Thursday, July 06, 2006

War making and state making as organized crime (Charles Tilly)

It was a joy to find this oft cited paper on state formation by sociologist Charles Tilly online. One online copy is at a regular university archive.

This Tilly paper is widely quoted in the state formation literature and is probably applicable to both pre-modern/ancient as well as nonwestern state formation. It caught my attention in Herman Schwartz's States versus Markets which has very nice summary descriptions of state formation processes. Since he doesn't link them back to the original historical events with citations though, it's difficult to see their full justification. A lot like Reid's magisterial Bruadel-like works for Southeast Asia that I often where the missing sources come from.

Michael Mann's "The Sources of Social Power I: From the Beginning to AD 1760" (Cambridge 1986) is a little bit more widely cited. For instance, being used in Scheidel's class on Ancient State Formation at Stanford.