essay on evolution of state

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The evolution of the state

Historical development of the evolution of the state : The preceding article in tracing the origin of the state , found difficulty in fixing he exact process by which the state came into existence and in separating political institution from other closely related forms similar problems confront an attempt to outline the historical development of political institution. The state has not had a single origin or a regular and continuous evolution. The idea held by many writers that political development tends inevitably to pass through regular and clearly defined cycles is not borne out by historical facts.

Various forms of state have arisen at different times and places as a result of causes by no means uniform. These states have had widely different histories, and have worked out governmental organizations far from similar. Thus, at first glance, it seems almost as difficult to follow the state’s evolution as it was to determine its origin. However, if attention is directed chiefly to those states that occupied the leading positions [in the world of their day and that, contributed most to the development of later political forms and ideas, a fairly uniform course of development may be discovered.

In broad outlines, the state has evolved through the following forms :

• The tribal state
• The Oriental empire
• The Greek city state
• The Roman world empire
• The feudal state
• The national state

The periods of time during which each of these forms predominated show wide variation, and within the general type important governmental changes took place. Besides, earlier forms usually survived in some parts of the earth long after later types had arisen elsewhere. There have also been tendencies at times to revive earlier forms among peoples who had passed to the new and types strikingly similar have arisen independently at different times in widely separated places.

The Tribal State:

As the previous chapter indicated the first states appeared in the form of tribes. These had certain elements in common, though in other respects they showed marked differences. They were usually comparatively small in sing and were governed by chiefs, often assisted by advisory councils. Some Were nomadic others were permanently settled in definite areas. While the main purpose of their existence was the preservation of internal order and the waging of aggressive of defensive war, they often retained strong traces of common birth, common religion, and common economic interests.

The scope of their political power was narrow, most of the affairs of like being controlled by long established customs. In some the authority of the chief was despotic in others his power Wan strictly limited by a democratic public opinion, or by assemblies of warriors in some authority was transmitted by heredity or by some accepted rule of succession in Others the rulers were chosen freely by members of the tribe. Sometimes the tribal organization was permanent in other cases it was temporary, the group easily falling apart into smaller units. In still other cases a number of tribes might be combined into a loose confederation.

The tribal form of organization has existed in some parts of the earth through the entire period of recorded history. The aborigines of Australia never progressed beyond that stage, and but little advance had been made in the Western Hemisphere before its contact with Europe. Even today, in underdeveloped parts of the earth and among backward peoples, the type persists.

The Oriental Empire:

The next step in state building resulted from the aggregation of population, the accumulation of wealth, and improvement in the arts of peace and war in regions favored by nature. Warm climate, fertile soil, abundance of water, and a considerable area free from geographic barriers were required to support a large population and to bring about those permanent relations among men that demanded increasing government.

In the fertile valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yellow River, and the Yangtze, which are called the “cradles of civilization,” wealth accumulated and cities arose. Such areas, furnishing abundant food with little effort, attracted surrounding peoples and led to that conflict and intermingling which was so important in creating the state, as contrasted with the earlier kinship organizations.

Through loose alliances, or through the conquest of the weaker by the stronger and more aggressive city, the inhabitants of these valleys were bound together into the empires of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, India, and China. These empires were not strongly centralized, but were made up of subordinate units, practically autonomous in local affairs, yet under central supervision, obliged to furnish soldiers and to pay tribute.

Warm climate and easily obtained food made possible the beginnings of civilization, but soon checked energy and caused stagnation. Abundant population and frequent conquests created a large servile class with resultant social differences castes and despotism. Religion crystallized into temple worship, over shadowing the ancient rites of the household, and a lose corporation of priests developed into an exclusive and highly organized instrument of social control.

The need for serial protection, especially in connection with increasing property and with frequent wars, and the ambition for power on the part of the ruling classes, led to a hierarchy of officials, culminating in a king or emperor, surrounded by a court of growing complexity, and with a code of manners and a mode of life that set it apart from the rest of the people. Rulers were exalted with corresponding abasement of subjects, since free political cooperation over a large area was impossible because of the difficulty of communication.

A permanent armed force replaced the spontaneous mustering of the tribe, and the military order became a strong conservative force translating the idea of service into the fulfillment of a command. With the political, priestly, and military classes reinforcing each other in stabilizing society through authority and subordination, the way was prepared for leaders who imposed the principle of dominance over their own subjects and who were ambitious to extend it by conquest over others.

The creation of empire brought new political problems. To unify authority over a large area was difficult in an age of slow communications. The provincial magistrates, possessing a large measure of autonomy, were frequently tempted to revolt against: the central authority. Powerful nobles in the court stood jealously ready to defy the emperor, especially when hereditary succession placed the scepter in weak hands.

Thus the early empires present a picture of instability at best they were a loose aggregation OE semi independent states, with authority shifting from dynasty to dynasty and from city to city. Some fell from external invasion others were destroyed by internal dissensions.

The problem of government is largely one of proper adjustment between authority and freedom, and of extending this Adjustment in a permanent and stable union aver a considerable tea. The Oriental empire accomplished neither. Based on conquest, they had no teal cohesion and fell apart whenever the ruling dynasty Was weakened based on fear, they represented bellied the people only the slave driver and the tax-collector. Neither unity in the state not liberty for the individual was possible under such conditions.

While these great empires per formed valuable service in establishing the beginnings of culture, in breaking down the narrow local basis of tribal organization, and in breaking mankind with widespread authority, they offered little hope of individual or political progress. Despotic power, unchecked by popular will, viewed the state as property, and the people merely as subjects. This defective basis of political authority the Oriental empire could never remove, and the course of political development was transferred to new peoples and a new form of state.

The Greek City State:

The Oriental empires were essentially agricultural, land powers. To them the sea was a barrier, not a highway and the centers of their civilization lay, not on the coasts, but in the valleys. As civilization spread to the region around the Aegean and Mediterranean, important physical differences were found. Europe is a peninsula, oceanic rather than continental. It has a climate more temperate and products more varied than the river valleys of Asia.

The land is broken up into small units adapted to both intercourse and defense while the seas, though permitting communication, made invasion from Asia difficult. Hence civilization, though arising later reached a much higher and more varied development than in Asia, and the nature of political organization was correspondingly different.

On the coasts of the Aegean Sea and on the islands stretching across it appeared the first maritime states, a new and epoch making form of political power. In this area diverse types of peoples intermingled and fused. Products and ideas were exchanged and the minds of men were liberated from the tyranny of fixed customs. While pastoral nomads had mobility without wealth, and agricultural peoples had wealth without mobility the seafaring peoples possessed both advantages.

In contrast to the expansion of land empires by conquest, requiring constantly increasing armies and making the problem of government ever more difficult, sea powers expanded by colonization, linking strategic centers together by the common advantages of economic ties.

Although advanced civilizations appeared early in Crete, Troy, Mycenae, Troy, and other maritime centers, it was in Greece, between the fifth and fourth centuries b.c, that this form of culture reached its highest development and made its chief contribution to political development. Greece has been called the “most European of European lands.” In a little district of ten thousand square miles are found, in miniature, all the characteristic features of Europe. The mountains and the sea break up this area into numerous valleys and islands, easily defended, yet, because of the sea, not isolated.

In contrast to the uniformity of Asia, the variety and moderation of nature in Greece developed a different mental attitude and genius. Growth of population led naturally to trade, commerce, and colonization the wine and olive oil which her hillsides furnished being an excellent medium of trade. Under these conditions a new form of state was created. Patriarchal tribes, coming into this area as invaders from the north, built their villages on easily defended hills.

In the secluded valleys, guarded by mountains and the sea, yet in constant contact through their harbors, with the outside world, groups of villages united under a single polity and gave a new emphasis and a distinctive form to city life. Natural barriers made the union of these cities difficult hence each city developed an intense life of its own. Before its claims all other human relationships took second place, and earlier ties of kinship were replaced by a patriotic sense of citizenship.

Many influences combined in the Greek cities to prevent the despotism that fettered the earlier empires. Religion bore less heavily on the Greeks and no priestly class existed to reinforce authority. The small size of the city destroyed the mystery of authority remote and secluded. The active, changing life of the city sharpened men’s wits, made them more critical and competitive and less likely to endure oppression without question.

The more complex order of city life demanded more regulation, brought government closer home to each citizen, and led him to examine and question his laws and his government. The city Is the natural home organized democracy, in contrast to the formless equality of tribal life and the despotic rule of empire.

The internal development of these city states followed, in general, the same political evolution, though the form of government that finally resulted differed in the various cities. Tribal chiefs became the kings of the Homeric period. their powers diminished and passed into the hands OI oligarchs, aristocratic nobles who controlled the councils and magistrates of the city. The selfishness and oppressiveness of the oligarchs led to a contest with the common citizens, as a result of which a more or less democratic constitution was set up.

In this process a dictator, or “tyrant,” frequently arose who suppressed the nobles by the aid of mercenary armies and popular support, but who was removed by the people when they realized their strength. While a large Part of the population of the city was composed of slaves and other unfranchised residents, within the citizen class political and civil rights were widespread. Each citizen was expected to take active part in holding public office and in deciding public questions.

Thus each city developed an intense, patriotic life, absorbing the energies of its citizens, and identifying their life with that of the city. Factions within the city, however, foreshadowing the political parties which seem an inevitable accompaniment of democracy, created internal dissension, and weakened the cities within. Besides, this democracy adapted to the city state, was effective only in small areas. Its perfection intensified jealousy among the cities and prevented the formation of a national Greek state.

Neighboring cities were viewed as enemies, although leagues, under the headship of a dominant city, were sometimes formed. Lack of unity was the chief weakness of the Creek political system. Facing east, Greece came into contact with the powerful Oriental empires, and was compelled to wage defensive war. This checked expansion and compelled a concentrated internal development.

Mutual jealousy prevented my union except loose confederations, and frequent wars among the cities destroyed in turn, the power of the strongest, Greece thus weakened, was at length united only when conquered by an outside power, first Macedon, then Rome

In one respect the city state made an important contribution to political thought. Organized self government and individual freedom had been developed and on this basis a brilliant, if brief, civilization had arisen. Only in small states, however, was this form of political life possible. The remainder of the world was not yet ready for democracy, much in the way of perfecting a wider organization first being needed. This was secured by Macedon and Rome at the expense of democracy, and the work necessary for modern civilization destroyed much of the Greek contribution to politics. It was not until the Teutonic barbarians later grafted their individual freedom with Roman organization, and devcloped the system of representation and local self government, that a democracy stable over large areas became possible.

The Roman World Empire:

The conquests of Alexander the Great about the middle of the fourth century B.C. destroyed the independence of the Greek cities, extended the control of Macedon over a large part of the Eastern empires, and restored for a time the Oriental-empire type of despotism. His empire, however, was short lived, and fell to pieces after his death. The main line of political development passed westward to Rome.

The beginnings of political life in Italy were similar to those in Greece. Natural advantages of location, climate, and resources led to increase of population, mingling of peoples and advance in civilization. While the mass of inhabitants lived in loose tribal organizations, a number of small city states gradually arose. These were not commercial, as in Greece,but were the centers of the surrounding agricultural area. One of these at first by no means the most important, was formed by the union of several tribes occupying a group of hills in the fertile plain of the Tiber.

A number of causes led to the preeminence of this city. Its central position and its location at the head of navigation of the only important river gave it considerable advantage. Besides, the various settlements on neighboring hills soon compelled isolation to yield to federation or conquest, and numerous hostile neighbors kept warlike ability. These conditions resulted in fusion of peoples. Thus in Rome the rigid letters of custom were broken earlier than usual, and necessary compromise amt treaty, resulting from the relation of various tribes, began the growth of Rome’s wonderful system of law thus the walk of conquest began that was finally to create the Empire.

In its early internal development Rome showed the same tendencies as the Greek city states. King, council and assemblies grew out of the patriarchal family organization monarchy Was replaced by an aristocracy of birth and wealth, as consuls praetors and senate replaced the king and a strong movement toward democracy was indicated by the widening of the assemblies and the increased privileges of the plebeians.

The ruling classes of Rome perceived what the Greek cities never learned, that a city state cannot resist its enemies without if torn by dissension from within. By extending citizenship within the city they secured stability and union. But before this tendency toward a democratic, compact city state could be carried to its logical conclusion, as it had been in Athens, a new series of event changed the whole course of Roman development, resulting, in a new type of state and in several important contributions to political ideas.

Geographic conditions in the main account for the difference in the trend of Greek and Roman politics. Italy is better adapted for internal unity than Greece. The divisions are larger and less distinct, the plains and uplands better suited to agriculture, and the absence of harbors and islands offers fewer ,advantage for commerce.

Hence, while civilization was delayed, energy was kept at home until Italy was united into a single date under Rome’s headship. Here again, as the armies of Rome triumphed, her former enemies were incorporated into the state ,and made citizens, and the territory of Italy was consolidated the process, however, did not stop at this point.

The direction of external effort further affected Rome’s progress. With the Apennines near the eastern coast, and the fertile plains, rivers mid harbors on the west, Rome naturally had little contact with eastern peoples until her institutions were well established on the contrary, she faced toward Gaul and Spain, and through Sicily, toward Africa. Her first wars were with inferior nations and led to conquest, to expansion of territory, and to the civilizing of fresh, vigorous peoples.

Adding sea power to land power, she emerged victorious from a life-and-death struggle with Carthage by the end of the third century b.c, Later, the fragments of Alexander’s empire in the East came also under hot sway, her central position enabling her to concentrate her forces and conquer her enemies in detail. Rome thus entered on the final stage of empire, extending her control over world over dominions, within which power and citizenship could no longer advance successfully together.

It was this career of conquest and expansion that compelled Rome to develop a new form of state. The city state constitution broke down When it was applied to a wide empire, and that tendency toward democracy was checked by the need for a vigorous and consistent policy in dealing with various peoples in all parts of the earth. Only at Rome could the citizens share in government and real power fell into the hands of the wealthy aristocrats, who controlled the votes of the Roman mob and of the army, which alone could control the provinces.

The attempts of various leaders to use one of both of these sources of power resulted in the series of civil wars that marked the end of the republic. Bureaucratic and despotic empire was the inevitable outcome of such conditions. A religious sanction was added to the new authority, and worship of the Emperor became a patriotic duty. Concentration of authority, uniformity of law, centralized organization-these were needed to bind the wide domain of Rome in to a state and to secure order and peace throughout her reach.

How well Rome succeeded in creating a successful imperial organization is shown by the fact that her rule lasted for five centuries in the West and for Eileen centuries in the East. The Christian church developed its organization on a Roman basis the ideal of world empire long outlived the destruction of actual unity and Roman law and Roman methods at colonial and municipal administration underlie modem systems.

Sovereignty and citizenship were worked out by Rome, and her methods of binding divergent nations into political unity have never been surpassed. The maintenance of peace for centuries within the civilized world was a gloat boon to mankind. Rome taught the world that a large state might be stable and successfully governed and her ideal of world unity underlay the later development of international law and later attempts at world organization.

The formation of this united and well governed empire was not accomplished, however, without accompanying evils. From the time of Caesar onward, citizenship was extended, but it no longer carried with it any Share in government. To secure unity and authority, individual freedom and democracy were sacrificed local self government disappeared as centralized administration grew. Greece had developed democracy without unity Rome secured unity without democracy.

Rome’s system prevented political education, and its very perfection brought about its ultimate fall. The ability to combine sovereignty and liberty, to make democracy possible over large areas, and to secure the best interests of both individual and state was reserved for a later time and a new people. Rome contributed but one side of political development, sovereign organization, wide unity, uniform law, and world peace, the side most needed at that period of state formation.

The Feudal State:

The unity which the principle of citizenship gave to early Rome became meaningless with the expansion of Rome to world empire. Imperial Rome depended increasingly on the army and the doctrine of power, and this gave no satisfactory basis for solidarity. When the state failed, men sought refuge in kingdoms not of this world and in individualistic philosophies.

The state was thereby disintegrated, and this internal decline made it difficult for Rome to maintain her frontiers against those Teutonic barbarians whom she had been unable to conquer. Great numbers of these were gradually admitted and many found service in the army. By the fifth century of the Christian Era the boundaries were so indistinct, the army so largely barbarian, and the pressure along the frontiers so great that the declining empire in the west fell to pieces and was parceled out among the various Teutonic tribes in the east the Byzantine Empire maintained for many years the framework of authority and the rise of the Mohammedan religion created again a great state of the Oriental empire type but in western Europe the state disappeared and had gradually to be rebuilt in a primitive society.

The work of the Middle Ages was the gradual fusion of Roman and Teutonic population and institution the former predominating in the south of Europe, the latter in the north. This process was marked at first by considerable destination. In the Dark Ages, Roman civilization and Roman political ideas seemed almost lost. Society crystallized around the church, which set up its dominion in the name of Rome, and mound the fragmentary territorial units ruled by warrior or noble. With the Renaissance came the gradual emergence of many of the old ideas and institutions, modified, of course, by ideas and institutions of the Teutons. The result of this process was modem civilization and the modern state, and during this process such political life as existed was largely of the peculiar transitional form commonly known as “feudal.”

To an understanding of the feudal state some knowledge of political methods among the Teutons is necessary. Before entering the Roman Empire their organization was of the tribal form. Largely because of physical conditions and undeveloped economic life, the Teutons had continued their rural organization and had not created the city state. Their system emphasized the importance of the individual as opposed to the sovereignty of the state. Such authority as existed was based largely on personal loyalty.

Leaders were chosen by the people, and ability in the activities that a vigorous, warlike people love was the basis of choice. Popular assemblies in the various units were held, and all freemen had a voice in affairs. Teutonic ideas of law and justice, while crude and unsystematic, contained possibilities of growth and added an important element to the Roman law, which had been codified and was in danger of stagnation.

These elements, emphasizing individualism liberty, and local self-government, were directly opposed to the Roman ideals of authority and centralization and the immediate result of their fusion was the apparent destruction of all organized political life. The absence of central authority, and the need for some form of protection and order, placed political power in the hands of every man that was strong enough to wield it.

Destruction of Roman commerce and an undeveloped economic system made land the thief form of wealth and as land was parceled out among the conquerors, governing authority went with it. Thus were brought together the holding of land, the exercise of political power, and the Teutonic personal relation of vassal and lord. The increasing wealth of the leaders, the influence of Roman ideas, and the confusion of the times strengthened the nobility, while the popular assemblies decreased in importance and, in many parts of Europe, disappeared.

Thus Europe was split up into a large number of political fragments, some of Which were held together by more or less definite ties to a common superior, to whom they owed allegiance and military service but in practice each fragment knew no law but its own. Such a condition naturally resulted in disorder and anarchy, in Conflicting law and authorities, in the complete subordination of the mass of the people. Neither unity nor liberty was possible in feudalism, and the political development of centuries seemed wasted.

The only institution that retained its unity during the Middle Ages was Christian church. Growing up on the ruins of the Roman Empire, it adopted imperial organization, and its power was further strengthened by the superstitious reverence in which it was held by the converted barbarians. The absence at strong government and the power of religious ideas over the minds of men led the church to take upon itself many functions of the state. Preservation of peace and order was largely in its hands, and with its growing wealth in land came corresponding political authority. Even a separate system of law and courts for its clergy was developed, and its monopoly of learning made great church-men the chief official and advisers in government. The head of the church claimed superiority to all princes and the power to release subjects from their oaths of fidelity thus another element was added to the already confused sovereignties and the way was paved for the bitter conflict 13th between church and state.

