Premodern States Research Articles

Usury enforcement as an alternative to capital taxation in pre-modern states

AbstractAll governments have an obligation to protect their territory and the wealth within that territory from external predation. In fact, since war has historically resulted in the plunder and destruction of wealth, it seems straightforward to suggest that the cost of providing adequate defense of one’s territory is a function of the accumulated wealth within the territory. Suppose that all wealth in society is capital. The accumulation of capital conveys a private benefit to its owner, but imposes an external cost on society. As with any externality, the optimal tax policy would be to tax capital. The revenue from capital taxation could then be used to finance defense. Such a taxation scheme, however, requires the state has an appropriate level of bureaucratic capacity. During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, this sort of state infrastructure did not exist. Yet the rulers of those states faced the same constraint. In this paper, I argue that the enforcement of usury laws during this period replicate the outcome of the optimal capital tax. Lending at interest was prohibited. However, rulers often allowed certain groups to lend in society in exchange for a license fee. This granted monopoly status to lenders. At the same time, rulers imposed binding price ceilings on interest rates. The combination of these three characteristics of enforcement replicate the long-run restriction on capital accumulation of the optimal capital tax and generate revenue that is possibly equivalent to the tax as well. I then model ruler behavior given these incentives. Finally, I use historical evidence from England, Italy, and France to support my argument.

Anatomy of a premodern state

Abstract We provide a blueprint for constructing measures of state capacity in premodern states, offering several advantages over the current state of the art. We argue that assessing changing state capacity requires considering the composition of revenues, expenditure patterns, and local-level budgets. As an application, we examine the case of Portugal (1367–1844). Our findings demonstrate that throughout most of this extended period, Portugal maintained comparatively high fiscal and legal capacities. This challenges claims that Portugal’s economic decline from the second half of the eighteenth century was due to low state capacity.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income—sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face a greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a new dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.It is unfortunately an established fact that both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irresponsible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that the different classes are barely to be known apart. —Nuremberg Ordnance of 1657, Quoted in Hunt (1996)

The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies.

How states and great powers rise and fall is an intriguing enigma of human history. Are there any patterns? Do polities become more vulnerable over time as they age? We analyze longevity in hundreds of premodern states using survival analysis to help provide initial insights into these questions. This approach is commonly used to study the risk of death in biological organisms or failure in mechanical systems. The results reveal that the risk of state termination increased steeply over approximately the first two centuries after formation and stabilized thereafter. This provides the first quantitative support for the hypothesis that the resilience of political states decreases over time. Potential mechanisms that could drive such declining resilience include environmental degradation, increasing complexity, growing inequality, and extractive institutions. While the cases are from premodern times, such dynamics and drivers of vulnerability may remain relevant today.

The Coloniality of Contemporary Human Rights Discourses on ‘Honour’ in and Around the United Nations

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge.

The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production

Most early sedentary villages (c. 1500–500 BCE) in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, were situated on or near well-watered land. Around 500 BCE, a new hilltop center, Monte Albán, was established at the nexus of the valley's three arms, where agriculture was far riskier due to unreliable rainfall and a dearth of permanent water sources. During the era of its establishment, not only was Monte Albán larger than any earlier community in the region, but many other settlers moved into the rural area around Monte Albán. This marked shift in settlement patterns in the Valley of Oaxaca and the underlying processes associated with the foundation of Monte Albán have long been debated. How can we account for the immigration of people, some likely from beyond the region itself, to an area where they faced greater risks of crop failure? One perspective, reliant on uniform models of premodern states as despotic, viewed the process from a basically top-down lens; leaders coerced subalterns to move near the capital to provide sustenance for the new center. Yet more recent research has found that governance at Monte Albán was generally more collective than autocratic, and productive activities were centered in domestic units and not managed from above. Based on these new empirical foundations, we reassess earlier settlement and land use studies for the Valley of Oaxaca and view this critical transition as initiated through coactive processes in which new institutions were formed and new relations forged. Shifts in defense, ritual, domestic organization, craft production, and exchange all coincided with this episode of growth fostered by joint production, which intensified agrarian yields through increased domestic labor investments.

Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences edited by Jo van Steenbergen

<i>Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences</i> edited by Jo van Steenbergen

Taxation: A Vantage on the Reframing of the Economic Past

A Review of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jonathan Valk and Irene Soto Marín (New York University Press, 2021)

Premodern Confederacies: Balancing Strategic Collective Action and Local Autonomy

A confederacy is generally understood to be a formal, institutionalized alliance of peoples who act in mutual support to achieve common ends. While the emergence and maintenance of early and pre-modern states have received tremendous scholarly attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said for confederations. This paper examines common features of premodern confederacies as an initial effort towards developing a body of theory aimed at exploring and explaining confederacies, leagues, and other modes of collective and regional governance. The central thesis posed is that confederation was an ongoing political process that provided a means for a diverse range of political formations to achieve collective strategic goals at a distance without sacrificing autonomy. Selected case studies ranging from Pre-Columbian North America to Medieval Europe are explored to evaluate this position. The case studies show that confederacies were capable of integrating a diverse range of political formations, from tribes to kingdoms. The question of whether or not confederacies constitute ‘good government’ is considered and since the objective of a confederacy is generally not to govern, the answer depends on the political organization of its constituent parts.

The Syro-Anatolian City-States: An Iron Age Culture

The Syro-Anatolian City-States: An Iron Age Culture

Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past

Abstract We have found that collective action theory, as developed by Margaret Levi and others, provides a new direction for the study of growth and decline of premodern states. By following this lead, we have challenged the traditional consensus that despotic rule characterized most premodern states, demonstrating instead the existence of a state-building process in which fiscal economies of joint production fostered the implementation of good government such as accountable leadership and public goods. In this paper we focus attention on causes and consequences of state decline, highlighting the decline pattern found where there was good government. Our investigation reveals that while regimes providing good government policies and practices were highly regarded by citizens and brought benefits to them, they were not always highly endurable and regime decline was frequently followed by serious demographic and economic consequences. While causes of decline were varied, we describe and comment on four well-documented examples in which primary causality can be traced to a principal leadership that inexplicably abandoned well-established principles of state-building, while also ignoring their expected roles as effective leaders and moral exemplars.

The collapse of Teotihuacan and the regeneration of Epiclassic societies: a Bayesian approach

The collapse of premodern states is an enduring theme of archaeological research, and it is increasingly clear that understanding how states dissolve requires research at sites beyond regional capitals, as well as attention to subsequent developments. Recent literature reflects substantial interest in the ways in which people rebuild communities after states break down and in how the legacies of failed states influence processes of regeneration. Here, I examine the transformation of communities in the Basin of Mexico in response to the fragmentation of the Teotihuacan state system during the 500s CE. I focus on the development of Chicoloapan, a large settlement in the southern Basin that expanded as the state declined. Demographic growth, changes to the built environment, and shifting practices at Chicoloapan reflect decisions made by local residents amid severe regional instability and infrastructural disruption. A temporal framework for the reorganization of the Chicoloapan community is presented, based on the Bayesian modeling of 24 radiocarbon dates from residential contexts. These dates reveal a spate of local construction activity in the 600s CE. This research advances knowledge of the close relationship between the deterioration of a centralized state and the development of new communities, practices, and identities.

The Dichotomy of Civilization and Barbarism: Its Origins and Evolution

The article researches the historical transformation the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, which was originally in ancient Greece without pejorative meaning. This dichotomy has become relevant today to justify the classification of states according to their degree of acceptance of “civilization standards,” which are understood as the standards of the European model of development. The main features of the stereotype of the divide between civilization and barbarism, which took shape in the Roman era, have survived to the present. The premise of “civilizational superiority” of European culture is accompanied by a moral depreciation of other civilizations, turning a barbarian into an enemy of civilization with an explicit racist connotation. Civilization itself is seen as a “vaccination” in the process of missionary work. There emerges the concept of “Eastern barbarism,” coupled with the concepts of terra nullis and the innate irrational behavior of the population of these countries, which justify the seizing of territories for a “more rational” resource management. This activity is historically accompanied by colonization and, in the modern world, by forceful forms of “promoting democracy.” According to the logic of the divide between civilization and barbarism, non-Western countries are doomed to imitate and perpetually fall behind, which causes the disunity of society and internal hostility of “second-rate “Europeanized” nations. The Western mentoring has transformed from protectorate to the creation of governance structures that are headed by Western-educated local elites and are designed to change the cultural patterns of society. There was a conception that the world is divided into spheres, in the first circle of which there is a progressive civilized European world, followed by a number of countries similar in structure and values to the European model, and then there is a sphere of barbarism and backwardness. In the contemporary version, this theory presumes the division of states into “pre-modern,” modern, and post-modern states. It the conclusion, it is noted that this divide contradicts to the humane essence of culture and civilization process.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that rationalizes the use of sumptuary laws by elites to regulate status competition from below. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income - sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a newly collected dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.

