Studying Modern Nation-State in a World-Historical Perspective: The Instance of Iraq

Studying Modern Nation-State ina World-Historical Perspective:

The Instance of Iraq

ZEHRA TASDEMIR YASIN*

Abstract By examining conceptual and historical approaches on modern stateand state formation in the context of Iraq, this paper addresses four interrelatedmethodological aspects of studying state formation (1) to contest the simplicity ofEurocentric knowledge production in studying state formation especially in theperiphery, (2) to bring capital and nation-state into a relational analysis and to callfor research on how they constitute each other historically and geographically, (3) tointegrate methodologically local and world-historical context in understanding thehistorical complexity of state formation, (4) to problematize the concepts of “capitalrelation” in order to recognize nature and transformation of nature in the study ofstate formation.

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Introduction: From Eurocentricism to World-HistoricalAnalysis in the Study of State Formation

Eurocentricsm1in the study of modern state formation produces a

problematic relationship between theory and history in two ways.Firstly, a symptomatic pattern of Eurocentric epistemologies is theprevalent use of normative categories and assumptions constructedon the empirical basis of the European experience of nation-stateformation as a theoretical lens to understand the political forma-tions in the peripheral geographies. This breaks the relation ofthe theoretical to the historical (Hopkins, 1982; Mongia, 2007).Secondly, these normative categories often presume a relativelyautonomous and self-sovereign state as the given locus of societalchange. This presumption, in turn, removes any necessity to delveinto geographically divergent and locally specific historical dynam-ics and how these dynamics interact with the modern relations ofpower at the world-historical level in studying modern state. Thesetwo aspects of Eurocentric episteme reproduce a self-determiningconceptual-analytical realm on state that is abstracted from thehistorical and geographical reality of state formation processesespecially in the periphery.

* Zehra Tasdemir Yasın is a PhD student at the State University of NewYork at Binghamton, Department of Sociology. Contact information:[email protected].

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2014DOI: 10.1111/johs.12078

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The inability to comprehend how the interaction between localdynamics and world-historical relations works out in the produc-tion of modernity leads to the representation of various local socialforms and processes peculiar to the periphery as pre-modernor traditional situated in a dichotomous relationship with themodern. Conception of history as a linear path from traditional tomodern divorces the very phenomenon of modernity itself from itsplace-based historical complexity and concreteness. As Arif Dirlik(2004) notes, Eurocentric modernity temporalizes the geographicaldivergence ruling out even the possibility of interaction between“traditional” and “modern” in the production of a complex anddifferentiated world-historical modernity. It portrays modernityand modern forms of rule such as nation-state as a universal andhomogenous phenomenon that emerged in the boundaries ofEurope and then spread to the other parts of the world. This stancediscounts the embeddedness of the processes of state formation inthe processes of capitalist deepening and expansion, which createdifferentiated and stratified spatial and temporal planes, i.e. geo-graphically specific centers and peripheries.

Against this Eurocentric backdrop, this paper proposes a world-historical perspective to the study of modern state formationsituating it in the development of the capitalist world economy.It understands modern state expressed as nation-state as thepolitical-territorial unit of rule and regulation peculiar to capitalistmodernity. It views modernity, following the works of Arif Dirlikand Dale Tomich, not as a sui generis aspect of Europe, but as aproduct of the historical interactions between the “modern” and the“traditional” through which they are transformed and unified in acomplex present (Dirlik 2003, 2004, and 2005; Tomich, 2004). Thespatial expansion and the temporal deepening of the capitalistrelations of production connect different locations and temporali-ties prompting their interaction in the same world-historical time ofmodernity. As the world-historical time acts upon the concretehistories of these locations; it also creates hierarchical and unevenyet complementary networks between them and, as a result, gainsa differentiated temporal-spatial specificity (Tomich, 2004: 135).

This approach conceives not only state but also the concept ofstate as historical. It rules out the methodological tendency char-acteristic of modernization theory that presumes nation-state asthe natural form of rule in the modern world and the self-containedunit of analysis (Hopkins, 1978). Modernization theory builds itsstatic conception of state on its assumption of the commensura-bility of nation-states on a linear temporal level and creates anahistorical typology of them by defining some set of conditions. Asopposed to this intrinsically political epistemological stance, this

2 Zehra Tasdemir Yasın

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2014

paper re-positions the question of modern nation-state by movingoutward from the narrowness of the presumption of the self-existence of state to its historical production, following TerenceHopkins’ evocative call:

Most students of modern social change tacitly presume the framework of a relativelyautonomous abstract state (or economy or society) as the given locus within whichthe changes they are explaining take place. Our concern, in contrast, is with theformation and development of larger and longer-enduring setting. Put another way,today’s world of interrelated and massively unequal sovereign jurisdictions cannotbe taken as a given in world-system studies -as the point of departure for pickingand choosing a site or two of state-formation or nation building- in order toconstruct a theory of such developments inductively. It itself a subject matter inneed of examination and explanation. There is thus no theory of the formation ofstates on a world-scale comparable to (let alone integral to) the theory of accumu-lation of capital on a world-scale (1982: 24).

