Why Wars Made States Only in the West: Revisiting Tilly’s Bellicist Thesis

• In Event: 2111 - War, States, Money and Culture: New Approaches to Classic Concerns in Comparative and Historical Sociology

Abstract

Charles Tilly’s dictum that in late medieval and early modern period Western Europe “War made the state, and the state made war” (Tilly, 1975:42) represents the perhaps most often quoted phrase ever written by a historical sociologist. The first part of this formula, which suggests that war-making was a major driving force for state-building, is recognized by some scholars as “Tilly’s most influential and enduring legacy” (Kaspersen, Strandsbjerg, & Teschke, 2017:14). This study puts Tilly’s argument to the most comprehensive test to date, evaluates the main criticism levied against it, and then empirically specifies the scope conditions under which war-making is most likely to lead to state-making, thus reaching for a reformulated bellicist theory of state making around the world. To meet these ambitious goals, we assembled a variable-rich panel data set with global coverage and wide temporal span: most of the variables record information collected since the early 19th century, and some key variables record information from as early as the 15th century. The result confirm Tilly’s a basic premise about the mechanism that links the frequency of wars to the emergence of the territorial state: an emerging contractual relationship between rulers and the populace, forged through intense warfare, which allows rulers to expand the state’s domains in return for providing the population with public goods. Going beyond Tilly, we identify the conditions under which such a contract is more likely to emerge: if wars are intense and mobilize the masses, bringing them into the political arena; if they are fought by the territory of independent polities with an autonomous governing elite, rather than in imperial dependencies; if they are fought by democratic regimes (or emerging democracies) that already institutionalize a contractual relationship between rulers and ruled; if a nationalist ideology has already emerged that can underwrite such a contract between the people and the state building elites; and if the population is culturally relatively homogenous, which avoid competing claims as to who should be included in the contract.

Authors

• Yuval Feinstein, University of Haifa

• Andreas Wimmer, Columbia University