War Making and State Making as Organized Crime

8/8/2019 War Making and State Making as Organized Crime

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170 Charles Tillycoercive exploitation forced would-be power holders to concede protectionand constraints on their own action. I t will therefore help us to eliminatefaulty implicit comparisons between today's Third World and yesterday'sEurope. That darification wiD make it eas ie r to understand exactly howtoday's world is diCCerent and wha t we therefore have to explain. It may~ v e n help u to explain the current looming presence of military organization and action throughout the world. Although that result would delightme, I do not promise anything so grand.This essay, then, concerns the place of organized means of violence inthe growth and change of those peculiar forms of government we call national states; relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officialsof which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentratedmeans of violence within a population inhabit ing a large, contiguous territory. The argument grows from historical work o n t he formation of nat ional states in Western Europe, especially on the g rowth of the Frenchstate from 1600 onward. But it takes several deliberate steps away fromthat work, wheels, and stares hard at it from theoretical ground. The argument brings with it few illustrations and no evidence worthy of the name.

Jus t as one repacks a hasti ly fi lled rucksack after a few days on the trail- throwing out the waste, putting things in order of importance, and balancing the load - I have repacked my theoretical baggage for the climb tocome; the real test of the new packing arrives only with the next stretch ofthe trail. The Irimmed-down argument stresses the interdependence o f warmaking and state making and the analogy between bothof those processesand what, when less successful and smaller in scale, we call organizedcrime. War makes states, I shall claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rival.ry,policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum - that 1shallclaim as well . For the historically limited period in which national stateswere becoming the dominant organizations in Western countries, J shallalso claim that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other.

Double-Edged ProtectionIn contemporary American parlance, the word "protection" sounds twocontrasting tones. One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone,"protection" calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by apowerful friend. a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other,it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to paytribute in order to avoid damage - damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver. The difference, to be sure, is a matter of degree: A hellanddamnation priest is likely to collect contributions from his parishioners onlyto the extent that they believe his predictions of brimstone for infidels; ourneighborhood mobstermay actually be, as he claims to be, a brothel 's bestguarantee of operation free of police intcrfcrt'nfi'.Which image the word "prot


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172 Charles Tillyauthori ty 's monopoly of force. A tendency to monopol ize the means ofviolence makes a government's daim to provide protection, in either th ecomforting or t he ominous sense of t he word, more credible an d moredifficult to resist.Frank recognition of the central place of force in governmental activitydoes not require us to believe that governmental authority rests " o nl y " o r"ultimately" on the threat of violence. Nor does i t entai l the assumptionthat a government's only service is protection. Even when a g ~ v e r n m e n t ' sus e of force imposes a large cost, some people ma y well drode that thegovernment's other services outbalance the costs of acreding to its monopoly of violence. Recognition of the centrality of force opens the way to anunderstanding of the growth an d change of governmental forms.Here is a preview of the most general argument: Power holders ' pursuitof wa r involved them willy-nilly in the extraction of resources for wa r making from the populat ions over which they had control an d in the promotion of capita l accumulat ion by those who could help them borrow an dbuy. War making, extraction, an d capital accumulation interacted to shapeEuropean state making. Power holders did not undertake those three momentous activities with the intention of creating national states - centralized, differentiated, autonomous, extensive political organizations. Nor didthey ordinarily foresee that national states would emerge from wa r making, extraction, and capital accumulation.Instead, the people who controlled European states and states in th emaking warred in order to check or overcome their competitors an d thusto enjoy the advantages of power within a secure or expanding territory.To make more effective war, they attempted to locate more capital . In theshort run, they might acquire that capital by conquest, by selling off theirassets, or by coercing or dispossessing accumulators of capital. In the longrun, the quest inevitably involved them in establishing regular access tocapitalists wh o could supply and arrange credit an d in imposing one formof reguJar taxation or another on the peopleand activities within their spheresof control.As the process continued, state makers developed a durable interest inpromoting the accumulation of capital, sometimes in the guise of directreturn to their ow n enterprises. Variations in the difficulty of collectingtaxes, in the expense of the particular kind of armed force adopted, in theamount o f w a r making required to hold off competitors, a nd s o on resultedin the principal variations in the forms of European states. It all began withth e effort to monopolize the means of violence within a delimited territoryadjacent to a power holder's base.Violence an d Go vern men tWhat distinguished the violence producl-d by states from the violence d{'-livered by anyone else? In the r l l n ~ run, t'nUuKh to make tht> division bt.,.

