity was not the cause. At least, that is what the bakers of the National Bread Makers’ Association (ADEPAN) claimed in 1958. According to ADEPAN, speculation was the true cause of rising flour prices. The bakers claimed that millers and the national agency charged with overseeing prices for basic goods worked together nefariously to keep flour prices high. Withholding the bakers’ raw material from the market ensured that prices increased. Bakers warned that this practice could have dire consequences: they threatened to stop making five-peso loaves, the most affordable option for Colombia’s poor. But they insisted that their concern for the public good prevented them from doing that. Rather than hurt their fellow citizens, the bakers would sacrifice their profits.1 A year later the National Supply Institute (INA) accused bakers of cheating consumers by adding more yeast to their dough, reducing loaf size, and increasing cost. ADEPAN defended its member bakers by referring to the rising cost of their basic raw material. To ensure adequate bread supply, INA and ADEPAN hammered out an agreement lowering the cost of both flour and loaves.2 But speculation continued, as did questionable baking practices. In 1961, public criticism of the baking industry increased; some claimed that as makers of a crucial food product, the bakers were public servants. As ADEPAN had spent years cultivating 1

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“Noticias breves,” El Panadero Colombiano (PC) no. 9 (1958), 4. All translations are my own. “El pan al peso,” PC no. 20 (1959), 29.

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an image of bakers as good citizens, it did not deny that claim. Instead, the bakers agreed that bread-making was a public service, and asked why the national state had not taken more steps to protect the industry and ensure that it had the resources necessary to provide its essential services.3 These subtly shifting meanings of “public service” illustrate a key aspect of state formation and practice – the achievement and maintenance of hegemony over popular sectors. But what is hegemony, how do states achieve it, and how do these Colombian bakers illustrate it? Regarding the first two of these questions – hegemony is a constantly evolving process of negotiation over and affirmation of popular consent for elite rule. In this process, popular classes (“the governed”) accede control to a ruling class (“the governors”) and thereby grant legitimacy to the state. Thus, hegemony is the assertion of power by the governors and the acceptance of it by the governed. To achieve hegemony the ruling class must incorporate some of the popular classes’ aspirations and desires into the state. Ideally, this inclusion ensures that the governed agree to the sociopolitical contract in which they accede power and control to the ruling class. Once this arrangement has been agreed upon, the governed will no longer challenge the legitimacy of the governors’ control, but rather, only contest abuses within the terms of their pact. But achieving hegemony does not mean that the ruling class will permanently maintain it. As noted above, two crucial characteristics of hegemony are process and negotiation. The state is an entity in constant construction. There is no definitive end point where it is formed and then statically remains so. Maintaining power requires continual reaffirmation of the rules of the pact.4 Governors can only perpetuate hegemonic rule when they include the aspirations and desires of popular classes.5 To do this, they must negotiate with the governed. These negotiations revolve around more than simple disagreements about the distribution of public goods or the extraction of private resources. Instead, negotiation refers to contestation over the meanings, symbols, categories, and modes of interaction that undergird the state and society. Such negotiation implies that autonomous 3

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“Informes rendidos al VII Congreso Nacional de ‘ADEPAN’: Informe de Don Francisco Montoya,” PC nos. 26–27 (1961), 22–24. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Florencia Mallon, “Reflections on the Ruins: Everyday Forms of State Formation in Nineteenth Century Mexico,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994),69–106, see esp. 70–71.

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popular culture does not exist; popular groups do not formulate their own consciousness separate from the state or ruling authorities. Rather, popular culture reflects the ideas of the rulers, but not slavishly.6 Thus, state formation requires constant negotiation, and in the process ruling and popular groups mutually construct each other. This conception of hegemony has deeply influenced Latin American historiography regarding the state, especially for Mexico. While other analytical frameworks that emphasize coercive and violent forms of state formation have yielded significant insights into Latin American states, examinations of popular consent and political culture frequently predominate.7 Of course, the relative importance of this analytical framework varies from one country to the next. Colombian historiography, for example, more heavily emphasizes the role of violence and coercion in state formation, largely owing to the prevalence of violence as both an historical phenomenon and an area of study in Colombia. Further fueling reduced emphasis on popular consent is the perception of the Colombian central state as failed, fragmented, or ineffective.8 Various characteristics undergird these claims (e.g., incomplete territorial control, regional disunity, the outsize role of semipublic institutions, and lack of legitimacy). While explanations for these characteristics vary, one of the most important is the exclusion of popular actors from formal mechanisms of democracy.

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Joseph and Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation,” in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms, 21–22; Daniel Nugent and Ana María Alonso, “Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua,” in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms, 209–246, see esp. 210. Helga Baitenmann, “Popular Participation in State Formation: Land Reform in Revolutionary Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 43 (2011), 1–31; Miguel Centeno and Agustin Ferraro, State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Wil Pansters, Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Benjamin Smith, “‘Defending Our Beautiful Freedom’: State Formation and Local Autonomy in Oaxaca, 1930–1940,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 23 (2007), 125–153. Eduardo Posada-Carbo, “Reflections on the Colombian State: In Search of a Modern Role,” in Posada-Carbo, ed., Colombia: The Politics of Reforming the State (London: University of London, 1998), 1–17; Marco Palacios, “Colombian Experience with Liberalism: On the Historical Weakness of the State,” in Posada-Carbo, Politics of Reforming the State, 21–44. Historians tend to study popular actors in relation to violence. See José Abelardo Díaz Jaramillo, “Del liberalismo al maoísmo: encuentros y desencuentros políticos en Francisco Mosquera Sánchez, 1958–1969,” Anuario colombiano de historia social y de la cultura 38 (2011), 141–176.

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In the nineteenth century, political exclusion was partisan – governing parties blocked the participation of both elite and popular members of opposition parties.9 This generated numerous regime changes and civil wars and only diminished in the early twentieth century, when popular actors took advantage of elite partisan conflict to press for social reforms. The threat these groups posed led to an official power-sharing arrangement designed to curb the worst effects of partisan conflict. But the new electoral rules did not include universal male suffrage and only opened the doors to the elite members of the opposition party.10 At the heart of this limited power-sharing arrangement was the Colombian concept of convivialismo. Politics was seen as an honorable activity, reserved for those with high social standing.11 By the early twentieth century, honor referred to behavior, comportment, and education rather than social class alone.12 Only those with elevated speech were deemed worthy of participating in the political system. Oratory and poetry marked a true gentleman. The intellectual pursuits of Colombia’s major political figures in the early twentieth century rivaled those of the great philologists, linguists, and poets of their age: a popular adaptation of a geology text, translations of Herbert Spencer, a 376page dictionary of Spanish Gallicisms, and numerous books of poetry.13 Although many of these works were designed to provide moral uplift through education for popular classes, the real audience was what the authors considered their social equals. Colombia’s elite political class in the early twentieth century passed its time performing for its peers – declaiming about political ideals and moral living at salons and social clubs, in coffeehouses and literary societies.14 Many saw themselves as 9

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David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 123–124. Sebastián Mazzuca and James A. Robinson, “Political Conflict and Power Sharing in the Origins of Modern Colombia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89 (2009), 285–321, see esp. 316. Victor Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 25; Frank Safford, The Ideal of the Practical: Colombia’s Struggle to Form a Technical Elite (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 147–159. Ricardo Arias Trujillo, Los leopardos: Una historia intelectual de los años 1920 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2007), 8–9; Bushnell, Making of Modern Colombia: 143–144, 163; Malcolm Deas, Del poder y la gramática y otros ensayos sobre historia, política y literatura colombianas (Bogotá: TM Editores, 1993), 25–51. Arias Trujillo, Los leopardos, 32–44.

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public figures who could uplift Colombia’s masses simply by example. Thus, they never took off their masks. Their entire lives were orchestrated to showcase their moral superiority. As one member of this class noted, “I am an arrogant gentleman, even when I am buttoning my pants.”15 When observers called Bogotá the “Athens of South America,” they had these men in mind.16 Importantly, it did not matter if one was Liberal or Conservative – poetry and oratory transcended political party. This was convivialismo – such men believed that their social position gave them much more in common with the elite members of the opposition party than with the popular members of their own. Therefore, as gentlemen, they had an obligation to work together for the betterment of their country. The unwritten rules that brought the power-sharing arrangement to life rested on the assumption of shared superiority – the fundamental binary these men constructed fell along class lines rather than political ones. Yet, while this political system formally excluded popular actors, convivialismo had a popular component. In his contribution to this volume, Seth Richardson examines how public circulation of elite poetic texts and proverbs that extolled or critiqued the state helped to form Mesopotamian governmentality. A similar phenomenon was at play here. Convivialismo was a politically exclusive system. Yet the underlying social rules that gave it substance touched everyone in society. Rules governing language and the proper way of communicating with fellow citizens did not end at the door of the salon, coffeehouse, or bookstore. The gentlemen inside believed that politics was something that happened behind closed doors, and that the street was a place of formality and respectful interaction with everyone, of all social classes. But, while the street may not have been the site of overt political discussion, the social glue undergirding the political system was embedded in every interaction that occurred there. The street, defined here broadly to mean the day-to-day interaction among all social classes, was filled with performers acting out the social rules. The rules were not just that everyone be treated with respect. Everyone also needed to demonstrate their place in the social hierarchy and communicate with each other in ways that recognized those social gulfs. This was expressed in deferential language. People in any position of authority were called “doctor,” whether or not they had a medical (or 15 16

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Braun, Assassination of Gaitán, 26. Ibid., 25; Bushnell, Making of Modern Colombia, 163.

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any) degree.17 Elites also commonly spoke of other people’s pobreza (poverty) and the difficult circumstances of their lives; doing so confirmed the social distance between the speaker and the object of discussion. Popular actors were familiar with the refined language of those higher in the social hierarchy, and they deployed it even while affirming their inferior status. During the National Folklore Survey in the 1940s, when the Ministry of Education asked for information about local customs, teachers responded with beautifully phrased, respectful letters that clearly demonstrated their lower social position. They “lamented the [unfortunate] cultural state of the campesinos,” and did so with language that reinforced their subordination: “I am pessimistic about the lifelessness of my sentences,” one writes. Another asks the indulgence of those who read her words, “being that the place where I live and my limited mental gifts don’t permit more.” They write of their “modest aptitudes,” of [the fact] that they don’t have “true enlightenment,” and only the “meager knowledge of a humble teacher.” Another concludes by saying: “Please allow me to present to you my humble work, free of the accoutrements of the orator or the poet.” “Thus I fulfill my responsibility,” another writes. Another expresses that it had been a pleasure “to complete this duty you asked of me.”18

In these examples we see the tension between the appropriation of the poetic and oratorical forms of speech of those at the top of the social hierarchy and the reaffirmation of that hierarchy through the ideas those words express. One can imagine these writers pulling out dictionaries and laboring over these letters, carefully choosing the words that demonstrated their own refinement, while acknowledging their lower position on the societal ladder. Or, more likely, these words and what they expressed came naturally, no dictionary needed. Careful and courteous speech did not operate in just one direction, however. Colombia’s popular classes were deferential, but not meek.19 They treated those higher in the social hierarchy with courtesy and respect; they expected the same in return. Thus, Colombians were hypervigilant about their treatment in public. And they were sensitive. Slights, disrespectful tones, harshness, or carelessness in language were taken as serious affronts. A North American visitor in the 1940s commented on the

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Herbert Braun, “De palabras y distinciones: Hacia un entendimiento del comportamiento cotidiano entre los colombianos durante la Violencia de los años cincuenta,” in Rubén Sierra Mejía, ed., La restauración conservadora, 1946–1957 (Bogotá: UNAL, 2012), 14, 19. 19 Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 22–23.

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care that Colombians higher in the social hierarchy took when speaking to those in lower positions: “[they] spoke to the campesinos with the elegance of a Chesterfield.” Landowners required so much tact when speaking to “peons,” they “would be perfectly suited for the highest levels of international diplomacy.”20 Here we see hegemony at work. Everyone seemed to agree on the social pact – they would all treat each other with respect and even deference, as long as they recognized the social hierarchy and their place in it. But, what did those on the lower social rungs in Colombia get out of this? Remember that hegemony demands reciprocity in exchange for accepting a power differential in their society. Elites need to give something back, or they will never maintain power over popular classes. In Colombia, popular actors believed that a social hierarchy came with strings attached for the ruling class. Accepting the social pact meant that they would not challenge the power of those at the top, as long as their needs and problems were recognized and, when necessary, rectified. Thus, convivialismo in early twentieth-century Colombia comprised a complex set of social rules that tied most Colombians to the national state, as weak as it might have been, if measured by capacity or territorial control alone. Strongly enforced hierarchies, cooperation, courtesy, and reciprocity all helped maintain a political system that, by definition, formally excluded popular actors. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, this system seemed relatively stable, and forestalled significant political protest among popular groups. It began to fray, however, in the 1920s. The closing of the coffee frontier increased land pressure, generating significant tension and sometimes violence between large landowners and smallholders or tenant farmers.21 Similar processes happened in cities. Growing industrialization and urbanization created new social groups who made new demands on the state.22 Strikes, protests, and calls for better public housing and transportation rocked Bogotá and Medellín.

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Ibid., 34. Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Keith Christie, Oligarcas, campesinos y política en Colombia (Bogotá: UNAL, 1986); Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1830–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); James Parsons, Antioqueño Colonization in Western Colombia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

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The next three decades saw various political changes, including reforms critiqued by both Conservatives and Liberals, for being either too radical or not radical enough.23 The brief rise of a populist leader who condemned Colombia’s social pact and the elites’ failure to fulfill their end of the reciprocal bargain ignited the fervor of the popular class. His assassination in 1948 dashed their hopes and further fueled the civil conflict in the countryside, known as la Violencia (1946–1966), which claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced many thousands more. Although violence followed partisan lines, the underlying causes were socioeconomic. But safe in the city, party leaders and the state looked on and did nothing to quell the violence. Indeed, fiercely partisan leaders further incited it. A military coup in 1953 curbed partisan excesses. Citizens were grateful, but resisted attempts to extend military control. Civilian rule returned under a new power-sharing arrangement, the National Front – the brainchild of business, political, and military elites.24 The Liberal and Conservative parties agreed to alternate control over the presidency for four presidential terms. Third parties were not outlawed, but they could not participate in elections. When Colombians decry the antidemocratic nature of their country’s political system, it is often this arrangement they have in mind.25 When the first National Front president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, a Liberal, took office in 1958, his inaugural speech spoke of conciliation and cooperation. He asked business leaders to make sacrifices for the public good, reminding them that popular sectors had helped promote domestic industry by accepting higher prices under the protectionist policies of previous administrations. It was time for businessmen to return the favor. The people demanded “that industry begins to reciprocate the gigantic effort the Nation has done to

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2000); David Sowell, The Early Colombian Labor Movement: Artisans and Politics in Bogotá, 1832–1919 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). James Henderson, Modernization in Colombia: The Laureano Gómez Years, 1889–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Álvaro Tirado Mejía, Aspectos Políticos del primer gobierno de Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934–1938) (Bogotá: Planeta, 1995). Silvia Galvis and Alberto Donadio, El Jefe Supremo: Rojas Pinilla en La Violencia y en el poder (Medellín: Hombre Nuevo, 1988), 259–262, 281–312; 345–372; Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Fragmented Land: Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 321–322. Mauricio Archila Neira, Idas y venidas, vueltas y revueltas: Protestas sociales en Colombia 1958–1990 (Bogotá: ICANH, 2003), 90–91; César Augusto Ayala Diago, Resistencia y oposición al establecimiento del Frente Nacional (Bogotá: UNAL, 1996), 128–129.

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create and sustain it.”26 When the president himself used the term “reciprocate,” deploying the language of respect and social hierarchy, he revived the hopes of Colombia’s suffering masses. The first year of his term was one of great excitement and expectation for significant social reform. Privately, he worked with business leaders on a “gentlemen’s agreement” regarding prices. ADEPAN participated.27 At the time, it was an umbrella organization. Its membership included both large-scale, mechanized bread-making companies and small, family-run artisanal bakeries. The majority were small; at its peak membership of approximately 1,000 member bakeries in 1959, only about eighty of them could be classified as “large” or even “medium” scale. ADEPAN’s monthly magazine, El Panadero Colombiano (The Colombian Baker), indicates that in the organization’s early years, those eighty members controlled it. The image they presented of the baking industry was one of gentleman bakers, in keeping with the elite ideas of convivialismo.28 This changed at the end of 1959, when the large mechanized bakeries established their own organization. El Panadero offered no explanation for this split. But it changed the organization dramatically. Previously ADEPAN purported to speak for the entire baking industry, and referred to itself as an “association” of businessmen employing 100,000 workers. After the split, it no longer claimed to represent the entire baking industry, and called itself a “union” whose membership consisted of home-based artisans.29 El Panadero began to emphasize “modesty” over “modernity.” Photo essays illustrated the bakers’ precarious situation – tiny spaces with old-fashioned brick ovens and beat-up equipment, only one or two employees, female family members “helping

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Alberto Lleras Camargo, El primer gobierno del Frente Nacional, Tomo Primero (mayo de 1958-agosto de 1959) (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1960), 53–77. “Adepán ofrece su colaboración a la política económica del gobierno,” PC no. 19 (1958), 10–11. “La campaña de ADEPAN,” PC no. 2 (1957), 18; “Noticias breves,” PC, no. 8 (1958), 4; “Hoy tenemos que enseñar a los niños para que sean buenos clients mañana,” PC no. 4 (1958), 10; Ana Quintero, “Nutrición para niños,” PC no. 8 (1958), 25–26; “Cocina de Ana Quintero,” PC no. 9 (1958), 28–29; “El Ina contra la escasez y los altos precious,” PC no. 10 (1958), 15; “Nutrición para niños,” PC no. 10 (1958), 25–26; “Una lucha sin tregua,” PC no. 11 (1958), 10; “Nutrición para niños,” PC no. 11 (1958), 25–26; “Sentido de cooperación,” PC no. 12 (1958), 5; “La cooperación del INA en 1958,” PC nos. 13–14 (1958), 20–21. Luís A. Rodríguez, “Una aclaración a ASEMOL,” PC nos. 22–23 (1960), 21.