As Terence Hopkins (1982) argues, the geopolitical boundaries ofmodern state have expanded in relation to the extension of thegeographical reach of the capitalist world-economy. Hopkins viewsthe extension of the inter-state system composed of nation-statesas one of the three major constituencies of the development ofthe capitalist world economy together with the extension of the“interrelations of production” and of the “capital-labor relation”(1982: 12). Either within the methodological realm of world-historical studies or not, each of these constituencies of the modernworld economy has been studied widely by the students of themodern social change. However, there have been very few examplesexploring the historical relationality among them

2, despite Hopkins’

inspiring call for it.This paper proposes to carry Hopkins’ thesis a step further and

conceives nation-state as a political-regulative product of the geo-graphically specific integration between the local time, i.e. themicro-historical processes constituted through the distinctive cul-tural and geographical aspects and dynamics of a place, and theworld-historical time, i.e. the time of the capitalist world economy.The spatial expansion of capitalist production relations and thevarying degrees and patterns of integration of diverse geographiesthrough the division of labor and nature not only produced oneworld economy composed of geographically specific commodityand labor frontiers, but also gave rise to the formations of political-administrative apparatuses in the form of nation-state. In turn,the nation-state form has made possible the integration ofthese various geographies into the world economy by regulatingculturally and naturally distinctive labor and nature throughmodern-rational mechanisms. In other words, the formations ofthe nation-state system and of the world economy are mutually

The Instance of Iraq 3


constitutive processes. Thought in this way, comprehending eachinstance of nation-state formation historically requires situating itin relation to the ways in which its social and natural geography iscommoditized and integrated in the expanding circles of the capi-talist world-economy. Abstracting the nation-state form from thisrelationality and treating it as a natural phenomenon ends up withthe fetishism of state.

In the following analysis, I will use the formation of Iraq as aninstance to underlie the methodological conditions of possibility ofstudying the non-Western histories of modern nation-state form.The main concern of this paper is how to understand the relation-ship between the two aspects of modernity, i.e. nation-state andcapital, via the instance of Iraq and oil. Through an examinationof both conceptual and empirical studies on modern state in thecontext of Iraq, this paper has four intersected objects: (1) tocontest the simplicity of Eurocentric knowledge production instudying state formation especially in the periphery, (2) to bringcapital and nation-state into a relational analysis and to callfor research on how they constitute each other historically andgeographically, (3) to integrate methodologically local and world-historical context in understanding the historical complexity ofstate formation, (4) to problematize the concept of “capital relation”in order to recognize nature and transformation of nature in thestudy of state formation.

In order to do that, I will firstly revisit the theoretical scholarshipon the relationship between nation-state and capital. Secondly, Iwill look at conceptual engagements to understand this relation-ship in the context of the Middle Eastern oil states. Here, I willintroduce the theory of the rentier state as an exemplar of howEurocentric assumptions underpin its conceptualization. Then,by drawing from the historical perspectives on state formation inthe region with a particular focus on Iraq, I will try to expose thehistorical complexity of the processes of state formation and itsrelationality to capitalist development.

Reconsidering Modern State Conceptually

Classical Marxist and Weberian accounts regard state as anautonomous structure that can be analyzed in relation to society.Their main concern is to understand how state gains its autonomyvis-à-vis society, putting state and society as two separate andexternally related realms (Mitchell, 1991). Their emphasis on the“relative autonomy” of state relies on the presumption of thenational level, within which state operates, as a sovereign realm ofanalysis. This presumption stems partly from the fact that abstrac-



tion in these theories reflects the empirical context of Europeansocial formations where institutionally consolidated power showsitself in the form of an “autonomous” state. It also stems from alack of concern with how the “internally” institutionalized power ofEuropean political formations depends on the “external” relations,which have been stabilized by the “nationally-bounded” modality ofspatial reproduction. This disinterest leads to the underestimationof the local-world historical linkages through which political poweroperates in the processes of nation-state formation. In other words,the assumption of sovereignty as an internal aspect of state in theclassical theories on state overlooks the very constitution of “sov-ereign national units” in the context of a spatially broader networkof unequal relations of power.

The main epistemological divergence between Weberian andMarxist approaches is on the nature of state autonomy. WhileWeberian theories posit state as a site of struggle for political powerover a determinate territory, Marxist approaches conceive it as a siteof struggle for socioeconomic power. Weberian approaches try tounderstand state in relation to its control on a particular territory,economy and population through administrative, legal, extractiveand coercive mechanisms (Skocpol, 1985). State formation, in turn,is conceived as an internal process of consolidation of juridical-territorial-military power. In this respect, they dismiss how thestructure of the capitalist world economy shapes the conditions ofpossibility of the formation of territorially sovereign national juris-dictions. From a Marxist view, however, not the state per se as anactor, but the relationship between state autonomy and reproduc-tion of capital is the key issue (Poulantzas, 1969, 1976; Bridges,1974; Block, 1977). State gains an instrumental role as a guarantorof capital accumulation and of the ruling class. In Poulantzas’sstructuralist framework, the (capitalist) state is an autonomousactor that provides cohesion to social formation while enabling thereproduction of the conditions of production and, thus, the domi-nation of one class over the others (Poulantzas, 1969, 1976). In hisaccount, while state as an institutionalized political power func-tions as a vehicle for the reproduction of class power, representingthe political it has also a relative autonomy from the economicand provides the cohesion to the social formation (Abrams, 1988:74–75). Yet, Marxist theories of state assume a fixed set of classdynamics at every national setting of “the capitalist state” dismiss-ing the divergent local-regional trajectories of capitalist developmentthat are related to each other at the world historical plane. As such,the relationship between “the state” and “the capitalist class” con-structed in these theories loses its relevance in the context of theperipheral social formations where the processes of state formation



historically preceded the development of an “internal” capitalistclass and are situated in the world historical processes of capitalaccumulation. Therefore, despite the substantial difference in theirconceptual tools, Marxist and Weberian theories of state converge intheir methodological neglect of the relational complexity of moder-nity at the world-historical level.