War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 173tween "legitimate" an d "illegitimate" force credible. Eventually, the personnel of states purveyed violence on a larger scale, more effectively, moreefficiently, with wider assent from their subject populations, an d withreadier collaboration from neighboring authorities than did the personnelof other organizations. But it took a long time for that series ofdistinctionstobecomeestablished. Earlyin the state-makingprocess, manypartiessharedth e right to us e violence, the practice of using it routinely to accomplishtheir e n ds , o r both at once. The continuum ran from bandits an d pirates tokings via tax collectors, regional power holders, an d professional soldiers.The uncertain, elastic line between "legitimate" an d "illegitimate" violence appeared in the upper reaches of power. Early in the stale-makingprocess, many parties shared the right to use violence, i ts actual employment, or both at once. The long love-hate affair between aspiring statemakers an d pirates or bandits illustrates the division. "Behind piracy onthe seas acteci cities and city-states," writes Femand Braudel of the sixteenth century. "Behind banditry, that terrestrial piracy, appeared the continual aid of lords."2 In times of war, indeed, the managers of full-fledgedstates often commissioned privateers, hired sometime bandits to raid theirenemies, an d encouraged their regular troops to take booty. In royal service, soldiers an d sailors were often expected to provide for themselves bypreying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, taking prizes. When demobil ized, they commonly continued the same pract ices, but without th e same royal protection; demobilized ships becamepirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.

It also worked th e other way: A king's best source of armed supporterswas somet imes the wor ld of out laws. Robin Hood's conversion to royalarcher may be a myth, but the myth records a pract ice. The dis tinctionsbetween "legitimate" and "illegitimate" users of violence came dear onlyvery slowly, in the process during which the state's armed forces becamerelatively unified an d p en nan en t.Up 10 that point, as Braudel says, maritime cities an d terrestrial lordscommonly offered protection, or even sponsorship, to freebooters. Manylords who did not pretend to be kings, furthermore, successfully claimed.the right to levy troops and maintain their own armed retainers. Withoutcalling on some of those lords to bring their armies with them, no kingcould fight a war ; yet the same armed lords const ituted the king's rivalsan d opponents, his enemies' potential al lies. For that reason, before theseventeenlh century, regencies for child sovereigns reliably produced civilwars. For the same reason, disarming the great stood high on the agendaof every would-be state maker.The Tudors , for example , accompl ished that agenda through most ofEngland. "The greatest triumph of the Tudors," writes Lawrence Stone,w as t h e ultimatt.'ly sUttt'ss{ul aSSl.'rfiun tit ;1 wy.11 ffillnupuly tit lIiult,n' b


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174 Charles Tillytics but also the quality of daily life. There occurred a changein English habits thatcan only be compared with the further steptaken in the nineteenth century, whenthe growth of a police force finaUy consolidated the monopolyand madeit ercectivein the greatest dties and the smallest villages.3Tudor demilitarization of the greatlords entailed four complementary campaigns; eliminating their great personal bands of armed retainers, razingtheir fortresses, taming their habitual resort to violence for the settlementof disputes, and discouraging the cooperationof their dependents and tenants. In the Marches of England and Scotland, the task was more delicate,for the Percys and Dacres, who kept armies and castles along the border,threatened theCrown but also provided a buffer against Scottish invaders.Yet they, too, eventually fell into line.In France, Richelieu began the great disarmament in the 16205. WithRicheJieu's advice, Louis XIII systematically destroyed the castles of thegreat rebel lords, Protestant and Catholic, against whom his forces battled.incessantly. He began tocondemn dueling.. the carryingof lethal weapons,

and the maintenance of private armies. By the later 16205, RicheJieu wasdeclaring the royal monopoly of force as doctrine. The doctrine took another haU-eentury to become effective;Once more the confficts of the Fronde had witnessed annies assembled by the"grands." Only the last of the regencies. the one after the deathof Louis XIV, didno t lead to anned uprisings. By that time Rkhelieu's principle hadbecome a reality.Likewise in the Empire after the ThirtyYears' War only the territorial princes hadthe right of levying troops and of maintaining fortresses. . . . Everywhere the razing of castles, the high costof artillery, the attractionof court life, and the ensuingdomestication of the nobility had its share in this development.4By the later eighteenth century, through most of Europe, monarchs controlled permanent, professional military forces that rivaled thoseof theirneighbors and far exceeded any other organized armed force within theirown territories. The state's monopoly of large-scale violence was turningfrom theory to reality.The elimination of local rivals, however, posed a serious problem. Be-yond the scale of a small city-state, no monarch could govern a populationwith his armed force alone, nor could any mona rch a fford to c re ate aprofessional staff large and strong enough to reach from him to the ordi