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out.”30 Fine dining, recipes, connections between bread and civilization – all of that disappeared from its pages. Moreover, where the gentlemen bakers subtly expressed their ideas about the state, the artisan bakers were more direct, explicitly stating how they understood the relationship between state and citizen. There were three main elements in their conception of the state: 1) mediation – the state was society’s referee, working with competing private interests to set fair rules that did not place an undue burden on any one group in society, and then acting as the guarantor that everyone played by the rules; 2) social welfare – while maintaining a healthy climate for business was important, the state had a particular responsibility to ensure that society’s wealth did not concentrate in a lopsided manner, leaving the vast majority hungry and struggling for survival; 3) hierarchy – while the idea of state as “referee” suggested a relationship among equals, the artisan bakers also recognized that they were ultimately supplicants, reliant on state protection. The bakers often combined various elements. For example, recall the agreement ADEPAN and INA reached at the end of 1959 regarding the price of flour and loaves of bread. This agreement also stipulated that bakers would conform to certain standards. To ensure that member bakers complied, ADEPAN began a quality control campaign. It rested on three appeals. Profit was one; bakers’ civic responsibilities was another. ADEPAN reminded members that they participated in a social contract among themselves, the state, and the rest of Colombia’s citizens. The state did not dictatorially impose stipulations. On the contrary, it had negotiated in good faith, bargaining with ADEPAN for the good of the entire nation. Bakers thus had a responsibility to keep their end of the bargain; ADEPAN exhorted member bakers to remember that “every price reduction that the State makes for the [baking] industry should reverberate to the benefit of the consuming masses.”31 Here ADEPAN demonstrated two of its main ideas about the state – it acted as mediator and as guarantor of social welfare. ADEPAN’s other argument to convince member bakers to lay off the yeast combined all three elements in their conception of the state, resulting in a complicated appeal to class solidarity. Essentially, the bakers should conform because of their privileged position in society – even though they were themselves struggling artisan bakers. It was not the 30 31

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“Así son nuestras panaderías,” PC nos. 26–27 (1961), 42–45. “El pan al peso,” PC no. 20 (1959), 29.

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state, ADEPAN argued, but the bakers themselves who claimed that their industry was “a social service . . . the best way to help the people.” The bakers, in other words, could sacrifice profit to benefit others. This put them in a privileged, but still precarious position. After all, the bakers themselves needed state protection. ADEPAN noted the ridiculously thin profit margins of small-scale, family-run bakeries. Indeed, it was economic insecurity that gave ADEPAN’s bakers such a “large dose of social sensibility” in the first place. But the state needed to remember that the bakers were not capitalists, profiting enormously from a price reduction for flour. Moreover, the bakers needed assurance that such price controls would continue. Without such a guarantee, it was unfair to ask bakers to sell loaves for one peso. Moreover, if the baking industry was truly a public service, and one-peso loaves therefore a public good, then the state needed to fund the studies to determine how to provide them to consumers/citizens, without breaking the backs of the bakers.32 Mediation, social welfare, and hierarchal social relations are all evident in this argument. One can see here many elements of convivialismo as well. During 1960 and 1961 ADEPAN made many similar claims. Paradoxically, this was a time when convivialismo seemed to have broken down. Remember that the maintenance of courteous interactions that affirmed the social hierarchy could only continue if those lower in the hierarchy felt that the obligations this recognition implied were being upheld. If they were not, courtesy and respect were denied. Bakers referring to their organization as a “union” reflected more than just a transformation in ADEPAN’s membership. The relationship between citizens and state had changed dramatically from 1958 to 1960. The reforms Lleras Camargo had promised seemed nowhere in sight. Social unrest and strikes grew. Lleras Camargo publicly continued to call for sacrifice on the part of the business class, claiming that Colombians should “demand more intense, active, and generous solidarity from the more fortunate economic classes.” He condemned those with an “abusive amount of personal property” who “created an uproar” at any mention of reform.33 Lleras Camargo also criticized those who disregarded the demands of striking workers by claiming that they were nothing more than communist agitators. He defended the right of workers and others to protest abusive 32 33

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Ibid. Lleras Camargo, “Instalación del Congreso,” in Primer Gobierno Frente Nacional, Tomo segundo, 451–486, 482–483.

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conditions.34 But for ADEPAN, and other popular sectors, the president’s statements of solidarity did not absolve the state.35 The rise in social agitation reflects the breakdown of convivialismo. Despite Lleras Camargo’s defense of workers, both the state and the business sector seemed to be ignoring their reciprocal obligations. Strikes reflected workers’ frustration. Since it seemed that neither wealthy landowners, industrialists, nor the state were holding up their end of the bargain, workers felt no reason to continue to speak with courtesy or deference. Of course, as Michael Szonyi notes elsewhere in this volume, when people refer to “the state,” they often mean a specific agency or bureaucrat, rather than an abstract, unitary entity. When the gentlemen bakers controlled ADEPAN, they didn’t criticize the state, partly because it still enjoyed good relations with INA, the state agency that regulated the distribution of their primary raw material. After 1960, this was no longer the case. Where ADEPAN previously counted INA as an ally in the battle against speculation, it now saw the organization either turning a blind eye to market manipulation by millers, or actively, if secretly, working with them. At first ADEPAN tentatively criticized INA, claiming that it failed to ensure a level playing field because of the incompetence or laziness of its low-level employees. Thus, ADEPAN insinuated that the man at INA’s top was not corrupt, just careless in supervising his subordinates. But when they brought this problem to his attention, he failed to act. His “official indifference” forced the bakers to go above his head and send their complaints directly to the president himself.36 But their critiques still only vaguely noted the state’s tendency to favor powerful business interests.37 A year later, the bakers of ADEPAN pulled no punches. They had lost hope that INA would ever keep speculation under control. The problem came from the top – INA’s director, Enrique Vargas Nariño. They claimed he was personally responsible for INA’s corruption and demanded his resignation. They called him a “usurer,” a “monopolist,” and a “dealer in hunger.” They declared him persona non grata to the bakers and the entire Colombian nation.38 He had “lost the masses,” one baker asserted, 34 35 36 37

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Archila Neira, Idas y venidas, 91, 93, 369–370, 443. Hernán Villamarín Gutiérrez, “El costo de la vida,” PC nos. 26–27 (1961), 4–5. “Carta económica: Otra suplica al INA,” PC nos. 22–23 (1960), 2, 6. “Declaración de principios del VII Congreso: ‘ADEPAN’ fija su política al estado,” PC nos. 22–23 (1960), 31–32. Villamarín Gutiérrez, “Costo de la vida”; “Informe del Doctor Jaime Angel Villegas,” PC, nos. 26–27 (1961), 25; “Informe sobre los ‘Adepósitos S.A.,’” PC nos. 26–27 (1961), 27–29.

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harking back to the importance of poetry and oratory in public discourse, since this was a play on the Spanish word masas, meaning both “dough” and “the masses.”39 That they believed he was nothing more than a common criminal was made explicit when another baker asserted that he would soon “be on the run,” owing to the fact that ADEPAN and FIP (the industrial bakers) had joined forces because his excessive corruption was so horrific.40 The saddest words came from one of ADEPAN’s most committed members, who claimed that he had held back from speaking out about INA’s injustices because he was “excessively Frente-Nacionalista,” but he could no longer keep silent. “Either the law applied to everyone,” he said, “or it applied to no one.”41 He clearly believed in the project of conciliation and cooperation that the National Front implied and his disappointment at its unkept promise was deep. All of this shows the breakdown of convivialismo. Bakers had been willing in the past to speak in polite ways that recognized their place in the hierarchy, while still asserting their demands. But years of official indifference and the state’s failure to fulfill its obligations blasted courtesy away. This sad episode for the bakers offers us a glimpse of hegemony at work. Recall that a crucial aspect of hegemony is negotiation over the meanings of symbols, words, and the modes of interacting. Popular groups accept the hierarchal rules of the game, as long as the governors recognize their reciprocal obligations and accede to some of the former’s demands. Convivialismo fits this description well. In this case, the bakers negotiated with the state over the meanings of “public service” and did so while following the rules of Colombian political culture regarding courtesy and deference. When the state demonstrated indifference and failed to meet its reciprocal obligations, the bakers abandoned courteous words. But even with their insults, the bakers still affirmed the important role of the state. Seth Richardson in his chapter in this volume asserts that to question the claims of the state – indeed, to engage with it at all – is to accept the premise of its control. Thus, we can interpret ADEPAN’s acts of protestation as recognition of the state’s legitimacy. The bakers objected 39 40

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“El INA y contrapunto” PC, nos. 26–27 (1961), 33. Ibid. El Panadero also published references to and reprints from other organizations critical of INA. See Hernán Villamarin Gutiérrez, “Una política panadera,” PC no. 21 (1960), 5–7; “Noticias que nos interesan,” PC no. 21 (1960), 14–15; “Conocemos los objectivos legales del ‘I.N.A.’ y su organización,” PC nos. 24–25 (1960), 35–36; “Que el INA regule precios piden entidades gremiales,” PC nos. 26–27 (1961), 70. “Informes rendidos, Francisco Montoya.”

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to the state’s indifference by reminding governmental ministers, administrators, and the president of their official duties. Complaints about unenforced laws were complaints that assumed that the law “applied to everyone.” This, then, is not a state lacking legitimacy. On the contrary, it was perceived as the ultimate arbiter among different societal groups. Perhaps central state hegemony did not encompass the entirety of Colombia’s national territory in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, the artisan bakers of ADEPAN show us through their protests and complaints that the process of reaffirming the rule of the governors was ongoing and vibrant.

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21 Indian Affirmative Action and the Postcolonial State Anupama Rao

On November 25, 1949, the chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee, Dalit (ex-untouchable) leader B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) rose to speak in the debate on the third draft of the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar argued: On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality . . . We must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment, or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has laboriously built up.1

Was the Constitution up to the challenge to inaugurate a political democracy by eradicating a millennial order of injustice and inequality? Ambedkar and his generation had done their best to make a “good” constitution through recourse to a grand exercise in comparative constitutionalism. But Ambedkar was also capable of rejecting this founding document if it proved inadequate to its charge. He argued, “I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn the [Constitution]. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody. If our people want to carry on, they must remember that the majorities cannot ignore the minorities by saying: ‘Oh no, to recognize you is to harm democracy.’”2 Ambedkar was famous for his powerful writings against untouchability, but he was even better known as a formidable critic of the positions taken by Congress and by Mahatma Gandhi with regard to the

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eradication of untouchability. Ambedkar’s standoff with Gandhi in September 1932 over the issue of separate political representation for the “Depressed Classes” (as they were known in bureaucratic parlance) had provoked a remarkable turn of events: this included Gandhi’s fast unto death, followed by the compromise solution of the Poona Pact, which instituted reserved constituencies to enhance the political representation of the Depressed Classes. Political power was ostensibly at issue in the Ambedkar-Gandhi debate. However, it was Ambedkar’s position that Dalits were a non-Hindu minority – a position aided by his strategic turn to colonial mechanisms of franchise and minority representation – that inaugurated the crisis of 1932. In effect, Ambedkar had used the demand for separate representation as a way to translate the outcaste identity of Dalits into collective political interest, to render them visible as a constituency. Indeed, the events of 1932 marked Ambedkar’s entrance on the national stage as a powerful critic of Congress nationalism, an insurgent thinker, and a reluctant founding father. Ambedkar’s reluctant embrace of the Indian Constitution reflects his commitment to and skepticism about programs and policies intended to produce caste equality. He draws our attention to the gap between legislated redress and existential suffering, and between the founding document and the equality it imagines: the staging of this tension also forefronts the difficulties of redressing past discrimination in the present, as historically produced inequality.

the postcolonial “difference” This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the paradox of Indian constitutionalism in order to reflect more generally on what makes the institution of founding documents in postcolonial societies distinctive: their attention to the politics of identity, and the ongoing effects of historic harm. Decolonization formed the global backdrop to India’s efforts to respond to complex structures of inequality with roots in religious exclusion, segregation, socioeconomic deprivation, and colonial underdevelopment via constitutional means. The Constituent Assembly began its deliberations on December 9, 1946, and adopted the Constitution on November 26, 1949. The Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950. In marked difference to the contentious, incremental process of franchise expansion in the West, the Indian Constitution instituted adult universal franchise in the context of mass illiteracy and myriad social

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inequalities. Another temporal compression was also evident: enfranchisement and affirmative action policies were adopted nearly simultaneously. While Euro-American liberal democracies have typically committed to the sanctity of procedure to guard against bias, India’s emergent democracy specified desired outcomes.3 Vulnerable populations were “enframed” by a constitutional vision: the Indian Constitution recognizes unmarked citizens, but they are also named as subjects defined by the markers of caste, poverty, and religion. The tension between economic empowerment, liberal individualism, and group equalization is embedded in the Constitution. In Robert Meister’s account: The Indian Constitution deals with social equality in three distinct contexts. In a society where severe poverty affects members of most communal groups, it asserts that government has a general duty to promote economic equality and wellbeing. In this respect it is an explicitly socialist document. In a society with a history of violent conflict along many different communal lines, the Indian Constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of religion, caste, sex, region, language, etc. In this respect it is an explicitly liberal, secular, and individualistic document. Yet in a society in which the dominant religion, Hinduism, traditionally supported a social hierarchy placing certain groups at the bottom under inherited disabilities in every aspect of their lives, the Indian Constitution separately abolishes untouchability in all its incidents and prescribes a system of compensatory discrimination for its victims and their descendants. In this respect it is an explicitly remedial document.4 The document is thus an interesting amalgam of competing ideologies mobilized to undo different sorts of inequality at one go, as it were.

There are discontinuities between the colonial past and the postcolonial present regarding state management of minority identity, reflected in the shift from governing difference, to legislating inclusion. Against the back-drop of subcontinental Partition and anxieties regarding the patriotism of Indian Muslims, Muslim Constituent representatives renounced the separate electorate, a hangover from the colonial past.5 Meanwhile caste came to the 3

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The Constitution articulates the state’s responsibility for group equalization in both the Directive Principles and Fundamental Rights clauses. Additionally, government is tasked with group equalization as an essential function. Robert Meister, “Discrimination through the Looking Glass,” Wisconsin Law Review, 1985, 946–947. Separate electorates for Muslims were granted in 1909 to recognize the community’s “historic and political importance.” The principle of weightage was included shortly after, to compensate Muslims for future demographic change. On the history of the Constituent Assembly, see Austin Granville, Working on a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For studies of minority identity and the Constituent Assembly debates, see Iqbal Ansari, “Minorities and the

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center of the constitutional debates about social justice. Caste was to be excised from the body politic by all means necessary: it was both a sign of tradition and a social evil. (The rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s again politicized Muslim identity. But that is a separate story.) In his classic text on the history of caste reservations, legal theorist Marc Galanter makes the startling and little-noticed claim that compensatory discrimination was “very much a domestic product, produced with little guidance or borrowing from abroad,” a unique kind of civil rights law that addresses caste (like race in the United States) as a collective structure of deprivation and impoverishment.6 Indeed Indian affirmative action is uniquely Indian, though it resonates with similar projects of remediation. For this reason it bears thinking about the project in its specificity, as well as for its comparative relevance. In what follows, I suggest that one way to understand the specificity of Indian affirmative action is to situate it within a broader inquiry into how projects to redress historical wrongs can change the relationship between the state and its subjects.

state effects: law, rights, and history In his famous deconstruction of the political realism of state theory, Philip Abrams argued that “the state” is an enabling fiction for masking decentralized practices of power; that the putative materiality of the state as a thing or a place that “really exists” is in fact the “effect” of practices of power that produce the state as an autonomous whole.7 Misrecognition

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Politics of Constitution Making in India,” in Minority Identities and the Nation State, ed. D. L. Sheth and G. Mahajan (Delhi, 1999), 113–137; Rochana Bajpai, Minority Rights in the Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946–1950, QEH Working Paper Series no. 30 (Oxford: University of Oxford, November 30, 1999); James Chiriyankandath, “Constitutional Predilections,” Seminar, no. 484 (December 1999); Shefali Jha, “Secularism in the Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946–1950,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 30 (July 27, 2002); and Ralph Retzlaff, “The Problem of Communal Minorities in the Drafting of the Indian Constitution,” in Constitutionalism in Asia, ed. R. N. Spann (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 55–73. Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 361. A more recent evaluation of the reservations regime can be found in Marc Galanter, “The Long Half-Life of Reservations,” in India’s Living Constitution: Ideas, Practices, Controversies, ed. Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan, and R. Sudarshan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 306–318. Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 58–89. See also Timothy Mitchell, “Economy and the State Effect,” in State/Culture, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999),

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plays a critical role in Abram’s account of the state effect: his reading of the state is premised on the idea that the state is both ideological and efficacious, but that its power must be denaturalized as the sum of a set of political practices. Abrams writes, “If there is indeed a hidden reality of political power a first step towards discovering it might be a resolute refusal to accept the legitimating account of it that political theorists and political actors so invitingly and ubiquitously hold out to us – that is, the idea that it is ‘the state.’”8 Abrams’s point is that focusing on “the state” leads us to reify it as the source of centralizing power. Instead, we should recognize that the idea of state centralization takes our focus away from (political) practice, and reorients it towards viewing the state as a unified, transhistorical apparatus. Abrams’s plea for historicizing the state notwithstanding, his is a conception of the state that takes as its referent an idealized, and indeed domestic account of the Western state, ignoring its imperial history. If we were to think about empire as the necessary if understudied corollary to the modern European state, we might extend and amend Abrams’s formulation. For instance I would argue that the colonial state effect is derived from an opposite set of moves to what obtains in Abrams’s account, and that it has enduring consequence into the present. In colonial societies such as India power was repeatedly denied, dissimu-lated, or devolved onto native social forms: this produced the effect of dispersion and disaggregation, rather than of state centralization, euphem-izing colonial authoritarianism. So-called communal identities (caste, religion) were marked as sites of native attachment and authority. In turn, these were incorporated into mechanisms of state control such as the law (through the recognition of personal status laws) and the franchise (through the grant of separate electorates). The rationale behind this was instrumental and ethnographic: it was assumed that ruling through native authorities and via native institutions was likely to produce the least amount of resistance to foreign rule, that it was developmentally appropriate, and that it indicated respect for local culture and practice. The outcome of this process was twofold. On the one hand, the state was presented as weak, failed, or nonexistent and unable to control the growing “communal” divide between Hindus and Muslims, in particular. That is

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76–97; and Steven Pierce, “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006), 887–914. Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty,” 63–64.

