War-Making and State-Making Revisited: The Military Revolution as a Pacifier?

• In Event: Long-Run Change in World Politics

Abstract

Historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly have argued that in early modern Europe war-making and state-making ultimately pacified societies. Recently, conflict researchers have begun to assess this “Tillyan perspective” statistically as part of a more general endeavor to probe the historical roots of modern conflicts. However, there has not been a systematical attempt to assess what we take to be the core insight of the “Tillyan perspective”: that European war-making after 1500 predict more civil conflict in the short and medium term but less civil conflict in the longer term. In this paper, we enlist new, unique data on warfare in Europe to assess this claim. We find evidence that the Tillyan pacification did indeed ensue but only after war-making and state-making had sparked intense internal resistance, which had to be violently repressed by state-builders.

Authors

• Jorgen Moller, University of Aarhus

• Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg

• Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg

• Suthan Krishnarajan, Aarhus University