In spite of actual conditions, the idea of a common superior resulting from the prestige of the Roman Empire, and the idea that it should be eternal, survived and the titles of “king” and emperor remained, even though their holders had little real authority. Naturally the church was the champion of authority, and by its aid efforts were made to restore the political unity of Europe, to set up a Holy Roman Empire.

Charlemagne came nearest to success but his work was temporary, and his successors could not again unite even his domains. Decentralization, doubtful sovereignty, conflicting allegiances and laws, union of church and state, and the association of landholding, political power, and personal loyalty these characterized the politics of the Middle Ages. The world empire of Rome had been destroyed and as yet no new form of state had arisen to replace it.

The revival of commerce, toward the close the Middle Ages restored the trading centers and cities especially in German and Italy, where the central political authority was weakest grew rich and powerful. The mercantile and commercial aristocracy of the cities differed from the landed aristocracy of the country and was hostile to the feudal system. It asserted and achieved independence from the feudal lords and revived for a time the ideals and institutions of free city states. As usual progress toward democracy was made in the free cities but their independent life was short and they were soon brought under the control of the new type of state that marked the beginning of the modern period.

The National State:

Out of the chaos of feudalism a definite form of political life gradually appeared. The spiritual principle and temporal power of the church were not in harmony and movements for reform within the church weakened its unity and attacked its claim to political leadership. As population became stationary and common interests developed. it became increasingly evident that new states would, in general follow geographic and ethnic lines. Bonds of nationality and language strengthened by natural boundaries, grouped the feudal fragments into more and more permanent combinations and France, Spain, England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia and, later, Germany and Italy arose. This separation into distinct states, each with its own national spirit, destroyed the idea of a common superior and made possible the rise of international law and the modern theory of the sovereignty and legal equality of states. Similarly, the growth of a strong government  each of these states destroyed the independence of local ruler attacked the influence of the church, and separated religion and political ideas, although more than a century of religious wars, civil and international, was needed before this distinction was realized.

These national states emerged as absolute monarchies . The great enemies of centralized authority were the feudal nobles, and their destruction was necessary before a strong state could exist. The Crusades killed off many of these nobles and impoverished others  in England the Wars of the Roses served the same purpose. The growth of industry and commerce and the rise of towns created other forms of wealth in addition to land, making the nobles no longer the only wealthy class and the use of gunpowder destroyed their military supremacy.

As the power of the nobility diminished, their strength passed into the hands of the growing kings. A national in and a national system of taxation replaced the feudal levies. The mass of the people, just rising from serfdom, ignorant and unorganized, were no match for the monarchs when the nobles, who had so long stood between them and the kings, were gone.

In fact, in many cases the people welcomed the strong government of their king‘s, partly because they desired peace and security, and partly because of the growing national spirit that centered in the monarch as representing the state. The revived study of Roman law reinforced the doctrine that law is Will of the king. In this general way arose the absolute monarchy of the Tudors in England, of Charles V in Spain, and of Louis XIV in France.

A national state with centralized government in the hands of an absolute monarch Organization again without freedom was the immediate outgrowth of the decaying feudal system and the series of dynastic wars and alliances that thank the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicates both the strength of the monarchs and the rivalry of the separate nations.

As might be expected, the development of national states was not uniform. Local conditions and past historic development In England, where the strong monarchy of the strong conquering Normans had early secured unity, feudalism never flourished and the Teutonic population, retaining many features of their democratic institutions early began the struggle against royal authority.

It was when only the nobles who were allied to the lower classes more closely In England than elsewhere, had been weakened that this gradual democratic development was checked and the absolute monarchy of the Tudors and Stuarts became possible on the other hand, absolute monarchy was the logical outcome of French conditions. Starting with the must complete feudal decentralization the Capetian line gradually extended its territory perfected its administration and secured uniformity of law and a national army and finance. A centralized French french monarchy ambition for centuries.

Germany and Italy, because of their connection in the Holy Roman Empire causing every aspiring German ruler to waste his resources in devastating Italy because of their long struggle with the Papacy, and because they were the battleground of Europe in both religious and territorial wars, were unable to secure national unity and strong government until the nineteenth century.

2. Democracy:

The next step concerned the conflict of king and people within the national state. With the growth of intelligence and wealth the mass of the people demanded a more political rights and privileges the forces of nationality, which had at first found the symbol of their unity in the king, demanded a fuller and more active expression. The overthrow of the feudal system destroyed the innumerable vertical group of the society and led to a horizontal division into classes or estates that had common aims and interests. Economic changes diminished the importance of the landed aristocracy and treated a new that m industrial workers whose outlook was different from that at the peasant and whose power to influence the state was vastly greater.

In addition, representative government was created. Thus both the motive and the machinery of democracy existed, and absolutism in reality hastened its progress. Power in the hands of the monarch was more apparent and more easily attacked than when possessed by a number of feudal aristocrats and when the divine authority of the ruler was questioned, people began to realise that power lay in their hands if they Wished to wield it. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise democracy, accompanied by more on less disturbance in proportion as the old order was established and refused to yield

Here again the process was not uniform in all states. In England the growth of democracy the completion of a process long begun was in the main, gradual and peaceful. In France the rise of democracy meant a complete break with past tendencies and caused the terrors of the Revolution and the rise a Napoleon. Elsewhere the monarchs learned wisdom by experience and yielded as political consciousness spread among their peoples. Local self government with representation for common affairs and written constitutions, with guaranties of civil liberty and restrictions upon government, were the usual arrangements that resulted.

In many cases the king remained as a historic figurehead but real sovereignty passed to a large proportion of the population and the state rested on a broad basis. Growing democracy demanded a wider suffrage. It aimed at the responsibility of ministers and the preeminence of the legislative branch of government. It demanded the right to elect representatives and to select the candidates for election.

It endeavored to improve the machinery of representation so that elements of public opinion should he represented, and it demanded that, after election representatives should continue to he influenced by the public opinion to which they owed their existence.

The growth of democracy was accompanied by the belief that the sphere of authority should be limited. Civil liberty, as we as political rights, was demanded, and freedom of religion and of opinion was desired. Even in the economic field it was believed that the state should interfere as little as possible Democracy and individualism were at first closely associated with the successful accomplishment of democracy, however the people changed their attitude toward government, and were Willing to in trust it with wider powers.

Authority in their own hands was not feared. On the contrary the government was appealed to for aid and for regulation. The past century was Seen a steady increase in the scope of state Power and socialistic theories that would give the state full control of economic interests have arisen and have been given practical application in modern states.

Thus modern democratic national states represent the most advanced form state evolution with ethnic and geographic unity they have a strong natural basis and by combining local self government and representation they secure that adjustment of liberty and sovereignty which even over large areas, may sub serve the interests of both individual and society.

However, many minor relations within the state are still difficult to adjust, and the relations of state to state are as yet by no means satisfactory. In recent years the theory of constitutional representative democracy has been seriously attacked. At one extreme the demand for the efficient government of strong dictatorship at the other extreme is the demand for economic equality am! the control of the state by the working classes Experiments of both these types are now being tried.

3. Colonial empire:

At the present time two tendencies, both powerful, yet in many respects antagonistic. exist one the one hand is the emphasis placed on ethnic and geographic unity. The national state, with well defined natural frontiers and with a homogeneous and united people, seems to be the goal toward which the development of the past five centuries has tended and states wage war to secure maintain their natural boundaries, and use every means to increase the solidarity of their populations.

The Great war, with its emphasis on the “self determination of nations,” gave a strong impetus to this tendency. A number of well organized, yet distinct and often rival national states is the logical outcome of this movement. On the other hand, many influences interfere with this process. The formation, during the past few centuries, of great colonial empires, composed of widely scattered areas and most divergent peoples has tended to destroy the geographic and ethnic unity On which the national state was based.

The process of colonial expansion began almost as soon as the national states were Cheated, and each state, as soon as it became powerful, demanded its “place in the sun.” The subjection of dependent peoples is not compatible with the self determination of nations or with the theory of democracy. Besides, the growth of enlightenment Which makes sympathy more cosmopolitan and the unity, of mankind more real is attacking the former narrow idea of unquestioning patriotism and of national supremacy.

Finally the enormous expansion of economic interests, by which the whole world become a single market, with trade and investment no longer limited by natural or political boundary lines is destroying the economic unity and self sufficiency of national state. Internationalism, as well as nationalism is a powerful force in present day political thought, and plan of Would organization receive serious consideration.

Whether these apparently opposite tendencies are in reality only two sides of the same movement, looking to the ultimate formation of real world federation on the basis of national units, the fun alone will reveal.

General features of state development:

The preceding discussion gives a brief survey of the Evolution of the state am those peoples that have contributed to modern political thought Several generalizations may be drawn horn this material:

1. From simple to complex:

As in the evolution of all organizations the process has been from the simple to the complex. Governmental organs have differentiated and their functions have become more definite, and this process has been accompanied by increasing unity as the interrelation of part and part became more complete. Consequently, the authority of the state. which was at first uncertain and irregular, grew more definite, at the same time making possible greater individual freedom, since the action of the state was no longer capricious or despotic.

2. Growth of political consciousness:

The development of the state has been accompanied by the growth of political consciousness and purposeful action. Early stages of social union were largely instinctive, but man gradually came to realize the possibility of making changes by his own deliberate efforts. Laws originated from legislation as well as from ancient custom: governmental organization was remodeled. its functions narrow ed or expanded, and the idea of reform and progress arose As political consciousness spread over a constantly widening pro portion of the state’s population democracy developed and, as sovereignty rested ultimately on a more extended basis, my existence of the state became more stable

3. Increase in arm and population:

In general, an increase in the area and population over which the sovereignty of the state extends characterizes the evolution of the state. While this process has not been uniform, as a comparison of the Roman Empire in the past with several small states at the present time bears witness, it is sufficiently marked to merit attention. Foul modern states control more than half time entire land area of the earth, the British Empire alone covering over one fifth.

When compared with the large number of political communities into which primitive man was grouped, or with the hundreds of fragments into which feudal Europe was divided, the half hundred sovereign states of the present day show considerable progress toward unity. The advance in political ability, making possible the successful working of governmental organization in large areas, the developments of communication and transportation, and the improvements in economic conditions, enabling a given area to support a large population all tend to increase the size of the state and the number of its citizens.

Obviously the form of government and the power of a state in peace and war will be affected by the extent of territory and by the number of inhabitants, size being a source of strength or weakness according to the conditions in each state.

4. Types of states:

The types of state that have appeared in the process of evolution fall into certain general classes. At one extreme stands what may be called the community state This type is small in area and numbers and consists of a natural local group. The tribal state, the city state, and the feudal state belong to this form. Geographic and economic conditions in the main determined which form the community state would take. Undeveloped hunting and pastoral peoples have lived in the tribal form throughout the entire period of human history. Agricultural villages, when not subordinated to a strong central authority, frequently take on the feudal form of organization this type appeared for a time in Egypt and japan, as well as in medieval Europe. Commercial and industrial centers, under similar conditions became free city states, and this type appeared at several periods of political development. At the other extreme stands the world empire type.

This form ignores natural barriers and diversities of peoples, and aims, usually by conquest, to bring the largest possible area under a single Political control. The ancient empires of the Orient, the Gram Oriental empire of Alexander, the Roman Empire, and the attempt of Napoleon to unify Europe are examples of this form of state. The ideal of world federation represented imperfectly in the League of Nations, has certain similarities to the world empire type, though differing in the voluntary pro crass of union by which it is put together, in the fact that the central authority is a representative assembly lather than an imperial head, and in the autonomous control of internal affairs left to the component members.

Between the community State and the empire stands the national state, Which rests on the patriotic principle of nationalism and gives attention to natural geographic frontiers. The national colonial empire is a combination of national state and empire, the national state exercising more or less control over scattered and diverse colonial possessions.

Relation of political institutions to other institutions:

State development has been marked by the separation of politics from some institutions and by increasing governmental control over Others. Religion, which was at first closely bound up in state existence is today almost entirely separate the private life of individuals is under less state supervision than formerly on the other hand. The idea that the state Should carry on certain activities which public welfare demands, and which individuals cannot or will not undertake, is gaining ground. Education sanitation the care of defectives, and the prevention of crime are illustrations of this kind of growth. During the past century especially the fundamental changes in economic life have caused a complete reversal in the attitude of men to the state. Instead of the individualism that opposed the extension of state functioning there is now a growing demand for increased activity on the part of the government in its relation to business. At the s time this state interference, now eagerly demanded, differs fret the state interference of earlier centuries. That was executive in nature irregular and often capricious in enforcement and removed and sanction from popular control. Such governmental encroachment has been greatly reduced. The expanding authority of the modern state is legislative in nature and our detailed statutes multiplying year by year, are at least fairly definite and uniform, and have their origin in popular representative bodies. However dangerous in the future the zeal for making law may become men have not yet wholly lost their traditional hatred of executive power or their trust in representative assemblies.

6. Compromise between sovereignty and liberty:

In many ways the most significant general feature of state development is the method by which the compromise between state sovereignty and individual liberty has been worked out. Primitive man, untamed and anarchistic, needed to be taught obedience hence the first successful states were those whose customs were most rigid and whose organization was most despotic. Such a system was fatal, however, both to the progress of the individual and to unity when the state expanded.

On this basis the Oriental empire possessed neither organization nor freedom. The Greeks, in developing individual freedom, sacrificed unity Rome. perfecting her organization, crushed liberty. The Teutons, combining their political ideas with the ruins of Roman institutions, ultimately evolved the modern democratic national state, man’s most advanced political product. In it the diminutive size of the city state, too weak to carry on the activities necessary for defense and public welfare, is avoided, as well as the unwieldy and stagnant uniformity of the world empire.

The physical basis of ethnic and geographic unity is utilized, and political bonds are strengthened by common sentiments and interests which seem natural and inevitable. Finally, by the principles of local self government and representation, an organization which secures unity in common affairs without sacrificing individual liberty is made possible, and democracy over large areas is at last secured. That the ultimate form of the state has been reached is not likely.

The balance between sovereignty and liberty is too nicely adjusted to be easily maintained and tends always toward despotism on the one hand and anarchy on the other. Constant vigilance is necessary to preserve this balance under changing and modern state are not agreed as to what is the proper adjustment or how it may best be secured.

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4 How States Evolve

• Published: October 2016
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This chapter explores the dynamics of change in states. States exemplify the challenges of complexity. The interactions, alliances, and disputes between politicians and civil servants; between one ministry and another; or between different tiers of government; and how each of them in turn respond to citizen demand and other external pressures, provide the political landscape upon which decisions are made. The chapter argues that understanding states as systems, rather than monoliths, should help avoid the cruder characterizations of states as ‘successes’ or ‘failures’. Thus, learning to ‘dance with the system’—understanding how the state in question evolved, how its decisions are made, how formal and informal power is distributed within it, and how that distribution shifts over time—are essential tasks for any activist intent on making change happen.

In 2015, I spoke to a director of works in a Pacific island nation who understandably preferred to remain anonymous because he had had enough. A no-nonsense engineer trying to build the roads his country desperately needs, he was instead grappling with a venal political system. His frustration was palpable:

In a mature system, everything is in place—the rules, the processes. Here, the playing field changes all the time. Development here is politics. We can see where we want to go, the vision for 2020. But we have a government that is power-hungry, politicians maintaining their own position. I’ve been moved, suspended, chucked out, called names. We had a good, cost-effective road programme on one of our islands. Then in comes a new minister, and one of his advisers is from that island, so he makes promises, says he wants to build some ridiculously expensive road. I say it’s impossible and am basically told ‘I’m the minister, what I says goes—I want you out by 5 pm’.

The director, who survived in the end, is a good example of many unsung heroes in the drama of development: civil servants who soldier on despite the obstacles, because the stakes are so high—the institution they work within will shape the fates and futures of their peoples. That institution is the state.

The German philosopher GWF Hegel described the state as ‘the march of God through the world’. 1 I doubt the frustrated Pacific engineer would agree with its divine origins, but to a greater or lesser degree, states ensure the provision of health, education, water, and sanitation; they guarantee rights, security, the rule of law, and social and economic stability; they arbitrate in the inevitable disputes between individuals and groups; they regulate, develop, and upgrade the economy; they organize the defence of national territory. More intangibly, they are an essential source of identity—the rise of nationalism and the state have gone hand to hand, for good or ill.

My own views on the state have evolved from indifference to hostility to admiration. Growing up in 1970s Britain, I was surrounded by a state languishing in the midst of stagflation, industrial unrest, and an aura of historical decline. Everything exciting (anti-nuclear protests, the burgeoning environmental and feminist movements, the cathartic anarchism of punk) was happening outside the channels of government. The state was boring and I took it for granted. In Chile and Argentina in the early 1980s, I saw a far bleaker side of the state: beribboned dictators in sunglasses, and friends in permanent pain over the whereabouts of their ‘disappeared’ relatives. Latin America at that time recalled George Orwell’s 1984 , written at the onset of the Cold War, with its dystopian vision of a ‘big brother state’ as ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’. 2

Later in the decade, I moved to Nicaragua before the sheen came off the Sandinista Revolution and saw the upsurge in social and economic freedoms a progressive state could achieve. Then, as Latin America slid into debt crisis and enacted ill-conceived liberalizing market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, I was struck by the contrast between the region’s economic stagnation and the concurrent state-driven ‘Asian Miracle’. Collaboration with Ha-Joon Chang cemented my belief in a positive role for the state in development. 3 Matthew Lockwood’s book on the state in Africa 4 convinced me that at the heart of Africa’s problems lay weak states, more than the international system then being targeted by activists around the world. I then focussed my 2008 book, From Poverty to Power on ‘effective states’ as a central pillar of development.

States may be ubiquitous, but they are far from static. A constant process of conflict and bargaining shapes their contours and responsibilities, and a flux of power determines both what changes and what does not. Activists need to look under the bonnet of states, and understand them as complex systems that can be influenced. The dynamics of change in states epitomizes the characteristics of systems discussed in Chapter 1 : the combination of steady change and sudden, unpredictable jumps born of personalities and events. So does states’ inertia: ideas, institutions, and interests interact to prevent progress and drive well-intentioned civil servants to distraction.

I worked for a brief spell for the British government’s development department in the mid-2000s. What had appeared to an NGO activist on the outside as a monolithic institution dissolved into Whitehall’s sprawling system of ministries and personalities, each with their own traditions, jargons, and acronyms ( lots of acronyms). Power was endlessly disputed within the system, as everyone lobbied internally for their preferred policies and budgets, using all the tactics of activists everywhere—coalitions, the search for champions, seizing critical junctures, and the rest.

Officials, especially ‘mandarins’ (senior civil servants), emerged from the shadows as powerful players and rather more permanent than their political masters. The enduring popularity of the British TV satire Yes Minister (which I am told is used to induct French officials into the ways of Whitehall) comes from the pleasure of watching the suave mandarin, Sir Humphrey, run rings round his hapless political master. Beyond the Whitehall bubble, similar scenarios can be found in other tiers of the state, right down to local councils.

