State Formation and Development
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17First version:
States are very old: the earliest writing finds them well-established in Sumer and in Egypt. Modern states are immensely more capable and powerful than those states, and not just because of technology: they are far more organized and effective. How, and why?
- Recommended (very misc.):
- ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah ["The state is that institution in society whose end is to suppress all such injustice as it does not itself commit." (From memory.)]
- Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
- William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000
- Charles Tilly
- "Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History", Theory and Society 39 (2010): 265--280
- "War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime", pp. 169--186 in Bringing the State Back In (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, eds., 1985) [PDF preprint]
- Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors
- To read:
- Ben W. Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services
- H. Zeynep Bulutgli, The Origins of Secular Institutions: Ideas, Timing, and Organization
- Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve
- Drew Conway, "Networks, Collective Action, and State Formation" [Abstract, with links to PDF and code]
- John A. Hall, Coercion and Consent: Studies in the Modern State
- Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
- Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan
- Conor O'Dwyer, Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development
- Philip G. Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism
- Hendrik Spruyt, "The Origins, Development, and Possible Decline of the Modern State", Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002): 127--149
- Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
- Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990--1990
