Large Territorial States Research Articles

The Economic Origins of the Territorial State

AbstractThis paper challenges the long-standing belief that changes in patterns of war and war making caused the emergence of large territorial states. Using new data describing the universe of European states between 1100 and 1790, I find that small political units continued to thrive well into the “age of the territorial state.” Some scholars have argued that changes in the production of violence led to the dominance of geographically large political units during this era. In contrast, I find evidence that variation in patterns of economic development and urban growth caused fragmented political authority in some places and the construction of geographically large territorial states in others. Exploiting random climatic deviations in the propensity of certain geographical areas to support large populations, I show via an instrumental-variables approach that the emergence of towns and cities caused the formation of small and independent states.

Agricultural adaptation to highland climate in Iron Age Anatolia

As polities grow and expand into environments distinct from their homeland, settlers moving to new landscapes may need to adapt familiar agricultural strategies to a new climate. This article explores one such case through the site of Kerkenes, a fortified, mountaintop urban center of Iron Age Central Anatolia evidently founded by Phrygian settlers from further west. New archaeobotanical data from Kerkenes indicate a set of agricultural practices broadly similar to that of other contemporary sites in Anatolia. Farmers at Kerkenes, however, appear to have prioritized bread wheat cultivation over that of barley, in stark contrast to agricultural strategies at Gordion, capital of the Phrygian kingdom. Placing Kerkenes in its environmental and economic landscape suggests that farmers took advantage of favorable rainfall patterns to emphasize a preferred cereal crop, deploying new strategies to minimize local subsistence risk. These results highlight the potential of regional syntheses of agricultural practices within large territorial states to illuminate the environmental footprints and agricultural signatures of individual polities.

Origins of Political Change. The Case of Late Medieval Guild Revolts

This study investigates the origins of the guild revolts in late medieval central Europe. At first, using newly compiled city level data, their temporal evolution and spatial distribution is discussed. Afterwards, the paper provides a historical discussion and empirical analysis of their origins. The results show that pre-existing city-level political institutions and location in a large territorial state were important for the emergence of late medieval guild revolts. Furthermore, the agricultural productivity of the region around a city matters in a negative way confirming the role of the late medieval agricultural crisis in the outbreak of the revolts. Other important factors are a city’s urban environment and market potential, its degree of autonomy and its commercial, industrial as well as political importance. This suggests that economic change can trigger political changes. I also found evidence for the existence of spatial spillovers from the developments in neighboring cities implying that rational strategic considerations played a role in the spread of the revolts.

Fortified settlements and the settlement system in the Northern Zone of the Han Empire

How far are settlement patterns affected by imperial systems of administration and control? The prototype city state consisted perhaps only of the population centre and its surrounding hinterland, but large territorial states, and still more empires, required complex systems of government and defence. Historical sources tell of the Chinese imperial system of ‘commanderies’ or provinces, and ‘county seats’ or subordinate centres, but this may conceal a range of local variations and development histories that only detailed archaeological survey can reveal. In this study, devoted to the Northern Zone of the Han Empire close to its border with the troublesome Xiongnu, a four-fold hierarchy of walled settlements is presented which varies in its character, origins and development even within this single zone. Many of its special features can be attributed to the pressures and insecurities of the border setting, and are the direct result of Han imperial planning.

Zehn Jahre Krebsregistrierung in Bayern

For a large territorial state like Bavaria only a decentralised cancer registration structure promises successful results: in the form of regional clinical cancer registries and--using the clinical registration as a base--one population-based registry. After ten years of epidemiological cancer registration in Bavaria it can now be shown that the chosen registration concept has proved itself. Currently the completeness of cancer notifications exceeded the international recommended threshold of 90%. A largely complete data stock is available for the years of diagnosis from 2004 to 2005. The task sharing between clinical and population-based cancer registries avoids double registration of data. Both types of registries are supporting physicians and hospitals with a wide palette of services. Together they enable transparency of cancer occurrence as well as transparency of health care for tumour patients.

French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne

Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like.

Forum: The Commodification of Indian Identity

Pre-Cabotian, Native North American peoples, like all peoples, had myriad ways of defining their group's membership, relying generally on kinship criteria - consanguinity and affinity - of many varied types. Like most others, they also had systems of naturalization that could confer group membership on nonkin. The Navajo, for example, took in large numbers of foreigners, creating Jemez, Zia, and Mexican clans in the process. The systems of self-definition were group specific, and there is little evidence of a any shared label of common identity that was pan-Indian, one including all of the hundreds of separate linguistic and cultural entities of North America. With the arrival of Europeans, things changed. Large territorial state had emerged and some were generating more complex heterogeneous citizenship notions. The colonialists made a market for ethnic identities, in which they have been traded as a commodity ever since. The federal government itself has taken steps to regulate the purity of the product-to guarantee the customer is getting The real McCoy

The Evolution of Social Complexity in Predynastic Egypt: An Analysis of the Naqada Cemeteries

A large territorial state emerged in Egypt by 300 BC, but its origins are not well known. Because what we know about the Predynastic period is mainly from cemeteries, archaeological evidence for the rise of the state in Egypt is lacking. An analysis of the largest Predynastic cemetery at Naqada shows increasingly differentiated graves over time, as well as an increasing interest in elite goods. An interpretation of the cemetery analysis seems to indicate increasing social differentiation and very possibly the emergence of political roles.