States influence the lives of their citizens primarily by agreeing and implementing laws, rules and policies, taxation and spending, and public messaging that influences norms and beliefs. Their most basic role is to guarantee the physical security of the population, offering protection against disaster and preventing what Hobbes called the ‘war of all against all’, 5 in which citizens are at the mercy of anyone with a weapon and a grudge. Historically, as Orwell described, this role has been a double-edged sword. In the twentieth century some 170 million people were killed by their own governments, four times the number killed in wars between states. 6 The picture looks different today; the worst deprivation and suffering often coincide with states that are weak or almost non-existent.

Freedom to be and to do requires income as well as security. States help create jobs, and regulate and upgrade the economy to deliver the kind of inclusive growth that liberates people from hunger and want and allows them to acquire knowledge, skills, voice, and agency, not least by guaranteeing access to quality healthcare, education, water, and sanitation, along with some form of social protection.

Politically, states guarantee the rights and voice of poor and excluded groups both directly (the right to vote, access to justice) and by creating an enabling environment, for example, through legislation on access to information, media independence, or decentralization and other participatory governance reforms.

Of course a gulf yawns between what states should do in theory and what they actually do in practice. Some readers whose experience suggests the state is a tool for elites and anything but progressive will have found these paragraphs alarmingly naive. State sceptics laud the role non-state institutions can play in providing the essentials of a decent life. Development economist Paul Collier even argued for ‘independent service authorities’ in countries like Haiti, deliberately bypassing states viewed as corrupt, inept, and unreformable. I asked Paul what his exit strategy would be—how would these authorities eventually hand power back to elected officials—he had no reply. 7 I believe there is no substitute for effective, accountable states and whatever we do in the short term should help build toward that goal. Setting up parallel and competing systems seems likely to undermine the process.

Understanding states as systems, rather than monoliths, should help us avoid the cruder characterizations of states as ‘successes’ or ‘failures’. States emerge over time and evolve as they interact with numerous non-state institutions and individuals. It is those interactions that matter for activists seeking to promote change.

How states evolve

In evolutionary terms, states are a comparatively recent addition to the family and kinship groups that have been the basic building block of human society since homo sapiens emerged from Africa some 100,000 years ago. China was the first to create a recognizably modern state, in the shape of a coherent, merit-based bureaucracy in the third century bc . By contrast, modern states did not emerge in Europe until some 2,000 years later, following two centuries of wars that whittled 500 political entities down into a couple of dozen nation states. 8

States rise and fall; prolonged periods of institutional inertia are punctuated by crises and sudden change. Over time, however, states have expanded, both in remit and size. States that once confined themselves to conscripting and taxing their citizens now seek to influence many aspects of their lives. In 1880, government spending in the UK and US was only about 10 per cent of GDP; 9 by 2013 it was 45 per cent and 39 per cent respectively. 10 State spending tends to grow as economies develop—in 2012 governments in low income countries spent only 16.5 per cent of their much lower GDP, compared to 38.3 per cent in the Euro area. 11

In his monumental history of the state, 12 Francis Fukuyama argues that ‘the miracle of modern politics’ lies in achieving a precarious balance between three pillars: effective centralized administration (civil service), the rule of law (courts), and accountability mechanisms (elected government and parliamentary oversight). Following this framework, I will discuss the administration in this chapter, while subsequent ones will cover the machinery of law and accountability.

Balance among these three elements is a miracle because they are often in conflict. Central administrations usually seek to maximize their power, while courts and parliaments seek to limit it. When balance is achieved, it doesn’t always last: societies have always wrestled with the ability of lobbyists and vested interests (‘hidden power’) to buy access and influence with decision makers. In trying to influence states, insider activists use many of the same tactics, albeit with considerably less money and different aims.

Fukuyama argues that the UK in the nineteenth century was the first to put in place a balance of all three pillars. He also finds comfort in the history of the US, which suffered mind-boggling levels of patronage and corruption in the nineteenth century, yet in the fifty years prior to the Second World War managed to turn the US government into a relatively effective bureaucracy.

In today’s developing countries, successive waves of European colonization wielded a determining influence over the evolution of states. Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and others took over existing states or created new ones where none had previously existed. In Latin America, Spain found the militarist imperial structures of the Aztecs and Incas not that dissimilar from its own, and used them to rule over their conquered subjects, leaving a legacy of hierarchical unresponsive bureaucracies.

In lucrative Asian colonies such as India or Singapore, whose wealth and trade underwrote the British Empire and Britain’s industrialization, the colonizers invested significantly in the national army and civil service to suit their purposes, institutions that lived on after independence. China and East Asia’s legacy of strong states survived European occupation and provided a basis for rebuilding upon decolonization. Africa was another story; the pillage of its people by the slave trade required no state institutions and, with the exception of South Africa, the continent appeared to offer little wealth and myriad difficulties for the colonizers. As a result, the Europeans opted for indirect rule with few settlers and fewer state institutions. The least developed parts of the world today are those that lacked either strong indigenous state institutions or transplanted settler-based ones. 13

The evolution of modern states has taken centuries, in a tortured and often bloody process far removed from the staid world of technocratic ‘state building’ promoted by today’s aid donors. Typical of the evolution of complex systems, the dynamic has been one of slow change, punctuated by sudden upheavals. Historically, war has been one of the great drivers of state evolution; in the words of social historian Charles Tilly, ‘war made the state and the state made war’. 14 The first proper state was forged amid carnage on the battlefields of China, and a similar bloodbath gave birth to modern European states and many others across the globe.

War posed existential threats that forced elites to pool their efforts, accept restraints on their individual power, and embrace change. It led to the introduction and expansion of taxation, which in turn required a state bureaucracy to collect and administer the revenue. And it laid the foundation for a social contract between citizen and state based on security: the former provided soldiers and money in return for the latter’s protection. As noted in Chapter 1 , the two world wars of the twentieth century vastly expanded the obligations of citizens and states to each other.

Wars (or the threat of them) are examples of ‘critical junctures’, major events that also include financial meltdowns and epidemics (the Black Death transformed Europe in the fourteenth century). Another such juncture is a ‘resource shock’ that finances either a feeding frenzy (Nigeria’s discovery of oil and gas), a period of boom and prosperity (Botswana’s diamonds) or a cycle of overspending, indebtedness and financial crisis (as seems to be happening in Ghana after its recent oil finds).

Each of these shocks prompted shifts in the structures and operating values of the state that proved crucial to movements for change. Critical junctures act as catalysts of change, rearranging the patterns of alliances and allegiances that underpin the political order, but also transforming norms on everything from the role of the state in providing welfare to the rights of women or African Americans (both strongly influenced by the Second World War). Activists’ thirty-year, apparently unsuccessful, campaign for a ‘Tobin Tax’ on financial transactions only came to fruition after the 2008 global financial crisis, an example explored in Chapter 11 .

Longer-term, less visible processes than war also create evolutionary pressures on the state. Economic growth can create new poles of power: it can throw up new entrants to elites, who demand preferential policies; and it can lay the basis for new social movements, through which middle classes demand civil rights and freedom of expression, or trade unions and urban slum dwellers fight for improved state services and a fairer distribution of wealth. Activists need to engage with new movements as they arise out of such slow processes, and at the same time remain alert to moments that allow for breakthroughs.

In recent years the actions and courage of strong and cohesive non-violent civic coalitions have proven vital to the political transitions that presage state change. Since the 1980s, successive waves of civil society protest have contributed to the overthrow of military governments across Latin America, the downfall of Communist and authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the removal of dictators in the Philippines and Indonesia, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Effective tactics have included boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience.

Even the most repressive states cannot ignore such movements for long. Confucius wrote that every ruler needs arms, food, and trust, but that if any of these had to be forfeited, the first two should be given up before the last. Even unelected governments need a degree of trust to do their day-to-day work. Without it laws will more often be evaded and broken, taxes harder to raise, and information harder to gather. ‘Legitimacy’—when citizens accept the rights of states to rule over them—lies at the heart of the social contract between rulers and ruled. 15 States’ desire to maintain or regain legitimacy provides activists with avenues for change even in apparently closed political systems.

In Liberia years of entrenched corruption had so eroded the public trust that even dire warnings about Ebola’s lethal contagion were seen as a cynical attempt to solicit and ‘eat’ international donations. 16 Corruption and political sclerosis are not confined to developing countries of course: Fukuyama ends his history of the state with an impassioned denunciation of today’s US ‘vetocracy’, paralysed by vested interests. Left to fester, such decay resembles the build-up of pressures in the earth’s crust preceding an earthquake.

Of course, for every Arab Spring there is often an Arab Winter, as forces of cohesion and disintegration slug it out. Systems are in constant flux and change is highly non-linear. Based on his observations in several Mexican municipalities, political scientist Jonathan Fox found state policy evolving through a cycle of conflict and cooperation: after a conflict would break out, more progressive local state officials would talk to the more approachable protest leaders, and a period of reform would ensue. When those reforms ran out of steam, or new issues emerged, conflict would flare up and the cycle would begin anew. 17 Another political scientist, Sidney Tarrow, sees a similar dynamic of repression, partial victories leading to reform, and demobilization, repeating itself in Europe over the last two centuries. 18

I use this model a good deal, because it neatly explains why struggles move between periods of conflict and cooperation. It also captures the fact that most political change happens through deals behind closed doors that seek to accommodate change and avert mass violence, even if protests and conflicts understandably draw our attention. The ‘political settlement’ that ended apartheid in South Africa and brought transition to non-racial democracy involved a wide range of pacts, deals, and ‘accords’ struck between major political forces, powerful economic interests, the labour movement, and civil society groups. Such deals reflect power, both visible and hidden, and activists need to be aware of the extent of their leverage and also be present, with access to decision makers at critical moments, even when decisions are made behind closed doors. Engaging in this way often provokes charges of legitimizing anti-democratic or untransparent processes, while refusing to engage entails missed opportunities. This issue generates a good deal of argument between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ activists, and will be discussed in Chapter 11 .

States in developing countries today

Nearly all developing countries reflect the dynamic interplay of ancient political traditions and those imposed by European colonizers. Each state is unique and any typology is inevitably unsatisfactory because particular states tick more than one box, move between categories over time, or because different elements within a state behave in different ways. Nevertheless, I find it helpful to think of today’s developing country states in three broad groupings: developmental states, patrimonial states, and fragile/conflict affected states.

Developmental states have an effective centralized state apparatus, geared primarily to generating economic growth. Many of them emerged where state institutions pre-date European takeover. Over the last fifty years, developmental states like South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia made huge strides growing the economy and reducing poverty; Ha-Joon Chang says that, for a development economist, growing up in 1960s Korea was like being a physicist present at the birth of the universe. The ‘Asian Tigers’ are closest to the classical description of the state set out by the German sociologist Max Weber, namely an efficient, merit-based civil service that manages to avoid capture by vested interests and guides the national economy in a process of sustained upgrading. Some observers include Botswana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Chile in the category.

As that list suggests, there is a problem. While aid donors laud the successes of developmental states in freeing their populations from poverty, human rights advocates condemn their repression of opposition and free speech. Going back to Amartya Sen’s definition, developmental states deliver only some kinds of ‘freedoms to do and to be’, while actively suppressing others.

Before everyone starts calling for a strong leader to impose order and deliver growth, it should be remembered that while some autocracies are developmental, many are not. Cross-country comparisons show that, on average, there appears to be no growth advantage (or disadvantage) in being authoritarian. Autocracies do account for some of development’s success stories, but they have also been responsible for innumerable dismal failures. In Latin America, I saw the hyperinflation inflicted by military rule in the 1980s that went hand in hand with their cruel human rights abuses.

The quality of growth also varies. As systems, autocracies are distinguished from democracies by the paucity of feedback loops and constraints—a dictator dictates, after all. With untrammelled power, a leader can conduct necessary reforms, often leading to growth spurts, but should the situation change, or should they simply get it wrong, there is no-one who can force them to alter course. Economies under autocracies are thus characterized by booms and busts, whereas democracies, with their often exasperating degree of feedback and constraint, have historically proved better at avoiding the extremes, producing a smoother ride. 19

The states I call ‘patrimonial’ bear very little resemblance to the Weberian ideal. They are deeply inefficient, with high levels of patronage and corruption, as officials and leaders put self and kin before citizens and country. The Pacific director of public works recalled one minister telling him that he was speaking at that meeting on that island, and that he wanted him to make sure that the diggers arrived while he was speaking. There were no road works under way, but he made sure the big yellow excavators arrived for the show. He has even set aside a small fund to pay for such pointless exercises in order to buy the political elbow room to get on with the real work.

Patrimonial states lie along a spectrum from vampire to ruminant: at one extreme, corrupt governments suck the blood out of the economy and give nothing back; at the other extreme, a degree of ‘eating’ does not rule out something useful emerging as a by-product.

The third grouping of ‘fragile and conflict affected states’ can barely control the national territory, or are wracked by conflict and violence. There, nothing seems to work, public services are negligible, the rule of law practically nonexistent. Citizens do not even enjoy the basic right not to be shot by marauding gangs. Over the course of this century, such states will be home to an increasing proportion of the world’s people living in poverty and therefore a growing focus for aid agencies.

Activists may find the typology useful for identifying the appropriate change strategy. In fragile states, where power resides mostly outside the state, activists may be better off working at a local level, with municipal officials and non-state bodies like traditional leaders and faith groups. In developmental states, engaging directly with efficient bureaucracies, using research and argument rather than street protest, often makes for a better (and safer) influencing strategy than challenging politicians. In my experience, closed political systems are often more responsive to evidence than democracies, where political horse-trading dominates. In more patrimonial systems, the best influencing strategy may be to network directly with those in power, perhaps even joining the local golf club to chat up the civil servants and politicians there, as was recommended by one of Oxfam’s country directors in West Africa.

The world in which today’s states operate is also changing fast. In some ways, traditional nation states are becoming too small for the big things, and too big for the small things. The ‘big things’—problems without passports such as climate change, migration, international criminal networks, or tax evasion—have been pushed upwards to regional and global bodies such as the EU, African Union, or UN. For activists, this means working in international networks and/or within international organizations. The Paris climate change conference in 2015 succeeded in part because a large and influential network of NGOs and scientists worked well with proactive national delegations. I discuss this in a case study on the Paris Agreement on pages 171–175.

At the same time, ‘small things’ like public services and policing have been pushed downward to municipal and provincial levels. A few cities in Colombia or South Africa are starting to look like ‘municipal developmental states’. 20 Decentralization has opened up enormous possibilities for change, as we saw in Chapter 3 regarding the Chiquitanos of Bolivia. At local level, the balance of power between social movements, activist organizations, and the state is likely to be less unequal.

Aid-financed state reform

Over the last thirty years, aid agencies and international financial institutions have devoted considerable attention to reforming states in developing countries. Their efforts to bring about ‘good governance’ have restructured budgets and ministries, rewritten laws, and even spawned new institutions, but by and large they made little change to the way states operate. The economist Lant Pritchett talks about governments’ increasing skill at ‘isomorphic mimicry’—a term borrowed from biology, where it describes different organisms that evolve to look alike without actually being related. 21

The lively conversation among aid donors, researchers, and activists regarding the failure of aid to bring lasting state reform was one of the prime motivators for this book. The discussion in networks with names like ‘Doing Development Differently’ 22 and ‘Thinking and Working Politically’ 23 has been rewarding and frustrating in equal measure: rewarding because I have learned a great deal from the assembled big brains about how states and aid systems do and don’t work; frustrating because some of the issues dear to my heart (‘power within’, citizen activism, gender rights) are often pushed aside in favour of dissecting political deal-making at the top. (It has also been rewarding in a more direct sense—as part of the Thinking and Working Politically conversation, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade agreed to support the work that went into this book.)

One recurring theme of these conversations is that aid-financed state reform failed because Western donors tried to graft liberal-democratic and free-market institutions onto countries with very different traditions. 24 Governments became adept at passing rules and creating institutions that look good on paper, but are in practice entirely cosmetic. At one point Uganda had the best anti-corruption laws in the world, scoring 99 out of 100 in one league table, yet came 126th in the 2008 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

In contrast, countries that successfully reformed state institutions did not follow some Washington or London-decreed ‘best practice’. Instead, they created hybrid institutions that combine elements of traditional, nationally specific institutions with good ideas from outside. In fragile states, it seems, the facts that governments were less able or willing to pursue imported reforms and non-state institutions were relatively more powerful favoured the creation of locally-relevant hybrid institutions. 25

One example comes from French-speaking West Africa, where the secular French-style school systems were losing Muslim students at an alarming rate to private religious schools. After vainly attempting to suppress the flourishing parallel world of private education, the governments of Mali, Niger, and Senegal decided instead to ‘go with the grain’ by bringing unofficial schools more squarely into the formal state system and at the same time reforming the official system by introducing religious education in state schools.

Preliminary indications suggest that the hybrid schools are providing as good an education as the previous regime. 26 According to Harvard’s Matt Andrews, such hybrid solutions are best devised by local stakeholders who understand the issue best. Rather than dictate solutions, outsiders should create opportunities for local actors to find their own. 27

The success of hybrid institutions is what you would expect from a systems perspective. Systems are path dependent—each stage of evolution shapes the possibilities of the next. Activists working with the grain of systems need both to be keenly attuned to new institutional variants that emerge spontaneously (positive deviance), and to use their knowledge of history or experiences elsewhere to sow new variants in the institutional ecosystem. What does not work is trying to shoehorn in ‘best practice’ institutions from elsewhere.

States are complex systems, made up of families of institutions, each with its own history, procedures, and norms. Even the most apparently monolithic dictatorship is, on closer inspection, nothing of the sort. The solidity of presidential palaces and halls of the people is in fact ephemeral, built upon the shifting sands of legitimacy and events. When I lived in Argentina, the military dictatorship appeared impregnable, yet within two years two ‘critical junctures’ led to its downfall—hyperinflation eroded its middle class support and military defeat in the Falklands destroyed its aura of power.

States exemplify the challenges of complexity. The interactions, alliances, and disputes between politicians and civil servants, between one ministry and another, or between different tiers of government, and how each of them in turn respond to citizen demand and other external pressures, provide the political landscape upon which decisions are made. Learning to ‘dance with the system’—understanding how the state in question evolved, how its decisions are made, how formal and informal power is distributed within it and how that distribution shifts over time—are essential tasks for any activist intent on making change happen.

Alongside the world of officials and ministries that constitute the administrative state, there are two additional institutional entry points for activists: the structures that administer justice and those that provide accountability. We turn to them now.

Further Reading

M. Andrews , The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: Changing Rules for Realistic Solutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 ).

Google Scholar

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P. Chabal and J.P. Daloz , Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (London: James Currey, 1989 ).

F. Fukuyama , The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 ).

F. Fukuyama , Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014 ).

T. Hobbes , Leviathan (1651, published Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 ).

A. Leftwich , States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 ).

B. Levy , Working with the Grain: Integrating Governance and Growth in Development Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 ).

M. Lockwood , The State They’re In: An Agenda for International Action on Poverty in Africa (London: ITDG Publishing, 2005 ).

Shlomo Avineri , Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 176.

George Orwell , Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949).

Duncan Green and Ha-Joon Chang, ‘The Northern WTO Agenda on Investment: Do As We Say, Not As We Did’, South Centre, 2003, www.ids.ac.uk/idspublication/the-northern-wto-agenda-on-investment-do-as-we-say-not-as-we-did.