Classical sociological approaches to state have received a varietyof epistemological and methodological critiques (Abrams, 1988;Corrigan and Sayer, 1985; Sayer, 1987; Denis, 1989; Marsden,1992). One crucial critique is Abram’s decomposition of state intothe idea of state and the institutional apparatuses, to which he calls“state-system”. Through this analytical distinction, Abrams con-tends that the socially constructed idea of the state creates afetishistic appearance of state as a natural entity independent of thereality of economic relations. For Abrams, this idea concealsthe real history and social relations that are incompatible with theclaimed autonomy of the state (Abrams, 1988: 76–81). Thus, herestates Marx’s argument on a peculiarity of capitalist societies thatthe abstraction of the political state is constitutive of the abstractionof private life. For Marx, the institution of political state andthe construction of fictitious abstract individuals, or civil society,divorced from the concreteness of the social relations of productionare the different facets of the same process (Marx, 1973; Sayer,1987). He does not employ the category of political state as anormative one to be theorized but as a conceptual category to beconcretized in relation to capitalist social relations.

3Instead, he

conceives both modern state and capital as specific historical andtransitory forms (re)produced in relation to one another. In thisregard, the construction of a normative typology of capitalist state inclassical Marxist sociology does not indeed reflect Marx’s method.Instead, it abstracts modern nation-state from the historical contextof its formation in relation to capitalist social relations.

Weber’s own account also manifests visibly the relationalitybetween capitalism and modern state. In Economy and Society, heargues precisely that “today, capitalism and bureaucracy havefound one another and belong intimately together” (Sayer, 1992:1383). Weber’s object of analysis is rationalization and rationalprocesses of legitimation as the distinctive aspects of modernity.Yet, he does not deal with this problem as an historical question.Rather, he makes it explicit that his ideal-types are analyticalconstructs that emphasize one side of a phenomenon. Following acombined analysis of Marx and Weber, Sayer contends that “it issimply the organization of a society as a state that is propitious forcapitalism” (Sayer, 1992: 1401). Studying the instance of Englishstate formation, Sayer shows how its peculiarities pose incongruities



with these ideal types. He concludes that the process of nationalunification in England, which claimed to embrace both the new andthe archaic or the “modern” and the “traditional”, through locallyspecific political and legal institutions and social disciplining ofsociety made a capitalist economy possible (Sayer, 1992: 1410–1411). In this respect, “the tyranny of ideal types” conceals theconcrete internal relationality between the processes of state forma-tion and the rise of capitalism (Sayer, 1992: 1405).

Weber even carries his analysis to the world historical level, whenhe renders the formation of multiple nation-states as a mechanismthat impedes the subordination of economics to politics (Sayer,1992: 1401). Such a plural structure of polity, in his view, ensuresthe sustainability of economic enterprises or accumulation withoutloosing social peace. Therefore, for Weber, state and the nation-state system is a regulative mechanism providing a secure andrational ecosystem for the economic processes at the local andglobal levels. Integrating Marx and Weber’s conceptions of stateand the contributions of Abrams and Sayer, I argue that theappearance of an autonomous sphere of “the political” in the formof a territorially bounded nation-state is situated in the globaldivision of labor and nature. The appearant autonomy of nation-state from “the economic” in capitalist societies ensures the legiti-mate regulation of labor and nature through territorialized legaland coercive mechanisms. Therefore, as Holloway puts it, “thepolitical” can be seen as a geographically bounded moment of theglobal capital-labor relation (1994: 29–33).

This epistemological stance conceives the capital relation as aninternal aspect of the very constitution of national state. In thatregard, it suggests studying “national” state formation not as aquestion of bringing together its internal and external determinantsbut of comprehending it from the beginning as a locally and his-torically specific regulative aspect of the construction of the globalcapital relation. The internal/external distinction that reproducesthe apparent autonomy of “national” states abstracts the questionof state from its social-historical context. In this approach, instead,the peculiarities of each nation-state are identified as productsof the distinctive ways in which the local social and physical geog-raphies interact with the world-historical relation of capital. Theintegration of locally specific use values and labor into globalcapital/labor/nature relation not only transform social and physi-cal geographies but also the political forms that govern peopleand nature. The nation-state form is both a product of capitalrelation and the condition of its reproduction at the world-historicallevel. It links the local physical and social geography within the“nationally” defined territory to the circuits of the capital and,



thereby, regulates the relationship between the micro-historicalplace-based processes and the world-historical relations. The socialconstruction of the idea of an autonomous state, however, confersto state an illusory sovereignty that naturalize socially and histori-cally produced boundaries, the bounded physical and institutionalspace and the bounded identities. What Lefebvre (1991) eloquentlycalls as the “fetishization of space in the service of the state” isconstitutive of the fetishization of state in the service of the capital.

Trapped Between Theorizing and Historicizing:The Instance of Iraq

The instance of Middle Eastern oil states in general and Iraqin particular opens a useful space to examine the historicalrelationality between nation-state formation and capitalist develop-ment. The production of Iraq

4as a “nation-state” form is a very

peculiar instance in that historically the geography of Iraq wasnot integrated socially, culturally and economically. In the north,the vilayet of Mosul had been more integrated with the northernand western vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, such as Syria andDiyarbekir, with its predominantly Kurdish population. In themiddle and south, the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra with a pre-dominantly Arab population had long established commercial net-works on the axis of the Gulf (Shields, 2004; Sluglett, 2007). In thisrespect, the territorial formation of Iraq as a nation-state cannot betreated as a natural phenomena. Quite the contrary, it is demon-strative of historically produced nature of nation-state.