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the state was persistently viewed as corrupt, inefficient, and partisan and therefore in need of authoritarian intervention by colonial administrators. Meanwhile, “culture” and “community” were politicized and became proxies for state power.9 A distinctive politics of identity (and entitlement) has ensued as a consequence of India’s colonial history: today, it manifests as a politics of minority, or as a form of ethnic politics. A second, and related set of revisions to Abram’s position is also necessary. This follows from extending his model of the state as an ‘effect’ to explore the distinctive force of law in the constitution of subjects. In this chapter I argue that Indian affirmative action is an institutional “innovation” that stitches law, politics, and history together with uncertain or unexpected policy outcomes. Affirmative action policies assume a relationship between history, law, and identity: their conception of rights is predicated on the assumption that historic injury requires correction in the present. The principle of equality – whether this is understood to mean the equality of outcome, or of opportunity – grounds claims in the present for past exclusions, whether these are social, political, or economic in nature. In brief, policy responses justify preferential treatment in the present in the interest of undoing historic harm: they are locked into a structure of equivalence where present deprivation is predicated on past exclusion. Thus, regardless of the specific form that policies might take, affirmative action relates group identity, on the one hand, with individual harm, on the other. The tension between individual and group (and efforts to relate the one with the other) has troubled liberal theories of rights derived from models of individual freedom and autonomy from the outset.10 Thus if we accept that affirmative action policies imply the acknowledgment of social inequality, we need to ask about their consequence for universalizing models of political citizenship. How do bureaucratic states predicated on homogenizing logics reinscribe social difference in the interest of 9

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Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. chapter 3. Clearly one of the anxieties regarding group recognition is the possible slide from a discourse of vulnerability and protection into demands for proportional political representation that could challenge the principle of one person, one vote, which is the basis of representative democracy. The history of colonial societies reflects long-standing experiments with proportional voting, separate representation, and political weightage. However these were mobilized for a rather different set of purposes: to maintain parity between religious, ethnic, or caste communities in aid of political control in complex multiethnic, multi-religious societies.

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remediation or historic redress? To put it differently, does affirmative action resolve a sociopolitical contradiction at the heart of the republic? Or, does it permanently mark a rift in the social body that policy cannot resolve? By way of provisionally responding to this question, let me begin by specifying the idea of affirmative action: 1) Affirmative action policies can take a number of forms, but they ought to be distinguished from multiculturalism, which also mediates between state and community, but privileges diversity as a common good without asserting any necessary relationship between an exclusionary past and the demand for restitution in the present. Thus the recognition of difference, including a commitment to the equal protection of difference, is to be distinguished from a commitment to eradicating inequality arising from historic relations of domination, subordination, and hierarchy. 2) The relationship between affirmative action policy and the demand for equality can be further clarified. Historically, vulnerable groups such as women, African Americans, or outcastes have demanded rights by arguing that their embodied particularism (color, female bodies, association with degraded livelihood, sexual preference, etc.) has been used to justify political exclusion and socioeconomic deprivation. Here it is the kind of body one possesses that is the problem: it justifies the association between the individual and the collective (“women are weaker than men,” “African Americans are less intelligent,” “Dalits are unhygienic,” and so forth). This might be one reason why the negative relationship between individual and collective has to be thought anew in the context of positive discrimination, or affirmative action.11 3) Political theorist Iris Marion Young has argued that debates about group preferences tend to convert questions of historic injustice, which are essentially political questions, into demands for distributive justice predicated on perfecting policy design.12 She argues that affirmative 11

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Minority “protection” can also activate majority reaction, of course, with critics of affirmative action equating redress with the unequal or preferential treatment of some groups over others. From here it is but a short step, e.g., to assertions of white vulnerability, or arguments that affirmative action threatens individual merit. A more sophisticated response is to be found in the position that group preference is antidemocratic (and racializing) because it emphasizes precisely those identities and attributes that produce discrimination in the first place. Though it is not wrong about performative outcomes such as the hyper-visibilization of identity, this position acknowledges neither the force of psychic desires for recognition, nor the historical accumulation of disadvantage that generates demands for redress. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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action constrains our interpretation of historic harm, as much as it produces visibility for them as redressable wrongs. Young is right to alert us to affirmative action policy as an act of depoliticization. Rather than agree with Young that affirmative action politics is no politics at all, we could instead argue that the politics of identity has a different set of consequences for law and for politics: historic inequality is an issue that is typically decided in the courts so far as affirmative action is concerned, while demands for rights and recognition typically occur (and recur) in the agonistic space of “politics.” Thus law and politics are mutually entailed, but they also operate as sites of friction and conflict.

indian affirmative action Let me begin with the simple historical fact that India has produced a distinctive branch of case law that addresses structural inequality as the consequence of historic discrimination. India inherited caste, a complexly articulated form of social hierarchy whose longevity has to do with the system’s innate suppleness and capacity for transformation. Indeed, the recent history of caste reveals vigorous challenges to caste hegemony. For instance, a long history of anti-Brahmin struggles in southern and western India produced efforts to institute quotas for non-Brahmins in employment and education as early as the turn of the twentieth century.13 These struggles were a response to the complex association between the colonial administration, on the one hand, and upper-caste elites, on the other, that British colonization enabled: their combined effect was to secularize caste privilege and render it newly visible in modern state apparatuses such as schools, law courts, and hospitals, where English-educated, upper-caste bureaucrats predominated. Meanwhile, enumerative technologies like the census took caste and religion as modal forms of social categorization and effectively gave them political pertinence.14 Demands for proportional representation

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Terms such as non-Brahmin, Depressed Classes, and Scheduled Castes were produced in response to struggles by lower-caste and untouchable groups to consolidate themselves demographically (the term non-Brahmin is an invention in this regard), render themselves into pan-Indian collectivities, and challenge stigmatizing social descriptions that justified their low status in the Hindu order. Census technologies – the first all-India Imperial Census was conducted in 1871/1872 – emphasized the differential electoral weight of religious communities, promoted identification with caste, and facilitated lower-caste demands for rights and representation. See Bernard Cohn’s classic essay, “The Census. Social Structure and Objectification in South

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grew, and the category of “backwardness” was positively valued in the demand for state entitlements. Mysore State first used the term Backward Class in 1918 to categorize everyone who was not Brahmin. Bombay included reservations for socially and economically backward groups in the Starte Committee Report of 1930. Madras had caste quotas for bureaucratic recruitment since 1916, while the princely states of Baroda and Kolhapur in western India instituted similar policies at the turn of the nineteenth century to curb Brahmin dominance. Subaltern demands for reservation were thus an important, if unintended consequence of the logic of imperial rule, which operated through categories of culture, difference, and distinction. As is well known, colonial intervention on the subcontinent was often justified as an extension of native or precolonial practices of government. However, collective life organized around caste and religion was invested with new political significance, though neither caste nor religion accrued value in a univalent or monolithic way. As a consequence, officially separate domains of religion and politics were intertwined in practice. Their inter-animation defined the colonial state form: religion had a temporal life as community, while community gained political pertinence as constituency. This was the route by which religion was politicized. A paradox of political commensuration followed: religious communities were seen as quantitatively incommensurable, but qualitatively equivalent. In turn, the colonial state mediated the paradox between community-as-demography and community-as-identity. Caste’s Secularity As noted earlier, colonial administrators did not invent caste, but they reified it as a millennial structure of social stratification and an aspect of Hindu tradition.15 Upper-caste reformers and nationalists also understood caste to be religiously derived. However they believed caste was not an issue for colonial policy, but for Hindu reform. In 1920, thirty-five

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Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224–254. “Hindus historically did not all share what was supposed to constitute a religion: not creed, deity, ritual or text . . . there was little that linked the various sects and faiths in the subcontinent. Except for two things, whose importance varied over time: one was the invisible thread that united ‘caste Hindus’ against so-called untouchable castes; the other was the idea of an external enemy, such as Christians, ‘secularists,’ and above all Muslims.” Arvind Rajagopal, “Indian Media in Global Context,” History Compass 14 (2016), 140–151.

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years after the Indian National Congress was founded, Gandhi acknowledged untouchability as a “reproach to Hinduism.” In turn, Gandhi (and the Congress) produced a religious and moral response to the problem: this consisted of exhorting upper castes to clean toilets and value stigmatized labor, pressing halfheartedly for untouchables’ entry into temples, and renaming untouchables as Harijans, or people of god. Untouchability was thus incorporated into the political project of anticolonial nationalism as a problem of Hindu reform. It is against this backdrop that the efforts of B. R. Ambedkar to focalize the Depressed Class constituency gains pertinence.16 To render what was viewed as religious (and therefore sanctioned by sacral structures) as both political and unequal was the first step for caste struggles: politicizing caste also involved secularizing it and redefining it into a form of historic inequality. Ambedkar argued that Dalits possessed a cohesive political interest, derived in large part by their antagonistic relationship with Hindus: by 1928, he was describing the relationship between caste Hindus and untouchables as a “fundamental and deadly antagonism.” Ambedkar believed that the colonial technology of separate representation allowed untouchables to manifest their political strength as a pressure group situated between Hindus and Muslims, the two largest political constituencies. “Our untouchable brethren will recognize their own strength once they realize that Muslims cannot win without us and equally Hindus cannot win without us.”17 Dalits were a community of suffering who required collective emancipation. However, in the process of claiming rights, they also had to identify themselves as stigmatized subjects and a special kind of minority: as non-Hindus defined by an agonistic relationship to the Hindu order. As we know, the demand for separate representation led to the historic confrontation with Gandhi, and a compromise over political representation. The (Postcolonial) Resolution of Group Rights The Indian Constitution finally resolved the caste question, after a fashion, as follows:

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It should be noted that from the mid-nineteenth century, anti-caste radicals had maintained that distinction between the social and the political and between the religious and the secular domain was artificial; that this bifurcation could not explain the complex and totalizing character of caste oppression. B. R. Ambedkar, editorial in Bahishkrit Bharat, May 20, 1927.

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1) Hinduism was secularized, which is to say that temples were thrown open to all Hindus, and a range of court cases around religious access in the first decades after independence defined the parameters of a Hinduism now conceived primarily as juridical construct.18 2) Second, caste was translated into the language of socioeconomic deprivation, that is, it became “class-like.” Article 15(4) specifies that the state must make special provisions for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens, or for Schedules Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 46 of the Constitution, which is a Directive Principle, stipulates: “The State shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people, and in particular, of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and shall protect them from social injustice and forms of exploitation.” Article 330 provides SC/ST reservations in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament), while Article 332 provides for reservations in state legislative assemblies.19 Article 16(4) advocates “any provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the State, is not adequately represented in the services under the State.” Legislation for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) thus forms the juridical limit under which entitlements for lower castes – that is, those who are neither classified as Scheduled Castes nor as Scheduled Tribes – can be framed. The legislation for SCs and STs is of two kinds: a set of unusual provisions in criminal law that seeks to protect them from violence, combined with policy measures enhancing their socioeconomic development. The latter has enabled three kinds of reservation, each focused on the provision of dignified livelihood: (1) in legislative bodies, government service, educational institutions, and milder forms in housing and land allotment; (2) through provision of scholarships, grants, loans, health care, and legal aid; and (3) special measures, mostly legislative, to protect SCs and STs from practices such as bonded labor, untouchability, and land alienation. 18

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Indian secularism equated with the equal protection of all religions, rather than a retreat of the state from the domain of religion. This has meant that debates about religion have been central to the changing character of Indian secularism. It has also meant that religion is a public issue and the site of enormous state intervention. Recent constitutional amendments, the Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Amendments of 1992, respectively, provide reservations in local government at the rural panchayat and municipality levels, and stipulate that one-third of those seats be reserved for women from the SC/ST communities.

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The “resolution” outlined here should not obscure the conflictual nature of claims to caste mobility. However, it should be emphasized that the executive is tasked with remediation for a history of discrimination that is perceived to be so enormous as to render universal commitments to equality inadequate. “Thus, in the area of equality which has the highest constitutional priority, courts must defer broadly to initiatives taken by legislative and administrative bodies.”20 The interpretive leeway for courts (and the state) in India has thus turned on eligibility, on deciding who the rightful beneficiaries of preferential treatment ought to be, and not on judicial scrutiny in balancing equal protection against affirmative action as in the U.S. context. “The Indian Constitution thus defines the duty of preferential treatment not through the rights of equality of opportunity and non-discrimination, but rather, as an exception to them . . . Compensatory preferential treatment, thus, does not have to be rendered consistent with non-discrimination.”21 The consequences are significant: caste is an object of excessive (state) attention, while affirmative action policies explicitly privilege certain group rights over the rights of individuals.22 Indian affirmative action has thus inadvertently set in play a complex set of transformations: together and separately they can be described as reflecting a situation of democracy against capital, and equality against history. 1) The franchise has proved crucial to reordering structures of inherited privilege and social capital since lower caste and untouchable populations constitute the numerical majority of the Indian body politic. 2) Equality within Hinduism is now predicated on equality between castes, and “Hinduism” has increasingly becoming a juridical construct. 3) Finally, because caste is associated with material deprivation, it has become central to narratives of upward mobility, self-respect and dignity on the one hand, and to discourses of economic (in) efficiency and productivity, on the other.

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Meister, “Discrimination through the Looking Glass,” 947. Meister, “Discrimination through the Looking Glass,” 947, my italics. I hope it is clear that I am reading founding assumptions and their internal consistency, and not their implementation as policy. The latter reflects high-minded rhetoric combined with a recurrent history of (political) failure.

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To return to the start of this chapter: it is important, of course, that B. R. Ambedkar, who came from a community that had suffered historic discrimination and inequality, was also the one to play a key role in its legal redress. The Indian example suggests a relationship between affirmative action, on the one hand, and histories of violent exclusion and dehumanization, on the other. It is certainly possible that the commitment to affirmative action carries its own dangers: for instance, an effort to balance competing inequalities might privilege particularism rather than universality. What the model offers, however, is a more complex and layered understanding of the dilemmas of legislating substantive equality in the face of complex inequalities rooted in religion, economy, and society. In this chapter I have argued that we ought to view civil rights and affirmative action as a key moment in the longer-term elaboration of rights, and thus a historically specific moment in the social life of “the state.” That is, the assertion of universal rights has provided an opportunity for extending, elaborating, and reinterpreting rights claims in the face of their exclusivist instantiation.23 We might thus extend the concept of the “state effect” to think about the specificity of law and ideas of legal redress. Though law has the power to define, it also appears to be an external source of redress: most of us act as if legal structures are capable of delivering justice once harm and injury are presented in familiar legal idioms, even when we know that this may not be the case.24 It is the seeming externality of the law, the sense that law is somehow different from categories that govern, which leads people to accept the force of law. In fact, the dual character of law as both punitive and protective has empowered the appearance of caste and race as legislated identities, with courts tasked with the adjudication of historic harm.

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The well-known essay by T. H. Marshall argued that the divide between formal and substantive rights was to be bridged sequentially with rights claims progressing from civic, to political, to socioeconomic domains. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). Oddly, the recognition versus redistribution argument famously put forward by Nancy Fraser posits a conceptual divide between elements that are part of an evolutionary framework in Marshall’s argument. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-socialist Age,” New Left Review, 212 (July 1995), 68–93; the responses by Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and Iris Marion Young in later issues of the New Left Review; and Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (May 2000), 107–120. Slavoj Zizek, “The Supposed Subject of Ideology,” Critical Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1997), 39–59.

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While the Indian example shows that policy is capable of politicizing identity, it is equally true that policy can itself become the site of politics. Postcolonial constitutionalism tried to undo earlier social distinctions, and to perpetuate new ones as the political rhetoric shifted from (colonial) governance to (national) redistribution. In each case, some identities were recognized as exceptional, and worthy of special political dispensation. In particular caste replaced the colonial focus on religion (and Islam in particular), and with this came a focus on the exclusionary frameworks through which caste was reproduced. In the process, caste has become newly political (as a legislated identity), though there are ongoing efforts to depoliticize it as a social identity. Without the active work of politics, affirmative action policies would indeed remain an anemic, statist response to structural exclusion. The postcolonial emendation of Abram’s critical discussion of the “state as effect” suggests way to rethink both the history and the theory of “the state.”

