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

I first want to direct people's attention to the very thoughtful comments on John Wolfsberger's review. I'm afraid that his ridiculous 3-sentence review will have undue influence purely because it is the only negative review, and thus continues to be displayed up front as the 'most helpful' critical review by default, even though so far 0 out of 26 people have found it helpful. He clearly never got past the introduction (or possibly the title).Tilly essentially provides us with a historical thought experiment in which he seeks to determine how much of the historical variation in the development of European states can be elucidated through an exploration of city/state interaction and the accumulation (total volume) and consolidation (distribution) of capital and the material means of violence. This might sound like a historical-materialist analysis to some, but Tilly never focuses on class conflict as a driving force of history. Again, he's simply interested in bringing out interesting relationships between capital and coercion, such as the relationship between capitalist expansion and the ability to raise capital-intensive professional armies (as only an industrialized economy can facilitate) vs. mercenary or peasant armies, setting in motion a cycle of economic and militaristic expansion that made the industrialized nation-state the dominant form of state of the modern era.In the process, he closely examines cities as crucial hubs of the flows of capital and the consolidation of military might in the hands of a centralized state. Combining all these factors, he does an excellent job of highlighting some of the causes of the different patterns of development in the different regions of Europe - from the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, who rose and fell with the fate of militarized mercantilism in luxury goods, to the different fates of Eastern and Western Europe once a continental division of labor set it - dynastic seats of power in Eastern Europe, in which economic diversity and social pluralism were stunted by the dominance of large-scale landowners and capitalist agriculture, vs. the development of cottage industry and later factory organization in Western Europe. Pretty straightforward history, actually, and Tilly never claims to be making any startling new discoveries, so much as teasing out the full implications of such a theoretical framework. As a big-level thinker, he clearly enjoyed writing the book, which also makes it an enjoyable, if challenging read.

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

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

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

Great book!

According to the author, the system of states that now prevails almost everywhere on earth took shape in Europe after AD 990, then began extending its control far outside the continent five centuries later. After all, the story of state building in Europe concerns capital and coercion. ‘It recounts the ways that wielders of coercion, who played the major part in the creation of national states, drew for their own purposes on manipulators of capital, whose activities generated cities.’ (P.16) Capitalists are people who specialize in the accumulation, purchase, and sale of capital. They occupy the realm of exploitation, where the relations of production and exchange themselves yield surpluses, and capitalists capture them. Where capital defines a realm of exploitation, coercion defines a realm of domination. Coercive means, like capital, can both accumulate and concentrate. When the accumulation and concentration of coercive means grow together, they produce states; they produce distinct organizations that control the chief concentrated means of coercion within well-defined territories.What drives state formation and transformation? ‘War made the state and the state made war.’ Thus, ‘over the long run, far more than other activities, war and preparation for war produced the major components of European states. States that lost wars commonly contracted, and often ceased to exist. Regardless of their size, states having the largest coercive means tended to win wars.’ (P.28) Therefore, for the purpose of war and preparation for war, rulers in very different environments responded to those environments by fashioning distinctive relations between ruler and ruled. In this regard, we might distinguish a coercion-intensive, a capital-intensive, and a capitalized coercion path to state formation.In the coercion-intensive mode, rulers squeezed the means of war from their own populations and others they conquered, building massive state structures of extraction in the process. In the capital-intensive mode, rulers relied on compacts with capitalists – whose interests they served with care – to rent or purchase military force, and thereby warred without building vast permanent state structures. In the intermediate capitalized coercion mode, rulers spent more of their effort on incorporating capitalists and sources of capital directly into the structures of their states. Holders of capital and coercion interacted on terms of relative equality. Generally speaking, the actual processes of state formation in Europe are subject to the unique combination of capital and coercion that appeared in different European states.On the other hand, state formation in Europe had undergone four phases since AD 990, namely patrimonialism, brokerage, nationalization and specialization, with varying temporal limits from one part of Europe to another. Much of Europe was in the phase of patrimonialism at a time up to the fifteenth century when monarchs generally extracted what capital they needed as tribute or rent from lands and populations that lay under their immediate control. The era of brokerage ran roughly from 1400 to 1700 in important parts of Europe when mercenary forces predominated in military activity, and rulers relied heavily on formally independent capitalists for loans, for management of revenue-producing enterprises, and for installation and collection of taxes.In much of Europe, from 1700 to 1850, states created mass armies and navies drawn increasingly from their own national populations in the process of nationalization. The transition to direct rule gave rulers access to citizens and the resources they controlled through taxation, mass conscription, censuses, police systems and many other invasions of small-scale social life. But it did so at the cost of widespread resistance, extensive bargaining, and the creation of rights and duties for citizens. Both the penetration and the bargaining laid down new state structures, inflating the government’s budgets, personnel, and organizational diagrams. Lastly, from approximately the mid-nineteenth century onward, military force grew as a powerful specialized branch of national government during the age of specialization.After all, the national state dominated Europe and parts of the world settled chiefly by Europeans. Throughout the world state formation converged on the more or less deliberate construction of national states according to models offered, subsidized, and enforced by the European great powers. Why national states? It was because only those countries that were, or became national states were able to combine significant sources of war-financing capital with large domestic military forces, enabling them to excel in warfare.

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

One of the top 3 books to understand geopolitics.