Here, the purpose is not to explore the historical processes thatproduced Iraq, but to bring together distinct conceptual and his-torical analyses with a critical lens in order to establish the neces-sity of a socio-historical methodology in studying modern state.The conceptual analyses of state in the context of Iraq, as well as ofthe other oil producing geographies of Middle East, discuss statemainly via the typology of rentier state. This typology presents a wayto understand the relationship between oil economy and state. Yet,it also sets the limits of discussion and abstracts this relationshipfrom its historical content and context turning into an engagementwith the Eurocentric conceptual tools. On the other hand, thefocus of historical analyses on the relationship between colonialrule, state formation and local social structures divorces the issuefrom oil and historical materiality of state formation. Their objectof analysis consist mainly of either the colonial nature of stateformation, i.e. how the Western political and economic forms areimposed during the colonial and mandate era, or the existing socialstructures that shape the nature of state formation.



Theoretical Impasse

The concept of “rentier state” is a theoretical tool to apply the notionof state autonomy to the oil-producing economies. Mahdavy(1970) coins the term to identify a definite typology of state thatderives the majority of its financial sources from oil revenues in theform of external rent. This typology conceives oil as an “external”source of income that disassociates the productive base of thelocal economy from state. It sees oil not as a resource base for thedomestic economy but for “the state”. Rentier state as the principalrentier in the economy becomes, thus, “the prime mover of theeconomic activity” mediating between the oil sector and the rest ofthe economy through its active role in disposing of the oil revenues(Beblawi, 1990; Abdel-Fadil, 1987).

Rentier state analysis presents the structure of state revenuesas the decisive factor shaping the nature of both economy and stateby creating a “rentier mentality” (Beblawi, 1990; Luciani, 1990;Karl, 1997; Niblock and Malik, 2007). It lays out the mechanismsthrough which oil wealth blocks the incentives for local productiveactivities either in the form of agricultural or industrial production(Hirschman, 1977; Hein, 1980; Beblawi, 1990; Karl, 1997).

5By

encouraging overvalued exchange rates and stimulating expendi-ture of imports, oil rent creates and broadens the economic base ofstate rather than creating a national economic space of accumula-tion (Hein, 1980: 245). Luciani argues that the rentier state has ahigh degree of autonomy from society and from domestic economy,because its income base is not the taxes or the local economy.Hence, the legitimacy of and loyalty to “the state” depends not onthe representation through taxation but on the allocation of the oilrevenues.

6

We can highlight two related shortcomings of the rentier stateanalysis. First, by presenting state as a natural autonomous entityoutside the social realm, this analysis locates the understandingof the process of state formation outside the arena of social change.Consequently, it disassociates the practices of ruling from thesocial structure and production relations. As Eric Davis notes, thenotion of “relative autonomy” especially in the context of the Araboil states collapses the historical specificity. By presuming anddepicting “the problematic of oil wealth” as self-evident and staticreality that can be analyzed through an abstract framework and,then, reflected onto history, this analysis “fails to indicate thegenesis of particular types of state formation” that are not ashomogenous across the region as it is assumed. The categoriessuch as rentier or allocation state ignore the constitutive impact ofthe intertwined processes of the world market integration, colonial



rule, and oil production on the divergent formations of the modern“nation”-state (Davis, 1991: 9–12). The structure of the world petro-leum market and the processes of global “petrolic accumulation”are constitutive of the process of nation-state formation (Karl,1997; Watts, 1987).

Second, by conceptualizing oil as externally accrued income, itconceals how it is a product of historically specific reconfigurationof local social and ecological structure in relation to the processesof its extraction, commoditization, and integration into worldmarket. It discusses oil rent in Ricardo’s terms of understandingof rent, i.e. as a matter of distribution in pertinence to the state’scontrol or monopoly over the oil fields and not specified as adeduction of value. As opposed to Ricardo’s transhistorical concep-tualization of rent as originating from social necessity, Marx speci-fies rent in capitalist societies as a historical product of the capitalrelation (Bina, 1989). He locates rent in capitalist societies in therelationship between capital accumulation and the structure oflanded property as the price given to land as a condition of pro-duction of value or transfer of value from capital to the landownerdue to the landowner’s control of the land (Murray, 1977, 1978;Bina, 1989). Thought in this way, it is not nature by itself but itsspecific historical integration into the circuits of world market thatgives oil an exchange value. The rentier state analysis, therefore,turns what is a historical product of the relationship betweenmaterial geography and capitalist expansion into a free gift ofnature that is accrued to state due to its ownership of land. Assuch, it dislocates the legal-institutional monopoly of modernstate over oil fields from the processes of state formation embeddedin the historical development of capital/nature relation in theregion.

Abstract Historicity

The historical approaches to nation-state formation in the regionleave any direct emphasis on oil out of their analytical lens. Whilethe rentier state analysis uses the category of “rentier state” as away to commensurate the modern Middle Eastern state with itsEuropean counterparts through the idea of state autonomy as thecommon denominator; the historical approaches rather underlinethe distinction of the former from the latter through their emphasison the colonial legacy and the preexisting tribal social structure.