Matthew Lockwood , The State They’re In: An Agenda for International Action on Poverty in Africa (London: ITDG Publishing, 2005).

Thomas Hobbes, De Cive , 1641, chapter 1, para 13.

Geoff Mulgan , Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

Francis Fukuyama , The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 19 and p. 328.

Ha-Joon Chang , Economics: The User’s Guide (London: Pelican, 2014).

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ‘General Government Spending’, https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm.

Central Government Finances, ‘Expense’, World Development Indicators 2015.

Francis Fukuyama , The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).   Francis Fukuyama , Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Francis Fukuyama , Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 33.

Charles Tilly , Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 54.

Jonathan Fox , Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2007).

Sidney Tarrow , Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics , 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Tim Kelsall, ‘State of the Art: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Development’, The Developmental Leadership Program, 2014.

Lant Pritchett , Michael Woolcock , and Matt Andrews , ‘Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure’, CGD Working Paper No. 234 (Washington DC: Center for Global Development, 2010).

The DDD Manifesto Community, Doing Development Differently website, http://doingdevelopmentdifferently.com/.

Adrian Leftwich, ‘Thinking and Working Politically: What Does It Mean, Why Is It Important and How Do You Do It?’ Document prepared for the Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) Research Policy Workshop, 10–11 March, 2011, in Frankfurt, http://www.gsdrc.org/document-library/thinking-and-working-politically-what-does-it-mean-why-is-it-important-and-how-do-you-do-it/.

David Booth and Diana Cammack , Governance for Development in Africa: Solving Collective Action Problems (London: Zed Books, 2013), p. 123.

Michael Woolcock , ‘Engaging with Fragile and Conflict-Affected States’, CID Working Paper No. 286 (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Development, Harvard University, 2014), www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/publications/faculty-working-papers/engaging-with-fragile-and-conflict-affected-states .

Matt Andrews , The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: Changing Rules for Realistic Solutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Culture and Power

The emergence of the state.

Humans partition the earth into subsections of governance and control often without regard for pre-existing communities. A once-nomadic species that moved in tune with the world now has privileges dependent on birth place and requires permission to cross superimposed borders that confine and divide. For generations, the current system of statehood has evolved until many of westernized society no longer recognize the emergence of the modern world as anything other than a natural progression. Though the concept of what defines a states remains a heated debate amongst political scientists, a state can generally be defined as a system of governance over a sovereign territory . The modern definition contrasts with older forms of empires, with ever-changing borders and states without territory (such as Palestine).

Nevertheless, states are often viewed by western theorists as the natural form of human communities. Early Greek theorist Aristotle contends humans removed themselves from the world as political animals that formed city-states . The gregarious, eusocial A term describing species that are incredibly social with each other, such as humans, or ants. qualities of humans enable them to make communal decisions and develop complex systems of governance. The progression of the natural theory of human states continues throughout history, with even the Declaration of Independence citing America’s transition to a self-sufficient state as a step in the course of human events. The common ideology that claims the current form of states are a part of human development overshadows the ways in which hierarchy and exploitation have increased under state rule, to the detriment of much of our world.

The First States

The earliest states formed because of advantageous regional ecosystems that supported agriculture and a growing population. According to Near Eastern historian Petr Charvat , the areas of modern Egypt and Palestine witnessed the creation of the first states. In the Neolithic Age, the Nile River and a moderate climate created an oasis of flora and fauna with abundant fisheries and wildlife not seen today. The fertile soil of the river valley allowed for the settlement of early Egyptian agricultural communities. Archaeologists believe the societies worked communally in the beginning, based on shared food storage and graves that indicate egalitarian social positions. In the Maadi site of lower Egypt, egalitarian origins extended to mammalian cousins, shown by animals and humans buried in the same position of reverence. Before power became consolidated in states, humans lived communally in tandem with the living world. 

Later, the formation of a larger, organized ancient state correlated with more highly differentiated statuses. Agricultural communities produce surplus that feeds a growing population but may also seed the establishment of hierarchies. Communal storage of food can give rise to rulers that control redistribution, leading to the consolidation of power. Societies can also increase in complexity due to surplus, as less time and labor is required for food collection. Historically, this increasing complexity has also involved increasing gendered divisions of labor, as men spend more time doing trade work such as building tools and begin trading with members of the community and other settlements. This has often led to women playing a decreased role in food production, while having more children and further increasing the population and its need for food. As civilizations rise, they engage in trade, causing state power to grow through control of currency and taxes.

“When the first civilizations, as distinct from the initial cultures, made their appearance, they were, without exception, the byproduct of a surplus, generally agriculture; and the size and distribution of that surplus determined the elevation and spread of that civilization” Frederic Paxson, expert on the history of agriculture

In upper Egypt, the burial grounds included large, ornamental graves storing valuables as of 3400 BCE. The state became organized, collecting taxes and consolidating the power that gave birth to the ruling class. Pharaohs claimed private property rights and received goods from local estates, allocating power to regional governors. At the same time, religion emerged, giving Pharaohs the divine, unquestionable right to rule, granted by gods that were believed to control the world. People shifted from equal members of society and the environment into “ society’s division into the ruling and the ruled “. Early statehood began with the development of classes, including a ruling class which assumed power to control all the borders of the state. 

The relationship between ancient states and the earth is clearly displayed through the rise of Chinese civilizations. Like Egypt, China created the basis for its early society through the use of agriculture , with rivers and water beds sustaining local communities. The settlements started as egalitarian, with burials and only began to display social status in the Longshan culture’s Chalcolithic Period. In Yanpeng Li’s study covering 2000 years of climate change and civilization in the Hexi Corridor of ancient China, climate change strongly impacted regional development through arable land and population growth. When the region experienced temperatures and precipitation that were more favorable to agriculture, the community developed an increased amount of arable land, leading to a larger population and a larger territory. Since the population and territory increased, the state became more complex in order to retain its central control. The state instituted provincial administrative units that gave regional elites power over a territory to allow for greater regulation while solidifying social hierarchies. China transformed from small village communities into a relatively complex system of centralized government and social hierarchy by gradually expanding the population and territory.

States of the Classical Era

In the classical era of Greece and Rome, the conception of a state led to the westernized understanding of citizenship and governance. Ancient Athens is often viewed as the founding model of democracy in which citizens act as both subjects and rulers in the polis , Greek for city center. Aristotle argues that a city-state is the natural form of humans, where free citizens act as equals to ensure justice. However, the only citizens in Greece were men, “ the natural superior ,” who ruled all other members of their households, including slaves and women. The rulers of the city-states came to power by their status in social hierarchies and economic independence while touting equality and moral superiority. It was only the elites of society that had the power to develop the laws of governance and learn how to participate in politics. The non-citizens were seen as natural inferiors, and they were compared to domesticated animals because they were valued solely for the labor their bodies could provide. Non-citizens were excluded from the rights and privileges of the state while exploited for their labor and subjugated in a stratified social order. Ancient Greece’s supremacist model is idolized by democracies for its virtues of equality and freedom, perpetuating the intended domination paradigms.

“Non-citizens were excluded from the rights and privileges of the state while exploited for their labor and subjugated in a stratified social order”

Ancient Rome shares similar influence over westernized forms of government, in addition to developing a republican form of citizenship. Roman citizenship was more inclusive than the Greek model, extending to all free men. The citizens would partake in government by practicing their right to participate in popular assemblies where government representatives were chosen. However, the expansion of the empire began to preclude mass participation because of distance to the capital and population growth. Participation lowered as local municipalities acquired political power and organized authority in local elites . The legal system became the primary form of protection for the rights of citizens. Legal protections ensured private property, inheritance, and contracts, but excluded the poor and slaves from the justice system. The empire and its hierarchies continued to expand while citizenship and rights gradually shrank until Rome eventually became a dictatorship instead of a republic.

Modern States

Modern states emerged from these ancient governmental systems and continue to protect the privileges of male elites while exploiting fellow humans and the natural world. The Declaration of Independence asserts the rights of all men as free and equals; however, white men were the only ones included in its vision of citizenship. Slave labor created the basis for the American agricultural and production system that funded the economy and its industrial expansion. Modern-day slavery continues to prevail through a loophole in the 13th Amendment that exempted prison labor from abolition. The prison-industrial complex criminalizes being black so that elites can profit off of the free labor of enslaved humans. Everyday humans are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes that threaten the livelihoods of white men and the hierarchies from which they benefit.

“The prison-industrial complex criminalizes being black so that elites can profit off of the free labor of enslaved humans”

Along with prison labor, exclusionary citizenship and unfair compensation for equal labor also propagates the expansion of hierarchy and exploitation. In many western states, citizenship is granted by birth within its territory in a seemingly universal expansion of the rights of inhabitants. By defining citizenship and belonging based on borders, the status is inherently exclusionary, and thus designed to protect the wealth and power of states by preventing outsiders from enjoying its privileges. For example, environmental refugees can be excluded from entering the so-called United States because of they are not citizens, despite the US being responsible for environmental degradation that led those refugees to seek refuge. When people do enter the US without legal means, they, as unprotected inhabitants, become targets for lower wages and even sex trafficking . The egalitarian origin of human settlements is no longer recognizable, as humans are divided by exclusionary citizenship status and identities that do not conform with the interests of ancient elites. 

Furthermore, the sustainable lifestyles of early villages are being lost as technology grows the complexity of societies, alongside several negative implications. The first villages relied on agriculture for the basis of the community, creating ways of living suited to environmental constraints. Increasing complexity and resource consumption led to the collapse of both the Roman and Mayan empire since higher complexity diminishes the sustainability of a society. Jevons Paradox , as witnessed in ancient Rome and post-industrial Britain, increases in technology efficiency actually accelerate the consumption of a resource, leading to greater amounts of it being consumed. The agricultural and industrial revolutions both came with great costs for human societies by requiring higher levels of energy usage. Today, many human societies respond to problems with growing levels of complexity in an ever-increasing persistent pressure for technology, regulation, and organization. Our society is now in a precarious position, as heavy reliance on the finite fossil carbon industry threatens the long-term viability of large, complex states.

Modern governments are built off of models of ancient states that diverged from egalitarian villages into hierarchies that allowed for higher complexity but decreased their sustainability. While perceived as human advancement, the advantages of development were mostly constrained to the elite who acquired wealth and political power from the labor of fellow humans and the exploitation of the natural world. Modern states continue the trend of exploitation using a legal system to protect their rights and resources while benefiting from hundreds of years of systematic oppression. A history of oppression cannot be undone, but a thorough examination of history can reveal proven alternatives to the present status quo.

“While perceived as human advancement, the advantages of development were mostly constrained to the elite who acquired wealth and political power from the labor of fellow humans and the exploitation of the natural world.”

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The early modern state was a coercive machinery designed to make war and to extract resources from society. Yet at the end of the eighteenth century, this machinery came to be radically transformed. Or rather, the ‘state’ was combined with a ‘nation’ forming a compound noun – the ‘nation-state’ – which was organised differently and pursued different goals. A nation, in contrast to a state, constitutes a community of people joined by a shared identity and by common social practices. Communities of various kinds have always existed but they now became, for the first time, a political concern. As a new breed of nationalist leaders came to argue, the nation should take over the state and make use of its institutional structures to further the nation’s ends. In one country after another the nationalists were successful in these aims. The nation added an interior life to the state, we might perhaps say; the nation was a soul added to the body of the early modern state machinery.

The revolutions that took place in Britain’s North American colonies in 1776, and in France in 1789, provided models for other nationalists to follow. ‘We the People of the United States’ – the first words of the Preamble to the US Constitution – was a phrase which itself would have been literally unthinkable in an earlier era. In France, the king was officially the only legitimate political actor and the people as a whole were excluded from politics. In addition, the power of the aristocracy and the church remained strong, above all in the countryside where they were the largest landowners. In the revolution of 1789, the old regime was overthrown and with it the entire social order. The French nation was from now on to be governed by the people, the nation, and in accordance with the principles of liberté, égalité et fraternité – liberty, equality and brotherhood.

The French Revolution: Crash Course World History #29

Already in 1792, confrontation began between the revolutionary French nation and the kings of the rest of Europe. The wars were to go on for close to 25 years, most ferociously during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century named after the French general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who made himself emperor of France. In contrast to the kings of the old regimes, the revolutionary French government could rely on the whole people to make contributions to the war due to the power of patriotism. This allowed first the revolutionaries, and later Napoleon, to create a formidable fighting machine which set about conquering Europe. Germany was quickly overrun and its sudden and complete defeat was a source of considerable embarrassment to all Germans. The Holy Roman Empire, by now in tatters, was finally dissolved in 1806 in the wake of Napoleon’s conquest. Yet, since there was no German state around which prospective nationalists could rally, the initial response was formulated in cultural rather than in military terms. Nationalist sentiment focused on the German language, German traditions and a shared sense of history. Before long a strong German nation began looking around for a unified German state. The goal was eventually achieved in 1871, after Germany – appropriately enough, perhaps – had defeated France in a war.

The Congress of Vienna of 1815, where a settlement was reached at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was supposed to have returned Europe to its pre-revolutionary ways. Yet, nationalist sentiments were growing across the continent and they constantly threatened to undermine the settlement. All over Europe national communities demanded to be included into the politics of their respective countries. Nationalism in the first part of the nineteenth century was a liberal sentiment concerning self-determination – the right of a people to determine its own fate. This programme had far-reaching implications for the way politics was organised domestically, but it also had profound ramifications for international politics. Most obviously, the idea of self-determination undermined the political legitimacy of Europe’s empires. If all the different peoples that these empires contained gained the right to determine their own fates, the map of Europe would have to be radically redrawn. In 1848 this prospect seemed to become a reality as nationalist uprisings quickly spread across the continent. Everywhere the people demanded the right to rule themselves.

Final Act of the Congress of Vienna

The Revolutions of 1848

Although the nationalist revolutions of 1848 were defeated by the political establishment, the sentiments themselves were impossible to control. Across Europe an increasingly prosperous middle-class demanded inclusion in the political system and their demands were increasingly expressed through the language of nationalism. The Finns wanted an independent Finland; the Bulgarians an independent Bulgaria; the Serbs an independent Serbia, and so on. In 1861 Italy too – long divided into separate city-states and dominated by the Church – became a unified country and an independent nation. Yet it was only with the conclusion of the First World War in 1918 that self-determination was acknowledged as a right. After the First World War most people in Europe formed their own nation-states.

As a result of the nationalist revolutions, the European international system became for the first time truly ‘inter-national’. That is, while the Westphalian system concerned relations between states, world affairs in the nineteenth century increasingly came to concern relations between nation-states. In fact, the word ‘international’ itself was coined only in 1783, by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In most respects, however, the inter-national system continued to operate in much the same fashion as the Westphalian inter-state system. Nation-states claimed the same right to sovereignty which meant that they were formally equal to each other. Together, they interacted in an anarchical system in which power was decentralised and wars were a constant threat. Yet, the addition of the nation changed the nature of the interaction in crucial ways. For one thing, leaders who ruled their countries without at least the tacit support of their national communities were increasingly seen as illegitimate. This also meant that newly created nation-states such as Italy and Germany were automatically regarded as legitimate members of the European community of nations. They were legitimate since the people, in theory at least, were in charge.

There were also new hopes for world peace. While kings wage war for the sake of glory or personal gain, a people is believed to be more attuned to the aspirations of another people. Inspired by such hopes, liberal philosophers devised plans for how a ‘perpetual peace’ could be established. For some considerable time, these assumptions seemed quite feasible. The nineteenth century – or, more accurately, the period from 1815 to 1914 – was indeed an uncharacteristically peaceful period in European history. At the time, great hopes were associated with the increase in trade. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations (1776), a nation is rich not because it has a lot of natural resources but because it has the capacity to manufacture things that others want. In order to capitalise on this capacity, you need to trade and the more you trade the wealthier you are likely to become. Once the quest for profits and market shares has become more important than the quest for a neighbouring state’s territory, world peace would naturally follow. In a world in which everyone is busy trading with each other, no one can afford to go to war.

Adam Smith Institute: The Wealth of Nations

By the twentieth century most of these liberal hopes were dashed. As the First World War demonstrated, nation-states could be as violent as the early-modern states. In fact, nation-states were far more lethal, not least since they were able to involve their entire population in the war effort together with the entirety of its shared resources. The peaceful quest for profits and market shares had not replaced the anxious quest for security or the aggressive quest for pre-eminence. In the Second World War, the industrial might of the world’s most developed nations was employed for military ends with aerial bombardments of civilian populations, including the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Between 1939 and 1945 over 60 million people were killed – around 2.5 per cent of the world’s population. This figure included the six million Jews exterminated by Germany in the Holocaust, which was one of the worst genocides in recorded history. After the Second World War, the military competition continued between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was known as a ‘cold war’ since the two superpowers never engaged each other in direct warfare, but they fought several wars by proxy such as those in Korea and Vietnam.

Further Analysis

The Real Lesson of the Vietnam War

USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War: Crash Course World History #39

Why are we so obsessed with World War II?

How did Hitler rise to power?

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• The Importance of World Wars to the Discipline of International Relations
• Sovereignty and the Nation-State
• Student Feature – Theory in Action: Indigenous Perspectives and the Buffalo Treaty
• Student Feature – Spotlight on Liberal Internationalism
• Student Feature – Theory in Action: Classical Realism and Migration
• Student Feature – Theory in Action: ‘Isms’ Are Evil. All Hail the ‘Isms’!

Erik Ringmar is professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey. He discusses the imagination in Moving Bodies, Cognitive Functions, and the World That We Made (Ringmar 2021). He tweets at @IRhistory.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Early States and State Formation in Africa

Introduction, theories of social complexity.

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Early States and State Formation in Africa by Graham Connah LAST REVIEWED: 17 August 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0047

Archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, and other scholars have long been interested in the attainment of social complexity within human groups. More conservative and more popular authors have clung to the 19th-century Eurocentric idea of civilizations, in the process giving attention to only those past societies whose material remains are obvious evidence of such complexity. This has given rise to the ancient civilizations view of human history, which has led to a proliferation of publications often restricted to six case studies at the most. Typically, these consist of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient (Pharaonic) Egypt, the Indus valley, Shang China, the Aztecs, and the Incas. Until the middle of the 20th century, even the last two were often excluded from consideration. Such an approach has overlooked the large number of societies in Africa (other than Egypt) for which there is evidence of the existence of past social complexity in a variety of forms. Given the preliterate condition of many of these groups, much of the evidence consists of archaeological data, from both excavations and field surveys. It is these archaeological data that are the main emphasis of this article. Nevertheless, historical documentation does exist for some areas and periods, yet because of its uneven distribution in space and time, the usual separation of prehistory and history is inappropriate in the context of much of Africa. Ethnohistorical sources, consisting of accounts by visitors from outside the continent, and oral sources, consisting of the traditions of indigenous African societies, also contribute to an increasing understanding of this aspect of the African past.