nary citizen. Before quite recently, no European government approachedthe completeness of articulation from top to bottom achieved by imperialChina. Even the Roman Empire didnot come close. In one way or another,every European government before the French Revolution reliedon indirect rule via local magnates. The magnates collaborated with the government without becoming officials in any slrong sense of the term, had someaccess to government-backed force, and exercised wide discretion withintheir own territories; junkers. justices of Ihe peace, lords. Yet the samemagnates were potential rivals, possibll' allies of a rebellious peopll'.

War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 175Eventually, European governments reduced their reliance onindirect ruleby means of two expensive but effective strategies; (a) extending their officialdom to the local communityand (b) encouraging the creation of policeforces that were subordinate to the government rather than to individualpatrons, distinct from war-making forces, and therefore less useful as thetools of dissident magnates. In between, however, the buildersof national

power all played a mixed strategy; eliminating, subjugating.. dividing, conquering, cajoling.. buying as the occasions presented themselves. The buying manifested itself in exemptions from taxation. creationsof honorificoffices. the establishmentof claims on the national treasury, and a varietyof other devices that made a magnate's welfare dependent on the maintenance of the existingstructure ofpower. In the long run, it all came downto massive pacificationand monopolization of themeans of coercion.Prott'ction . If tht' IOpt,und shart' tlf thuSt' taxes paid byone of tht> princes mlrchantsubjt,(,ts KOlVl' him ols1'lurl.'d ilCt."t.'SS to world


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176 O\arles Tillymarkets at less than the IS-pound shares paid by the merchant's foreigncompetitors to thnr princes, the merchant also gained a Pr:otection rent of(15- 10=) 5 pounds by virtue of his prince's greater e f f i a ~ n c y . ~ a reasoning differs only in degree an d in scale from the r ~ a s o ~ m g ~ violencewielding criminals and their clients. Labor racketeenng (10 WhiCh, for example, a ship owner holds off trouble from longshoremen by means .oftimely payment to the local union boss) ,:",000 o exactly the same pnnopie: The union boss receives tribute f ~ hIS no-s!"ke pressure on the longshoremen, while the ship owner aVOIds the strikes and slowdowns longshoremen impose on his competitors.Lane pointed. out the different behaviorwe might expect of the managersof a protection-providing government owned by

1. Citizens in general2. A single self-interested.monarch3. The managers themselvesU cit:izens in general exercised effective ownership . o t ~ g o v e r n ~ e n t - 0distant ideal! - we might expect the managers to mlnuJUze protecboncostsand tribute, thus maximizing protection rent. A single s e l f - i n t e r e s t ~ monarch, in contrast, would maximize tribute, set costs so as to accomphsh thatmaximization of tribute, and be indifferent t o t he level of protection rent.I f the managers owned the government, t h ~ y ~ o u l ~ t end to keep costshigh by maximizing their own wages, to m ~ m l z ~ tnbute o v ~ r an.d abovethose costs by exacting a high price from theIr subjects, and I i k e w ~ to beindifferent to the level of protection rent. The firs.t model a p p r o ~ m a t e s . aJeffersonian democracy, the second a petty despotism, and the third a mil-itary junta. .Lane did not discuss the obvious fourth category of owner: a dominantclass. If he had, his scheme would have yielded interesting empirical criteria for evaluating claims that a given government was " ~ I a t i v e l y autonomous" or strictly subordinate to the interests of a d o m ~ n ~ n t class. Presumably, a subordinate government would t ~ n d to maXlmlz.e monopolyprofits _ returns to the dominant class resulting .from the. dIfference be-tween the costs of protection and the price received. for It - as w ~ 1 I astuning protection rents nicely to the economic interests of the d 0 " ' : l ~ n tclass. An autonomous government, in contrast, would ~ e n ~ to maximIzemanagers' wages and its own size as well and would be m d l f f e n : ~ t to protection rents. Lane's analysis immediately suggests fresh propositions andways of testing them.Lane also speculated that the logic of the situation produced four successive stages in the general history of capitalism:

1. A period of anarchy and plunder .2. A stage in which tribute takersattracted c u s t ~ m e r s and e ~ t a b h s h t . " l Jtheir monupulit.'S by struAAlinK tn l"T\'ilh' t'xcluSlvl', substantial states

War Making and State Making as Organiud Crime 1773. A stage in whichmerchants and landlords began togainmore fromprotection rents than governors did from tribute4. A period (fairly recent) in which technological changes surpassedprotection rents as sources of profit for entrepreneurs

In their new economic history of the Western world, Douglass North an dRobert Paul Thomas make s tages 2 and 3 - those in which state makerscreated their monopolies of force and established property rights that permitted individuals to capture much of the return from their own growth-generating innovations - the pivotal moment for sustained economic growth.Protection, at this point, overwhelms tribute. If we recognize that the protected property rights were mainly those of capital and that the development of capitalism also facilitated the accumulation of the wherewithal tooperate massive states, that extension of Lane's analysis provides a gooddeal of insight into the coincidence of war making, state making, and capital accumulation.Unfortunately, Lane did not take full advantage of his own insight.Wanting to contain his analysis neatly within the neoclassical theory ofindustrial organization, Lane cramped his treatment of protection: treatingalI taxpayers as "customers" for the "service" provided by protection-man.ufacturing governments, brushing aside the objections to the idea ofa forcedsale by insis ting that the "customer" always had the choice of not payingand taking the consequences of nonpayment, minimizing the problems ofdivisibility created by the public-goods character of protection, and deliberately neglecting the distinction between the costs of producing the meansof violence in general and the costs of giving "customers" protection bymeans of that violence. Lane's ideas suffocate inside the neoclassical boxand breathe easily outside it. Nevertheless, inside or outside, they properly draw the economic analysis of government back to the chief activitiesthat real governments have carried on historically: war, repression, protection adjudication.More recently, Richard Bean has applied a similar logic to the rise ofEuropean national states between 1400 and 1600. He appeals to economiesof scale in the production of effectiveforce, counteracted by diseconomiesof scale in command and control. He then claims that the improvement ofartillery in the fifteenth century (cannon made small medieval forts muchmore vulnerable to an organized force) shifted the curve of economies anddiseconomies tomake largerarmies, standing armies, and centralized governments advantageous to their masters. Hence, according to Bean, military innovation promoted the creation of large, expensive, well-anned. national states.Hiltory TalksBean's summary does nut ~ t a n d ur to historil'al !t('Ntiny. A:4 II moltlt'rofpractin', tht' shift to infantry-h..lrkt'd artillery llj"KI'1l of furtiflt'l1 !ili"1l II("


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J80 Charles Tilly(The government's failure to paythose rerdt!S, incidentally, helped align theParisian bourgeoisie against the Crown during the Fronde, some twelvedecades later.) By 1595, the nat iona l debt had r isen to 300 million francs;despite governmental bankruptcies, C\llT'ency manipulations, and themonumental rise in taxes, by Louis XIV's death in 1715 war-induced borrowing ha d inflated the total to about 3 bill ion francs, the equivalentofabout eighteen years in royal revenues.' War, state apparatus, taxation,an d borrowing advanced in tight cadence.Although France was precocious, it wasby no means alone. "Ev en mo rethan in the caseof France," reports the ever-useful EarlJ. Hamilton,the national debt of England originated and has grown during major wars. Exceptfor an insignificant cany-over from the StUilrts, the debt began in 1689 with thereign ofWilliam and Mary. In the words of Adam Smith, "it was in the war whichbegan in 1688, and was conduded by the treatyof Ryswick in 1697, that the foundation of the present enormous debt of GreatBritain was first laid."9Hamilton, it is true, goes on to quote the mercantil ist Charles Davenant,wh o complained in 1698 that the high interest rates promoted by government borrowing were cramping English trade. Davenant's complaint suggests, however, that England was already entering Frederic Lane's thirdstage of state-capital relations, when merchants an d landowners receivemore of the surplus than do the suppliers of protection.Until the sixteenth century, the English expected their kings to liveonrevenues from their own property an d to levy taxes only for war . G. R.Elton marks th e great innovation at ThomasCromwell's draftingof HenryYlJI's subsidy bills for 1534 an d 1540: "1540 was very careful to continueth e real innovation of 1534, namely that extraordinary contributions couldbe levied for reasons other than war:'IO After that point as before, however, wa r making provided the main stimulus to increases in the level oftaxation as well as of debt. Rarely did debt an d taxes recede. What A. T.Peacock an d J. Wiseman call a "displacement effect" (and others sometimes call a "ratchet effect") occurred: When public revenuesand expenditures rose abruptly during war, they set a new, higher floor beneathwhich peacetime revenues an d expenditures did not sink. During th e Napoleonic Wars, British taxes rose from 15 to 24 percent of national incomean d to almost three times the French level of taxation.11True, Britain had th e double advantage ofrelying less on expensive landforces than its Continental rivals an d of drawing more of its tax revenuesfrom customs an d excise - taxes that were, despite evasion, significantlycheaper to coUect than land taxes, property taxes, and poll taxes. Nevertheless, in England as well as elsewhere, bothdebt an d taxes rose enormously from the seventeenth century onward. They rose mainly as a function of the increasing cost of war making.