Many accounts perceive the colonial rule in Iraq as the mainhistorical agent of the formation of what Zubaida calls “the nationalpolitical field” (Halliday, 1974; Zubaida, 1989; Zahlan, 1998; Owen,2004; Sluglett, 2007; Hourani, 2007; Dodge, 2003a). Accordingly,



in contrast to the West where modern state formation is an inter-nally developed process through societal dynamics; in Iraq, as in theother parts of the Third World, it is an externally imposed structureonto the social formation in both juridical and historical-sociologicalsense (Zubaida, 1989; Owen, 2004: 14–15; Halliday, 2005). In thisrespect, the Marxist thesis on the relationship between state andthe bourgeoisie as demonstrative of the nature of state becomesirrelevant (Zubaida, 1989). While in the West there is an organicrelationship between nation-state formation and the formation ofthe capitalist classes; the formation of nation-state in this regionwas based on the consolidation of the power of traditional landedelites by the colonial rule. The transformation of the landed tribalelites

7, in turn, from status groups to social classes is thus located

in the colonial legacy and colonially established modern institu-tional structure (Zubaida, 1989; Haj 1997; Owen, 2004; Sluglett,2007).

With this common denominator, the main lines of differentiationin these accounts occur in the degree and the nature of the powerof the colonial rule, on one hand, and of the local social structure,on the other, in shaping the process of state formation. Oneapproach perceives the colonial rule as the main mechanism thattransformed the traditional social and political structures intomodern ones (Dodge 2003a; Peterson, 1991; Sluglett, 2007).Accordingly, the formation of Iraq as a modern nation-state on thehistorical ground of the Ottoman imperial state was possiblethrough the centralization of social and political power in the handsof the traditional rural sheiks vis-à-vis the urban elites, i.e. theeffendi class

8, who had worked as local governor and civil servants

and inherited the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. By consolidatingthe rural landed powers, the colonial rule broke this legacy and,instead, laid the basis of an “Iraqi” national field (Dodge, 2003a).

The colonial practices of British officials in Iraq shaped by thetenets of modern rational thinking aimed at building a moderninstitutional order, which enabled measuring, calculation and pre-diction. The British administration’s will to conform the local tribal

9

landholding and land tenure practices to the European-based fiscaland administrative concerns reordered the land and society accord-ing to the template of this hegemonic colonial vision (Dodge,2003a). As the social relations based on land were restructured, sowas the political and economic power of the tribal elite and hisrelation to society. Following the colonial rule, the transformation ofthe social formation as such led to the emergence of oligarchictribal monarchy. Thus, the “traditional” constituted the very sourceof modern state formation in Iraq as opposed to a rising bourgeoisclass in the European instance.



What is also striking is that colonial rule intervened in andreversed the course of a dynamic that had started to integratethe region in the capitalist world economy during the nineteenthcentury (Stork, 1980; Owen, 1993; Haj, 1994, 1997; Shields, 2004).Accordingly, the increasing commercial linkages within the broaderregion and with Europe during the second half of the nineteenthcentury had brought, although unevenly, certain parts of theregion’s economy into the scope of the world economy. Especiallywith the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 these relations beganto transform the local economic relations creating profound shiftsfrom “tribal” subsistence agriculture to production for externalmarkets (i.e. British India and Europe) transforming at the sametime the chief/tribesman relationship into one of landlord/peasant

10(Stork, 1980; Owen, 1993; Shields, 2004). The changing

forms of production started to erode the authority of the tribal chiefon the eve of the British colonial conquest. However, the politicalrule established by Britain was depended on the reconsolidation ofthe power of the traditional political rulers in the countryside or thesheiks vis-à-vis the urban ruling elites or the Ottoman effendis.Therefore, the consolidation of the political control of territorywas hinged on the establishing barriers to capitalist development(Stork, 1980).

11

Although concurring with the contention that the tribal oligarchybacked by the British colonial administration hampered the furtherdevelopment of capitalist relations of production, Samira Haj’saccount posits a complete break from the legacy of the colonialrule and portrays the post-colonial era as an internally sovereigndomain of the local rulers. Here, the question of state formationbecomes a question of consolidation of internal coherence andsovereignity. She writes:

Although the Iraqi nation-state was the creation of British imperial power, it wasable, fairly quickly, to acquire its own internal coherence and sense of sovereignty.Rather than being simply derived from an external authority, the legitimacy of theIraqi state was now based on the marshaling of various indigenous elements,interests, and social forces in the form of loyalty to the monarchy, or else to aterritorially based national identity (1997: 83).

In this depiction, the social relations of production characteristicof the existing agrarian system is the decisive force in either bol-stering or impeding social and political change rather than thecolonial rule. Within the context of the conflicts between the risingcapitalist interests and the tribal oligarchy, on one hand, and thetribal oligarchy and the peasant sharecroppers, on the other, oilrevenues were spent to consolidate the power of the tribal oligarchyand to reproduce the non-capitalist agriculture until the revolution



of 1958. What she identifies as “blocked transition to capitalism” isa product of the predominance of tribal structures in the localsocio-economic plane and the conscious agency of powerful tribalgroups to take advantage of the political and material opportunitiesarisen from the process of Ottoman centralization in the ninteenthcentury and from the world market in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries (Haj, 1994, 1997).

These accounts bring important contributions to the historicalunderstanding of state formation in relation to colonial rule andsocial change. Yet, their level of methodological abstraction mis-places the concrete historical relationship between capitalist devel-opment, colonial rule and state formation in the instance of Iraq.Although unsettling some presumptions of the Eurocentric depic-tion of capitalist development and state formation, these accountsunderstand capitalist development in a linear perspective throughthe category of “the mode of production” constraining capitalistproduction relations to capital-wage labor relationship. As such,the distinction of modern state formation in the instance of Iraqfrom the experience of Europe appears as a matter of capitalistdistentegration or “blocked transition to capitalism” situated ineither colonial rule or the tribal social structure of Iraq. While thecountryside or the agrarian structure is presented as the site ofcapitalist transition, oil becomes an urban phenomenon and anexternal means that bolstered the power of the tribal oligarchy.