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Conclusion Notes toward a Global Synthesis John L. Brooke and Julia C. Strauss

We opened this volume with three issues before us: 1) the distinction between premodern and modern polities, 2) forging a global approach to state formations, and 3) navigating the tense theoretical boundaries between Weberian and culturalist approaches to state formations. Our chapters work these issues from a great variety of perspectives. Can we propose a path toward synthesis? What would the outlines of such a synthesis look like? First, is it possible to conceive of a “premodern state”? Here we would suggest that we will need to split the difference. On the one hand, it is extremely difficult to argue that there were no political authorities wielding coercive power and rule-making capacities in the premodern world. Clearly there were, and in any event, the Young Turks of the cultural turn in archaeology are pushing the discussion of state-like entities further and further into the deep past.1 On the other hand, Quentin Skinner and Greg Anderson are on equally solid ground when they argue that the critical premises of these premodern polities were fundamentally different than those of modern states. Here Anderson’s position that the political in premodernity was embedded in a “cosmic ecology” from which modernity has been “disenchanted” is especially convincing. He presents the imperative that any examination of state formations across the premodern-modern divide consider not just the duality of state and society but the triad of polity, religion, and society. 1

Timothy R. Pauketat, Chiefdoms and Other Archeological Delusions (Plymouth: Altamira, 2007); Bruce Routledge, Archaeology and State Theory: Subjects and Objects of Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Regarding our global approach, we trust that our wide geography has made its point. As the twenty-first century advances, the traditional focus of state formation studies on Europe is beginning to look more than a little anachronistic. While the lessons of two world wars and the 400 years of European state formation leading to them are not lost on us, the historical stage is bigger than Europe, and the contemporary stage has bigger players that are products of different global histories: most importantly the United States, Russia, China, and India. As in other contexts, we are beginning to think in planetary terms, perhaps we should begin to do so for state formations as well.2 While we regret our inability to include the preColumbian Americas, our fifteen substantive chapters that touch on China, South and Southwest Asia, Africa, and the settler Americas allow us to think about a wide, global terrain. Finally, as Clifford Ando puts it so diplomatically in his contribution, the authors in this volume come from a “diversity of first-order theoretical commitments.” At the broadest level, this theoretical and conceptual plurality involves the divide between the Weberian inheritance and the proliferation of culturalist departures. One thing is quite clear: the Weberian macro-analytical questions of centralized capacity, bureaucratic administration, and authority over claimed territory remain the bedrock points of departure of any examination of state formations. The questions about micro-power proposed in Jessop’s relational analysis, Foucault’s governmentality, or Abram’s and Mitchell’s “state as effect” all in different ways argue that these Weberian qualities are situated not in “physical space,” but in “action space.” If Weberians tend to consider the “state” as an “object” with a “will,” the post-Gramscian inheritance posits that it is also the sum consequence of the web of interactions of actors. It is both hard and soft, knowable and elusive, object and action. One of the questions that this project opens up – and perhaps the first step toward a synthesis – is the analysis of both institutions and practices of governance through the deep time of the state. Weber wove institutions and authority into a series of ideal types what we can call Weberian administrative regimes: prestate forms, most importantly “gerontocratic” councils of elders, patrimonial states, and bureaucratic states. As many of our chapters suggest, there is another important Weberian distinction: between consolidated singular sovereignties (be they ancient empires 2

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Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014):1–23.

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exercising direct rule or the modern nation-state), and much more composite, plural polities, including innumerable decentralized tributary empires. Many of our chapters work to describe the state effects, the strategic relations and web of action relationships, in premodern polities as well as modern states. Our chapters posit very different manifestations of state effects and strategic relations in patrimonial and bureaucratic states, in consolidated, single sovereignties and composite plural polities. Further exploration of these tangles of macro and micro structures for different types of states is obviously an important research agenda. Thus, within a wider global turn, we need to establish the parameters of these macro-micro relationships. The nature of those relations/effects has typically been articulated in the context of the modern state, but – as Michael Szonyi and Seth Richardson suggest – we can also see comparable dynamics in premodern contexts. Hypothetically Jessop’s strategic relations and Abrams’s and Mitchell’s state effect can be explored in any political context for which we could find data. Here, however, Anderson’s argument is critical: the premodern polity was by its very nature “embedded” in a sacred ethos, a religious framework, an enchantment. Thus the effects and relations – the entire “embeddedness” – emanating from and around the premodern state are shaped and refracted by this religious aura. What of the modern, desacralized state? On the one hand Skinner and Anderson see it standing autonomous, and also “disenchanted.” On the other hand the scholars of the wider cultural turn see the modern state as embedded, “re-embedded” perhaps, but in a very different way, perhaps best summarized under Foucault’s language of “governmentality.” Foucault’s governmentality is a situationally special case, a “modern state effect”: the roots of his conception of governmentality lie in his account of the post–Black Death plague ordinances, a state ordering of the social that stands as a critical departure from medieval to early modern.3 In pursuing the regulation of its population, what Foucault came to call “biopolitics,” the modern state becomes embedded in a web of social and ideological formations that provide the framework in which modern governance can happen.4 In Mitchell’s analysis, the

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Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1979), 195–200. One might ask whether the unfolding state crisis in the contemporary United States is a result of the erosion of the fabric of governmentality constructed since before the American Revolution.

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“effect” lies in the nebulous boundaries between the “formal state system” and – for example – corporations operating in the global economy. Foucault’s arena of modern governmentality is really not that far removed, and at the end of The Birth of Biopolitics he suggests that “the art of governing must be given a reference, a domain or field of reference, a new reality on which it will be exercised, and I think that this new field of reference is civil society.” Linking his analysis to Mitchell’s capitalist market, Foucault summarized that “homo oeconomicus and civil society belong to the same ensemble of the technology of liberal governmentality.”5 Once we have “civil society” in view, the path back to Gramscian hegemony is obvious, since Gramsci proposed that the formative model of hegemony is the cultural formation forged by elite and middling consensus in modern civil society. And here too the Gramscian origins of Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere of civil society are also obvious, if not explored in our chapters. Habermas’s public sphere is the arena in which governance is conducted in explicit and implicit forms, grounded in the rational deliberation of literate individuals associating in public.6 While there has been considerable debate regarding the earliest emergence of the public sphere, it is overwhelmingly clear that it was a function of an emergent modernity, rising in the Europe of Machiavelli and Hobbes, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 And it was in the operation of politics in the early modern public sphere that state authority grounded in sacred texts, custom, and particularized charters gave way to authority grounded in impersonal constitutions.

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The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 296. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans., in association with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); John L. Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998), 43–67. Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); David Cressy, “Revolutionary England 1640–1642,” Past & Present 181 (2003), 39–71.

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Thus we would suggest that the “re-embedding” of the modern state operates in and upon the arena of civil society. And while – as is clear in the United States – religious institutions can be situated in civil society, civil society is by its very nature secularizing, disenchanting. Within civil society, deeply imbricated with state systems, the capitalist market maximizes profit, the press and education claim a rational deliberation; in the infrastructure of science and technology, analysis undermines sacred enchantment. With this break from enchantment, powered by the symbiosis of state and civil society, comes the explosion of capacity that has unfolded in the past several hundred years.

§ § § § § Let us suggest the outlines of a global and historical synthesis. It will not capture all of the questions posed earlier, but it might offer some main lines of inquiry for a global history of the state, considering Weberian notions of administrative capacities, sovereign structures, and state enchantment while also suggesting opportunities to investigate effects, relations, and governmentality. First, let us propose the following about capacity, regimes, and sovereign structures in the deep time of state formations. State capacity in the widest sense hinged on what we can call strategic technologies, and here the metals actually matter. The broad labels of Bronze, Iron, “cheap steel”, and now fiber optics, do capture important shifts in social and state capacity, in which the marshaling of ore and energy resources to produce the raw technologies of military power, transportation, and communication are good barometers of the ability of states to achieve their ends. And just as much as cheap steel is deeply involved in the entire array of modern technologies that support modern state capacities, Bronze and Iron Age societies saw critical shifts in technologies of literacy and record keeping that underwrote early state capacities.8 What of administrative regimes and sovereign structures in the ancient world? The earliest states emerged out of Neolithic villages and village networks governed by various forms of quasi-oligarchic councils, 8

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For recent overviews of early state capacities and recording technologies, see Carles Boix, Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Consequences for Human Welfare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 91–170; Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-modern States (New York: Springer, 2008); and Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, “Early Writing, Archaic States, and Nascent Administration: Ancient Egypt in Context (Late 4th–Early 3rd Millennium bc),” Archéo-nil 26 (2016), 149–169.

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certainly blending religious and political power.9 If we accept Richard Blanton et al.’s amendment of Weber, these earliest, pristine state formations, as well as emerging secondary states, were either corporate regimes – showing signs of wide participation in collective public ritual action – or patrimonial regimes, roughly what Blanton et al. call “exclusionary.”10 The chapters by Rita Wright on the early Indus and Chapurukha Kusimba on the Swahili coast capture some of the dynamics of such societies. Wright’s Indus Valley, as suggested by craft and irrigation, was a mosaic of corporate localities, perhaps council-governed, and patrimonial, exclusive-ruled city-states. Kusimba’s Swahili coast was dominated by patrimonial city-states, perhaps also in some measure council governed, controlling the trade on the coast with the Indian Ocean circuit. Adherence to these states may not have been entirely driven by coercion. If Richardson’s scribes mocked the failings and “presumptions” of the rulers of these early city-states, their mockery had its limits, for the alternative of drought, flood, and banditry outside the walls was not that appealing.11 Indeed, Timothy Pauketat suggests, early state peoples may have found the monumental places and ritual drama of early states an exciting release from the confined horizons of the Neolithic village. Such would have been a powerful example of an early state effect.12 Beyond the city-state often lay a tributary system, where relatively distant subject peoples were self-ruling but owed tribute and services to a paramount king. Clifford Ando provides us with a detailed account of an advanced ancient tributary empire. Importantly, the Roman Empire as a decentralized system of semiautonomous, internally self-governing provinces was only one version of a system found throughout the historical record, from the Bronze Age to the eve of modernity. Around the ancient Mediterranean the earliest state formations were linked hierarchies and 9

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For example, see Ian Kuijt and Nigel Goring-Morris, “Foraging, Farming, and Social Complexity in the Pre-pottery Neolithic in the Southern Levant: A Review and Synthesis,” Journal of World Prehistory 16 (2002), 361–440; Brian F. Byrd, “Public and Private, Domestic and Corporate: The Emergence of the Southwest Asia Village,” American Antiquity 59 (1994), 639–666. Richard Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Steven Kowalewski, and Peter N. Peregrine, “A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization,” Current Anthropology 37 (1996), 1–14. Frank Hole, “Environmental Instabilities and Urban Origins,” in Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman, eds., Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East: The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity (Madison, WI: Prehistory Press, 1994), 121–151. Pauketat, Chiefdoms and Other Archeological Delusions, 198–199.

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alliances of trading city-states: most were patrimonial monarchies or oligarchies, some verging on the republican forms of Athens. Clifford Ando’s Rome, then, with its republican city-state origins, patrician Roman elite, minimal nonmilitary bureaucracy, and stable tributary empire of autonomous subordinate provinces, was thus the most effective expression of a composite state form of extremely wide distribution in the ancient world. Inside the frontiers, rather than heavy-handed direct rule, Rome was stitched together certainly by good roads, but as importantly by the effective mobilization of provincial oligarchies, tied by interest and cult to the empire. Across the majority of state formations in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas an oscillation of petty patrimonial kingdoms with unstable tributary empire was the norm. As Richardson’s scribes suggest, both city-states and tributary empires required bureaucrats to manage state affairs: the Akkadian empire and the Third dynasty of Ur stand out as early examples, as do Darius’s Persia and Rome two millennia later. But certainly patrimonialism operated powerfully both at the core of empire and in its tributary provinces.13 Bureaucrats operated as agents of royal households, and their emerging organizational independence always stood under the threat – or the temptation – of what Francis Fukuyama, in Origins of Political Order, usefully terms “repatrimonialization”: the conversion of offices to hereditary claims of rising elite families, often potential challengers to a ruler.14 Thus we can suggest that city-states and tributary empires in the ancient world rarely developed fully articulated bureaucracies, and saw a perpetual contest between competing patrimonial modes of governance, which rewarded loyalty with patronage, and bureaucratic modes of governance, which stressed effectiveness in implementation. Ando’s world, and indeed Richardson’s world, however, was not Szonyi’s world. Three ancient states stand out as distinctly sweeping in their powers and penetrating in their administration: ancient Egypt, Szonyi’s China, and the comparatively recent – and fleeting – Incan empire

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Norman Yoffee, “Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States,” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 24 (1995), 281–311; Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions, Mario Liverani, ed. (Padova: Sargon, 1993); Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114–116, 161–162, 207–209, 217, 389–394, 404; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, c. 3000–323 BC (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 28–33, 52, 59–79, 154–158, 205–214, 216–252, 271–279. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order from Prehistoric Time to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 101, 229, 453–454.

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in the Andes. These were direct-rule empires governed through elaborate bureaucracies insulated from repatrimonializing incursion by an enduring web of regulation and oversight. And they seem to have had particularly “dense” forms of ideological enchantment buttressing their regimes.15 Where the Nile had been divided into a series of smaller “Predynastic” city states,” after 3000 bc the Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs acted swiftly to unify their domain, to break the power of local familial rule, and to establish a long-enduring bureaucracy reporting directly to them; the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (~2100–1780 bc) has been described as a “bureaucratic utopia.”16 Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs, demigods of the sun along a narrow, bounded slice of river and alluvium, also forged a state theology that penetrated deeply into the daily fabric of common life, indeed agricultural production, since they were the divine guarantors of the Nile floods. The pharaoh’s bureaucrats were officers of temples that assured the afterlife but also distributed rations, assembled public labor, and raised taxes. This was a particularly “dense” form of sacred enchantment married to temporal rule, and one wonders whether we could find an Egyptian scribal class generating a mocking commentary on their rulers, such as Richardson finds in ancient Mesopotamian city-states where the bureaucracy did not have such a uniform, monolithic articulation.17 Long before we get to secularization, there were different qualities – densities, if you will – in the sacred enchantment in ancient and medieval states. Were the state cults in city-states and tributary empires more mutable, because their sacred claims had a less convincing homology with natural forces operating on vitally reproductive landscapes? Were they also undermined by their plurality and the segmentary forms of patrimonial lineage? Besides Egypt, two premodern societies developed into large, direct rule, bureaucratic empires with similar encompassing state theologies. One was the Andean Incas, where a sun-god cult of the ruler was combined with a highly centralized system of administrative recruitment, appointment, and circulation.18 The other of course was China. Emerging out of the growing Late Neolithic Longshan villages, the early 15

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Here see the note by Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, “With Moralizing Gods, Exclusion Reigns,” Science 350 (2015), 393. Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2006), 163–192, 243; Trigger, Understanding Ancient Civilizations, 209–211, 218–219. Here one has to wonder whether the ritual bureaucracies of Dynastic Egypt might better be compared to the predynastic Mesopotamian Uruk temple-states of the fourth millennium. Trigger, Understanding Ancient Civilizations, 80–81, 106–107, 118, 212–214, 450–452.

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Chinese polities were city-states, coalescing into decentralized tribute empires of the Shang and Zhou.19 Defeating the Shang around 1050 bc, the Zhou established the core of Chinese state theology – he who could unify China could claim the Mandate of Heaven. But this theology preceded its supporting structure of bureaucracy – and direct-rule empire. Here it is well established that the critical transformative force was ongoing destructive war, as decentralized Zhou feudalism gradually dissolved into independent patrimonial states competing in endemic warfare in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Eventually technologies of power in the widest sense led to bureaucratized empire. As war ground down the hereditary lordships, small states began to seek the best advice on how to improve their chances of survival. The states of Wei and then Qin were the first to successfully drive these technologies – including the reorganization of landownership and local governance, new systems of crop rotation to increase productivity, and two key departures: the detailed registration of all households and an accelerated use of iron for work and war. Iron smelting spread across most of Eurasia after 1000 bc in a technology – the inefficient, low-temperature bloomery – that would be in use through the late Middle Ages. Iron came late to Warring State China, but the Chinese – based on their early advances in bronze casting – increased their smelting temperatures to create the earliest continuous production blast furnaces. At the same time households were recorded for tax and military service, and draconian punishments instituted, so draconian that they fueled an internal rebellion that toppled the Qin. But these systems were adopted by the Han Empire, with the softening addition of Confucian notions of moral rule and the Confucian examination system shaping merit-based recruitment. This Han innovation became the model for a unified bureaucratically managed imperial state reproduced in the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing.20 Thus Michael Szonyi’s account of kin networks negotiating with Ming bureaucracy – in what he terms a “regulatory arbitrage” – may capture a story with deep origins in

19

20

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Li Lui, The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories toward Early States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 223–238. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60–65, 97–99, 178–190; Edgar Kiser and Yong Cai, “War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003), 511–539; Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 128–138.

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China. It is not impossible to see precursors of Foucault’s governmentality in China as far back as the Wei and Qin. China’s empire did suffer setbacks: the Han collapsed in 220 CE, followed by centuries of disunity before the Tang reunification in 618, and there would be at least three other short intervals of imperial collapse before 1911, each marked in some measure by Fukuyama’s “repatrimonialization.”21 Similar interruptions, the so-called Intermediate Periods separating the Old, Middle, and Old Kingdoms, shaped Egyptian history. But in both cases the powerful, resilient state theology of the pharaonic relationship with the Nile and the emperor’s Mandate of Heaven contributed to an imperial restoration, as did the entrenched social structure of the bureaucracy. And both theology and bureaucracy also shaped Egypt’s and China’s experience with “vulture empires” lurking on their borders. Strong unifying state “technologies” and weakened traditions of local patrimonial power allowed these vultures – Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, French, British, Manchurians, Mongols – to swoop in and assume the pharaonic mandate by conquest. On the other hand, Egyptian models of bureaucratization may have spread throughout East and Southwest Asia with the Hellenistic, Islamic, and Mongol empires forged in these vulture conquests.22 China’s Mandate spread further than its bureaucracy: during the Qing dynasty, if not before, the Chinese imperium spread beyond its formal frontiers, with tributary states accepting the Mandate of Heaven and a subordinate if honored place under the emperor’s protective mantle.23 Francis Fukuyama stresses the uniqueness of this Chinese-Egyptian pattern (though he only discusses China), arguing that South Asia simply never suffered the severity of China’s ancient warring periods, thus

21 22

23

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Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 101, 229, 453–454. Joseph G. Manning, “State Making, Military Power and Bureaucracy. Some Thoughts on New Directions in the Study of the History of Bureaucracy in Egypt,” Essays for the Library of Seshat: Studies Presented to Janet Johnson on the Occasion of her 70th Birthday, Robert K. Ritner, ed. (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2016) 111–119; Thomas J. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10–41. Mark C. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (New York: Longman, 2009), 126–129. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 400–406.