A large number of published studies have examined the subject of social complexity and the means by which it has been attained in the past. Many of these studies have considered the subject as a worldwide phenomenon, and in some cases their relevance to the African past is more implicit than explicit. To understand much of the literature on this subject, however, it is necessary to have some familiarity with the more outstanding and more recent theoretical writing. Most of this is anthropological or sociological in approach, and its subject matter is variously identified. In the early 21st century, “social complexity” is most often the focus of attention, but discussion often centers on the origins of “early states and state formation,” as in the title of this article. Such states are often contrasted with “chiefdoms,” which are considered to be at a lower level of complexity and perhaps on a path to becoming states. Yet, this dichotomy is no longer as acceptable as it was formerly, when the study of complexity was strongly influenced by 19th-century evolutionist ideas, which emphasized a linear progression from simple to complex. Furthermore, any inquiry into social complexity inevitably leads to a consideration of “urbanization,” with which it was so often associated in the past. Early African urbanization existed in a wide variety of forms, and some understanding of the character of “preindustrial cities” is essential if one is to avoid an approach influenced by more recent European or American models. In the African case, towns and cities were often characterized by hierarchical organization, but it has been argued that instances of heterarchy also existed. Newcomers to the subject will find that Sjoberg 1960 , although based mostly on anthropological data and generalized, is useful for understanding the characteristics of early cities. McIntosh 1999 is a collection of papers that investigate the diversity of African states and urbanization, and Trigger 2003 is a conventional comparative work that provides a global basis for understanding early civilizations. In contrast, Yoffee 2005 argues for a new approach to the subject, and Pauketat 2007 stresses the importance of archaeological evidence rather than social-evolutionary theory. Fletcher 2007 is an analytical study seeking to explain the factors influencing urban growth, in the process offering a thoughtful investigation. Maisels 2010 emphasizes the role of power in the formation of states, and Smith 2012 is yet another collection of comparative studies of complex societies.

Fletcher, Roland. The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline . New Studies in Archaeology. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Originally published in 1995. Argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on the long-term development of a settlement and can restrict social and political change. Using this approach, the book reviews worldwide settlement growth over the last fifteen thousand years, concluding with agrarian urban and industrial cities. Contains some material relevant to Africa.

Maisels, Charles. The Archaeology of Politics and Power: Where, When, and Why the First States Formed . Oxford and Oakville, Canada: Oxbow, 2010.

Looks at the examples of the Indus, the Levant and Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Andes. Advances an explanation of the state formation process, including internal differentiation within communities, the manipulation of religion, the acquisition of economic privilege, social stratification, the application of force, and the eventual formation of an elite.

McIntosh, Susan Keech, ed. Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa . New Directions in Archaeology. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Although concerned with theory, this book is set firmly in an African context. It includes subject matter from the Inland Niger Delta, Cameroon, the Kalahari, Uganda, and Central Africa as well as discussions of the segmentary state, the evolutionary mapping of African societies, “invisible” African towns, and other topics.

Pauketat, Timothy R. Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions . Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007.

Debunks much of the recent social-evolutionary theorizing about human development, but in the context of American Mississippian culture. Nevertheless, relevant to Africa because the author challenges all students of prehistory and history to examine the actual archaeological evidence with an open mind.

Sjoberg, Gideon. The Preindustrial City: Past and Present . Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960.

An old but classic study that examines a wide range of social, economic, political, religious, and communication aspects of preindustrial cities worldwide. Not specifically concerned with Africa, but contains much that is implicitly relevant to past African urban societies.

Smith, Michael E., ed. The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies . Papers presented at a conference held at the Amerind Foundation, Dragoon, Arizona, 3–7 March 2008. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

A number of authors draw on examples from an array of geographical settings, considering urbanization, settlement patterns, the political strategies of kings and chiefs, and the economic choices of individuals and households. A chapter by Roland Fletcher discusses low-density, agrarian-based urbanism, a subject of relevance to Africa.

Trigger, Bruce G. Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study . Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

A good introduction to comparative studies of social complexity, not only focusing on well-known examples from China to the Americas, but also including one from Southwestern Nigeria: the Yoruba. Covers sociopolitical organization, economy, and cognitive and symbolic aspects. Presents problems of definition and usefully contrasts city-states with territorial states.

Yoffee, Norman. Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States and Civilizations . Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489662

Challenges prevailing ideas about the evolution of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. Questions earliest states as large and despotic and suggests an evolutionary process centered on the concerns of everyday life. Draws on worldwide evidence, including from Egypt.

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Chapter: 11th 12th std standard Political Science History goverment rule laws life Higher secondary school College Notes

The origin of the state : the historical or evolutionary theory, the origin of the state.

Political thinkers have attempted to explain the origin of the state in various ways. When, where and how the state came into existence have not been recorded anywhere in history. Therefore, the political thinkers were compelled to adopt various hypotheses, many of which are now discredited in the light of modern knowledge. Among the many theories which are concerned with the origin of the state the following are explained in this chapter.

1.         The Theory of Divine origin

2.         Social Contract Theory.

3.         Matriarchal and Patriarchal Theory.

4.         Force Theory.

5.         Evolutionary Theory.

  The Historical or Evolutionary theory

Five theories in explanation of the origin of the state, but no single theory offers an adequate explanation. The theory which explains and is now accepted as a convincing origin of the state, is the Historical or Evolutionary theory. It explains the state is the product of growth, a slow and steady evolution extending over a long period of time and ultimately shaping itself into the complex structure of a modern state. This theory is more scientific.

The state is neither the handiwork of God, nor the result of superior physical force, nor the creation of evolution or convention, nor a mere expansion of the family. The state is not a mere artificial mechanical creation but an institution of natural growth or historical evolution says professor Garner.

There were a number of factors which helped the evolution of the state. They were kinship, religion, war, migration economic activities and political consciousness. The important factors which contributed to the growth of the state are

1.         Kinship

2.         Religion

3.         Property and defence

4.         Force

5.         Political consciousness

Kinship is the most important and was based upon blood relationship and kinship was the first strongest bond of unity. Family constituted the first link in the process of the evolution of the state with the expansion of the family arose new families and the multiplication of families led to the formation of clans and tribes. Kinship was the only factor which bound the people together.

According to Professor Mac Iver, the magic of names

'reinforced the sense of kinship, as the course of generations enlarged the group. The blood bond of sonship changed imperceptibly into the social bond of the wider brotherhood. The authority of the father passes into the power of the chief once more under the aegis of kinship new forms arise which transcend it. Kinship creates society and society at length creates the state'.

Religion provided the bond of unity in early society. It also affected all walks of life. The worship of a common ancestor and common goods created a sense of social solidarity. There was fear in the hearts of men as far as religion was concerned. Even today we see religious practices, affairs and faith in uniting people. In the early days a number of races are united by religion and unity was essential for the creation of state.

Force also played an important part in the evolution of the state. It was the use of physical force that was responsible for the growth of kingdoms and empires.

Property and Defence

Property and depence played a vital role in the evolution of state in ancient times particularly among the people who were nomads and wagabonds and tribals. Prof. Laski has referred to the necessity of acquiring property by the members of society and protecting the property aequired with reference to the population mentioned above.

This led to making adjustments in the social system and relationship between the members of different groups. The need to protect property ultimately compelled the ancient people to establish the state.

Political consciousness

The last is political consciousness arising from the fundamental needs of life for protection and order.

When the people settle down on a definite territory in pursuit of their, subsistence and a desire to secure it from encroachment by others. The need for regulating things and persons is felt imminently and this is the essence of political consciousness.

It follows that many factors helped the growth of the state. No single factor alone was responsible for its origin. Sometimes all and sometimes many of them help the process by which uncivilized society was transformed into a state.

Of all the theories which seek to explain the origin of the states, the evolutionary theory is the most satisfactory. It should be noted that no theory pin-points the time at which the state originated as a consequence of many factors working in union at different times.

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State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia

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The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from 3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history.

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1 Introduction

History has shown that economic development often thrives in states where governments guarantee the rule of law and provide public goods for their citizens. In order to reach a deeper understanding of why some countries have good government and others do not, social scientists have become increasingly interested in studying the long-run patterns of institutional development within states. The roots of countries’ contemporary failures or successes have often been traced back to “critical junctures” far back in history. Footnote 1

In this paper, we analyze how state development has interacted with economic development. More specifically, we attempt to make two distinct contributions to the literature. First, we provide a complete state history index from its first origin around 3500 BCE up until the present day. Initially developed by Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ) for 159 countries, the index covered the period 1–1950 CE. We extend the index from 1 CE backwards in time to the first origins of states around 3500 BCE and also code the 1951–2000 CE period, which was previously missing from the time series.

Second, we investigate how our extended state history index is related to indicators of long-run economic development. The key hypothesis from our theoretical framework is that modern levels of productivity and population density should have a hump-shaped relationship with the extent of state history. We expect non-linear effects of state experience in the pre-industrial era, and we predict it develops into a hump-shaped relationship by 2000 CE. In the empirical section, we then confirm that the relationship between our state history index and current levels of economic development has the shape of an inverted u, implying that countries with very much or very little state experience have the least developed economies whereas the richest countries have intermediate state history scores.

For the first of these objectives—the creation of a state history index for the BCE-period, we follow the methodology in the original effort by Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ). This combines three dimensions of state development: (1) The existence of a state above tribal level; (2) Whether rule was internally or externally based (i.e. whether a country’s territory had an autonomous government or was ruled partly or fully by an authority outside of its borders); (3) How much of its territory was under the control of a government (as opposed to multiple competing governments and regions still lacking state presence). The three indicators were coded for each of the 159 countries in our sample and for each 50-year period from the origin of the first states around 3500 BCE, yielding a panel data set with 17,490 country-period observations. The details of the sources for and construction of the index are described further below.

Our second objective hinged crucially on extending the state history data initially compiled by Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ). Their study was the first to show a significant correlation between state history and recent growth rate and between state history and income level. The numerous studies that followed strengthened the evidence that current development is positively related to state experience. Although subsequent versions of the index used in these papers expanded the set of countries, none coded the history of states BCE.

With these developments in mind and with the new data on the extended state history index, we revisit the relationship between the degree of exposure to state institutions and current output. We show that the relationship between state history and current income per capita across countries is hump-shaped rather than linear, and that this is due to the inclusion of state experience before the Common Era. Thus, in addition to young, inexperienced states, very old states also incur economic disadvantages relative to states with around 2000 years of state experience.

Our inquiry is supported by the empirical observation that countries having long state experience like Iraq, Turkey and China are poorer today than younger states like Britain, Denmark and Japan, a fact that remained unexplained in previous work. The early experience of the former was uncoded in the previous data, which effectively forced countries having much more state experience to take similar values to ones having intermediate levels, such as England (the UK).

Building on previous literature, we contribute additional knowledge about the influence of early political and societal development on modern economic development. In a stylized theoretical framework, we argue the earliest states developed the fiscal capacity and coordination needed to achieve increases in productivity, but ultimately limited that productivity due to overcentralization. Although earlier states became stagnant, younger states were able to learn from them and surpass their productivity before they reached stagnation themselves. By contrast, very young states early in the process of building fiscal and institutional capacity, are at a relative disadvantage. Thus, along with young states, a very long state experience also comes with economic disadvantages relative to countries with intermediate state experience. We show that this more complex relationship starts to be visible with respect to economic development indicators (population density and urbanization) and technology adoption in 1500 CE, but it clearly reveals itself in 2000 CE economic performance. Moreover, the relationship for current outcomes is further strengthened when adjusting the index for the ancestral lines of post-1500 migrant populations. Footnote 2

The work clearly involves several methodological challenges. For instance, how should a state be defined? In this regard, we follow the tradition of Service ( 1962 ), Carneiro ( 1981 ), Johnson and Earle ( 2000 ) and others, distinguishing between bands, chiefdoms, and full-fledged states. Unlike the other forms of governments, states are further characterized by a centralized government with the ability to collect taxes, enforce laws, and mobilize forces for war. Using this definition, the literature seems to be in rough agreement about the time when states arise in different countries. Accompanying this paper is an extensive online data appendix where we motivate the coding for each country-period observation.

Another issue concerns the unit of analysis, which is the territory delimited by the modern-day country borders of 159 contemporary countries in the sample. It is a well-known fact that the borders of current countries sometimes have very little resemblance with the geopolitical logic in ancient times. As discussed in Sect.  5.4 , several factors have played decisive roles in the reconfiguration of borders through history, including military conquest and colonization by foreign powers. We discuss the potential risks associated with shifting borders, in terms of retroactive measurement error for historical outcomes and bias in the estimates for contemporaneous outcomes.

A potential alternative to using country borders could have been to divide the world into equal-sized grid cells (or “virtual countries”) and then study the history of each such cell. This would however entail a separate set of coding challenges that we leave for future work. The problem of endogenous borders is arguably somewhat mitigated in regressions with contemporaneous outcome variables since most countries actually have changed their borders throughout history. We would further argue that to the extent that researchers are interested in tracking the histories of countries in order to understand contemporary levels of development, the modern configuration of countries is still a natural point of departure.

The paper is organized as follows: In Sect.  2 , we provide an overview of the literature on the definition of a state and the relationship of state history to economic development. In Sect.  3 , we present our theoretical framework. In Sect.  4 we present the new data and the principles guiding its construction. In Sect.  5 , we carry out an econometric analysis of the relationship between economic development and state history. Section  6 concludes.

2 Literature review

2.1 state history and economic development.

It is a well established empirical fact that history has shaped the contemporary economic development of nations in numerous ways. Whether initial biogeographic endowment and transition to agriculture (e.g. Hibbs and Olsson 2004 ; Olsson and Hibbs 2005 ; Galor and Moav 2007 ) or past technology adoption (Comin et al. 2010 ), early and productive starts have been typically shown to translate into better income and institutions in present times.

The experience with state institutions has been put forth as one of the important correlates of the current wealth distribution in the world. Specifically, from its original development, the State antiquity index of Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ) was shown to be positively associated with 1995 income and with the 1960–1995 GDP growth rate. Bockstette et al.’s aim was to use presence and duration of experience with macro polities as one of several potential indicators of societal complexity and level of technological advancement. The authors were interested in investigating the effect of early social and technological development on post-WW2 economic growth rates, and they assumed that the impact of very early experience would decay over time, so they did not attempt to code information on state presence before 1 CE or after 1950. They coded all countries with substantial populations for which relevant economic growth and other indicators were available, resulting in a sample of 104 countries, of which their analysis focused especially on 70 non-OECD member countries.

Roughly the same data set was also used by Chanda and Putterman ( 2005 ), and Chanda and Putterman ( 2007 ). Bockstette et al.’s data were subsequently expanded to include more ex-Communist countries (Iliev and Putterman 2007 ), more African countries (Cinyabuguma and Putterman 2011 ), and a few other countries for which complementary income or other required data had initially been viewed as unreliable. Based on this extended dataset, Putterman and Weil ( 2010 ) demonstrated that the ability of state history to predict current levels of development is greatly strengthened by replacing the state history that transpired on a given country’s territory by the weighted average state history of the places in which current residents’ ancestors lived in the past. This adjustment was motivated by the large movements of populations especially from “Old World” continents to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand after 1500. Chanda et al. ( 2014 ) apply the same procedure to demonstrate “persistence of fortune” of ancestral lines in former colonies that display a “reversal of fortune” (Acemoglu et al. 2002 ) in the absence of such ancestry and migration accounting. Footnote 3

In short, previous work has largely agreed on a positive association between long-run state history and current development. However, as scholars have acknowledged, the present shares complex links with the past. For instance, pre-1500 economic advantages seem to have become relative disadvantages among colonized countries during the colonial era (Acemoglu et al. 2001 , 2002 ). As of late, this idea of reversal has been revisited in two studies that are particularly relevant to our paper: Hariri ( 2012 ) presents compelling evidence that early (precolonial) experience of state institutions in countries outside Europe prevented them from transplanting democratic institutions brought by European colonizers, leaving instead an “autocratic legacy” in these countries. Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ) reveal a negative association between the time from Neolithic transition and current income levels in the Western agricultural core—Europe, North Africa and Southwestern Asia.

Furthermore, the long-run persistence literature has begun to reveal nonlinearities in how events in the very distant past affect economic development. For instance, the migration out of Africa is argued to have generated a wide array of genetic diversity levels in human populations around the world. In turn, predicted genetic diversity displays a hump-shaped relationship with indicators of economic development, including per capita income in 2000 (Ashraf and Galor 2013 ).

Thus, in light of these recent developments, allowing for a more flexible relationship between state history and contemporaneous levels of development is a natural extension to the literature. The closest paper to ours to have done so is Lagerlöf ( 2016 ), which presented simulations of a theoretical model consistent with a hump-shaped relationship where old states with a large extractive capacity and autocratic elites have been overtaken by younger and more democratic states with a greater growth potential. The empirical evidence hints at a concave relationship between contemporary income levels and state history in a cross-country sample, based on the 1–1950 CE state history index, but only when adjusted for post-1500 migration.

In the theoretical section, we present a framework outlining how states affect and are affected by economic development over history and in the empirical section we explore systematically this relationship considering the complete state histories.

2.2 Defining the “state”

How do we know when a state has emerged? The first challenge stems from the question of how to define the state, hardly a novel dilemma in social sciences. The classical understanding of the “state ” comes from Max Weber, who defined it as an entity which “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (Weber 1968 , p. 54). This implies that we should be looking for evidence of the initial monopolization of power within a certain territory.

However, there is also the question of the extent of this original jurisdiction: how large is the population or the territory subject to the power monopoly? Is, for instance, a village with 100 tribesmen, led by a chief, large enough to classify as “state”? It appears that we need to find an appropriate threshold to distinguish between small and large scale political organization. Therefore we adopt the convention that, although simple chiefdoms fall short of being states, a paramount chiefdom which incorporates multiple individually substantial chiefdoms can be understood as a form of incipient state. Hence we decided to begin according partial weight when a polity reaches this level. By this convention, for instance, the land of what is today Belgium came under large-scale political organization for the first time between 59 and 52 BCE, when it was integrated in the Roman Empire.

This agrees with established sociological and anthropological taxonomies of human societies throughout their evolution. For instance, Johnson and Earle ( 2000 ) proposed a division of societies into small-scale local group (further divided into family, village and the Big Man group) and larger-scale regional polity, which can be a chiefdom or a state. This distinction goes back even earlier, to Charles Tilly: “the term [state] includes city-states, empires, theocracies, and many other forms of government, but excludes tribes,” (Tilly 1990 , p. 1) and to Service’s ( 1962 ) proposed typology of bands/tribes/chiefdoms/states. Footnote 4

3 Theoretical framework

In this section, we outline the theoretical framework underlying the empirical analysis. We present the three basic premises of the model and then use four country case studies to illustrate the kind of dynamics that we have in mind which eventually produce a hump-shaped hypothesized relationship between state history and indicators of aggregate productivity. In the third subsection, we explain briefly how our intuitive framework fits into a more standard Malthusian growth model.

3.1 The basic premises

The key assumption of our framework is that up to a point, accumulated state history favors capacity building, taxation and the provision of public goods, which in turn spur economic growth. But beyond a certain level, state experience is conducive to the rise of extractive institutions and powerful elites that appropriate tax revenue rather than turn it into public goods. In the absence of constraining institutions, excessive centralization ultimately leads the state into stagnation. When more experienced states have reached this level, they tend to be overtaken by less experienced states still in their expansion phase (as bottom-up pressures in the latter bring about executive constraints). Of course, the state as such is not the only driver of growth, for example processes of technological improvement and trade expansion promoted in neighboring states may spill over to nearby areas. We nonetheless emphasize state experience as it is our focal empirical measure and it represents a key dimension of the development process over the very long run. We note again that by ”state experience” we refer not only to duration of presence of macro polities, but also degree of unity, territorial coverage, and locally rather than externally based rule.