The idea of capitalist development featured in these accountsdesignates the development of a class system of surplus extractionof wage labor, characteristic of many classical Marxist accounts. AsTomich argues, such an understanding reduces the complexities ofhistorical capitalism to a single dimension of social relations ofproduction, i.e. wage labor, by collapsing the theory and historyof capitalist development and class formation. As a result, thesocial relations of capitalist production are solely attributed to agiven “national” society on the axis of institution of capital/laborrelation (Tomich, 2004: 39–45), while the relation of capital tonature is excluded from the conceptual thinking. The notion of“obstacle to the linear trajectory of capitalist development” neglectsthe integration of this region into capitalist world market throughthe commodification of natural environment and revaluation ofoil, a dynamic which is also situated in the colonial rule. Thecountryside-urban dualism and the assumption that the capitalistdevelopment realizes through the dissolution and transformation ofthe production relations based on land underlying these accountsgloss over how the intensification of the power of the tribal ruler isintrinsically related to the integration of local oil in the worldeconomy. As a result, the historical relationality between changes



in the agricultural cultivation and oil extraction, between the ruraland the urban and between the the local production and the worldeconomy is just missing from the analysis. In other words, it doesnot grasp that not the commodification of local labor and thedevelopment of wage labor but the commodification and extractionof local oil by global capital was the mechanism that Iraq became anintegral part of the world economy and world-historical divisionof labor/nature in the twentieth century. Thought in this way, whatis regarded as a process of hindering the capitalist developmentbecomes the mechanism through which the region is integratedinto the world economy. In this respect, the historical process ofconsolidation of the power of the “tribal rulers” should be situatednot in relation to changing modes of production but to a morecomplex (nonlinear), relational and concrete understanding of his-torical processes of capitalist development.

A concrete historical understanding of capitalist developmentand state formation also challenges the Eurocentric presupposi-tion of the incongruity between nation-state and tribe and themodern/traditional dualism. The tribal social elements have beenconstitutive of modern political forms in Iraq providing an impor-tant source of distinctiveness to state formation (Anderson, 1990;Beck, 1990; Davis, 1991; Dawood, 2003; Haj, 1997; Karim, 2003;Khoury and Kostiner, 1990). A key aspect of the British colonialmentality is to sustain and reinvent the existing traditions in orderto define and justify the colonial authority (Dodge, 2003a, 2003b).The invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) or tribalrelations by the colonial administration in Iraq, of which the insti-tution of the legal code of Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regu-lations was a manifestation, formalized “the tribal” and transferredit to the modern historical context (Khalidi, 1991; Mamdani, 1996).Tribal leaders have been incorporated into modern state structuresin the region blurring the distinction between tribal and modernpolitical systems. Reproduction of tribes, while integrating peopleinto the state structures, was also preventing their completesubordination to or assimilation into the modern state (Beck,1990). Tribal loyalties transferred to and internalized by thecontext of national state and identity without being completelyerased (Dawood, 2003; Jabar, 2003; Tibi, 1990). Put in this way,the formation of state through the colonial rule involves not onlya process of establishing modern legal and administrative appara-tuses and rational thinking on pre-modern geographies, butalso production of a complex heterogonous modernity throughre-invention of the “pre-modern” in the context of modernity.

Moreover, the comprehension of the geographically specific his-torical complexity of modern nation-state formation unsettles the



presumption of modern national space as a coherent citizenship-centered structure (Tibi, 1990). What Marx describes as the cre-ation of abstract individuals or civil society divorced from thepolitical sphere in the empirical context modern state formation inEurope partly looses its relevance for that of Iraq and the MiddleEast. This geographical-historical divergence leads scholars toexplain the latter experience as a “failure case” of nation-stateposited in opposition to the “successful model” in Europe (Tibi,1990). Such an approach presumes that these divergent trajecto-ries of state formation are independent of each other and theyoccur in a linear evolutionary time. However, quite the contrary,re-invention of tribal relations in Iraq, which incapacitated theseparation of the material sphere from the political in Marx’s ter-minology, was situated in and institutionalized by the coloniallegal-administrative context and the processes of capitalist integra-tion with the rest of the world through oil (Jabar, 2003: 79–90). Inother words, the crisis of national integration in Iraq in particularor in the Middle East in general is not a product of “failure” tointegrate the tribal identities into national identity, but of the fragilehistorical processes of state formation whose fragility was accen-tuated by the petro-accumulation. What is identified as a failurecase, symptomatic of a linear historical perspective that presumesnational autonomy, demonstrates the fragility and relational com-plexity of modernity from a world-historical perspective.

From Iraq to Studying State Formation in the Periphery:Historicizing Capital/Nature Relation

The theoretical and historical analyses of state and state formationin the context of Iraq enable us to diagnose two central method-ological observations. First, the effort to theorize the nature ofstate in an oil economy through the Eurocentric category of “stateautonomy” confines the relationship between modern state andcapital to a matter of the source of revenues of a presumablysovereign entity postulated as a completely independent domainfrom societal dynamics. It, thus, constricts the historical under-standing of nation-state, oil and the relationship between them.Second, the linear conceptual approach to capitalist productionconceived through the capital/labor relation and the consequentabstractness of the treatment of capitalist development in the his-torical analysis leads to the conclusion of the association of modernstate formation with capitalist disintegration. The state formation isspecified through the lack of formation of a local bourgeois class, asopposed to the European experience, due to the process of theempowerment of the rural tribal elites backed by the colonial rule.