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preserving its ancient patrimonial order.24 Surviving in the caste system and in petty kingdoms and tributary empires, the Hindu patrimonial order was blended into the patrimonial-bureaucratic sarkā r tradition brought to India from the Iranian steppe by the Islamic Mughals – and ultimately to Nicholas Abbott’s eighteenth-century Awadh, and its struggle with the British East India Company. In Europe, though Rome left an enduring memory in law and culture, a post-imperial “repatrimonialization” prevailed, though offset by the “non-state” bureaucracy and common mandate of the church. Thus feudal Europe was fundamentally a patrimonial world, and a plural, “composite” world: Clifford Ando’s empire and Michael Martoccio’s Renaissance states are linked by more than geography and legend. Abbott and Martoccio bring us to recent thinking on patrimonialism in early modern Europe, and the great debate about the end of the premodern world. Corrigan and Sayer, in their formative book The Great Arch, argue that the state formation supporting of a capitalist economy in England developed as a slow cultural revolution in governmentality. Sayer has since extended this argument to stress the slow death of English patrimonialism: in the world of BBC-TV, Wolf Hall’s founding English bureaucrat Thomas Cromwell took centuries to defeat Downton Abbey’s die-hard patrimonialist Lord Grantham (and importantly died at the hands of the Duke of Norfolk).25 Thomas Ertman, in Birth of the Leviathan, highlights the strength of patrimonialism across early modern Europe as a powerful impediment to the modern bureaucratic state, and a rising Tudor-Stuart “repatrimonialization” in England broken only with the force of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Julia Adams, in The Familial State, extends this analysis, and sees patrimonial forms enduring in the English state down to the reforms of the 1830s.26 The 1830s reforms marked a key moment in the disenchantment of the British state, breaking the Anglican monopoly on marriages and funerals, and allowing non-Anglicans to attend university and to serve as civil (and

24 25

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Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 150–188. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Derek Sayer, “A Notable Administration: English State Formation and the Rise of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 97 (1992), 1382–1415. Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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military) officers.27 Adams suggests, thus, a late closing of a longer early modernity, with distant roots in the process of nationalization that Victor Lieberman describes, running from the late Middle Ages across much of Eurasia. Lieberman’s analysis begins with an intensification of state enchantment, as the common people of a host of smaller early modern states began to fuse ethnicity and religion with their allegiance to a monarchical state. This was also the cultural context for the mobilization for war that Charles Tilly and his wider school have argued was so foundational to the emergence of consolidated national sovereignties in early Modern Europe.28 But Lieberman’s story is also the foundation of Benedict Anderson’s vernacular imagined communities, intensified in Europe by the circulation of print in Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere. Here we might stress two vectors deeply dependent on association and print and acted out in Habermas’s public sphere. One is the disciplinary transformation of the rise of Calvinism that Philip Gorski sees as critical to an early modern bureaucratic revolution in Protestant Europe. 29 The second is the entangled rise of science and the modern state that John Clark describes in his article. Both authors situate their stories of Calvinism, science, and the emergence of the modern state as aspects of the construction of Foucault’s governmentality in civil society, nicely aligned with Corrigan and Sayer’s state formation through slow cultural revolution. Slow, and contradictory: the early modern era was thus both a profoundly transitional epoch and riven with countervailing trajectories. The end result, apparently, was state modernity: nations with singular, consolidated sovereignty, disenchanted from sacred texts, and – by the 1850s – endowed with the rapidly developing technologies of the age of steel: railroads, telegraph, steam power. By the turn of the twentieth century, and particularly since World War II, as Yannis Kotsonis argues, the modern state had the knowledge capacity to mandate that the citizen embed him- or herself into the ever-tighter web of taxation 27

28

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For details, and a chronology similar to Adams’s, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 527–564. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Tilly, “War Making as State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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systems, a precursor to the Internet driven grid of big data providing both public state and private corporation limitless detail about our lives. Of course the rise of the modern state was not always slow. At critical junctures, contradictions and tensions erupted into national revolution, in England in the 1640s, in North America in the 1770s, in France in 1789, in mid-nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, in twentieth-century Russia, Mexico, China, and Iran. It may well be an open question whether the slow route of gradual change or the rapid route of revolution was more significant in advancing the structures of the modern state. As Richard Bensel argues, however, revolutions rip open the question of authority and consent, and in the process – generally – patrimonial and enchanted forms are clearly eroded, and bureaucratic, disenchanted forms advanced. Such is the argument advanced in Steven Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution, siding with Ertman against Adams, and advanced further in his chapter with William Novak here on the rise of a “strong American state” in the American Revolution. On the other hand, as François Furet argued so influentially for the French Revolution, the cultural forms of old regimes powerfully shaped essential patterns underlying new regimes, as Julia Strauss argues for the two post-revolutionary Chinas.30 And we might point out that Richard Bensel’s account of the rise of nondemocratic states in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Shia Iran all suggest that a “re-enchantment” can at least be attempted in the forging of modern states.

§ § § § § The rise of the modern state might seem to be one of a simple, general convergence on the European story – the consolidation of singular sovereignty by the national state. But this is only part of the picture, because the rise of European states was shaped by their seaborne settler and conquest empires, out of which other state formation experiences would emerge, experiences in which ancient histories still have their relevance. The continuity from ancient tributary systems to early modern empire gives us entry into key dimensions of modern global state formations beyond the confines of Europe. If early modern seaborne empires had roots in ancient tributary empires, these roots were refracted through the composite polities that Michael Martoccio alludes to in his closing. His “Renaissance States of 30

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François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, Elborg Forster, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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Mind” were a plural patchwork of divisible and crosscutting allegiances, inspired by the city-state traditions of Greece and Rome, but shaped by the encrustation of patrimonial claim, corporate right, and outright purchase. His Italian mosaic and the composite polities reaching across early modern Eurasia were points along a continuum, with implications for state formations in the emerging seaborne empires. Great tributary land-based empires surrounded Europe to the east: the Ottoman, the Mughals, the Tsars, limited by geographic barriers to direct rule. As emerging early modern European states began to establish seaborne empires of conquest and settlement, the model of the tributary empire – explicitly Roman – was not so subtly converted into the doctrine of mercantilism: wealth would flow from subordinate colonies to European metropole.31 And some of the plural complexities of Martoccio’s Florence and Arezzo would flow from the delegation of authority to chartered companies in the colonial dependencies, to say nothing of the corporate privileges established for religious orders, confraternities, and militias across Spain’s American empire.32 The colonies of British North America were simple by comparison, but their detailed governing charters bore the imprint of a very long cultural memory in their restraints on royal power and enumeration of local autonomy.33 Thus was born Europe’s awkward federal stepchild, byzantine it its sovereign complexities, but a modern global hegemon. Our American papers by Novak and Pincus, Mihm, and Downs all explore the results of what were in effect seventeenth-century state-formations. The North American colonies can be seen as semi-autonomous states, governed by charters that were converted during the American Revolution after great effort and debate, into state constitutions.34 Massa-chusetts is a particular case in point: the colony’s 1629 charter, enumerating a virtually autonomous self-governance, was physically carried to Boston, an ocean away from London, by a people profoundly immersed in Gorski’s 31

32

33

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Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 11–28; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29–53, 68, 125–145, 155–156, 191. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 197–207. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 125–389.

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“Disciplinary Revolution,” and profoundly hostile to Adams’s corrupt “familial state.” They nurtured Calvinist discipline to enhance state capacity in a hostile world, and they – and other New Englanders – forged the earliest model of governance fully accountable to a broad electorate.35 Of course, while they constructed a state free of patrimonialism and deeply committed to deliberation in the public sphere, the slave colonies to the south saw little need for a public sphere, and veered back quite happily toward de facto patrimonial patterns.36 But the cumulative shared experience of a quasi-autonomous resistance to the imperial center, living out the dreams of subordinate tributary provinces over the millennia, provided the common ground for revolution, and for an awkward late eighteenthcentury state formation. Thus Pincus and Novak find that the states were the real actors in “the origins of a strong American state” and Mihm’s Congress failed to establish common weights and measures; similarly Gary Gerstle argues that the states – rather than the federal government – wielded unrestrained “police powers” into the twentieth century.37 Greg Downs’s victorious Union attempted to enforce – via the new steel technology of high-speed transport – the new singular national sovereignty won in battle and mandated in the Civil War Amendments: the white South intractably worked to restore its ancient state police powers to maintain racial preeminence. The complex pluralities of empire go far beyond the origins of the United States. If the state in North America was powerfully shaped by slavery and its legacy, the state in Latin America was equally powerfully shaped by the privileges of the peninsulars versus creoles and indigenous peoples. The hegemonic role of the culture of convivialismo in Colombian politics, in Rebecca Tally’s description, clearly has its roots in this tradition of state privilege deeply embedded in political practice. Diane King 35

36

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Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); J. S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Here we might bear in mind Novak’s suggestion that we find a way “beyond Weber”: William J. Novak, “Beyond Max Weber: The Need for a Democratic (not Aristocratic) Theory of the Modern State,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 36 (2015), 43–91. Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 60–85; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 167–204. Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 55–86.

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and Anupama Rao get us to the cultural effects of British imperial state formations, which go back to the recognition of Catholicism and Roman law in the 1774 Québec Act, where Parliament abandoned the Reformation model of a uniformly Protestant empire. Recovering by trial and error the cultural plurality of other tributary empires contemporary and ancient, British imperial rule reinforced patriarchy in greater Iraq, and caste in post-independence India.38 In these two instances, and around the postcolonial world, indigenous forms of the state interact with the imprint of recent global empires. Here the emergence of modern state forms has been deeply complicated by their coercive imposition from Europe. In vast parts of the world, in what are called the postcolonial states, processes of state formation will involve for generations the echoes and effects of the pluralities of the imperial experience. Thus we suggest that a long chronology and theoretical flexibility gives us a better perspective on global state formations. The emergence of “the modern state” has not been an exclusively European story. The entanglements between state institutions and local cultural dynamics have produced distinctly different kinds of state effects/formations in different settings around the globe. If Europe “brought” the modern state to the world, its national manifestations were deeply shaped by the terms of that imperial bringing, entangled with local traditions, assumptions, and surviving structures. Recognition of this kind of complexity illustrates the larger value of synthesizing Weberian with culturalist approaches when considering the longer historical trajectory of state formations modern and nonmodern. The relationship of state institutions and governing practices, the structural space and action space of state formations, examined in deep time and contemporary manifestations, will continue to offer a particularly fruitful domain of analysis.39 We hope that our effort has made some small contribution in this inquiry.

38

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Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 37–42, 139–165. For a microhistory of a state effect of the imperial error, see Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). For two such ventures, see Experiencing the State, Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stuart Corbridge, Lyn Williams, Monoj Srivasta, and René Véron, Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Index

Abbott, Nicholas, J., 355 Abrams, Philip, 6, 7 caste as colonial state effect, 20, 344 misrecognition, 334 state as enabling fiction, 334 state effect, 18, 346, 347 absolutism vs. representation, 4 Adams, John, 145, 146 promoted U.S. domestic production, 144 Thoughts on Government, 142 Adams, Julia, 4, 5, 355, 356, 357, 359 Aden, and medieval African trade Networks, 102 affirmative action, 343, See India: affirmative action Africa bidirectional trade in, 96 interaction spheres in, 99 not isolated from Eurasia, 95 social complexity in, 95 See also East Africa, medieval; Swahili Coast, medieval Africa, North patriliny in, 305 Africa, Southeast Pangani, 96 Rufiji Delta, 96 agha, 307, 310 agnatic kinship. See patriliny Aʾīn-i akbarī (The regulations of Akbar), 125 Akkadian empire, 351

Almond, Gabriel, 3 Ambedkar, B. R., 331, 340, 343 American Revolution, 138, 357 historiography of state weakness, 147 interventionist social and economic policy, 148 issues of taxation, 230 policymaking as liberty or rights narration, 148, 153, 154 as project of state formation, 139 and sovereign plurality, 14 state formation and consumer economy, 143 and strong American state, 357 strong British imperial model, 142 and theory of limited government, 140 American revolutionary state legislatures, 148, 151 colonial charters converted to state constitutions, 358 controlled state political economy, 152 and federal activism for public welfare, 142 Madison’s critique of, 150 political and societal organization, 153 positive use of state power, 154 power against imperial authority, 153 precedents for strong American state, 150 Americas, pre-Columbian, 346 state formation in, 58 Anderson, Benedict, 290 imagined communities, 8, 356 on print media and nationalism, 292, 356

361

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Index

362

Anderson, Greg, 13, 131, 276 “dividual” persons, 69, 121 enchantment in premodern state, 15, 16, 17, 345 on premodern polities, 345 Anderson, Perry, 4 Ando, Clifford, 346, 350 Ankersmit, Frank, 28 anthropocentrism, 62 disenchanted, 62, 66 apartheid, 53, 56 Arab Spring, 311, 316 Arabian Peninsula, 76, 79, 107 Arendt, Hannah, 139 Arezzo, 358 as divisible state, 118 delegitimation of Aretine state, 114 Guelf popolo shielded from Ghibellins, 121 parliament organized by Florence, 120 Saint Donatus, patron of, 117 Tarlati family, 114, 115, 121 Ubertini family, 121 Aristotelian approaches ideals of city governance, 110 inductive method, 178 republicanism, 112 arms races, 235 Articles of Confederation, 142, 201 changes ratified by states, 154 as liberty or rights narrative, 147 national government to set weights and measures, 193 Asia arrival of firearms, 298 nationalism and democracy disconnected, 294 politicization of ethnicity, 294 Assyria as vulture empire, 354 Athens, classical, 67 demokratia in, 69 demos in, 68 interdependent households, 70 polis not disenchanted, 68 Austria, taxation and property surveys, 232 authoritarianism and nationalism, 294 postcolonial, 316, 335

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authority bureaucratic, 3, 166 charismatic, 2, 3, 166 Awadh, 14, 133, 135, 136, 355 Bacon, Francis New Atlantis, 220, 222 Bailyn, Bernard, 140, 147, 151 Baker, Michael, Jr., Regulator of Weights and Measures, 199, 200 Bali, 76, 89 Balkans, the and the market for sovereignty, 115 patriliny in, 308 Baltic, the and the market for sovereignty, 115 Baluchistan, 84, 86 banditry, 175, 350 banks banking families, 117, 118 banking networks, 119 collapse of, 29 mortgage, 237 and taxation, 234 Barbeyrac, Jean, 34 Baroda, 339 Bayly, C. A., 204 Beck, Ulrich, 217, 225, 226, 227 Becker, Martin, 119 bees beehives as models of state, 227 the commonwealth of, 217 as exemplars of statecraft, 223 and the rational beehive, 217, 221, 222, 224, 225 as lesson in statecraft, 218 wooden beehives replace straw, 221 bees, colony collapse causes of, 225 ecological significance of, 225 and separation of nature and society, 227 as social metaphor, 218 Bengal, 133, 134 Benin Yoruba urbanism, 95 Yoruba, the, 75 Bensel, Richard, 357 Bentham, Jeremy, 41, 238 critique of Blackstone, 40 influence of, 223

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Index Panopticon, analogous to beehive, 223 bills of rights, 64 population management, 223 bio-power supporting the state, 222 Bisht, R. S., 84, 86 Blackstone, Sir William, 39 Blake, Stephen, 124, 125, 131, 132, 136 Blanton, Richard, 10, 13, 75, 93, 350 body politic, 312 in India, 334 patrilineal, 306, 312 and royal body, 7 Bologna, 117 Bolsheviks, 159, 160, 166 as Marxist vanguard, 163 Bonaiuti, Baldassare, 119 Bosanquet, Bernard, 25, 26 Boston, 358 forcible rendition of escaped slaves, 206 Botswana, 98 Boukalas, Christos, 47 boundaries, state, 54 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 field theory of the state, 9 habitus and doxa, 9 Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 149 Boyle, Robert, 219 Brewer, John, 148 Britain, 293 Anglo-Dutch wars, 301 Anglo-French wars, 296 culture of gentility, 302 dominates Atlantic trade, 301 France, trade rivalries with, 301 Netherlands, trade rivalries with, 301 Tudor monarchsgl, 299 See also England Britain and Burma compared, 295, 297, 299 displacement of alien populations, 295 economic growth, 301, 302 elites in capitals, 296 growth in trade and agriculture, 297 British East India Company, 14, 131, 132, 134, 355 acquisition of the Bengal dīwā nī, 134 conflation of sarkā r with state, 134 as sarkā r, 126, 133 sarkā r both person and autonomous institution, 135

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363

British Empire abandoned imperial Protestantism, 360 imperial constitution of, 144 in Iraq, 306, 315 social and economic imperial infrastructure, 141 state formations in, 360 trade with North America, 298 as vulture empire, 354 weakness of imperial state, 140 British Empire in India, 124 Baroda, 339 Bombay, 339 bureaucracy, 135 census technologies and caste, 338 colonial authoritarianism, 335 enabled upper-caste elite, 338 Kolhapur, 339 Madras, 339 politicized caste and religious identity, 339 Rebellion of 1857/8, 136 sarkā rs and enlightened European governance, 135 separate electorate in, 333 stratification of caste, 339 British Empire in North America, 358 colonial charters converted to state constitutions, 358 Grenville Ministry, 144 imperial state nonfunctional, 142 North ministry, 144 patrimonialism in slave colonies, 359 restrictions on colonial trade, 139 slavery in, 359 taxation and liberty, 232 taxation suppressed colonial consumption, 144 unmaking of, 145 weakness of colonial authority, 140 British Raj. See British Empire in India Bronze Age, 15, 16, 349, 350 Buddhism, 296 and Burmese hegemony, 297 Theravada, 297, 300 bureaucracy, 251, 346, 351 in ancient Egypt, 352, 354 in ancient Mesopotamia, 352 autonomous, 2 in Bacon’s New Atlantis, 220 in Britain, 301