Usury Enforcement as an Alternative to Capital Taxation in Pre-Modern States

All governments have an obligation to protect their territory and the wealth within that territory from external predation. In fact, since war has historically resulted in the plunder and destruction of wealth, it seems straightforward to suggest that the cost of providing adequate defense of one's territory is a function of the accumulated wealth within the territory. Suppose that all wealth in society is capital. The accumulation of capital conveys a private benefit to its owner, but imposes an external cost on society. As with any externality, the optimal tax policy would be to tax capital. The revenue from capital taxation could then be used to finance defense. Such a taxation scheme, however, requires the state to have an appropriate level of bureaucratic capacity. During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, this sort of state infrastructure did not exist. Yet the rulers of those states faced the same constraint. In this paper, I argue that the enforcement of usury laws during this period imperfectly replicate the outcome of the optimal capital tax. Lending at interest was prohibited. However, rulers often allowed certain groups to lend in society in exchange for a license fee. This granted monopoly status to lenders. At the same time, rulers imposed binding price ceilings on interest rates. The combination of these three characteristics of enforcement replicate the long-run restriction on capital accumulation of the optimal capital tax whereas the licensing fees allowed the governments to collect as much as half of the revenue that the optimal capital tax would generate. Given that some defense costs were paid in kind, this sort of policy is capable of replicating the optimal capital tax. I support this claim with historical examples of ``lombard'' and Jewish lending in pre-modern England, Italy, and France.

Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson

Reviewed by: Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson Walter Scheidel Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America. Edited by clifford ando and seth richardson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 309 pp. This volume addresses the question of how—and how autonomously—the rulers and political elites of ancient states exercised power over the populations and territories to which they laid claim. The discussion is structured around Michael Mann's twin concepts of "infrastructural power"—the state's capacity to penetrate civil society and implement decisions—and "despotic power," which allowed its agents to act without consultation or negotiation with civil society constituencies. Premodern states are commonly considered to have been rather deficient in the first of these types of political power, and this is certainly true if conditions in more modern societies serve as our principal frame of reference. Yet, even many centuries ago, central authorities needed to be able to maintain a certain degree of control in order to sustain the force generation and extractive activities that were required for preserving their position and deterring rivals. This collaborative project is designed to explore state capacity empirically by means of a series of historical case studies that are theoretically informed by Mann's ideal types (as well as by some cognate theorizing), which have been largely neglected by students of the ancient world. It thus seems unhelpful that readers need to make it to chapters 2 and 4 to encounter actual definitions of Mann's key concepts, which Clifford Ando's introduction curiously withholds [End Page 447] (most notably on page 9). The geographic and chronological range is impressive: while the volume concentrates on western Eurasia—with seven chapters covering the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Iran—one chapter each is devoted to early China and the Inca empire, an addition that is particularly welcome in view of the all-too-common exclusion of New World societies from what counts as "ancient history." Although one could always ask for more—early imperial China has much more to offer and pre-Islamic South Asia would surely have been worth a look – this is a promising start. If there is a common theme that runs through the volume, sometimes clearly developed and sometimes more obliquely implied, it is the evolution of infrastructural power over time. Seth Richardson, building on his earlier work on what he calls the "presumptive state," stresses the weakness of centralized state power in the Old Babylonian period: notwithstanding rulers' expansive rhetoric, territory was poorly defined and formal law was of little import. Even so, exaggerated claims to power helped build up real capabilities, which gradually surfaced in subsequent stages of Mesopotamian state formation. Emily Mackil paints a more optimistic picture for archaic Greece. Drawing on evidence that is centered on the island of Crete, she argues that early written laws that often concerned themselves with private property rights served to define territoriality and played a significant role in the emergence of small polities with growing infrastructural capacity. The historical record is (even) more tenuous for Western Zhou China, where—as Wang Haicheng maintains on the basis of elite-facing commemorative inscriptions on bronze vessels—direct political control was confined to the capital regions and most territories were run by aristocratic elites to whom power had been delegated. How this affected the scope of royal powers remains unclear. Turning to the much better documented mature Roman empire, Ando analyzes administrative attributions that drew rural communities into the institutional framework of nearby cities and imperial regulations that imposed road maintenance on local residents. These were among the mechanisms that extended the reach of the center by establishing both infrastructural and despotic power "in mutually constitutive ways" (p. 119). The evolutionary theme features very prominently in John Weisweiler's chapter in which he discusses the expansion of Roman governmental capacity in response to the shocks of the third century C.E. Marrying inclusive rhetoric with greater, if costly, penetration of civil society, a bundle of reforms amplified the despotic dimension of the emperor's persona, decentered established aristocratic elites, and drew in new constituents via fiscal, legal, and [End Page...