In turn, the missing bourgeoisie or the delay of the formationof capital/wage labor relation is seen as an indicator of capitalistdisintegration. As a result, the commodification of nature, i.e. oil,and reproduction of the region as an oil enclave for the worldeconomy, and the development of (global) capital/ (local) naturerelation does not find a place in the analysis.

In this respect, the instance of Iraq provide us a critical spaceto construct a historical perspective on state formation in theperiphery that can transcend both the inherent hegemony ofEurocentricsim and what Sayer (1987) calls “the violence ofabstraction” in understanding the relationship between capitalistdevelopment and state formation. What is instead proposed here isthe problematization of this relationship methodologically as asocio-historical rather than theoretical matter (Corrigan and Sayer,1985). The socio-historical perspective to the study of state forma-tion does not mean to ignore valuable conceptual tools provided byMarx and Weber. It means situating these tools in historical analy-sis and reconstructing them based on the concrete historical andgeographical complexity. Marx’s “historical theory”, as Tomich illu-minates, does not draw a picture of the historical development ofcapital, but presents an abstact-level relationality in order to con-struct a contextualized inquiry of concrete historical processes(Tomich, 2004: 27). In Capital, Marx gives cognitive primacy tothe logical relation among the conceptual categories over the his-torical relation. His theoretical analysis of capital/labor relationpresumes the interchange between men and nature as given andtranshistorical. He does not provide any persistent account of thehistorical character of either use values or the material processes oftheir production. The level of abstraction of his method of presen-tation employs the category of “use-value” as a transhistoricalcategory, without any “violence” to the theoretical exposition of thecapital relation (Marx, 1976; Rosdolsky, 1968; Tomich, 2004:22–23; Schmidt, 1983: 37). His account does not suggest a theo-retical separation between society and nature and the relegationof the latter to the outside of the historical analysis.

12Yet, by

understanding capital through its relation to labor, Marxist writinghas reflected a negligence of nature that dominates much of thepost-enlightenment ideas of historical progress granting time andculture primacy over space and nature (Coronil, 1997: 23–24). Inthis regard, Marxist tendency to delimit the analysis of capitalistdevelopment with labor stems partly from the inadequate compre-hension of Marx’s method.

Only if we go against the grain of Marx’s method of presentationand “the wage-centered totality of Capital”, we can reveal what thecapital/labor relation by itself excludes (Tomich, 2004). Only then



we can invert nature’s epistemological subordination to capitalunder the concept of rent, as argued by Philip McMichael (2012:148–150), and start to explore the capital/nature relationship in theproduction of value historically. The works of Bunker and Ciccantell(2005), Bunker (2007) and Martinez-Alier (2007) point well thatcontrolling not only cheap labor but also nature and securingpermanent flow of raw materials have driven the worldwide expan-sion of capital and the formation of the world market. The social andpolitical production of the “first” and “third” worlds is premised onthe division of nature and raw materials as well as of labor (Coronil,1997: 29–30). The transformation of geographically peculiar natureinto value means also a relational process of formation of modernpolitical forms in order to regulate natural and human geographyand the interaction between the two. In the instance of Iraq, asopposed to the dominant theses, this signifies how the modern stateformation becomes a mechanism for regulating and managing theextraction of oil, its transportation to the value chain and thetransformation of the interaction between society and nature.

13Iraq

and oil presents concrete examples of how the tendency of capital toexpand the commodity market, i.e. the formation of one worldeconomy (and world-historical time), works with the fragmented anddifferentiated nature of social and physical geography, i.e. thecentral ingridents of commodity production. In this context, theapproach proposed here opens up a space to examine nation-stateand its formation as a specific historical solution to regulate,manage and secure the access of capital to locally specific social andnatural geography in the twentieth century.

As such, the formation of a geographically integrated capitalistworld economy and of a territorially defined and divided normativeand institutional order of legality and rationality are two mutuallyconstitutive aspects of modernity. Marx distinguishes how theinstitution of political state and civil society create a more coher-ent field that is abstracted from the reality of material production.Weber, on the other hand, points out how this modern form ofrule is based on a rational-buracuractic system. Both specifya “typical” aspect of modernity as an expanding process, butboth needs to be contextualized as a historical process. Even inEngland, accepted as “the classic ground of modern rational capi-talism” state formation and its relationship with capitalist devel-opment is very peculiar and deviate strikingly from the ideal-types(Sayer, 1992). The incongruity between theory and history becomeeven more important for the peripheral geographies, where stateformation was situated in colonial legacy and uneven processes ofcapitalist integration. Terence Hopkins points out this clearly ashe writes:



This rather common general picturing of internal state-formation relations andprocesses has, of course, a fundamental limit. It is drawn from and only holds atbest for the “national” states (and deriving from the state jurisdictions, the “national”societies) that have formed in or have come to enclose core-areas of the capitalistworld system. Not only are there no sound reasons for expecting it to hold in evena loose way for political formations elsewhere in that world-system (a fortiori outsideof it altogether), but also there are good theoretical reasons for assuming it cannot.The presemption that it even could is one of the fundamental mistakes of“developmentalists”. There is, though, no comparable picturing of the relationalnetworks and processes of political development in peripheral-areas of the world-system, let alone in areas including in them the transforming effects of (a)peripheralization and (b) inclusion as sovereign units in the interstate systemremains a major theoretical task” (1982: 28).