The proposed relationship between state history and long-run economic development has three distinct premises: (1) In a newly established state, an increase in fiscal and institutional capacity and in central coordination from low levels have historically been conducive to productivity increases and economic growth. (2) Governments in long enduring states often tend to misuse the tax revenue at the expense of economic progress, despite having access to a solid fiscal capacity. (3) Citizens of countries having less powerfully consolidated states can exploit the experience and mistakes of countries with greater degrees of internally-imposed power centralization, to advance their levels of productivity beyond the maximum reached by the latter. We discuss the evidence supporting these premises below.

First, there is widespread agreement that a very short state history, especially if characterized by a lack of autonomy and rule instability generally implies weaker fiscal capacity. This has recently been discussed among others by Tilly ( 1990 ), Collier ( 2009 ), and Besley and Persson ( 2013 ). Increasing evidence shows that a consolidated bureaucracy enables investments in large public projects, technological innovation, and effective warfare, thus spurring economic growth. Recent empirical studies on the historical role of state capacity reveal strong correlations and potential causal links between administrative infrastructure, high taxes and economic prosperity (Besley and Persson 2013 ; Dincecco and Katz 2014 ).

Second, older and more autonomous states are more predisposed to maintain overly centralized, often abusive power structures. The first states developed naturally from the basic need to sustain collective action in large communities, particularly in response to attacks by predators (Tilly 1990 and Olson 1993 and more recently, Mayshar et al. 2015 ). Against “roving bandits,” it was welfare enhancing to have a member of the community become the dictator who collected rents used partly for defense, but mostly for self-gratification (“stationary bandit”). However, without mechanisms to commit to providing a certain level of public good, the autocrat became a “roving bandit,” maximizing rent-extraction. Hence, as Olson concludes, in an autocracy good economic performance is unsustainable in the long run.

Examples of political and economic collapse in ancient states due to overcentralization abound. For instance, the demise of the expansive Mesopotamian empire Ur III (c. 2000 BCE) came when local city-states sought independence, rejecting the overbearing supercentralized bureaucracy tailored to channel resources from the periphery to Ur and finance the defense of conquered regions (Yoffee 1988 ). Similarly, only a few centuries later Hammurabi’s great empire collapsed after disempowered local authorities rebelled against the drain on resources for the king’s glorification in Babylon, plunging the state into an irreversible economic crisis (c. 1600 BCE).

Complementary evidence comes from Hariri ( 2012 ) who shows that older indigenously formed states were more likely to develop autocratic institutions than later states. His proposed channel is that older states more successfully fended off attempts at colonization by European powers between the 15th and 20th centuries, and hence did not experience either direct transplantation of or cultural influence related to conceptions of democratic institutions (developed between the 18th and 20th centuries within the Western colonizing powers).

Non-inclusive institutions and political instability also undermine fiscal capacity (see e.g. Besley and Persson 2013 and Dincecco and Katz 2014 ). Footnote 5 Early states incurred frequent regime changes due to predatory attacks and internal strife. Footnote 6 Moreover, ancient warfare did not stimulate tax collection to the same extent modern warfare does (Gennaioli and Voth 2015 ). Lacking sustainable revenue generation and constraints against turning resources away from public goods and technological innovation made earlier states more vulnerable to economic stagnation and collapse.

Third, we argue that countries with less state experience tend to be able to reach a higher level of development than countries with more (and usually longer) state experience before their stagnation phase sets in. This is supported by the pattern of superior economic development in countries with an intermediate length of a civilization, like the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries, compared to countries like Egypt or Iraq, as discussed in recent work by Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ). Footnote 7 Again, the main arguments here are institutional: Olsson and Paik argue that old civilizations developed autocratic, hierarchical societies that were not conducive to the emergence of democracy and innovation, which became critical factors for economic growth during the modern era, leading to a “Western reversal of fortune” since the onset of agriculture. Footnote 8 Similarly, Lagerlöf ( 2016 ) argues the autocratic elite in old states made repeated investments in extractive capacity, while the lack of a similar extractive capacity in younger states facilitates the transition to a faster-growing democracy. Democratic political structures with constraints on executive power may have developed in initially peripheral areas like England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, because local and commercial elites effectively countered tendencies towards power centralization during the maturation process of these younger nation-states. Executive constraints, in turn, set the premise for unhindered technological innovation and may have mitigated the economic downturns accompanying domestic struggles for political leadership (Cox and Weingast 2015 ).

The regions once peripheral to the more ancient civilizations, slower to develop state institutions, were also less exposed to raids by roaming armies and to incursions by migrating peoples (such as the Persian, Hellenic, Hun, Islamic, Mongol and Turkic incursions in the old civilizational core regions). All these factors contributed to their ability to eventually overtake the levels of development in the older states. Footnote 9

3.2 The predicted pattern

The three central factors discussed above combine to form the basis of a stylized pattern of state history and economic development. Figure  1 a showcases this pattern, using four current countries, all located in the Western agricultural spread zone, Footnote 10 as case studies. We assume, for simplicity, a logistic, positive relationship between state history and aggregate productivity in the spirit of existing long-run models. Footnote 11 We do not, however, argue that every country necessarily follows this proximate pattern. Needless to say, the short account below does not have any ambition of providing a full description of the histories of Egypt, Italy, United Kingdom and Estonia. Please see the extensive Data Appendix for details about state development and our coding of historical events. Although we only use four examples, we do argue that the model below is applicable in broad outline also to the rest of the world. Footnote 12

To the far left in the figure, we use Egypt as an example of a very old civilization where the first signs of a state-like organization above tribal level emerged around 3200 BCE. From a low pre-state level of development, total productivity in the economy started to increase when the government of a full state was able to extract taxes from the population that, in turn, were transformed into public goods that provided security and a more efficient mode of agricultural production. A few centuries after the origins of the state, development took off in the classic period of the Old Kingdom with large cities, massive public monuments, codified language and a highly stratified, complex society.

However, as outlined in detail in our Data Appendix, the centralized government of Egypt began to run into problems by 2130 BCE during the 8th dynasty, when a decades-long drought and famine set off the fragmentation of central power. Repeated foreign invasions from the Hyksos in 1650 BCE and onwards implied that Egypt gradually lost its economic and military dominance over the region, until a succession of foreign invaders such as the Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans caused a marked slowdown in productivity growth. During the first millennium BCE, Egypt arguably started its long period of stagnation, characterized by slower productivity growth than the civilizations on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, which has by and large persisted to the present. By 1 CE, the Romans had conquered all lands around the Mediterranean and had surpassed the Egyptians technologically, militarily, and also in terms of state organization.

State origins in Italy can be traced back to the Etruscans in 850 BCE, more than two thousand years after similar developments in Egypt. As is well known, the Roman republic with its innovative political institutions and military organization, would soon become the greatest empire in Western Eurasia and forcefully dominate the lands around the Mediterranean. Economic stagnation set in with the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire circa 476 CE. While historians still argue about the main causes, it appears that political fragmentation and power struggles between the Church, senatorial aristocracy and the military led to territorial concessions to the barbarian invaders, a weakening of fiscal capacity and ultimately economic bankruptcy. Footnote 13 However, as seen in our stylized figure, Italy long continued to be the most developed country among our four countries even after the fall of Rome. The barbarian tribes that invaded Rome soon tried to mimic Roman traditions and Latin lived on as a lingua franca for centuries due to the rising power of the Pope in the Vatican. Merchant sea powers such as Venice and Genoa would become very powerful in the early Medieval period and the Renaissance period was still a very innovative period in the history of the Italian peninsula, with progress in many fields.

However, with the emergence of Protestantism in northern Europe, the discovery of new trading routes on the Atlantic, and the increasing power of emerging centralized states in France and Britain, Italy started its period of economic and technological stagnation. Footnote 14 Compared to Italy, the emergence of a centralized state in Britain came quite late, beginning with external governance by Rome around 50 BCE and internal polities from AD 401. Spurred by revenues from Atlantic trade and from institutional innovations that strengthened private property rights and accountable political institutions, Britain rose to eventually become the leading power in the world after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815. The cluster of innovations that formed the backbone of the Industrial Revolution contributed to a dramatic rise in output per capita and to the breakdown of the Malthusian link between income levels and fertility. After World War I, the United Kingdom arguably entered a phase of relative stagnation in which it clearly lagged behind, for instance, the United States.

Sources : Data presented below

Predicted pattern of accumulated state history and productivity. a Stylized model and illustrations of long-run state history and economic development. b Relationship between log GDP per capita in 2000 and state history in four illustrative countries. c Relationship between Technology Adoption and Statehist in 1 CE, 1500 CE and 2000 CE in full cross section of countries. Note : a Shows a stylized model of the long-run relationship between state history and aggregate productivity, using Estonia, England, Italy and Egypt as examples. In the left-hand side of the figure, we explain the typical development over time in the logistic development curves with the four basic states of origins, take-off, slowdown, and eventually stagnation. In the right-hand side of the figure, we map the development of the four states over time into a specific combination of state history scores \(S_i\) and its corresponding productivity from the left-hand side. b Shows the actual combinations of log GDP per capita in 2000 and the main state history score, using a depreciation rate of 1%, for these four illustrative countries. c Shows the predicted Technology Adoption index from Comin et al. ( 2010 ) fitted as a polynomial of extended Statehist , for 1 CE, 1500 CE and 2000 CE for our full cross-section of countries. The shaded areas are the confidence intervals of the mean.

The territory of current Estonia was populated by tribes with no organized government until 1237, when the area was taken by Denmark and by German knights. Sweden and Russia then controlled the region until 1919 when Estonia experienced a brief period of independence, before it was once again swallowed by the Soviet Union after World War II. The country did not become fully independent until 1991. The country therefore has a relatively low state history score. Nonetheless, the country has pushed for innovation, such as e-government, and economic growth has been fast since independence with income per capita standing at about 70% of that of United Kingdom in 2014.

Focusing on the states’ age part of state experience, the highly stylized logistic development curves in Fig.  1 a only differ along two dimensions: the timing of state emergence and the maximum level of attainable development, which increases with every new state. Our argument above proposes that highly centralized governments, typically in the earliest states, in the long run supported less economic dynamism than states where powers were devolved to different institutions. In addition, relative newcomers caught up with and eventually overtook older states. The Romans could learn from experience of Egypt that a state led by a divine regent was inferior to a republican and subsequently imperial order that made better use of human resources, politically and militarily. After 1500 CE, England could overtake Italy in part due to its access to trade and colonization opportunities associated with its Atlantic-facing location, but also due to far superior political institutions that strengthened the accountability of government, encouraged commerce, saw the emergence of superior naval and military capabilities, and led to a leading position in the emerging system of international credit. Footnote 15 Our long-run representation implies that Estonia may eventually overtake United Kingdom in productivity when it converges to its long-run maximum level where stagnation ensues. However, like many other countries, Estonia has not yet reached this stage.

To sum up, in Fig.  1 a we see that the long-term trend is that the relationship between state experience and productivity is predicted to turn negative among more mature states. This negative relationship arises since newer states reach a higher maximum level of productivity than their older neighboring states. However, due to the fact that many countries are still in a transition period to their long-run steady state level of productivity, there will be a positive-sloping part of the overall contemporary curve as well (the segment between Estonia and England in the figure). Taken together, these opposing trends imply a hump-shaped relationship between state history and contemporary measures of productivity.

In Fig.  1 b, we illustrate the consistency with this hypothesis of the pattern of data on accumulated state history and level of GDP per capita in 2000 CE for the four countries discussed above. In line with the prediction, we find that the fitted non-linear curve is indeed hump-shaped with an upward-sloping part between Estonia and United Kingdom and a negative-sloping part to the right. In the empirical section below, we investigate more formally this non-linear relationship in a large cross-section of countries.

It should further be noted that our model actually implies that the relationship between state history and aggregate productivity should change over time. In the year 500 BCE, for example, Fig.  1 a suggests that Egypt was ahead of Italy, which, in turn, was ahead of England and Estonia in terms of productivity, so that the relationship between state history and productivity at the time should be strictly positive.

As an initial test of our model, we show in Fig.  1 c the evolution over time of the relationship between state history and our preferred proxy for productivity (a composite index of technology adoption from Comin et al. 2010 ) for a cross-section of all countries in the world with available data. When the relationship is estimated early in history, in year 1 CE, we find indeed that the fitted non-linear curve has a positive slope, implying that older states (like Egypt) were more technologically advanced at the time. The curve then tilts to become distinctly concave with a short negative-sloping section in 1500 CE, with a clear hump-shape emerging in 2000 CE. In Figure C1 in the Appendix, we show that a similar pattern is evident in 1 CE and 1500 CE when we use population density as our proxy for productivity. Our interpretation of this evidence is that it is consistent with the model outlined in Fig.  1 a where the disadvantages of being an early state eventually manifest and lead to a gradually stronger negative relationship for older states. Footnote 16

Although Fig.  1 a considers the age of states only, other dimensions of state history, such as experience with home-based rule, can also help to account for some countries’ laggardness or advance. In some cases, in North Africa and the Middle East, colonization by middle-aged states (e.g British, French) may have generated negative effects on the level of stagnation of earlier developed states. Extractive institutions and other forms of economic domination fuelled by globalization may not only have helped the later comers to overtake earlier states, but may even have influenced the productivity stagnation or decline of the latter. Footnote 17

At the other end of the statehist spectrum, young colonial states, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa with no pre-colonial state institutions, have not only had short histories, but also have spent more than half of their macro-political histories under external rule. With modern state structures thrust upon them from without, they could not build institutional capacity organically. This left them vulnerable in the face of post-colonial challenges, against the backdrop of ethnic divisions, over-reliance on natural resources, and a legacy of extractive institutions (Collier 2009 ). The post-colonial experience highlights that extractive institutions are not exclusively a feature of longer state histories. As a possible consequence, post-independence productivity levels in many countries with young states have declined and income per capita is lower today than in 1960. Thus, while Fig.  1 c above suggests that the hump-shaped relationship between state history and aggregate productivity is only transient, other forces at play shed uncertainty over whether and when a globally negative relationship between the two variables will eventually emerge.

Note that if state history before year 1 CE is not counted, as was the case in the statehist index used by Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ) and subsequent papers until the present, the state history score for Egypt would be closer to that of Italy. This party explains why analyses based on the data heretofore available tended to find a positive relationship between state history and level of development around the end of the 20th Century (note again the exception of Lagerlöf 2016 , discussed above).

3.3 Towards a growth model

The stylized pattern above can be translated into a growth theory framework generating specific hypotheses to be tested in the empirical section.

Let \(S_{it}\) be the accumulated state history of a country i at time t , where a greater \(S_{it}\) implies that the country has had a more substantial experience of unified, home based, large-scale states. For simplicity, we assume that \(S_{it}\) is a positive, linear function of time from the date of state origins onwards. The first state is \(i=1\) . Thus, the index \(i\in \left\{ 1,2,3,\ldots \right\} \) reflects the historical order of state formation. Footnote 18 We define total factor productivity \(A_{it}\) as a function \(A_{i}(S_{it})\) with \(\partial A_{i}(S_{it})/\partial S_{it}>0\) , where the positive relationship with state history takes the form of a non-linear, logistic curve as in Fig.  1 a. At low levels of \(S_{it}\) , aggregate productivity increases sharply with \(S_{it}\) but as state history accumulates, stagnation sets in and \(\partial A_{i}(S_{it},i)/\partial S_{it} \) approaches zero.

We also assume that for any given level of state history \(S>0\) , \( A_{i}(S)<A_{i+1}(S)\) , i.e. of two countries with identical accumulated levels of state history, the state which emerged at later t will be able to attain a higher level of productivity at every level of S and eventually reach a higher maximum productivity. Footnote 19 This advantage stems mainly from the fact that new states could learn from the experiences of older states, or that countries in which the state developed later have been more successful at avoiding the overcentralization of power.

In the preindustrial era, in terms of a standard Malthusian growth model, total output in a territory is given by \(Y_{it}= A_{it}X_{i}^{\alpha }L_{it}^{1-\alpha }\) where \(Y_{it}\) is the total output, \(X_{i}\) the fixed amount of land in the country, and \(L_{it}\) the level of population (Ashraf and Galor 2011 ). In a long-run, Malthusian equilibrium, output per capita \( Y_{it}/L_{it}=y_{it}\) is constant since any temporary increases in \(Y_{it}\) are offset by higher birth rates, hence population, so that \(y_{it}\) eventually returns to its steady-state level \(\bar{y_i}.\)

Combining the elements above, we can express the Malthusian equilibrium as

where \(p_{it}=L_{it}/X_{i}\) is the population density of country i at time t . Over the long run, as productivity \(A_{it}\) grows in response to the increase in state experience \(S_{it}\) , population density \(p_{it}\) will also increase and country i ’s Malthusian equilibrium level of income per capita \(\bar{y_{i}}\) will remain intact. When two countries at a given point in time have reached the stagnation level, where \(A_{it}\) is unresponsive to further increases in \(S_{it}\) , the level of productivity \(A_{it}\) (as well as the level of population density \(p_{it}\) ) will be relatively lower in the country where states emerged early (with a higher \(S_{it}\) and a lower i ) compared to the country where states emerged later.

There are thus two countervailing effects of extensive state experience on \( A_{it}\) : On the one hand, greater state experience increases the level of productivity within a country directly, up to the steady-state (through fiscal capacity and centralized coordination). But since a higher level of state history also typically implies an early state, its level of productivity is limited compared to countries with later states. This pattern eventually gives rise to the hump-shaped cross-sectional relationship between \(A_{it}\) and \(S_{it}\) some time during the Malthusian era. Note that our model also implies a hump-shaped relationship between \( S_{it}\) and \(p_{it}\) . We expect these patterns to emerge by the end of the Malthusian era and therefore, in the empirical section, we test these hypotheses using an index of technology as a proxy for \(A_{it}\) and levels of population density and urbanization rates as our measures of \(p_{it}\) in 1500 CE.

In the industrial era, the Malthusian link between productivity levels \( A_{it}\) and levels of population density \(p_{it}\) typically disappears after a period of adjustment. Income levels per capita \(Y_{it}/L_{it}=y_{it}\) then tend to be strongly positively correlated with higher levels of \(A_{it}\) (Hall and Jones 1999 ). For the contemporary era, we will therefore proxy aggregate productivity by income per capita, which is of course also the standard measure of economic prosperity, and study whether the the historical impact of \(S_{it}\) on \(A_{it}\) prevails even after the transition to modern economies.

In this section, we outline how the existing index of state history has been extended to cover the BCE period. We will also briefly present some of the key tendencies in the new data series.

