War And State Formation In Ancient China And Early Modern Europe

The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in having a multi-state system in international relations and liberal democracy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric perspective believes that China is destined to have authoritarian rule under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656–221 BC) was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. Both cases witnessed the prevalence of war, formation of alliances, development of the centralized bureaucracy, emergence of citizenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book, first published in 2005, examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive universal status.

This book, first published in 2005, explores why China and Europe's development of state systems began similarly but experienced opposite outcomes.

The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in having a multi-state system in international relations and liberal democracy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric perspective believes that China is destined to have authoritarian rule under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656-221 BC) was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. Both cases witnessed the prevalence of war, formation of alliances, development of the centralized bureaucracy, emergence of citizenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive universal status.

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

This engaging volume scrutinises the causal relationship between warfare and state formation, using Charles Tilly's work as a foundation.

For many years, the Ming and Qing dynasties have been grouped as “late imperial China,” a temporal framework that allows scholars to identify and evaluate indigenous patterns of social, economic, and cultural change initiated in the last century of Ming rule that imparted a particular character to state and society throughout the Qing and into the twentieth century. This paradigm asserts the autonomous character of social change in China and has allowed historians to create a “China-centered history.” Recently, however, many scholars have begun emphasizing the singular qualities of the Qing. Among the eight contributors to this volume on the formation of the Qing, those who emphasize the Manchu ethos of the Qing tend to see it as part of an early modernity and stress parallel and sometimes mutually reinforcing patterns of political consolidation and cultural integration across Eurasia. Other contributors who examine the Qing formation from the perspective of those who lived through the dynastic transition see the advent of Qing rule as prompting attempts by the Chinese subjects of the new empire to make sense of what they perceived as a historical disjuncture and to rework these understandings into an accommodation to foreign rule. In contrast to the late imperial paradigm, the new ways of configuring the Qing in historical time in both groups of essays assert the singular qualities of the Qing formation.

In a relatively short time, the American state developed from a weak, highly decentralized confederation composed of thirteen former English colonies into the foremost global superpower. This remarkable institutional transformation would not have been possible without the revenue raised by a particularly efficient system of public finance, first crafted during the Civil War and then resurrected and perfected in the early twentieth century. That revenue financed America's participation in two global wars as well as the building of a modern system of social welfare programs.Sheldon D. Pollack shows how war, revenue, and institutional development are inextricably linked, no less in the United States than in Europe and in the developing states of the Third World. He delineates the mechanisms of political development and reveals to us the ways in which the United States, too, once was and still may be a "developing nation." Without revenue, states cannot maintain political institutions, undergo development, or exert sovereignty over their territory. Rulers and their functionaries wield the coercive powers of the state to extract that revenue from the population under their control. From this perspective, the state is seen as a highly efficient machine for extracting societal revenue that is used by the state to sustain itself.War, Revenue, and State Building traces the sources of public revenue available to the American state at specific junctures of its history (in particular, during times of war), the revenue strategies pursued by its political leaders in response to these factors, and the consequential impact of those strategies on the development of the American state.