War Making and StateMaking as Organized Crime 181Wlut Do Sf;tles Do?As should now be clear, Lane's analysis of protection fails to distinguishamong several different uses of state-eontrolled violence. Under the general heading of organized violence, the agentsof states characteristicallycany on four different activities:

1. War making: Eliminating or neutralizing their own rivals outsidethe territories in which they have dear an d continuous priority aswielders of force2. State making: Eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside thoseterritories3. Protection: Eliminatingor neutralizing the enemiesof their clients4. Extraction: Acquiring the means of carrying ou t the first three ac-tivities - war making, state making, and protection

The third item corresponds to protection as analyzed by Lane, but the otherthree ~ I s o involve the application of force. They overlap incompletelyandto vanous degrees; for example, war makingagainstth e commercial rivalsof th e local bourgeoisie delivers protection to that bourgeoisie.To the extent that a population is divided into enemy classesan d the state extendsits favors partially to one class or another, state making actually reducesth e protection given some classes.War making, state making, protection, an d extraction each take a numbe r of ~ o n n s . Extraction, f ~ instance, ranges from outright plunder to reg_ular tribute to bureaucratized laxation. Yet aU four depend on the sta te 'stendency to monopolize th e concentrated meansof coercion. From th e perspectives of those wh o dominate the state , each o f t he m - i fca rr ied one f f ~ v e l y :- g ~ n e r a l l y ~ n f o r c e s th e others. Thus, a state that successfullyeradicates Its Internal nvals strengthens its ability to extract resources, tow a ~ e war, an d to p r o t ~ c t its chief supporters_ In th e earlier European expenence, broadly speaking. those supporters were typically landlords armedretainers of the monarch, an d churchmen. '

Each of the major uses of violence produced characteristic fonosof organization War making yielded armies, navies, an d supporting services.State making produced durable instruments of surveiJIance an d controlwithin th e t e ~ t o r y . Protection n:lied on th e organization of war makingan d state making bu t .added to It an apparatus by which the pro tectedcalled forth. the p r o t ~ o n that wa.s their due, notably through courts andr e p r e ~ n t a h ~ e assembhes. ~ x t ~ a c t i o n brought fiscal an d accounting structures mto bemg. The orgamzatlon an d deployment of violence themselvesaccount for muchof the characteristic structureof European states.The general rule seems to have operated like this: The more costlyth e. ~ v i t y , all other things being equal. the greater was the organizationalreSidue. To the extent, for exampit' , that a Kivt'n Kuvcmmcnl invested inlal'Ke standing armies - a vt'ry CU!'ltly. if effective, ml.'anM of war making-