4.1 Constructing the index

The construction of the index for the BCE period follows the principles developed by Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ), applied here to 159 modern-day countries. Footnote 20 We use evidence of written records where available. Where not extant, we rely on archaeological data, following a “diagnostic traits” approach: we consider material manifestations of the monopolization of power, as an “archaeological confirmation of the process of state formation” (Jones and Kautz 1981 , pp. 16–17). These can be monumental structures, such as palaces, temples or large urban settlements etc. In the case of Iraq, for instance, there is the transition from small to large urban centers with grand architectural structures such as Uruk in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE. Footnote 21

The second task is to mark the transition from chiefdom to fully-fledged state. Following the paradigm of the evolution of pristine states from chiefdoms (see e.g. Carneiro 1981 ; Earle 1987 ; Flannery 1995 ; Marcus 1992 ; Spencer 1990 ; Spencer and Redmond 2004 ), we mark this distinction in our data by assigning the following values: Band/tribe is marked by a rule score of 0, paramount chiefdom is assigned 0.75 and fully-fledged state receives the value 1. Robert Carneiro emphasizes that the paramount chiefdom is the evolutionary link between autonomous bands or tribes and the state. Footnote 22

While it is difficult to know exactly where the chiefdom ends and where the state begins in pre-history, we have made efforts to draw a sensible line where the evidence suggests a noteworthy evolution in socio-political organization. Footnote 23 While this approach is not uncontroversial, it is the most feasible given limited documentary resources. We further detail the assignment of scores in a later section.

For each country, the time of emergence of the first state institutions on its territory is identified, as defined above. State age is defined as the time elapsed from this date until 2000 CE. The oldest state was established on the land of today’s Iraq around 3500 BCE. Hence, the time for all countries is divided into 110 periods of 50-years.

For each country i and half century t , scores are assigned to reflect three dimensions of state presence, based on the following questions Footnote 24 :

Is there a government above the tribal level? Score component \( z_{it}^{1}\) receives 1 point if yes, 0.75 if the government can at best be described as a paramount chiefdom and 0 points if no government is present.

Is this government foreign or locally based? \(z_{it}^{2}\) is 1 if the rule is locally based, 0.5 if externally based, and 0.75 for local government with substantial foreign oversight. Footnote 25

How much of the territory of the modern country was ruled by this government? \(z_{it}^{3}\) reflects the proportions of the territory under some rule: 1 (over 50%), 0.75 (25–50%), 0.5 (10–25%), 0.3 (under 10%). Footnote 26

Time is indexed by t and refers to a 50-year period ranging from \(t=0\) for 3500–3451 BCE when the first state arose, to \(t=109\) for 1951–2000 CE). For every such time interval, we compute a composite State index score by multiplying the three components by one another and by 50 Footnote 27 :

Finally, joining the BCE-with the preexisting CE-era series, we aggregate all “flow” scores \(s_{it}\) into Statehist —the comprehensive index of the cumulative state history. Footnote 28 The index is normalized by the score of a hypothetical state with full discounted scores between 3500 BCE and the period of interest \(\tau \) :

This cumulative Statehist index \(S_{i\tau }\) ranges from 0 to 1 and can be calculated at virtually any point in history \(\tau =\left\{ 0,1,\ldots 109\right\} \) . We calculate it mainly for 1500 CE (at \(\tau =99\) ) and for 2000 CE, usually discounting the more distant past relative to the present by setting \(\rho>\) 0, although usually at a modest value. For instance, the Statehist value of a state with full scores discounted at 1% between 3500 BCE and 2000 CE is 3359.79. The previous literature has employed \(\rho =0.05\) , in light of the reasonable assumption that the more distant past matters less today than recent history. With the additional data, however, this rate gives almost no weight to the long stream of \(s_{it}\) -scores before 1 CE. Footnote 29 While it of course remains to be seen below just how useful placing weight on the distant past will be, our convention is to employ the 1% discount factor when calculating the normalized Statehist score. Footnote 30

To answer the three questions (a-c) above in a manner that is consistent across periods, we relied mainly on information in the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, but also additional sources where information in Britannica was insufficient. We provide additional detail on our data sources and illustrate the coding process and further data aggregations in online Appendix B. Accompanying this paper is also an online Data Coding Appendix, which provides a comprehensive list of coding decisions for all country-period observations.

4.2 A brief look at the data

In this section we present some patterns that arise from the complete state history time series and the data used in forthcoming analyses.

Firstly, we note that the evolution of state institutions in the world follows approximately an exponential upward trend with periods of rapid growth punctuated by periods of stagnation (Fig.  2 ). The graph shows the log of the aggregated percentage score for all contemporary countries in our sample on the vertical axis plotted against number of years BCE or CE on the horizontal axis. The percentage score in period t is calculated as State index world \((t)=100\cdot {\sum }_{i=1}^{N}s_{it}/\left( N\cdot 50\right) \) where \(N=159\) is the number of included countries and where \(s_{it}\in \left[ 0,50\right] \) is the state history score for country i during 50-year interval t , as described above. Footnote 31 A value close to 0% in this world index indicates that there is almost no sign of state presence in any of the included countries in period t whereas a score of 100 means that all 159 countries reach the maximum value \(s_{it}=50\) in our state measure during that period. Footnote 32

Several periods are characterized by rapid state evolution whereas other periods are marked by a general decline. The first boom in state emergence appears already in 3500–2300 BCE, which then ends with a long period of stagnation. The other major stagnations in the figure happened around 1750 BCE, 1200 BCE, and 400 CE. A second period of rapid growth was 850 BCE–1 CE during the Iron Age. From just after the collapse of the Roman empire around 450 CE, aggregate state emergence shows a steady upward trend.

This pattern is also visible in Fig.  3 , which in addition shows the regional aggregated percentage score for all contemporary countries in our sample (this figure displays world and regional averages of the State index , rather than the natural log of that average as in Fig.  2 , allowing the reader to get a sense of the trend in a form some may find more intuitive). We disaggregate the evolution of state history into the four main agricultural core areas: Western, Eastern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas. Footnote 33 These four areas are created on the basis of how Neolithic agriculture and civilization spread during early historical times.

Emergence of states in the world 3500 BCE–2000 CE. Note : The graph shows the logged value of the aggregate State index for 159 countries identified during 110 50-year intervals between 3500 BCE and 2000 CE. The value 100 would signify all 159 countries in our sample are full states, as defined in our text, including high geographical extent and unity and being entirely locally based. On the horizontal axis, negative values imply years BCE whereas positive values show the CE period. A linear fitted regression line has been included. The State index is calculated as described in the text

Emergence of states in four agricultural core areas and in the world as a whole 3500 BCE–2000 CE. Note : The figure shows the development of the aggregated State index in the Western agricultural zone (including 62 current countries in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, as well as Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), Eastern Asia (20 countries), Americas (including 27 countries in North and South America and in the Caribbean), and Sub-Saharan Africa (47 countries). Oceania (only 3 countries in our sample) is omitted. It also shows the aggregate index for the 159 countries in the world as a whole (solid black line). On the horizontal axis, negative values imply years BCE whereas positive values show the CE period. Particular years with trend breaks are marked

When we divide up the world in this way, some striking historical differences between the regions appear: State evolution started earliest in the Western area, with Eastern Asia lagging behind until rough convergence (indeed, initially overtaking) around 500 CE, with the other regions gaining steam later and all converging only toward the end of the era of European colonialism. State emergence was earliest in Eastern Asia and in the Western region. Interestingly, both of these early civilizations took off on a more rapid path after 850 BCE. By the time of the Western Roman collapse after 450 CE, Asian state development overtakes the Western one for the first time. Footnote 34

The other two regions, the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa, clearly lag behind, particularly after the Eurasian turning point 850 BCE. From about 500 CE, the pace of state emergence starts to rise in Sub-Saharan Africa. When the colonial era starts in the late 15th century CE, the lagging regions experience a dramatic increase in the State index . This increase is of course to a great extent driven by the emergence of colonial states, created by European powers (although \(z^2\) is capped at 0.5 so long as colonial status continues). By the final period of observation (1951–2000), the Americas has the highest score on state presence among all regions in the world. Footnote 35

The Statehist index and other variables related to state experience, as well as outcomes and control variables used in all forthcoming analyses are summarized in Table  1 below. Full definitions of each variable are given in the online Appendix.

5 State history and economic development

We now proceed to analyze the relationship between state history and different indicators for historical and contemporary levels of productivity. Our proxies for aggregate productivity will be an index of technology adoption, population density, rates of urbanization, and GDP per capita.

5.1 State history and pre-industrial economic development

State history and productivity in 1500 CE

We begin with the empirical question of the relationship between state history and productivity in the Malthusian era. The key predicted pattern in Fig.  1 a was a hump-shaped relationship between our state history measure and aggregate productivity in a cross-section of countries, reflecting on the one hand that newer or more inexperienced states tend to be in the process of converging to their own maximum productivity potential, whereas more experienced states already have attained a relatively low maximum level. Was such a tendency in place already in 1500 CE?

As a starting point, we proxy historical productivity with the average index of technology adoption constructed by Comin et al. ( 2010 ). Using various data sources on the presence and complexity of various technologies, the country-level index captures advances in five sectors: agriculture, transportation, communications, writing, and military. The index is computed for 1500 CE and 2000 CE, using slightly different approaches, which we describe in some detail in online Appendix A.

In order to test this prediction, we set up the following model:

On the left hand-side of Eq. ( 4 ) we have the average technology adoption index in 1500 CE. On the right-hand side we include our main independent variable, Statehist (the cumulative index shown in Eq. ( 3 ) accumulated in 1500 CE), both linear and squared, to allow for a quadratic relationship. The Statehist index is normalized with respect to 3500 BCE–1500 CE and computed using a 1% discount rate per period. This equation captures the potentially hump-shaped relationship to Statehist across countries. We also consider variants of (4) that include additional controls, represented by:

\(Z_{i}\) is a vector of historical controls including: \(Agyears_{i}\) , the time before present since the transition to agriculture in the country in question, a variable taken from Putterman and Trainor ( 2006 ); \( Origtime_{i}\) —the approximate time since the first settlement on the territory of the modern-day country by anatomically modern humans, a variable introduced by Ahlerup and Olsson ( 2012 ) as a determinant of the variation in levels of ethnic diversity across the world. In a more flexible specification, we include the square of \(Origtime_{i}\) in order to account for recent developments in the literature postulating that the patterns of human settlement in prehistory may have nonlinear effects on later economic development (Ashraf and Galor 2013 ). In the same specification we also include State age \(_{i}\) in 1500 CE (the time elapsed in 1500 CE from the date of state emergence). \(X_{i}\) is a vector containing geographic controls. These include: the absolute latitude of the centroid of the modern-day country i , whether the country is landlocked, its distance to coast or ocean-navigable river, average elevation, land suitability for agriculture, climatic variables for temperature and precipitation, and the risk of malaria. Footnote 36 \(\lambda _{c}\) is a vector of continent fixed effects. The results are displayed in Table  2 . Columns (1) and (2) present linear and quadratic versions of Eq. ( 4 ), while columns (3)–(7) add further controls, as in Eq. ( 5 ).

In column (1) we display the simple association between technology adoption and Statehist, which is positive and significant. In column (2), where we add Statehist squared, our main coefficients of interest, \( \beta _{1}\) and \(\beta _{2},\) display a concave pattern: \(\beta _{1}\) is positive, while \(\beta _{2}\) is negative, both significant at 1%. In the online Appendix Table D1, we estimate this specification using Statehist discounted by alternative factors, 0.1% and 2%, which reveal the qualitatively identical result of significant concavity. As concavity does not imply non-monotonicity, to test for the latter, we run piece-wise estimations using the linear Statehist separately in countries below and above the technology-maximizing level of Statehist implied from Eq. ( 4 ) (which is 0.44, with only 9 countries recording a higher Statehist of 1500 CE ). Footnote 37 The results reported for different Statehist discount rates in the online Appendix Table D2, including our main case 1% rate, show positive insignificant slopes above the maximizing Statehist . Therefore, we do not find an inverse-u shape in the case of technology adoption in 1500 CE.

In column (4) we add to the model the first historical control - Agyears (shown to be positively significantly correlated with the dependent variable in column 3, for comparison purposes). Its inclusion only slightly changes the signs and the magnitude of the coefficients of the Statehist terms. Moreover, the effect of the time from transition to agriculture is reduced relative to column (3). When we also add Origtime and geographical controls in column (5), the magnitude of the estimates changes slightly, but the relationship remains concave. The continent fixed effects in the last two columns reduce the squared term’s coefficient, which becomes insignificant. Footnote 38

State history, population and urbanization in 1500 CE

We now inquire whether this concave pattern is reflected in other commonly used indicators of historical productivity: population density (Table  3 , panel A) and urbanization rate in 1500 CE (Table  3 , panel B). All specifications are analogous to those in Table  2 .

The extended Statehist is positively and significantly correlated with past population density and urbanization (column 1). Column 2 shows, however, that a quadratic relationship fits the data even better, with both linear and square terms obtaining highly significant estimated coefficients (the same holds when using discounts of 0.1% of 2%, as Appendix Table D3 shows). The population density maximizing level of Statehist is that of Greece (around 0.42). For population density, the below/above maximum regressions including only linear Statehist (Appendix Table D4) display negative slopes above the maximizing value of Statehist , significant when we use a 2% discount rate for Statehist . Hence, some evidence indicates an inverse-u shape already forming in 1500 CE (albeit not when we look at urbanization, which is maximized by a Statehist value of 0.64, which is above the range represented in the data). Both for population density and urbanization, quadratic yet monotonic patterns emerge in the specifications which introduce controls and continent fixed effects. In conclusion, while there are clear signs of diminishing benefits of additional state experience as of 1500 CE, there are few indications that added state experience was a net liability for more experienced states as of that year. Footnote 39

5.2 State history and current economic development

In our theoretical framework, the downward sloping portion of the cross-country Fig.  1 a was assumed to result from less experienced states overtaking more experienced ones. The other portion may be explained by the many states in several parts of the world which emerged only in recent centuries. Thus, we expect contemporary levels of development to correlate in a non-monotonic fashion with accumulated Statehist . To investigate this, we estimate the model with technology adoption and GDP per capita in 2000 CE as a quadratic function of state history. The results are displayed in Tables  4 ,  5 and 6 below.

However, when analyzing the current levels of technological sophistication or output, using the raw Statehist data means that we only account for the history within the territories of present-day countries. This ignores the state history of other territories from which people migrated in recent centuries to settle in new territories. Population flows after 1500, when the era of colonization began, are instrumental in mapping the impact of historical events to today’s economic performance. This is because the ancestors of today’s population have evidently brought with them the history, the know-how and the experience with state institutions from their places of origin (Putterman and Weil 2010 ; Comin et al. 2010 ; Ashraf and Galor 2013 ).

We therefore also use an alternative measure of state history which is obtained by adjusting the 1500 CE Statehist index with the migration matrix developed by Putterman and Weil ( 2010 ). We then re-estimate our model using this new measure— the ancestry-adjusted Statehist— which, for each country, represents the average pre-industrial Statehist of its year 2000 population’s ancestors, with the weights for each source country being the share of then-living ancestors estimated to have lived on its present-day territory. These alternative results are displayed in Tables  4 , panel B and  6 .

Technology adoption in 2000 CE displays a similar concave relationship with year 2000 Statehist as did the technology index of year 1500 CE (Table  4 , panel A). Furthermore, using the ancestry-adjusted Statehist in 1500 CE to explain the differences in average technology adoption in 2000 yields robustly significant estimates across all specifications, with larger magnitudes and higher R-squared statistics than when using the Statehist in 2000 CE. This result is consistent with our theoretical expectation that the relationship between technology and state experience was concave in the late Malthusian era, and that it was transmitted all the way into modern-day levels of technology adoption. The unconditional relationship shown in column (2) of Table  4 , panel B, withstands using different discount rates for Statehist , and the relationship exhibits the downward sloping portion of an inverted-u shape in regressions with a linear Statehist above and below its implied maximizing value (panel B in Tables D5–D8). Footnote 40

Given the central role of aggregate productivity in the standard production functions for total output, we argue the hump-shape should also emerge when we look at GDP. Figure  4 illustrates the essence of our findings. On the Y-axis we have the logarithm of GDP per capita in 2000 and on the X-axis we have the extended Statehist (normalized with respect to 3500 BCE–2000 CE and computed using a 1% discount rate per period).

Non-linear relationship between Log GDP per capita in 2000 and Statehist index. Note : The figure shows a fitted quadratic regression line corresponding to the estimates in Table  5 , panel A, column 2, with 154 country observations distinguished by 3-letter country isocodes. On the Y-axis we have the logarithm of GDP per capita in 2000 and on the X-axis we have the extended Statehist (see Eq. ( 3 ) above). An increase in Statehist by 0.1 is interpreted approximately as an additional 300 years of effective fully autonomous statehood

The figure displays a scatter plot of all countries in the sample, while also allowing for a quadratic fit of the relationship between output and Statehist. The hump-shaped relationship emerges when using the extended Statehist. Footnote 41 In the online Appendix Figure C3, we show that the state history index based on 1–1950 CE data does not display the downward sloping portion seen in Fig.  4 .

We estimate the quadratic relationship to the logarithm of GDP per capita in 2000 CE in Table  5 , panel A. In panel B, the Statehist 1–1950 CE data are used for purposes of comparison. All specifications are analogous to the ones in the previous tables.

As before, the simple correlation between per capita income and Statehist (column 1) is positive and similar in magnitude across the two panels, but slightly less precisely estimated when the independent variable is the extended Statehist . In column (2) we add the squared Statehist , and the results mirror the pattern in Fig.  4 : In panel A, both coefficients are significant at 1%, and their signs confirm the concave relationship between log per capita GDP and state history. By contrast, in panel B, the counterpart of this specification using Statehist 1–1950 CE displays coefficients with the same signs but much smaller and insignificant (the coefficient of the quadratic term becomes positive when controls are included). Footnote 42

While Agyears is significantly positively correlated with modern-day GDP (column 3), when we control for it alongside the linear and quadratic Statehist , its inclusion hardly changes the signs and the magnitudes of the coefficients of the Statehist terms. Moreover, the effect of the time from transition to agriculture is insignificant when the Statehist terms are added (column 4), indicating that although early states may only have arisen where agriculture had long been practiced, a country’s subsequent experience with states eclipses its experience of agriculture as a predictor of current productivity. As with technology, the concavity is robust to using alternative discount rates (0.1 and 2%) to calculate Statehist (Appendix Tables D5–D6). Moreover, separate linear estimates below and above the maximizing Statehist display a large, significant downward slope for countries in the upper range, consistent with Fig.  4 (Table D6, in the online Appendix). Footnote 43 \(^{,}\) Footnote 44 This confirms that a very limited or very extensive experience with state institutions can become a relative disadvantage across nations.

The concavity results are robust to the inclusion of Origtime , as well as geographical controls and continent fixed effects. Footnote 45 However, the coefficients on Statehist squared are smaller than the linear terms’ coefficients as more controls are introduced in columns (5)-(7). This implies that the optimum level of Statehist falls very close to, or outside the top of its range. Does this mean that the hump-shaped relationship between state history and income suggested by the earlier estimates (e.g., columns 2 and 4) is mistaken? We think not. Our framework posits such a relationship between state history and productivity as emerging across countries, whereas each individual country’s trajectory is described by a logistic curve, with no downward sloping portion (see the left side of Fig.  1 a). As the number of factors controlled by our regressions grows, we may be approaching a situation in which the estimated coefficients on the focal Statehist variables will reflect only differences between otherwise nearly identical countries within a very narrow sub-region (countries not only in the same continent but sharing almost identical geographic coordinates, climate, etc.), as well as a very similar date of state origins, as indicated by the inclusion in column (7) of the variable state age . The resulting estimates of concavity without evidence of a downward sloped portion is consistent with the logistic curve pattern expected for any single country (left side of Fig.  1 a) rather than the hump shape predicted for the full cross-section of countries over which state histories show wider variation.

