Primary vs Secondary States: Ancient States, State Formation and State Systems

• In Event: International History and Politics & Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: State Behavior Throughout History: Diverse Factors of Influence Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

The relationship between state-building and the interstate system is an intimate one. As Waltz argues, states and their behaviors are shaped by the pressures of the international system, yet that system itself is a product of states’ actions. With apologies to Charles Tilly, one could argue that the international system made the state, and the state made the international system. This chicken or the egg type endogeneity problem makes sorting out the relationship between states and the system in which they are enmeshed.

Work on state-building has drawn primarily on cases ranging temporally from medieval Europe to the modern world. Cases of state-building in antiquity, however, have seldom been applied to contemporary political science theories of state formation. Yet, by studying state-formation in antiquity, it is possible to derive insights about how the state system influences state formation. The earliest ancient states formed in areas devoid of other states. Comparing the formation of such primary states to the formation of secondary ancient states—those states that developed in the presence of a state system—can help sort out the importance of internal versus external factors in state-building. Given modern state-building always occurs in a state system, ancient state-building offers a rare opportunity to obtain variation on this variable. While Bronze Age states differed in important ways from modern states and even from the states of the Hellenistic and Roman eras, they can provide insights into modern state-building much as studies of medieval state-building have done. Further, since the comparison will largely be between primary and secondary states in the Bronze Age, the differences from modern states will be held constant in the comparison. Utilizing anthropological research, the paper explores several aspects of state-building.

In both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, the first states appeared about 4,000 to 5,000 years after the creation of the first agricultural villages. This means that the earliest states emerged in the third millennium BCE—essentially at the beginning of the written historical record. They emerged not from chiefdoms, but rather directly from agricultural societies whose social organization was local and centered on villages. There is widespread agreement on several prerequisites or characteristics that societies possessed prior to the formation of these first states. First, their societies were socially differentiated and economically stratified. Second, these societies were producing large, regular, and storable agricultural surpluses as a result of the Neolithic revolution. Indeed, without a surplus, social stratification would be quite limited. Last, primary state formation and urbanization are strongly correlated outside of Egypt with state formation. Yet, the successful formation of stable, primary states is quite difficult and rare. Stratified societies with an agricultural surplus are not on an inevitable path to state formation. So beyond these shared characteristics, what lead to state formation in regions where no states existed?

Anthropological research into the earliest states has found that unsurprisingly that coercion and extraction are at the center of Bronze Age primacy state formation much as in later eras. The crucial question for primary states is how were these nascent states more able to coerce their populations into yielding up sufficient resources to fund a state when other ancient societies could not? Geographic circumscription—areas such as Egypt or Peru, where it was hard for agriculture peasants to flee from the coercive state because the fertile valleys were surrounded by deserts or barren mountains—certainly is part of the answer.

Once such primary states form, they begin to interact not only with each other, but with populations not yet organized into states. The pressures of these interactions—including warfare, diplomacy, tribute extraction, and state directed trade—often induce further state formation even in polities where the conditions for primary state formation are lacking.
Using cases from the around the world including China and the Americas, but especially the Bronze Age Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, this paper attempts to sort out the effects of how coercion and the provision of public goods led to the formation of primary states from how the pressures of the state system. This allows insights to be drawn about the relative roles of internal and external factors in medieval and modern state formation. Further, using cases not often employed in the study of state formation as well as using insights from anthropology fits well with APSA 2021’s focus on pluralism.

Author

• Zachary Coleman Shirkey, CUNY, Hunter College