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Index

364

bureaucracy (cont.) centralized, 124 in China, 18, 19, 250, 353, 354 defined, 244 depersonalized, 245 empowered by new technologies, 73 and early modern Protestant revolution, 4 exclusionary, 73 and exclusive sovereignty, 131 and experimental natural philosophy, 220 in France, 231 Incan, 352 in India, 14, 339 in Iran, 166 Indus Valley, 78 in Iraq, 315 legal-rational, 245, 247 limited, 245 in Mesopotamia, 273 monarchist, 9 of the modern state, 136 in Mughal Empire, 131 patrimonial, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132, 136 in Post-Ottoman states, 312 in Rome, 351 royal, 7 in the United States, 206, 235 and social remediation, 337 See also authority, bureaucratic; governance, rational-bureaucratic; Weberian approaches to the state Burma, 293 Alaung-hpaya, 300 Buddhist identity, 296 Irawaddy basin, 295 isolation limited trade, 301 Kon-baung dynasty, 303 Mon minority, 296, 297 nationalism in, 19 patronage and royal authority, 303 social inequality in, 298 sovereignty remained royal, 303 trade with China and Indian Ocean, 296 wars against infidels, 296 See also Britain and Burma compared cadasters, 232, 242, 248 Calvinism, 4, 356, 359

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and post-Calvinist benevolism, 303 See also Protestant Reformation, the Cambridge School, 12, 141 Canada, 240 Québec Act, the, 360 capitalism, 51, 217 anthropocentric, 62 and bourgeois social relations, 166 and liberal governmentality, 348 and liberal individualism, 63 materialist markers of, 13 of the modern state, 13, 58 and state alignment of individual lives, 61 and state-sponsored economic growth, 55 state support for, 355 state-sponsored economic growth, 56 state-systems and maximizing profit, 349 Caracol, 85, 87 Carroll, Patrick, 11, 221 Catholicism, Roman abandonment of universal claims, 300 British opposition to French “popery and tyranny,” 302 bureaucracy of the Church, 355 and English anti-Catholicism, 297, 300 English recusants, 300 mandate of the Church, 355 Protestant critique of, 296 recognized in Québec, 360 Cato’s Letters, 146 CCP. See Chinese Communist Party Chahā r chaman-i brahman, 134 Childe, V. Gordon, 9, 13, 73, 74, 78, 88 China bureaucracy in, 353, 354 early city-states, 353 and long-distance exchanges, 107 Longshan villages, 352 Mandate of Heaven, the, 66, 353, 354 Shang empire, 353 state formation in, 58 Sunan Province, 254 warlords in, 246 water management in, 73 Zhou empire, 353 China, Han dynasty, 353 China, Ming dynasty, 19 art of being governed, 287 bureaucracy in, 351, 353 capital in Nanjing, 65 conscription in, 279

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Index conscription, abuse of system, 284 emperor the “Son of Heaven,” 66 everyday politics in, 278 family defines personhood, 67 genealogy and military households, 279, 282, 284, 285 government, 65 Grand Secretariat, 65 Great Ming Code (Da Ming lü), 66 household registration, 281, 282, 286 imperial apparatus, 66, 67 kin networks in, 353 kinship structures in, 288 Mao military household, 284 military households, 279, 282, 286 military recruitment in, 276 officials extensions of the Emperor’s body, 66 ordered domains of reality, 66 regulatory arbitrage in, 287, 289 scholar-bureaucrats, 65 Six Ministries, 65 state as network of institutions, 278 state effect in, 18, 67, 278 state membership, 276, 277, 288 subjects’ experience of statehood, 289 Tian military household, 279 China, People’s Republic of, 294 and land reform, 17, 253 assigned class labels, 248 blurred boundaries of state and society, 256 Ming minority in, 288 public accusation show, 254 Shanghai Grain Company, 249 Shanghai Municipal Food Bureau, 249 China, Qin dynasty, 353, 354 China, Qing dynasty, 292, 353, 354 China, Republic of and land reform, 17, 253 as a conservative state, 247, 248 clarified boundaries of state and society, 256 Guomindang, 248, 254, 256 Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, 252 Land Office, 255 land reform in, 248 Land Tenancy Committees, 255 Land to the Tiller program, 254 New Life Campaign, 250

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365

re-established central organization, 249 sorted historical records, 248 China, Song dynasty, 353 China, Tang dynasty, 353 China, Warring States period, 353 China, Wei dynasty, 353, 354 China, Yuan dynasty, 292 defeated by Burmese, 296 Chinese Communist Party, 250, 254, 256 Chinese Revolution, 357 Christianity distinction between universal church and kingdom, 300 introduction into Africa, 96 Papal Revolution, 300 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 180 civic humanism of, 110 ideal of harmony among ranks, 112 citizenship, 16, 179, 192, 203, 211, 265, 314, 316 allowing women to pass on, 316 British, 302, 311 in Iran, 311 in Iraq, 311, 316 Kurdish, 306 medieval Swahili Coast rules for, 103 metropolitan, 188 not passed on by women, 311 Ottoman, 313 patrilinear, 305, 311, 312 Roman, 16, 179, 188 Sicilian, 180 Swahili, 104 transition from subjecthood to, 300 universalized models of, 336 See also civil rights; exclusion; rights; state membership city-states, 244 in Greek and Roman tradition, 358 interdependent with hinterlands, 95 civic humanism Bruni, Leonardo, 112 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 110 Florentine, 121 civil rights, 202, 211, 212, 213, 240, 334, 343, See also citizenship; exclusion; rights; state membership civil society, 348 and reembedding of modern state, 349

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Index

366

civil society (cont.) undermines enchantment, 349 Clark, John C. D., 299, 356 Cold War, 3, 226 Colombia ADEPAN and INA price agreement, 325 artisans vs. gentlemen bakers, 326 Bogotá, 321, 323 bread-making as public service, 318 Gómez, Laureano, 324 hegemony in, 318, 323, 329 historiography of, 319 industrialization in, 323 la Violencia, 324 legitimacy of state, 330 Medellín, 323 National Bread Makers’ Association (ADEPAN), 317 National Folklore Survey, 322 National Front, 324, 329 National Supply Institute (INA), 317 political elites in, 320 politics of bread in, 20 state as mediator and guarantor of social welfare, 326 tension between elites and popular actors, 323 the street, 321 Colombia, convivialismo in, 20, 320 breakdown of, 328, 329 complex social rules of, 323 and gentlemen bakers, 325 and hegemonic reciprocity, 329 and hegemony, 359 and political elites, 321 politically exclusive, 321 popular component of, 321 positive effects of, 327 speech and hierarchy, 322 colonialism, 124 cheap labor in Africa and the Americas, 93 Roman, 185 colony collapse. See bees, colony collapse commission state, 206, 212, 213 commodification, 292 commonwealth, 32, 35, 221 communalism, 333 group identity, 335 in India, 314 in postcolonial Middle East, 314 Comte, Auguste, 2

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Confederate States of America collapse of, 207 secession of, 206 surrender of, 202 confessionalism, 313 Confucianism Chinese people unitary family, 67 filial piety, 18, 67 in Han dynasty, 353 and Ming dynasty scholarship, 65 conquest states, 244, 245 Timurid, 126 conservation resource preservation for state, 225 vs. environmentalism, 217 conservativism, 4 against increased control in welfare states, 27 Constitution of the United States, 149, 190 established power for state governments, 191 salus populi in, 155 uniform weights and measures, 16 Constitutional Convention, 193 Continental Congress, 154 and state debt, 138 and the strong state, 154 Corrigan, Philip, 7, 355, 356 craft production, 13, 74 autonomous, 89 economies of, 78 in the Indus Valley, 350 urbanization of, 92 credit rating agencies, 237 Cuba, 294 cultural colonization, 7 cultural production, 8 Culturalist Approaches to the state, 2, 5, 11, 15, 21, 346 synthesis with Weberian approaches to the state, 360 See also Abrams, Phillip; Anderson, Benedict; Bourdieu, Pierre; Foucault, Michael; Gramsci, Antonio; hegemony; Latour, Bruno; Mitchell, Timothy; Scott, James; state, theories of; Weberian approaches Cushing, Caleb, 205, 211, 213 Dahl, Robert, 3 Dalits. See India, caste system in: Dalits

. /:4021 74 1: 4

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Index data mining, the birth of, 237 de Guidotti Filippo, 119 debt, public, 43 Declaration of Independence, 139, 142, 145, 148, 154 argues for strong state, 143 call for state formation, 142, 145 negative liberty in, 139 rejected ineffective British government, 14 and revenue for state-building, 145 summarizes failures of British state, 147 and theory of small government, 140 decolonization, 332 democracy in classical Athens, 67 decoupling from nationalism, 294 nations’ claim to, 290 dendritic model, 91 Downs, Gregory, P., 359 Drucker, Peter, 225 Durkheim, Emile, 9, 236 Earle, Timothy, 10 East Africa, medieval archaeological evidence of interconnection, 95 Asian influences on, 94 emergence of chiefdoms and polities, 94 interactions with Indian Ocean communities, 94 interactions with Mediterranean world, 94 Islamic identity in, 94 See also Swahili Coast, medieval Easton, David, 3 eco-governmentality, 226 ecologism. See environmentalism Egypt British occupation of, 7 Egypt, ancient, 354 bureaucracy in, 351, 354 sacred enchantment, rule by, 351 state formation in, 58 water management in, 73 elites, economic, 91, 92, 93, 102, 107, 322, 324 control of wealth-creating resources, 92 elites, military, 324 elites, political, 15, 91, 92, 96, 102, 107, 109, 133, 148, 156, 177, 178, 182, 185,

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367

186, 187, 207, 212, 224, 245, 293, 295, 296, 297, 312, 314, 320, 321, 323, 324, 338 empires as aggregations of subordinate populations, 176 agrarian, 244 decentralized tributary, 353 infrastructural weakness of, 177 necessary to modern European state, 335 predatory or “vulture,” 354 seaborne, 357 sovereignty in, 346 states that have empires vs. states that are, 188 tributary, 358 empires, ancient delegated power to local governments and elites, 177 slowness of communication, 177 empiricism, 222 British, 300, 303 employment and colonial trade, 143 for freedpeople, 210 globalism and control of, 26 necessary to sustain state, 91 sarkar as source of, 129 England authority over British archipelago, 297 and British identity, 296 begins trade with Africa, 102 class, power, and culture in, 5 Corn Laws, repeal of the, 234 densely populated areas gain authority, 295 early modern growth in trade, 297 Glorious Revolution, 141, 299, 355 income tax in, 234 laws of, 39, 299 nationalism in, 19 patrimonialism in, 355 protestant Enlightenment in, 303 public sphere in, 19 revolution of 1640s, 357 right of privacy, 241 rise of the “middling sort,” 302 standard weights and measures in, 192, 193, 196 state and secular culture yoked, 291 state support of capitalism in, 355

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Index

368

England (cont.) taxation and the right to privacy, 233 transforming Ireland, 297 England, Church of, 300 breaking Anglican monopoly on civic life, 355 Enlightenment, 303 entrepreneurialism, 92 by states, 29 environmentalism, 215 declensionist history, 218 and ecological crisis, 226 and the nature/society dichotomy, 217 green state, the, 228 green theory, 215, 227 makes contested science visible, 216 Ertman, Thomas, 4, 5, 355, 357 ethnicity, political, 291, 292, 293, 294 in England, 301 in Japan, 294 and nationalism, 304 and patrilineal denial of hybrid identities, 313 in Southeast Asia, 294 erritorialized, 301 Evans, Peter B., 4 excises, 233 exclusion, 161, 162, 295, 319, 321 economic, 336, 337 and oppression, 57 in patrimonial states, 13 political, 73, 74, 76, 88, 320, 321, 323, 336, 337, 350 religious, 332 restitution for exclusionary past, 337 social, 336 structural, 344 structural in state, 53 violent, 343 of women from patriliny, 309 See also citizenship; civil rights; state membership expertise, 98, 101, 245, 247 as mystery of state, 216 contradictory, 226 failure of, 227 fiscal, 233, 237 management of resources, 224 political, 217 religious, 165, 168 scientific, 216, 224 undemocratic, 226

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fascism, 294 federalism in the U.S., 190 modern federal states, 178 Florence, 108, 111, 117, 358 Acciaioli family, 119 and Arezzo, 14 as Burckhardtian-Individual state, 109 coalition with Perugia and Siena, 114 created territorial state identity (distretto), 121 divisible state-building, 113 emulation of Rome, 110 expansion of administrative territory, 118 exploitive patrimony in, 109 fiscal apparatus, 109 Ghibellines (magnates, nobles), 113 governed Arezzo as divisible state, 120 Guelf popolo (people of), 112 Guelf popolo vs. despotism, 112 and the market for sovereignty, 115 network of financiers, 119 patrimonial oligarchy in, 14 payments to Naples, 118 precedent of Rome, 112, 121 purchase of Arezzo, 109, 113, 115, 119, 120 purchase of Prato, 118 right to rule, 121 Foscherari, Francesco, 117, 119 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 61 biopolitics, 7, 17, 223, 347–348 governmentality, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 179, 221, 346, 347, 348, 354, 356 influence of, 7, 11, 242 Panopticon a mechanism of power, 223 vs. the sovereign state, 28 France, 293 Anglo-French wars, 296 citizenship, 231 English claims in, 299 notion of state, 25 standard weights and measures in, 192 as vulture empire, 354 France, New Regime abandoned personal taxation, 232, 233 taxation, 229, 230 France, Old Regime and calculable economy, 230

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Index treasury vs. economy, 230 Frankfurt School, 8 French Revolution, 193, 357 Fukuyama, Francis, 351, 354 repatrimonialism, 354 Furet, François, 357 gabarbunds, 84, 85 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 331, 340 gateway communities, 91, 96 genocide, 56 George III (king), 143, 147 Germany, 235 income taxes in, 238 mid-nineteenth century revolution in, 357 notion of state, 25 gerontocracy, 2, 13, 346 Gerstle, Gary, 204, 359 Ghibellinism, 121 gift exchange, 92 globalism, 26, 225, 348 GMD. See China, Republic of: Guomindang Gorski, Philip, 4, 356, 359 governance Indo-Islamic theories of, 125 rational-bureaucratic, 4 shifting challenges of, 15 vs. government, 27, 60 governmentality, 7, 185, 262, 347, 349, 355 in ancient Mesopotamia, 321 erosion of, 347 liberal, 348 and public text circulation, 262 See also eco-governmentality; Foucault, Michel Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 5, 6, 47, 55 on autonomous state, 230 on hegemony, 8, 47, 267, 348 influence of, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 20, 346, 348 on modalities of state power, 47 state embedded in culture and society, 2 Great War, the. See World War I Guelfism, 112, 121 Habermas, Jürgen, 8 public sphere, 8, 348, 356 Hamilton, Alexander, 143 Hammurabi, code of, 177 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 8, 25, 238

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369

on progress of human emancipation, 218 theory of the Rechstaat, 40 hegemony, 8, 47, 52, 56, 267, 348, See also culturalist approaches and active consent, 47 in African trade networks, 102 bourgeois, 6 Burmese, 297 of caste in India, 338 in Colombia, 323 in crisis, 53 defined, 318 demands reciprocity, 323 envisioning government, 55 hegemonic imaginaries, 13, 56 in Mexico, 319 and popular aspirations, 318 Roman Empire not conceived as, 180 soft, 18 and state-formation, 5 and subaltern resistance, 5 unstable, 20 See also culturalist approaches heterarchy, 77 Hidden Imam, the, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 169, 170 hierarchy, 76, 244, 245, 247 Hitler, Adolf, 161, 168 infallible embodiment of German historical destiny, 165 Mein Kampf, 169 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 3, 14, 17, 58, 122, 131, 348 on absolute sovereignty, 30 on covenants, 31, 32, 33 on establishing political authority, 30, 31 hostile reception to, 33 influence of, 12, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 244 Leviathan, 2, 4, 30, 219, 232, 355 sovereign and state, 32 on states vs. governments, 32, 42, 43 the state as person, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44, 219 Holy Roman Emperors Charles IV, 113, 114, 118 claim to universal sovereignty, 113 Henry VII, 113 impermanence of, 113 Rupert, 113, 121 Sigismund, 113

. /:4021 74 1: 4

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Index

370

Holy Roman Emperors (cont.) sovereignty of, 120 Wenceslaus, 113 human nature essentially innocent, 215 essentially presocial, 63 socially aligned with justice, peace, stability, 215 unsocially sociable, 63 human rights, 27 Huntington, Samuel, 4 hybridity. and colonialism, 14 in state formation theory, 15 of state theory and cultural analysis, 12 See also culturalist approaches; state, theories of; Weberian approaches Hyderabad, 133 hydraulic state, the, 13, 73, 75, 78 irrigation as causative agent, 79 immunity. See privacy Incan Empire bureaucracy in, 351, 352 India, 19, 292, See also Mughal Empire affirmative action in, 339, 342 and long-distance exchanges, 107 Bombay, 102, 339 boundary with Pakistan, 79 case law addressing discrimination, 338 caste and Hinduism, 333 challenges to Portuguese commerce, 102 communalism in, 314 compensatory discrimination, 20, 333, 334, 337, 342 Congress Party, 331, 332, 340 Constitution of, 332 group identity, 336, 337, 344 Harayana, 20 historic inequities, 331 historic injustice, 332, 336, 337, 343 and long-distance exchanges, 79, 94–95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 107 literacy vs. illiteracy, 332 Manipur, 296 Maratha, the, 102 minorities, 332, 333, 335, 336, 338, 341 Mughal, the, 102 Muslims in, 333, 340 Mysore State, 339