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182 Owles Tillythe bureaucracy created to service the army was likely to become bulky.Furthermore, a government building a standing army while controUing asmall population was likely to incur greatercosts, and therefore to build abulkier structure, than a government within a populous country. Brandenburg-Prussia was the classic case of high cost for available resources. ThePrussian effort to build an army matching those of its larger Continentalneighbors created an immense structure; it militarized and bureaucratizedmuch ofGerman social life.In the case of extraction, the smaller the pool of resources and the lesscommercialized the economy. other things being equal, the more difficultwas the work of extracting resources to sustain war and othergovernmental activities; hence, the more extensive was the fiscal apparatus. Englandillustrated the corollary ofthat proposition, with a relatively large and commercialized pool of resources d rawn on by a relatively small fiscal apparatus. As Gabriel Ardant has argued, the choice of fiscal strategy probablymade an additional difference. On the whole, taxes on land were expensive to collect as compared with taxes on trade, especially large flows oftrade past easily controlled checkpoints. Its position astride the entrance tothe Baltic gave Denmark an extraordinary opportunity to profit from customs revenues.With respect to statemaking (in the narrow sense of eliminating or neutralizing the local rivals of the people who controlled the state), a territorypopulated by great landlords or by distinct religious groups generally im-posed larger costs on a conqueror t han one o f fragmented power or homogeneous culture, This time, fragmented and homogeneous Sweden. withits relatively small but effective apparatus of control, illustrates the corollary.Finally, the cost of protection (in the sense of eliminating or neutralizingthe enemies of the state makers' clients) mounted with the range over whichthat protection extended. Portugal's effort to bar the Mediterranean to itsmerchants ' competi tors in the spice trade provides a textbook case of anunsuccessful protection effort that nonetheless built up a massive structu ....Thus, the sheer size of the government varied directly with the effortdevoted to extraction, state making, protection, and, especially, war making but inversely with the commercialization of the economy and th e extent of the resource base, What is more, the relat ive bulk of different features of the government varied with the cost/resource ratios of extraction,state making, protection, and war making. In Spain we see hypertrophy ofCourt and courts as the outcome of centuries of effort at subduing internalenemies, whereas in Holland we are amazed to see how small a fiscal apparatus grows up with high taxes within a rich, commercialized economy,Oearly, wa r making. extraction, state making. and protection were in

terdependent. Speaking very, very generally, the classic European statemaking experience followed this causal pattern:

War Making and StateMaking as Organized Crime 183

! +w"Tng>< ExTonPmtron StotfM.k;ng

In a i d e a l ~ z e d s e q u e n ~ , a gre.at lord made warso effectively as to becomed o n u n ~ t 10 a substanllal temtory, but that war making led to increasedextraction of the meansof war - men, arms, focxl, lodging. transportationsupplies, andlor ~ h money to buy them - from the population within t h a ~t e m t ~ r y . The buiJdmg up of war-making capacity likewise increased thec a p a ~ t y , to ~ x t r a c t . The very activity of extraction, if successful, entailedthe ell,mmanon, n e u t r a l ~ z a t i o n , or cooptation of the great lord's local rivals;thus, It led to state making. Asa by-product, it created organization in thefonn of t a x ~ o ~ l e c t i o . n agencies, police forces, courts, exchequers, account~ e e J > C : r s ; thus It agam l to state making. To a lesser extent, war making~ k e w l s e led to s t ~ t e makmg through the expanSion of military organizationItseU, as a standIng army. war industries, supporting bureaucracies, and(ratherlater) schools grew up within thestate apparatus.All of these struc.tures c ~ e c k e d potential rivals and opponents. Inthe course ofmaking war,extracting resources, and building up the state apparatus, the managers ofstates formed alliances with specific social classes. The members of thosec l a s ~ loaned resources, provided technical services, or helped ensure thecompliance of the rest of the populat ion, all in return for a measure of~ r o t e c t i o n against their own rivals and enemies. As a result of these mul.tipl,e s t r a t ~ g i c choices, a distinctive state apparatus grew up within eachmajor section of Europe.How S t a t ~ FormedThis ~ n a l y s i s , if c o ~ , has two st.rong implications for the developmentof n a t i o n ~ 1 states. First, P O P u l ~ r resistance to war making and statemakingmade a d l f f e ~ n c e , When ordmary people resisted vigorously, authoritiesmade concessions: guarantees of rights, representative institutions, courtsoi a p p e a ~ . Those concessio,ns, in their tum, constrained the later paths ofw a making and sta.te makmg, To be sure, alliances with fragments of the" : , , ~ n g . class greatly Increased the effects of popular action; the broad mobilizallon of g e n t ~ against Charles I helped give the English Revolution of1640 a far greater Impact on political institutions than d id any o f the multiple rebellions during theTudor era.Second, the relative balance amonp; war makinp;, prott"CIion, extraction.

and state making sip;nificantly affloctt'd thl' tlTKani)'''tinn u( thl' litatl'li that