Sparks and needles: Seeking catalysts of state expansions, a case study of technological interaction at Angkor, Cambodia (9th to 13th centuries CE)

This paper presents a framework for identifying catalysts of expansionary phases of premodern states and empires. Combining ideas from W. Brian Arthur’s Complexity Economics with multi-scalar evidence we investigate how changes in individual technologies act as material ‘sparks’ that enabled states and empires to dynamically transform over their history. Technological interaction is used to evaluate how the Angkorian Khmer Empire used temple architecture to expand elite interests within the capital regions. Multidisciplinary analysis based on archaeometallurgical evidence is used to test the impact of iron technology on the changes in Angkorian temples between the 11th and 13th centuries. We find a correspondence between the permanent switch to sandstone and the increased use of iron from the Phnom Dek region, the largest source of iron ore in Cambodia. Technological interaction leads us to consider the broader impact that developments in the iron and temple architecture industries had across Angkor’s economy and whether those developments correlate with new ideas or access to new resources. The evidence suggests that material changes are directly interlinked with politico-religious strategies. Using the multi-scalar and recursive nature of technological interaction is an effective way to begin breaking down the complex range of factors that enabled state expansions.

Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and Southeast Asia's Premodern States

Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott'sAgainst the Grain: A deep history of the earliest statesdraws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.

Why did pre-modern states adopt Big-God religions?

Over the past two millennia successful pre-modern states in Eurasia adopted and cultivated Big-God religions that emphasize (i) the ruler’s legitimacy as divinely ordained and (ii) a morality adapted for large-scale societies that can have positive economic effects. We make sense of that development by building on previous research that has conceptualized pre-modern states as maximizing the ruler’s profit. We model the interaction of rulers and subjects who have both material and psychological payoffs, the latter emanating from religious identity. Overall, religion reduces the cost of controlling subjects through the threat of violence, increases production, increases tax revenue, and reduces banditry. A Big-God ruler, who also is a believer, has stronger incentives to invest in expanding the number of believers and the intensity of belief, as well as investing in state capacity. Furthermore, such investments often are complementary, mutually reinforcing one another, thus leading to an evolutionary advantage for rulers that adopted Big-God religions.

11 The Archaeology of Intermediate‐Scale Socio‐Spatial Units in Urban Landscapes

ABSTRACTIn this chapter, we argue that research on intermediate‐scale socio‐spatial units can benefit from collective action theory. Accordingly, we posit that institutions developed to promote cooperation help shape urban landscapes. A cross‐cultural sample of 30 premodern states from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and South America is used to evaluate this hypothesis. The results indicate that highly collective cities tended to be large and dense with public investment in road networks, canal systems, public drinking water, and uniform administrative wards (neighborhoods) centered on public buildings or spaces. In cases with lower collectivity, centralized investment in public goods tended to be comparatively lower. Cities varied from dispersed, low‐density settlements to disordered, large, dense aggregations. In the dense settlements, some residents organized at the neighborhood scale to solve collective action problems associated with public goods supplies, whereas others did not. In dispersed urban landscapes, neither the state nor local social groups organized to solve collective action problems. In low‐collectivity cases, other factors such as patron–client relationships, forced resettlement, kinship, etc. predominate. Thus, we conclude that archaeological analysis of urban landscapes can provide information on the political‐economic strategies employed by the state and other members of society.