Hopkins sees exploring state formation as a theoretical taskbecause it breaks the violent abstractions and their applications(See 1982: 27–28). What he suggests is to examine the relationshipbetween uneven development (or peripheralization) and state for-mation or situating modern state formation in historical capitalism.Unpacking this relationship historically in the context of “Iraqi”instance implies exploring the relationship between oil, capital andstate formation and the reproduction of “pre-national” spacesincluding the ecology in the service of “national” unification andcapitalist development. It implies how the distinct phases of (global)capital/ (local) oil relation have shaped the nature of state forma-tion and the reproduction of traditions in the context of modernsocio-political context.

Such a relational understanding can not only concretize capitalrelation historically and geographically but also de-fetishize andde-naturalize nation-state. It can recognize the formations ofmodern forms of jurisdiction throughout the world and the expan-sion of the world economy as internally related processes. It cantranscend the Eurocentric image of the “Middle Eastern” nation-states as communalistic and religious “Islamic” societies that areimpervious to modern ideologies (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett,1991; Zubaida, 1991). Further, it can comprehend how this image isrealized as a modern phenomenon emerged with the rise of modernnation-state (Zubaida, 1991). Explaining the reproduction of tribaland secterian relations only as a matter of local aspects of socialformations contributes to the idea of “failed nation-state” of theMiddle East as opposed to the successful “cases” of the West.However, “the failure” should be explored in the interlinkages of theprocesses of nation-state formation and the specific ways in whichthese “national” geographies are integrated in the world economy.Situating “success” and “failure” as twin façades of modernity linksthe core and the periphery, the modern and the traditional, tran-scending the dualisms on which Eurocentric epistemology is based.



Unpacking the violent abstractions and their applications to theperipheral geographies calls for new epistemological and method-ological directions in the study of state formation. Locally informedaccounts offer an emphasis on the complex interactions of differentspatial and temporal forms in creating modern state. Yet, anyunderestimation of the spatially and temporally broader historicalcontext in which the local is situated poses the risk to perpetuatean abstract localism that regards a place a self-enclosed andsovereign arena. This local/global tension can be overcome bysimultaneously specifying the concrete development of the world-historical at the local levels and locating the local in the world-historical parameters of its social and spatial reproduction. Thevery connectedness between place-based and world-historical rela-tions renders their historical content and complexity. The centralquestion via the instance of Iraq is how the world historical tem-porality of capital relation and the local social and physical geog-raphy interacted in the historical production of Iraq as a modernspatial and temporal product. This question uncovers not only thematerial context of nation-state but also the locally peculiar com-plexity of modernity.

Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to Dale Tomich, Ravi Palat, ShelleyFeldman, Philip McMichael and Caglar Keyder for their encouragement toundertake this work and their comments on its earlier and later versions.

1 For a discussion of how Eurocentric knowledge production hasbecome hegemonic since the 17th century in the context of the European-centered capitalist expansion and colonialism, see Quijano (2000: 549–550).

2 In this context, Thongchai Winichakul (1994), Fernando Coronil(1997), Manu Goswami (2004) and Myrna Santiago (2006) offer recentexamples of post-Eurocentric historical studies that look at modern stateformation in Thailand, Venezuela, India, and Mexico respectively in abroader historical context.

3 For a powerful discussion of Marx’s method see Sayer (1987) andRosdolsky (1968).

4 “Iraq” was used by the Ottoman Empire as a geographical term todenote its eastern edges. In the twentieth century, it gained a modernpolitical meaning relegating its geographical meaning to the past.

5 Indeed, Hirschman (1977) makes this argument not only for oil butfor all mineral economies.

6 Luciani asserts that an allocation state as such does not need tocreate a unifying national myth and to represent the “national” community,but rather perpetuates segmentary politics. This is because segmentarypolitics restrict the number of people who have claims in the allocation ofthe oil wealth (1990: 75–78).

7 The tribal elites were composed of the chiefs of ashirets, called aghain Northern Iraq and sheikh in Southern Iraq. In Northern Iraq sheikhrefers to influential religious people.



8 Stephen Longrigg (1925), one of the British administrators in Iraqduring the mandate era, defines the effendis as a “parasitic middle class”created by the Ottoman to connect the Turk to the Arab.

9 In tribal social formations, i.e. ashirets, the social structure wasmainly composed of agricultural production and pastoral nomadism.

10 This was the central argument of Hannah Batatu in his classicalstudy of social classes in Iraq. He characterized the transformation of thetribal sheiks from status groups to classes as the most important dynamicin the consolidation of state power (1978: 6–11).

11 In this regard, Stork argues that the rise of oil industry and thegrowth of oil wealth reactivated the urban-based economic activity with anincreasing pace. As a result, the disarticulation between the political rulemonopolized by the landlords and the rapidly changing social reality withthe increasing oil wealth became the eventual source of the Iraqi revolutionof 1958, which expropriated the largest private landholdings and brokedown the political power of the landlords (Stork, 1982).

12 He clearly states this in his emphasis on how abstractions abuse thehistory and the necessity “to correct the idealist manner of the presenta-tion, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptualdeterminations and of the dialectic of these concepts” (Marx, 1973: 151).

13 Even Marx’s category of rent is increasingly inadequate for under-standing the commodification and exploitation of nature in the service ofcapitalist reproduction and expansion. Recent studies of exploitation ofnature began to conceive nature’s at once material and social contributionto capital via capital/nature relation rather than via capital/labor relation(see, Bunker, 2007). These attempts should be developed for construc-tion of a “nature theory of value” (Elson, 1979; Coronil, 1997) that cannecessarily complement “labor theory of value” and that can historicize andunderstand use value within capitalist relations of production.

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Documents

Studying Modern Nation-State in a World-Historical Perspective: The Instance of Iraq