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184 Charles Tillyemerged from the four activities. To the extent that war making wen t onwith relatively little extraction, protection, and state making. for example,military forces ended up playing a larger and more autonomous par t innational politics. Spain is perhaps the best European example. To the extent that protection, as in Venice or Holland, prevailed over war making.extraction, and state making, oligarchies of the protected classes tended todominate subsequent national politics. From the relative predominance ofstate making sprang the disproportionate elaboration of policing and surveillance; the Papal States illustrate that extreme. Before the twentieth century, the range of viable imbalances was fairly small. Any state that failedt o put considerable effort intowar making was likely to disappear. As thetwentieth century wore on, however, it became increasingly common forone state to lend, give, or seD war-making means to another; in those cases,the recipient state could pu t a disproportionate effort into extraction, pro-tection, and/or state making and yet survive. In our own time, clients ofthe United States and the Soviet Union provide numerous examples.This simplified model. however, negiects the external relations that shapedevery national state. Early in the process, the distinction between "internal" and "external" remained as unclear as the distinction between statepower and the power accruing to lords all ied with the state. Later, threeinterlocking influences connected any given national state to the Europeannetwork of states. First, there were the flows of resources in the fonn ofloans and supplies, especially loans and supplies devoted to war making.Second, there was the competition among states for hegemony in disputedterritories, which stimulated war making and temporarily erased the distinctions among war making, state making. and extraction. Third, therewas the intermittent creation of coalitions of states that temporarily combined their efforts to force a given s ta te into a cer ta in fonn and positionwithin the international network. The war-making coalition is one example, butthe peace-making coalition played an even more crucial part: From1648, if not before, at the ends of wars aU effective European states c0 alesced temporarily to bargain over the boundaries and rulers of the recentbeUigerents. From that point on, periods of major reorganization o f theEuropean state sys tem came in spurts, at the settlement of widespreadwars. From each large war, in general, emerged fewer national states thanhad entered it.War as International RelationsIn these circumstances, war be


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186 Charles Tillytions. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers t h e m s e l v ~ s ,making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit,services, and expertise.To a larger degree, s ta tes tha t have come into being recently throughdecolonization or through reallocations of territory by dominant states. haveacquired their military organization from outside, without the same mternal forging of mutual constraints b e t w e e ~ . rulers and ruled. To t ~ e.xtentthat outside states continue to supply military goods and expertise to return for commodities, military alliance or both, the new states harbor powerful. unconstrained organizations that easily overshadow all other organizations within their territories. To the extent that outside states guaranteetheir boundaries, the managers of those military organizations exercise exb'aordinary power within them. The advantages of military power becomeenormous, the incentives to seize power over the state as a whole by m e ~ n sof that advantage very strong. Despite the great place that war makingoccupied in the making of European states,. the old ~ t i o n a l states ~ Europe almost never experienced the great disproportton between m I h ~ r yorganization and all other fonns of organization that seems the fate of clientstates throughout the contemporary world. A century ago, Europeans mighthave congratulated themselves on the spread of civil g o v e m m ~ n t throughout the world. In our own time, the analogy between war making and statemaking. on the one hand, and organized crime, on the other, is becomingtragically apt.Notes1. Arthur L. Stinchcombe,Cons/ructing SodIiI 'l'Morin (New York: Harcourt, Brace

& World, 1968), p. ISO; italics in the original.2. Femand Braudel, LA MMitrmmtt rt mondr mMitemmhn II l'ipotJue de PhiliWII (Paris: Armand Colin, 1%6), vol. 2, pp. 88-89.3. LawrenceSt one, The Crisis oftM Aristocrm:y (Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1965), p.200.4. Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europt: A Study ofCon/inuity, 1000-1800 (New York: AcademicPress, 1981), pp. 124-25.5. Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europt in lin Age of Crisis, 16OO-J750 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1976).6. V. G. Kiernan, S/ll/e lind Society in Europt", 1550-1650 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980),p. 104. For French finances, see Alain Guery, "Les Finances de la MonarchicFranc;aisc sous I'Ancien Regime," Anna/es Economies, Sodtt ts, Civilisations 33 (1978),p.227.7. Earl J. Hamilton, "Origin and Growth of the National Debt in France and England," in Studi in ouore di Gino Luzzoto (Milan: Giuffre, 1950), vol. 2, p. 254.

8. Ibid., pp. 247, 249.9. Jbid., p. 254.10. G. R. Elton, "Taxation for War and P e a ~ in Early-Tudor England," in War 111101Economic Ckvtlopmrut: Essays in Memory of David loslin, cd. J. M. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridp;e University Press, 1975). p. 42.

War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 18711. Peter Mathias, The Tronsfomudion of Eng/lind: Essays in thr Economic lind SociDl

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War Making and State Making as Organized Crime