State formation

"[5] The most commonly used definition is by Max Weber[6][7][8][9][10] who describes the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.

"[13] Charles Tilly defines states as "coercion-wielding organisations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories.

States are minimally defined by anthropologist David S. Sandeford as socially stratified and bureaucratically governed societies with at least four levels of settlement hierarchy (e.g., a large capital, cities, villages, and hamlets).

At the latter date, there were fifteen kingdoms in Europe: England, Scotland, France, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarra, Sicily, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

[34] This event notably marked the shift from the medieval practice of feudalism to the emergence of increasingly centralized state systems that held monopolies over violence and effectively extracted revenue from their civilian populations.

Finally, since colonial powers drew territorial borders with little regard towards religious, ethnic, and cultural differences within indigenous populations, civilians in most new states lacked a shared identity.

Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, with decolonization processes underway, attention began to focus on the formation and construction of modern states with significant bureaucracies, ability to tax, and territorial sovereignty around the world.

[18] African states most typically gained independence peacefully, thus not receiving the benefits of the economic booms associated with wartime efforts, and they also have accepted the boundaries drawn up by colonizers.

[58][59][60][61] Certain types of agriculture are more conducive to state formation, such as grain (wheat, barley, millet), because they are suited to concentrated production, taxation, and storage.

[68] The theory was most significantly detailed by Karl August Wittfogel's argument that, in arid environments, farmers would be confronted by the production limits of small-scale irrigation.

Eventually different agricultural producers would join together in response to population pressure and the arid environment, to create a state apparatus that could build and maintain large irrigation projects.

Carneiro writes that theories "with a racial basis, for example, are now so thoroughly discredited that they need not be dealt with...We can also reject the belief that the state is an expression of the 'genius' of a people, or that it arose through a 'historical accident.'

[91] Often dated to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, there began to be the development in Europe of modern states with large-scale capacity for taxation, coercive control of their populations, and advanced bureaucracies.

[98] According to Philip Gorski and Vivek Swaroop Sharma, the "neo-Darwinian" framework for the emergence of sovereign states is the dominant explanation in the scholarship.

[99] Thomas Ertman wrote in 1997, "it is now generally accepted that the territorial state triumphed over other possible political forms (empire, city-state, lordship) because of the superior fighting ability which it derived from access to both urban capital and coercive authority over peasant taxpayers and army recruits.

[98] Adom Getachew writes that it was not until the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples that the international legal context for popular sovereignty was instituted.

"[17] Tilly's theory is prominent in the field of historical sociology, where scholars have tended to identify the onset of modern state formation as coinciding with the military revolution in the 16th century.

[107] A 1999 statistical analysis by William R. Thompson and Karen Rasler found support for the notion that major, regional warfare was linked to an increase in army size, but that a military technology revolution was not.

Economists Mark Dincecco, James Fenske, Anil Menon, and Shivaji Mukherjee have found evidence for Tilly's thesis in the development of the Indian state, as they show that "districts that were more exposed to pre-colonial conflict experienced greater early state-making.

[18] However, Chin-Hao Huang and Dave Kang argue that Tilly's bellicist theory of state formation does not account for Korea and Japan, as they did not face intense security threats.

[30] Robert Holden and Miguel Angel Centeno find limited evidence for the applicability of the bellicist theory to state formation in Latin America.

[116] To what extent warfare was important in state formation, it was indirectly "by mobilizing the aristocracy in the king's service and by necessitating drastically increased taxation and bureaucratization.

"[116] Furthermore, he argues that the chronology of events in China and Europe are inconsistent with Tilly's argument that increasing costs of warfare led to processes of state formation.

[120] New institutionalists such as Douglass North argue that state centralization happened as contracts and agreements were made between rulers and influential economic groups within their territory.

The state then is not simply a military or economic authority, but also includes cultural components creating consent by people by giving them rights and shared belonging.

[125][126][127] Sverre Bagge has argued that Christianity was a key component in European state formation, as the "Church created permanent institutions which strengthened the power of the king.

[129] Some scholars have argued that state formation occurred through an ideological revolution, as a preference for personalized rule shifted towards depersonalized, rational-legal administration.

[133] In addition, because many of the early modern states like the United Kingdom and France had significant empires, their institutional templates became standard for application globally.

As such, ruling elite in Africa did not have the impetus to develop strong and effective institutional structures as the survival of the state was guaranteed by the international community.

This claim complements and refines the usual ideas that attribute all forms of economic and social backwardness in Latin America to colonial institutions.