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political commensuration in, 339 politicizing identity, 344 Poona Pact, 332 postcolonial redress, 332, 337, 343 secularization of Hinduism, 341 separate electorate, 333 separate representation for Dalit, 332, 340 Sidi, the, 102 Timurid invasion of, 126 weak state aggravated by Hindu-Muslim divide, 335 See also British Empire in India; Indus Valley, Mughal Empire India, caste system in “Backward Class,” 339 Brahmins, 339 British Empire reinforced patriarchy, 360 caste and Hinduism, 331 caste and secularism, 332 caste mobility, 342 caste translated into class, 341 census technologies, 338 Dalits, 331, 332, 340 “Depressed Class,” 340 and employment quotas, 338 and Hinduism, 338, 339 Harijans, 340 hegemony of elites, 338 lower castes and untouchables numerical majority, 342 and poverty, 342 non-Brahmins, 338 patrimonial-sarkā r tradition, 355 renaming and group identity, 340 riots of Jat caste, 20 scheduled castes and tribes, 341 and secularism, 334, 338, 340 secularization of, 20 untouchability, 331, 333, 340 India, Constitution of, 331 abolition of caste in, 20 individual rights, 312 individualism, 237 French, 241 private life protected from public power, 64 individuality as primordial human condition, 63

. /:4021 74 1: 4

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Index Indus Valley civilization canals, no evidence of, 79, 81 craft production, 78, 350 Dholavira, 79, 84, 89 ecological diversity in, 76 gabarbund technology, 84 Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro, 83, 87 7-Harappa, 13, 78, 80, 85, 89 hydraulic theory. See South Asian rivers irrigation systems in, 87 long-distance trade, 78 Mohenjo-daro, 81, 82, 86, 89 variation in city structure, 76 water management in, 73 infrastructure, 74, 91, 142, 144, 235, 349 British imperial social and economic, 141 bureaucratic, 4 canals, 204 French, 232 hydraulic development, 84 in American Revolutionary era, 139 Mesopotamian, 262 of trade, 93 political and economic, 78 and political control, 93 power of, 176, 178, 204 railroads, 16, 204, 210, 356, 359 roads, 15, 177 Roman, 185 Roman roads, 351 ships and shipping, 204 telegraph, 16, 204, 356 innovation enabled by governance, 27 Iran (Persia), 351, 354 and medieval African trade networks, 102 and Indus trade networks, 79, 97 See also sarkar Iran, Islamic Republic of, 15, 294, 357 dedicated to prepare Shi’ia for Hidden Imam, 162 ideological variation among clerics, 165 legitimated by representation of popular will, 163 popular will resides with devout Shi’ia, 161 religious community unified with leader, 161

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371

rule by ulama (religious scholars), 159 Supreme Leader not to be opposed, 165 theocratic foundation, 160 theocratic inhabitation of state, 168 Iran, Shi’ite Revolution, 15, 357 clerical support, 163 historical destiny, 167 rejected modernism, 168 religious vanguard, 159 and theocracy, 157 Iraq, 19, 306 Ba’thist, 313 Baghdad, 310 British Empire reinforced patriarchy in, 360 fragmentation of, 316 Hashemite dynasty, 315 Saddam Hussein, 312 Iraq, Kurdistan region of. See Kurdistan Ireland, 141 the Anglo-Irish, 298 assaults on Gaelic culture, 297 and British identity, 298 Iron Age, 11, 15, 349, 353 Islam, 100 African patricians appropriate religious regalia, 104 introduction into Africa, 96 Italian Wars, the, 108, 109 Italy Burckhardtian-Individual Renaissance states, 108 revolution in, 357 See also Arezzo, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Roman Empire, Venice Japan, 293, 298 colonization of China, 248 geographically protected from Inner Asian conquest, 292 political ethnicity, 294 war with Russia, 240 Jefferson, Thomas, 144, 193 Jessop, Bob, 12, 13 strategic relations, 6, 8, 18, 20, 57, 276, 346, 347 Johnson, Andrew, 207, 212 Joseph, Gil negotiation of rule, 7, 18, 20

. /:4021 74 1: 4

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Index

372 Kenya, 100, 102 Khomeini, Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi, 161 infallible in spiritual matters, 163 tasked with purification of the people, 167 King, Diane E., 359 kinship, forms of bilaterality, 306 matriliny, 305 patriliny, 305 social constructivist, 309 knowledge networks, 292 Korea, 293 geographically protected from Inner Asian conquest, 292 Kotsonis, Yannis, D., 356 Ku Klux Klan, 212 Kurdistan, 19, 306 body politic in, 306 Hewler, 310 peshmerga, the, 310 Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), 310

Latin America and coercive state formation, 319 historiography of, 319 privileged peninsulars vs. creoles and inidigenous people, 359 state formation in, 7, 359 Latour, Bruno, 217, 218, 226 Lebanon post-Ottoman personal status law, 313 rebellion against Syrian occupation, 316 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 163 Lincoln, Abraham, 150 and national sovereignty, 205 literacy, 292, 295, 349 Biblical, 300 Burmese, 296, 297, 303 in Britain, 302 medieval Swahili Coast, 105 Mesopotamian, 262 Little Ice Age, 100, 219 Liu Zhiwei, 288 Lleras Camargo, Alberto, 324, 327 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 2, 3, 14, 58, 115, 348 Madison, James, 149, 194 Mann, Michael, 4, 10 Martoccio, Michael Paul, 131, 357

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Marx, Karl, 2, 3, 8, 9, 47, 244 state as mechanism of class rule, 2 Marxist approaches to the state, 4, 5, 74 and archaeology, 9 and British colonialism, 124 as executive arm of ruling classes, 27 and historical destiny, 169 hydraulic theory, 75 non-Soviet, 5 sociological, 141 as a social relation, 47 and state autonomy, 5 materialism, 67 as foundation for social being, 61 matriliny, 305 Mayan cities Caracol, 85 Tikal, 85, 86 medicine, history of post-Black Death ordinances, 347 social contexts of disease, 223 Mesoamerica, 75, See also Mayan, cities of; Teotihuacan, Tikal Mayan cities of, 85, 86, 87 trading zones in, 91 Mesopotamia, ancient, 75 access to texts, 262 agricultural domestication in, 73 audience for state voices, 262 autonomy of state in, 273 bureaucracy in, 352 city laments, ambivalence to state in, 267 city laments, citizens vs. polity, 263 city laments, familial disruption in, 269 city laments, mortality in, 270 city laments, performativity of, 267 city laments, portray king as helpless, 270 city laments, subordinate state to divine plan, 271 city laments, sympathy in, 268, 269, 273 claims to power, 261 debate texts, 264 genre, lampoon of, 271 genre, validity of, 261 hegemony, 267 Lugalzagesi (king), 266 propaganda vs. criticism, 264 proverbs and debates, 271 proverbs, critical of royal policy, 273 proverbs, critical of state, 263

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Index proverbs, disenchanted with institutions, 273 royal literature, assimilative strategies in, 264 royal literature, fair conduct in, 265 royal literature, inscriptions, 264 royal literature, joy and gladness, 266 royal literature, sympathy in, 263, 273 scribal bureaucracy in, 264, 272, 273 sovereign monarchic power, 177 state capacity, 263 state claims, 263, 271 state formation in, 58, 261 Šulgi of Ur (king), 266 Sumerian proverbs, 264 textual genres in, 263 theocracy vs. kingship, 271 third dynasty of Ur, 351 water management in, 73 metrological systems and state formation, 191 Mexican Revolution, 357 Mexico hegemony in, 319 Middle East, the linkage between nationalism and democracy severed, 294 See also Iran; Iraq; Jordan; Kurdistan; Lebanon; Turkey Milan, 108, 109 Miliband, Ralph, 5, 6 misrecognition, 156, 157, 158, 160, 334 Mississippi, 204, 212 Mitchell, Timothy, 7, 17, 61, 65, 348 state effect, 8, 13, 18, 60, 64, 278, 346, 347 modernity disenchanted, 64 separation of nature and society, 226 monarchy and anti-absolutism, 299 as proto-nationalism, 19 collapse of kingship, 268 composite, 140 divine right, 30 end of, 3 familial politics of, 9 impermanence of, 113 king as representative, 30 king’s household in Mesopotamia, 265 patrimonial, 2, 351

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373

royal authority and patronage, 303 sacerdotal quality of, 300 sovereign power in, 177, 299 Mozambique, 96, 99 in trade networks, 102 Mughal Emperors Akbar, 130 Aurengzeb, 131, 132 Babur, 126, 129, 130 Humayan, 130 Jahangir, 129 Muhammad Shah, 133 Shah Abbas, 129 Shah Alam, 135 Shah Jahan, 131 Mughal Empire, 358 Awadh, 135 bureaucracy in, 131 conquest of Indian sultanates, 129 households, formation of, 125 households, multiplicity of, 125 imperial authority, 132 as patrimonial-bureaucratic state, 132 patrimonialism in, 125 sarkā r autonomous and bureaucratizing, 132 Shahjahanabad, 124 state as interlocking sarkā rs, 133 state extension of imperial household, 124 successor states, 132 and universal sovereignty, 133 Mughal Empire, states of Arcot, 133 Awadh, 14, 133 Bengal, 133 Hyderabad, 133 Mughal vazīrs, 130 Qamar-ud-din Khand, 133 Safdar Jang, 133 Mukhlis, Anand Ram, 127, 133 myth of statelessness. See United States: as weak state Naples, Kingdom of, 109, 115, 117, 118 Acciaoli family, 119 national economy, 236, 298 National Socialist Party. See Nazi Party, the nationalism, 19, 290, 316 authoritarian, 294 British, 299, 303

. /:4021 74 1: 4

:1

Index

374

nationalism (cont.) cultural origins of before print, 292 cultural traits symbolize political allegiance, 291 decoupling from democracy, 294 and disenchantment, 356 historiography of, 293 as medieval regnal loyalty, 291 modernist understanding of, 294 varieties of, 294 as version of political ethnicity, 291 nation-states, 29, 169, 204, 244, 347 as instruments of peace, 300 emergence of, 122 and natural philosophy, 220 patrilinear, 315 and popular will, 162 postcolonial, 136 undemocratic, 290 See also state, theories of natural philosophy legitimated political nation-states, 220 nature, 62 as rationally explicable machine, 219 ideas of, 215 modern separation of society from, 226 Nazi Party, the, 168 aligned people, race, and nation, 160 as extension of the Leader, 165 historical destiny, 160 unified power of leader and popular will, 161 neo-liberalism, 29 democratic states inefficient and wasteful, 27 and the fading state, 12 Netherlands Anglo-Dutch wars, 301 begins trade with Africa, 102 early modern pre-nationalism in, 291 United Provinces of the, 5 networks, 93, See also infrastructure: roads of alliance, 93, 94 allow elite control of resources, 93 and state-formation, 12 bureaucratic, 65 of communities, 181 economic, 78, 92, 298 economic, elite control of, 93 of enmeshed institutions, 7 of exchange, 91

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financial, 119 of gift exchange, 93 of households, 132 of institutions, 278 of interdependence, 92 of kinship, 94, 101, 353 of knowledge, 292 political, 48, 180, 181, 349 of power, 49, 93 social, 5, 78, 96, 295 social, elite control of, 93 of trade, 93, 98, 99, 102, 108 of trust in science, 216 New York (state) credit rating in, 237 standardizing weights and measures in, 194 Newton, Isaac, 216, 219, 303 Novak, William, J., 9, 357, 359 infrastructural power, 178 Nugent, Daniel, 18 negotiation of rule, 7, 20 oligarchy, 351 in earliest state formation, 349 local, 16 patrimonial, 14 in Roman city-states, 15, 186, 187 oriental despotism, 13, 74, 299, See also Wittfogel, Karl Ottoman Empire, 292, 311, 315, 358 genealogy and patriliny in, 312 and Greece, 241 millet system, 312, 313 Nationality Law, 313 Pakistan, 76, 79 boundary with India, 79 as vulture empire, 354 Panadero Colombiano, El (The Colombian Baker), 325 Papal States, the, 109 patriarchy, 2 and bureaucracy, 135 colonial rule enforced, 360 in the Mughal Empire, 125 patriliny in Arab-majority states, 311 control of reproduction, 307 definition of, 305 and gender, 307

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Index legal structures questioned, 316 limits female autonomy, 307 in the Middle East and North Africa, 305 paradox of, 308 and patrogenesis, 309 upheld by European colonizers, 314 patrimonialism, 2, 4, 13, 14, 346, 351, 358 in early modern England, 355 in exclusionary regimes, 350 See also repatrimonialism; Weberian approaches Patriots, British opposed colonial policy, 144 strong state tradition, 143 Patriots, North American promoted public good, 146 sought to replace imperial state, 144 state-supported economic diversification, 147 traditions of economic thought, 146 Pauketat, Timothy, 350 personification. See state personality theory Philadelphia, 145, 154, 190, 193, 196 Pincus, Steven, 302, 357, 359 Pisa, 115 disputed Florentine claims, 119 Pitt, William, 144 PKK. See Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê Polanyi, Karl gateway community hypothesis, 91 political and societal organization, 50, 51, 52, 53 capital accumulation a principle of, 51 formal, 256 leaders consolidate power over lower levels, 88 rival principles of, 57 weak states, 245 Weberian approach to, 59 See also bureaucracy; Hartlib, Samuel political strategies both corporate and coercive, 106, 229 both corporate and exclusionary, 88, 89 coercive, 93, 199, 244, 350 corporate, 75, 76, 93, 350 corporate vs. exclusionary, 77, 79 exclusionary, 73, 74, 75, 76 Popes claim to universal sovereignty, 113 impermanence of, 113 popular culture, not autonomous, 319

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375

popular will, 157 Portugal and Indian Ocean commerce, 102 postcolonial states, 306 authoritarian, 316 constitutionalism in, 344 and patrilineal descent, 19 post-modern approaches to the state, 109 Poulantzas, Nicos, 5, 6, 17, 47, 230 poverty, 322, 333 privacy, 231 right to be left alone vs. right to be accounted for, 243 propaganda, 18 in ancient Mesopotamia, 262, 263, 264, 270 in China, 251, 252, 254 in early modern Florence, 121 Protestant Reformation, the and disenchantment of the state, 19 in England, 297 and literacy, 300 and model of Protestant empire, 360 and national distinctiveness, 300 and tolerance, 300 See also Calvinism; England, Church of Protestantism, 4, 296, 299, 302, 303, 356 and Bible, 297 and empire, 360 scripturalism in, 303 Prussia, 3, 9 income taxes in, 236, 238 and privacy, 239 scientific forestry in, 224 public sphere as function of emerging modernity, 348 Pufendorf, Samuel, 33, 34, 37, 43, 122 discursive and associative, 19 agreement with Hobbes, 35, 37 disagreement with Hobbes, 35 distinction between state and government, 37 on moral and natural persons, 35 state as compound moral person, 35, 36 Rakove, Jack N., 140, 148, 149 Rao, Anupama, 360 regulatory arbitrage, 287, 289, 353 Renaissance Italian states capital-intensive, 119, 120 the city (civitas), 111

. /:4021 74 1: 4

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Index

376

Renaissance Italian states (cont.) the commune (comune), 111 delegation of sovereignty, 111 divisible, 122 as divisible, multiple persons, 110 divisible, relational form, 120 emulation of Greek and Roman ideals, 110 as interwoven merchant networks, 108 legitimating narratives, 110 legitimation of, 120 market for sovereignty, 119 multiple identities, 109 repatrimonialism, 351, 354, 355 in Tudor-Stuart England, 355 See also patrimonialism; Weberian approaches republicanism, 112, 240, 351 Richardson, Seth, 10, 14, 18, 321, 329, 347, 350, 351, 352 rights. of citizenship, 113, 120 government protection of, 63 human, 33, 63, 69, 146 of individual states, 28 of land use, 103 narratives of, 147, 148 of the state, 36, 111 universal, 27, 343 See also citizenship; civil rights; exclusion; state membership risk society, 218, 225 Roman Empire alliance, language of, 180 Augustus (emperor), 181 autonomous polities within, 186 autonomous right to use one’s own laws, 182 autonomous subordinate polities within, 176, 180 cities competed for privileges, 184 city-states remained legally alien, 188 city-states within, 185 civic and imperial elites aligned, 187 Claudius (emperor), 182 collaboration with indigenous elites, 185 decentralization in, 350 delegated power to local governments, 178 democracy in city-states, 186 as federation of city-states, 15

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First Punic War, the, 180 fragmentation of, 16 historiography of government, 178 indigenous elites, 186, 187 late claim to unified territory or population, 179 and local elites, 178, 179 network of roads, 177 oligarchic elites rule subject city-states, 186, 187 ruled by delegation, 15 Sicily, province of. See Sicily Syrian villages in, 181 transformation into empire, 188 as tributary empire of autonomous provinces, 351 universalization of citizenship, 189 as vulture empire, 354 Rome fall of, 4 influence of Roman law, 110 precedent of, 14 republican, 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques, 40 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 4 Russia, post-Soviet linkage between nationalism and democracy severed, 294 taxation in, 242 Russian Empire, 358 income tax in, 234, 238, 240 right of privacy, 233 soul tax, repeal of, 235 taxation and property surveys, 232 Russian Revolution, 157, 357 Bolsheviks, 159 salary revolution, 195 salus populi, 155 sarkā r, 14, 123 adopted by British colonial regime in India, 126 definitions of, 126 as household, 127 precolonial usage, 128 of prominent noblemen, 133 registers of, 129 shifts in usage narrate history, 129 Timurid origins of, 125–126 Sayer, Derek, 7, 355, 356

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Index science. and biopolitics, 17 crisis of faith in, 226 positivist history and sociology of, 227 post-constructivist history and sociology of, 218 the rise of scientific forestry, 224 thought to aid reason to rise above nature, 226 See also natural philosophy Scientific Revolution, 216 Scotland, 141, 297 and British identity, 296, 298 Scott, James C., 5, 7, 8, 10, 193, 224, 288 all-seeing state, 8 art of being governed, 18 muscular state, 229 sectarianism, 313, 316 and strife, 219 Middle-Eastern, 314 toxic enthusiasm, 300 secularism, 62 and caste, 334 French, 303 in India, 341 secularization, 303, 352 and state-imposed oath-taking, 239 of civil society disenchanting, 349 of Hindu caste, 20, 338, 341 Service, Elman, 106 Siam. See Thailand Sicily legal jurisdictions (civitates) in, 180 and the right to use one’s own laws, 182 as Roman province, 180 disputed Florentine claims, 119 Skinner, Quentin, 12, 13, 58 on the Hobbesian state, 131 on premodern polities, 345 SLAVERY, 16 abolition of, in Britain, 206 in India, 134 in Rome, 184 See also British Empire in North America: slavery; United States, slavery in social complexity, 8, 91, 95 South Asia never suffered prolonged wars, 354

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377

Partition, 333 postcolonial nation-states of, 136 See also India; Pakistan; South Asian Rivers South Asian rivers Beas, the, 79, 80 Chenab, the, 79 Ghaggar-Hakra, the, 76, 79, 82 Jhelum, the, 79 Lower Indus, the, 76, 81 Manhar torrent, the, 85 Nara Nadi, the, 82 Panjnad, the, 79 Ravi, the, 79, 80 Sutlej, the, 79 Upper Indus, the, 80 South Carolina, 209, 212, 243 Southeast Asia, 13 geographically protected from Inner Asian conquest, 292 sovereign authority, 10, 220 monarchic power, 177 personating the state, 33 sovereignty geographical, 209 no unitary Greek or Roman concept of, 182 of state diminished, 28 singular vs. composite, 346 Soviet Union, 3, 15, 163, 241, 357 Communist Party, 163 dedicated to international proletarian revolution, 162 foundation of, 159 historical destiny a global communist revolution, 166 income tax in, 240 popular will resided in proletariat, 161 united vanguard and proletariat, 161 vanguard acted in advance of popular will, 167 Spain, 293 Spruyt, Hendrik, 4 Sri Lanka and long-distance exchanges, 107 geographically protected from Inner Asian conquest, 292 Stasavage, David, 119 state, death of the, 33

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Index

378

state, disenchantment of the, 19, 345 state, early modern, 4, 58, 122, 131, 293, 356 See also British Empire; Reformation and bureaucracy, 245 and empire, 357, 358 class, power, and culture in, 5 fused ethnicity, religion, and allegiance, 356 in the public sphere, 348 patrimonialism and, 5, 355 state, emergence of, 90 state, modern, 16, 17, 176, 216, 231, 240, 313, 338, 347, 349, 357, See also state effect:modern and analogy of colony collapse, 227 and anthropological archaeology, 9 autonomous, 347 bureaucratic, 357 capacity, 349 capitalist, 13, 58 as commonwealth, 221 coproduced with scientific revolution, 228 desacralized, 347 disenchanted, 11, 13, 357 enforces norms throughout territory, 175 environmental crique of, 217 forged in revolution, 357 and governmentaliity, 7 and green theory, 227 imperial past of, 314 indigenous practices in, 306 individualized, 109 and knowledge of nature, 218 and knowledge-making, 17 and obstacles to modernity, 289 patrilinear, 316 political authority in, 224 political struggle within, 20 population management in, 7 and body politic, 312 and sources of wealth, 236 state effects in, 347 and state personality theory, 122 and statecraft, 216 strategic relations in, 347 underpinned by science, 224 state, non-western, 58

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state, post-modern, 109 over-reach of modern state and science, 225 state, premodern, 11, 58, 345 and enchantment, 13, 18, 345, 347, 352 patrimonial, 6, 9 patrimonial and enchanted, 357 processual archaeology and, 10 See also bureaucracy; city-states; empires; empires, ancient; Athens, classical; Bronze Age; Burma; China [dynasties]; East Africa, medieval; Egypt, ancient; hydraulic state; Indus River civilization; Incan Empire; Iron Age; Mesoamerica; Mesopotamia; Roman Empire; Rome; Swahili Coast, medieval; Teotihuacan; Tika state, quiddity of the, 59 state, spacial reach of the, 202 state, theories of. absolute sovereignty, 30 as apparatus of rule, 26, 29, 40, 42, 59 autonomous, 1, 5, 11, 12, 60, 61, 64, 122, 230, 273, 347 Burckhardtian-Individual, 108, 120, 122, 123 as coercive apparatus of government, 25 composite polities, 358 in constant construction, 318 continuities from early modern to modern, 293 culturalist, 5, 11, 346, 347 disenchantment, 347 distinct from government, 30, 42 divisible, 123 dual processual, 75, 93 dualistic, 229, 230 embedded, 5, 11, 12 enchantment, 347, 352 enmeshed power relations, 7 entrepreneurial, 29 evolution of nationalism, 294 field theory, 9 fiscal-military, 4, 11, 301 foundations technology-driven, 13 government and state synonymous, 40, 41 green, 215, 227, 228 hybridity of Weberian and culturalist approaches, 11 interventionist, 29

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Index liberal pluralistic, 3 Marxist, 27 material and ideal, 65 as modern phenomenon, 58, 70 as produced by material practices, 60 as structural effect, 61 neo-autonomist, 4 neo-liberal, 29 neo-Weberian, 11, 18 not universal in non-modern contexts, 70 patrimonial-bureaucratic, 125, 126, 128, 132, 136 personification, 122, 219 post-Hobbesian, 13 post-processualism, 10 presumptive, 14 processualism, 10, 75, 292 representing interests of all, 44 as a work of art, 108 See also culturalist approaches; Marxist approaches; Weberian approaches state, vanishing of the, 28, 29 state boundaries, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 47, 50, 79, 161, 162, 169, 256 state building bureaucratic, 247 campaigns, 247, 250, 251 in China, 250 in early United States, 145 performance of, 253 social and economic networks, 78 state capacity, 15, 18, 246, 247, 251, 252, 349, 359 and boundaries, 12 in Colombia, 323 geography of, 16 Mesopotamia, ancient, 261 and strategic technologies, 349 state claims to local police power, 16 national sovereignty, 16 state protection of freed people’s liberty, 16 state effect, 13, 19, 61, 65, 347, 350 colonial, 335 in Ming China, 18, 67 in postcolonial India, 343 modern, 64, 65 pre-modern, 278

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379

variability of, 360 See also Abrams, Philip; Mitchell, Timothy state formation effect of war on, 295 justification of right to rule, 156 and misrecognition of social purpose, 158 and political regulation, 157 and popular will, 156 presumptive state claims, 177 and resource extraction, 244 through slow cultural revolution, 356 variability of, 360 state formation, democratic state as social contract between people and political community, 170 state formation, modern misrecognition of social purpose, 157 state formation, non-democratic, 15 exclusive definition of “the people,” 161 nation-states imperfect instruments, 170 no social contract, 170 popular will and historical destiny, 168 pre-existing historically destined collective, 170 quietistic acceptance, 316 revolutionary elite’s role in, 157, 158 social purpose of, 156 starts with core revolutionary cadre, 166 transnational extensions of “the people,” 161 state formation, postcolonial and imposition of European forms, 360 state membership, 18 See also citizenship; civil rights; exclusion; rights state personality theory, 26, 35, 36, 40, 108 Hobbes on fictional entity, 33 opposition to, 26, 59 state power, 29, 261 state purpose safety of the people, 37 See also Salus populi state sovereignty, 16 and humanitarian intervention, 29 and surveillance of citizens, 29 culture and community substitute for, 336

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Index

380

state vs. society, 60, 345 states, integrative principles of. production, 90 urbanism, 95 See also political and societal organization stratification, social states, modern forged in revolution, 9 states, new, 246 steel Age of, 356 and infrastructure, 359 and state capacity, 349 Steinmetz, George, 7 Stratification social, 90 by caste, 339 of theological power, 13 of wealth, 13 Strauss, Julia, C., 263, 357 subalternity, 8, 339 resistance to hegemony, 5 supernatural, the, 62, 68 surveillance, 29, 60, 66, 231, 234, 278 Swahili Coast, medieval archaeological evidence of bead- and cloth-making, 98 archaeological evidence of trade networks, 94, 98 asymmetrical power, 106 bands, tribes, and chiefdoms predate state, 90 beads and shells as trade goods, 100 bidirectional trade, 96 cemeteries, ancestry, and wealth, 104 city-states, 13, 99, 101 conflicts with Portuguese and Omani trade, 102 elite control of social and economic networks, 99 elite control of trade and communication, 107 elite investment in stone houses, 104 elite monopoly of resources, 90, 103 emergence of elites, 102 extractive technology, 90 food surplus and security, 106 increase in sedentism, 106 investments by elite, 98 ironworking in, 101, 107 Kenya, 96, 99 land ownership, 103

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literacy reserved for patrician elite, 105 manufacturing trade goods, 105 migration and settlement, 103, 106 non-local trade goods as status symbols, 105 patrician elite in, 103 patricians and Pan-Islamic identity, 105 patricians appropriate Islamic regalia, 104 patricians monopolize means of production, 105 patrimonial city-states in, 350 predatory commerce in, 100 resource organization in, 102 rise of city-states, 105 rules governing citizenship, 103 trade, 90, 92, 96 trade forbidden to commoners, 103 trade goods, 98, 99, 100 urbanism, 107 Syria, 306 fragmentation of, 316 occupation of Lebanon, 316 post-Ottoman personal status law, 313 See also Roman Empire: Syrian villages in Szonyi, Michael, 263, 328, 347 Tally, Rebecca, 359 tax reform, 229, 238 and personhood, 237 taxation, 17 British income tax, 234 citizens both private and exposed, 231 and the economic personality, 237 equality in tax practice, 231, 232 and gap between person and state, 235 impersonal, 230, 233 intrusive upon privacy, 239 and juridical persons, 237 lack of surveillance machinery, 234 modern Greek resistance to, 242 personal, 231, 236 progressive, 231, 237 property surveys (cadasters), 232 and surveillance, 231 and transparency, 241 tax farmers, 233 technocracy, 64, 224, 226 Teotihuacan, 75, 87 Thailand, 293, 294, 296

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Index theocracy, 51, 56, 160 in ancient Mesopotamia, 271 Islamic, 157 priestly states, 244 Third Reich, the, 3, 15, 157, 357 consolidation and expansion of German communities, 162 contempt for democracy in Nazi elections, 168 election demonstrated acceptance of Hitler, 168 individual identity subordinated to collective destiny, 168 legitimated by representation of popular will, 163 popular will in German “blood,” 161 Volkisch theory, 160, 169 Thompson, E. P., 5 Tikal, 85, 86, 87 Tilly, Charles, 4, 10, 14, 120, 244, 267, 356 Timurid Empire. See also Mughal Empire conquest states, 126 sarkā r in, 129 shared dynastic sovereignty in, 132 totalitarianism, 3 in democratic states, 27 Toulmin, Stephen, 216 trade, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 350 alliance building, 92 American revolutionary states take control of, 152 in ancient societies, 91 in Burma, 296, 301 colonial, 147 colonial and metropolitan, 143 colonial, British restrictions on, 139 and colonial employment, 143 bidirectional, 96 British imperial, with North America, 298 competition for, 102 elite monopoly on, 103 English, growth in, 297 establishes social ties, 91 gateway communities and, 91 infrastructure of, 93, 177 long-distance, 78, 91, 99, 107, 110 not protected by privacy, 233 ports of entry, 91, 99 in prestige goods, 92, 93 protection of, 295

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regulation of, 91 routes, 93, 301 in state formation, 13 state-supported, 146 and state-formation, 91, 105 and urbanization, 105 transoceanic, 96, 101, 298 tribalism, 90 patrilineal, 306 pre-capitalist, 315 scheduled tribes (India), 341 See also agha; Tuareg, the Trigger, Bruce G., 10 Tuareg, the, 305 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 231 Turkey, 294 citizenship may be conferred by mothers, 311 Ottoman nationalism in, 312 patriliny in, 314 unemployment, 222, 246 United States banned federal tax assessment of individuals, 232 Civil Rights Movement, 213 Continental Congress, 144 federal government ceded weights and measures to states, 201 federal vs. state authority, 203 income tax in, 234, 240 national sovereignty in, 16 popular sovereignty in, 293 post-New Deal state, 204 as powerful national state, 214 and tariffs, 232 as weak state, 191 United States Constitution, 201 13th Amendment, the, 202 14th Amendment, 211 16th amendment, 240 United States, Civil War era, 16 Battle of Appomattox, 206 commission state, 205 emergency legislation during, 151 federal vs. state authority, 203 force in struggle for sovereignty, 203 limits of federal state, 202 military central to national sovereignty, 205, 206 precedents for statecraft in, 150

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Index

382

United States, Civil War era (cont.) Union Army and slave liberation, 16 war powers, 16, 206, 207 United States, founding documents. See Articles of Confederation; Constitution of the United States; Declaration of Independence United States, political parties Democrats, 205 Republicans, 214 United States, Reconstruction era, 204 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 211 commission state, 212, 213 conditions for freedpeople, 204, 207, 208 Department of Justice, 213 Freedmen’s Bureau, 209 geographical sovereignty in, 209 Ku Klux Klan, 212 martial law, 206, 211 military enforcement of national power, 209 military occupation of the South, 209, 210 Military Reconstruction Acts, 212 national sovereignty and enforcement, 359 occupation, end of, 212 Posse Comitatus Act, 213 rights contested, 211 slavery persisted during, 208 southern insurgency after surrender, 207, 212 southern resistance to federal authority, 208 spatial range, 208, 210 Stockade State, 204 struggle for state vs. national supremacy, 213 war powers, 208, 213 Zones of Access, 210 Zones of Occupation, 210 United States, slavery in abolition, 16 abolition and federal sovereignty, 202, 204 American Patriots against slave trade, 147 capture and return of escaped slaves, 206 emancipation necessitated state of war, 207 Emancipation Proclamation, the, 202

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federal military enforcement of emancipation, 204, 206 Fugitive Slave Act, 205, 211, 213 military enforcement of emancipation, 202 post-slavery freedom, 202 slave labor for public works, 153 Union Army and liberation, 16 United States, weights and measures, 201 untouchability. See India, caste system in: untouchability urbanism, 105 in Britain, 302 in Colombia, 323 and craft production, 92 as integrative principle, 90 medieval Swahili Coast, 105 pre-industrial, 292 and trade, 105 Roman transformation of, 90, 185 Yoruba, 95 utilitarianism, 41, 42 influence on Anglophone legal and political thought, 40 legal theory, 25 Vattel, Emer de, 34, 37, 38, 43, 122 Vietnam, 293 Wales, 297 and British identity, 296, 298 rise of the middling sort, 302 war, 53, 107 See also Anglo-Dutch Wars; AngloFrench War; Cold War; Italian Wars, the; United States, Civil War era; First Punic War; World War I; World War II in ancient states and empires, 18 Anglo-Dutch, 301 animated by commerce, 302 Burmese, 296 in China, 246, 277 civil (Colombia), 320 effect of, on state formation, 295 effort in American Revolution, 142 foreign, 3 increasingly global English, 141 in Ming China, 65 money the nerve of, 138 originating in fusion of ethnicity, religion, and monarchism, 356

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Index and Renaissance state-making, 14 Roman-style, 181 and the Roman Empire, 179 and shift in state priorities, 51 and taxation, 240 as transformative force, 353 and war powers, 206 Russo-Japanese, 240 warlords, 246 Washington, George, 144 on powerful American state, 138 on promoting the general welfare, 139 on strong American state, 139 wealth, 106, 185, 230, 233, 234, 235 access to, 98 British monarchs and, 299 of colonies transferred to metropole, 358 locating, 236 networks provide access to power, 92 and political patronage, 92 purchasing patronage to influence policy, 92 stratification of, 13 and taxation, 232 Weber, Max, 1, 2, 3, 9, 244 influence of, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 148, 346 legal-rational bureaucracy, 245, 247 on state authority, 2, 3 on state capacity, 277, 349 on state monopoly of coercion, 26, 59, 177, 277 state as autonomous, 2 Weberian approaches to the state, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 59, 124, 136, 346, 350 analytic categories, 136 depersonalized state hierarchy, 245 field theory of the state, 9 historicizing and indigenizing, 126

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standardization, 248 state as coercive, 59 state autonomy school, 4 state capacity, 10, 15, 346 state formation in China, 17 synthesis with culturalist approaches to the state, 360 See also Bourdieu, Pierre; bureaucracy; culturalist approaches; Skocpol, Theda; Tilly, Charles; state, theories of; Weber, Max weights and measures, 16, 177, 190, 201 fines for noncompliance, 196, 199, 200 heaping vs. stricken, 197 Pennsylvania Standard, 197 sealers of, 194 United States federal government ceded authority to states, 201 See also metrological systems welfare state, 7, 29, 235 conservative opposition to, 27 Wilson, Woodrow, 151 concentrated state actions, 150 Wittfogel, Karl, 13, 74 hydraulic theory, 13, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 88 oriental despotism, 13, 74 Wood, Gordon S., 140, 148, 149, 151 World War I, 150, 235, 240, 312, 315 World War II, 3, 27, 356 Yoffee, Norman, 10 yundong. See state building: campaigns Zambezia, Southern decline of Mapungubwe, 100 Zhu Yuanzhang (emperor), 65, 67 Zimbabwe, 98 Zimbabwe, Great, 99, 100

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