Is our finding of concavity of per capita GDP with respect to state history in fact attributable to having included coding of state presence in the BCE era in our analysis, unlike previous studies? To see that this is the case, compare panel B of Table  5 , which shows estimates of similar specifications but using the old state history variable covering years 1–1950 CE only. The main estimates are neither significant nor similar in terms of signs with the estimates in panel A.

Lastly, from column (2) in Table  5 , based on the estimates of our coefficients of interest, we can infer that the predicted income-maximizing level of Statehist is reached at 0.355, which is very close to that of the United Kingdom and most countries in Western Europe.

The effects’ magnitudes are not straightforward to assess from the tables. However, some numerical examples may show more clearly how the impact upon per capita GDP of an increase in Statehist depends on the level of state experience at which the change occurs. Take for instance the case of Indonesia, which has 1350 years of state existence and a Statehist score of 0.254. If we could hypothetically increase the Statehist score by 0.1 (which is 58% of Statehist’s standard deviation, but enough to add 335 full-state years making it reach the level of the UK score), the implied approximate effect on per capita GDP in 2000 would be roughly a 20% increase, from USD 773 to USD 944 in 2000. Footnote 46 The opposite would happen if we were to increase the value of the Statehist score by 0.1 for China, which starts off with a value of 0.582 (a value exceeded by only five countries in the sample): the approximate effect would be a drop in per capita GDP in 2000 by 44.4%.

Taken together, our estimation results so far are consistent with our predicted pattern. Moreover, this becomes evident only when we employ the new extended Statehist index. Are the estimates improved by accounting for the state histories of the ancestors of present-day populations, instead of the state histories of places? To investigate this, we estimate the model for per capita GDP above using the ancestry-adjusted Statehist index. The results are displayed in Table  6 , where we use the Statehist index in 1500 CE adjusted by the migration matrix (as in previous studies, but for the first time including full state history before 1 CE). Footnote 47

We find that the concave relationship between per capita income and the ancestry-adjusted Statehist is robust to all specifications and that the coefficients of interest are significant at 1% level in all columns in panel A. Moving from a linear (column 1) to a quadratic function (column 2) in Statehist as in all other tables, greatly improves the goodness of fit, strengthening the case for a nonlinear specification. Moreover, the explanatory power of the model (as measured by the regression R-squared) when we introduce only the ancestry-adjusted Statehist terms (column 2) is now 23.4% versus 5.2% for unadjusted Statehist . Footnote 48

In the online Appendix Table D12 we look at how sensitive the results from specifications where we include controls and county fixed effects are to excluding various countries from the sample. The estimates describing a concave function are significant when we exclude in turn the Middle-East and Sub-Saharan Africa, but the standard errors increase and the Statehist squared is insignificant when we exclude both these and North Africa (column 4). This is because this exclusion takes away a large part of the variation in Statehist that is due to very short and very long state age. Nevertheless, the signs and magnitudes of the coefficients point to the same concave relationship. There is no evidence of a concave relationship in the sample of European colonies, which are all very young and with little experience with home-based rule relative to the rest of the sample (median age 550 years and average 1180 years). Footnote 49

5.3 Statehist mechanisms

So far we have looked at the accumulated Statehist, which summarizes via their interaction (i) the variation in state age (the time elapsed since the first occurrence of \(z^1>0\) ), Footnote 50 (ii) the degree to which the state was home-based ( \(z^2\) ), and (iii) the state’s territorial completeness and unity ( \(z^3\) ). In this sub-section, we briefly investigate the distinct effects of those three components and their respective contributions to the inverse-u shape. In Appendix Table D13, we estimate variants of columns (1), (2), (5) and (7) from Table  2 , replacing Statehist with each of its components, in turn. Without controls (column 2), a quadratic relationship is found for each component (panels A–C), although for \(z^3\) (territorial completeness), the coefficients in quadratic specification (2) are not statistically significant, whereas when included alone, the level term attains a positive coefficient (in column 1) that is significant at the 5% level. When all three separate component terms are included simultaneously, in panel D, the results are similar. Two of the three components (state age, and territorial completeness/unity) also obtain highly significant positive coefficients in a strictly linear specification (column 1). Taken together, these results support that each component, not only state age, has some importance in its own right, a finding not explored in previous studies. When additional controls are added in column (3), and continent fixed effects as well in column (4), only the coefficient on level of \(z^2\) (home rule) remains statistically significant. Its positive sign suggests that having been independent rather than part of an externally based empire is most robustly and significantly associated with favorable outcomes, among the three components. Footnote 51

5.4 Borders endogeneity and spatial dependence

We now turn to the issue of whether endogeneity of borders raises concerns about the reliability of our findings. Throughout history, borders shifted as states consolidated or weakened their administrative or military capacities, or incurred political regime changes. For instance, Alesina and Spolaore ( 1997 ) showed that democratization can lead to secession, an example of which is the case of the Balkan countries. Gennaioli and Voth ( 2015 ) showed that the post-1500 military innovations in Europe led to more efficient warfare, stronger state capacity to finance warfare, and imminent territorial conquests or redistribution, which have redefined country borders. Their examples of Silesia, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Duchy of Milan are joined by numerous others, such as the regions split in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 amongst Sweden, France, The Dutch Republic, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. European colonisation is a leading example where late comers, having overtaken older states, proceeded to redraw the borders of these states in Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Against this backdrop, defining the state experience and economic indicators on the basis of present-day country borders may induce several risks.

First, there is a risk of retroactive measurement error, due to the fact that the current countries’ territories used to compute historical values of Statehist often bear little resemblance with the geopolitical logic in ancient times (with a few exceptions like Norway, Sweden, and Japan). We should note that our definition of Statehist requires keeping track of the changing boundaries of states-of-the-time within and across half-centuries, and the scores account for multiple polities, the internal or external basis of their rule and the percentage of territory they occupied within what may be thought of as an arbitrarily defined territory, from the standpoint of early periods. Although the state presence in some polities or sub-territories may be measured with error, if this error is random, at worst our estimates are biased towards zero. It would be more difficult to predict the bias if measurement error was correlated with the outcome variables, e.g. if borders shifted through conquest or colonization to include territories with more/less state history, productivity and technological sophistication, potentially also associated with the accuracy of data sources. Even so, the amalgamation of low information areas together into countries with better information and more state history is likely to lead to a reduction of error for the low Statehist parts of those countries, since the histories of such areas are typically better documented than are those of otherwise similar areas more distant from record-keeping societies. A second concern is that, as discussed earlier, productivity and technological sophistication sometimes drive conquest, moving borders and influencing state history. While we cannot fully dismiss the problem of endogenous borders, the issue of selection into state history is partly mitigated in cross-country regressions with contemporaneous economic development by the fact that whatever state-level polities existed at this and that period within the boundaries of what are today countries have changed their borders on many occasions and for a wide variety of reasons.

An alternative to using country borders could have been to divide the world randomly into equal-sized grid cells and then study the history of states and economic development in each such cell (e.g. Michalopoulos 2012 ). State history has been coded at the grid-cell level for sub-Saharan Africa after 1000 CE by Depetris-Chauvin ( 2014 ). For the present study, however, this would require constructing disaggregated data on a global scale for nearly six thousand years. The challenge with this approach, in addition to the sheer magnitude of the exercise, would be the precarious state history information for many grid cells. Average quality of data may well be higher with the countries-of-today approach than would be achievable with grid cells, unless a research effort several orders-of-magnitude larger were undertaken. With these caveats in mind, to the extent that researchers are interested in tracking the histories of countries in order to understand contemporary levels of development, the modern configuration of countries is still a natural point of departure.

A third concern, which is particularly salient in the context of jointly determined borders, is that the histories and outcomes of neighbouring countries transcend national boundaries. Countries in the same geographical or geopolitical regions tend to have correlated productivity levels and experience similar productivity shocks, for instance through contemporary diffusion of new technologies. In the presence of such spatial spillovers, the standard assumptions on the independence of observations are violated, and OLS regressions might yield biased and inefficient estimates. In this case, modelling spatial dependence is a more suitable approach. To account for potential spatial autocorrelation in the disturbances, we estimated alternative regressions using the Conley ( 1999 ) correction of the standard errors. Footnote 52 The results, displayed in Appendix Table D17 (panel A for Statehist and panel B for Ancestry-Adjusted Statehist) are very similar to the counterparts in Tables  5 (panel A) and  6 , despite the fact that standard errors are, if anything, slightly larger than in the OLS regressions. We also estimate models where we allow the dependent variable to be a function of neighbouring countries’ outcomes (the spatial autoregressive model—SAR) and where we allow both the dependent variable and the errors terms to follow spatial autoregressive processes (SARAR). Footnote 53 In both models we input a matrix of weights given by the inverse great-circle distances between geodesic centroids. Footnote 54 Appendix Tables D18 and D19 show that the results with the Ancestry-Adjusted Statehist are robust across models, and that the SARAR results for Statehist generate qualitatively similar but insignificant results. We also report the SARAR estimates using a contiguity matrix defined not by geographical proximity, but by whether countries share the same legal origins (Appendix Table D20). Footnote 55 All results hold, with the linear and squared terms of both extended and Ancestry-Adjusted indices remaining significant. In sum, accounting for spatial spillovers does little to affect the results with extended state history and leaves the results with Ancestry-Adjusted indices unchanged. Footnote 56

6 Discussion and conclusions

To sum up, we have presented a model of the role of state history in economic development wherein growing state experience is associated with increases in productivity in the individual country, but where countries with less history of state presence may have a productivity advantage compared to ones with more experience of state institutions. We have coded and assembled a comprehensive data series on state history from state emergence (which often occurred before the Common Era) to 2000 CE for a sample of 159 countries, building on the previously constructed State antiquity index of Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ). The resulting empirical analysis revealed consistent reduced-form regressions, where a hump-shaped relationship is confirmed between extended Statehist and technology and economic development in 2000 CE. This relationship is robust to using a fairly wide range of discounts of the past, to controlling for duration of reliance on agriculture, and to assuming that migrants beginning with the age of European colonization carried the state experience of their home countries with them in the form of a portable and transmissible cultural heritage. Although the estimated coefficients cease to indicate an absolute decline in income at the highest levels of state experience after the addition of enough controls, this finding is consistent with the relationship being concave and monotonic within the individual country, the hump-shaped pattern being predicted only for cross-country and evidently cross-regional comparison at a particular historical juncture.

Although an extensive analysis of the causal mechanisms is beyond the scope of this paper, we believe we have offered support from the literature that improvements in the quality of institutions that are more easily achieved by states of intermediate age provide a plausible explanation for this pattern. Our finding appears to be consistent with the fact that while there is indeed a great deal of persistence of early societal advantages, it is also the case that the technological and institutional know-how of societies can slowly diffuse to neighbouring societies through migration or trade. These societies with younger states and/or a higher degree of autonomy can then pick the best practices of the older societies and potentially avoid some of the pitfalls that might have become a drag for the old civilizations.

State capacity might be one example of such institutional transfer across state borders. The ability to levy taxes and to consolidate an administrative infrastructure has recently been shown to produce regional spill-overs to neighbouring areas’ economic performance (Acemoglu et al. 2015 ). Such spill-overs might occur more easily, however, among countries sharing similar histories, including depth of experience with centralized authority.

There are also other factors that have been proposed for explaining the reversal in the Western core, including environmental degradation in the Fertile Crescent and in parts of the Mediterranean region. Once agriculture spread out of the Fertile Crescent, the more robust loess soils of northern Europe, combined with a reliance on rain rather than irrigation for cultivation, proved to be an advantage in the long run (Jones 1981 ). It has also been suggested that the rise and fall of dominant empires of the Western core followed cycles of expansion, over-extension, and eventually decline, with a gradual shift of power towards the northwest (Kennedy 1989 ). Acemoglu et al. ( 2005 ) show that the emergence of Atlantic trade after 1500 CE had a major impact on the rise of for instance Spain and the United Kingdom. Footnote 57

A similar process can potentially explain comparative development in East Asia. Japan’s less powerful central court and greater perceived vulnerability to potential Western colonizers led it to undertake decisive modernization measures almost a century before China. This development had spillover effects on Korea and Taiwan, all young states in comparison with China.

In summary, the new pattern uncovered by the extended Statehist shows that although greater depth of state experience is associated with better economic outcomes when the measure used emphasizes mainly the millennium before 1500, the relationship of state history to income and technology includes a range of excessive age or senescence, if we account for the BCE millennia and give them sufficient weight. We leave it for future work to attempt to identify the exact mechanisms behind this pattern. However, we believe caution is recommended against the interpretation of these disadvantages as fully automatic and insurmountable consequences of long state histories. Our view is not that a long uninterrupted state history is always bad for economic development and as such undesirable. We believe this is a story of moderation in the exercise of centralized power and adaptability of the state institutions to the ever-changing economic realities. While those in the middle range of state history have thus far exhibited such moderation and adaptability more effectively, on average, there remains a considerable space of indeterminacy within which political actors may still exert influence over their countries’ fates.

See for instance North ( 1990 ), Acemoglu et al. ( 2005 ), Acemoglu and Robinson ( 2012 ), and Besley and Persson ( 2009 ).

Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ) hint at this relationship, showing a “reversal of fortune” of countries that made an early Neolithic transition. The idea of economic reversal was also discussed by Acemoglu et al. ( 2001 ) and Hariri ( 2012 ).

The state history data have also been employed in a number of other studies, receiving focal attention in Ang ( 2013a , b ), playing important roles in Ahlerup and Olsson ( 2012 ), Hariri ( 2012 ), Ertan et al. ( 2016 ), and Daniele ( 2013 ), and being included as a control in a number of other studies. None of the above studies attempts to extend the information on states to include the BCE years or fill in the last half of the 20th Century.

We thank Jacob Gerner Hariri for useful references on the matter of state definition.

Using data from 11 European countries for 1600–1913, Dincecco and Katz ( 2014 ) present causal evidence that historical reforms of tax centralization and, to some extent, constraints on the executive, led to higher tax revenue and improved infrastructure provision, which then stimulated economic growth. By contrast, states with more autonomous regional authorities generated smaller revenues.

Our statehist index captures political fragmentation (simultaneous existence of multiple states within a territory) through a downgrade in the territorial component, and reflects capture by external empires through a downgrade in the internal rule component.

Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ) also present preliminary evidence for overtaking of older by younger states in East Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Wittfogel’s ( 1957 ) “hydraulic hypothesis” makes the related argument that the old riverine civilizations were autocratic due to the technological nature of large-scale irrigation. See also Acemoglu and Robinson ( 2012 ) for an analysis of how countries with inclusive, democratic institutions eventually tend to dominate countries with extractive, autocratic institutions.

Olsson and Paik ( 2016 ) further argue that an early transition to agriculture led to the outbreak of several new infectious diseases which probably killed numerous inhabitants in the growing farming villages. The prevalence of infectious disease most likely also contributed to a collectivist culture with a strong in-group orientation and a suspicious attitude towards strangers and new ideas. But the impact of disease may have been different in late medieval/early modern Europe; see Voigtlander and Voth ( 2013 ).

That is, countries whose first adoption of agriculture was based on the Fertile Crescent package of crops and domesticated animals, as opposed to that of China, Mesoamerica, etc. See Hibbs and Olsson ( 2004 ) and Diamond ( 1997 ).

The logistic curve, with its implied take-off and maturity stages, is similar in spirit to the account in Rostow ( 1960 ). However, unlike Rostow, our model deals primarily with long history including pre-industrial development.

In a previous version of the paper, we modelled explicitly how fiscal capacity and central coordination of economic activities interacted with total factor productivity in a full Malthusian growth model.

See Yoffee ( 1988 ) for a brief discussion of the political decline and economic transformation of the Western Roman Empire.

See Puga and Trefler ( 2014 ) for an account of how a change in political institutions that increased the power of a small elite, led to the gradual decline of Venice after 1297.

See Kennedy ( 1989 ) for a seminal work on the rise and fall of great Western powers after 1500 CE.

As Estonia and countries with still younger states, such as New Guinea, develop to their full potential, our model predicts a long-run negative relationship—eventually younger states will be more productive than older over the full range of cases. Such a reversal in relative developmental ranking is strongly related to the findings for the Western world in Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ). Of course, the framework ignores the possibility that old states might achieve new vigor by borrowing approaches from younger ones, something that could become more common in a world of declining cultural and informational barriers. We accordingly view assumptions underlying Fig.  1 a as useful for organizing historical experience to date, but perhaps not for formulating predictions about the distant future.

However, the overall situation in this regard is quite complex and without further analysis we cannot formulate a general conclusion as to whether colonization and economic domination by states of medium age were or were not on balance net contributors to the stagnation of earlier states. For many earlier states colonization was typically either late or never came: Hariri ( 2012 ) and Ertan et al. ( 2016 ) show that older states (such as China and Turkey) were most likely not to have been colonized by Europeans at all, and Ertan et al. show that if they were colonized (as with what are now the countries of the Levant) it tended to be much later than other countries. Hariri argues that being colonized was advantageous in the sense that it promoted modernization (democratization) of institutions, relative to countries not colonized.

Note that we can assume \(S_{it} < S_{jt}\) for \(i < j\) only by adopting the implicit assumption that variation in the territorial coverage, unity, and home based dimensions of our full state history index leave ordering by time of establishment as an adequate approximation. In this subsection, we use state age as shorthand for state experience in its more complete sense for convenience of exposition.

Note that this assumption also implies that the logistic curves will attain a more and more steep curvature to the right in Fig.  1 a.

The reader is referred to online Appendix B for a more detailed discussion of the coding procedures and exceptions.

Admittedly, the drawback of this “symptomatic” approach is that it blurs the boundary between state and civilization and it is susceptible to misclassifying an emerging or transient civilization into a state in the sense adopted above (see Sect.  2.2 ).

In his definition, the paramount chiefdom is “an autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief” (Carneiro 1981 , p. 45), while the state is “an autonomous political unit, encompassing many communities within its territory and having a centralized government with the power to collect taxes, draft men for work or war, and decree and enforce laws” (Carneiro 1970 , p. 733).

Such is the case of Mexico, where we assign a score of 0.75 to the period 450–100 BCE for the early urban settlements at Chiapas and Oaxaca. We then raise this score to 1 in 100 BCE when large-scale urban growth at Teotihuacan and the development of previously missing institutions such as a standing army warrant the status of fully-fledged state.

Each dimension is denoted by \(z_{it}^{c}\) , which is the score for component c in country i for period t .

If there were multiple polities within a present country’s borders, its state score for the period is coded as a simple average of their respective scores.

For multiple contemporaneous states within what is now a single country \( z_{it}^{3}\) is adjusted down one category, because centralized coordination is assumed to decrease.

Half century periods are used in order to simplify value assignments for the large number of case-period units in which there is either no known state or available information imprecisely dated. This periodization affects the index’s construction when there is detailed information only insofar as the time discounting procedure discussed below is applied to half centuries. Within period changes in \(z_{it}^{c}\) require averaging the scores over subperiods, using as weights the number of years in each sub-period \(\theta \) divided by 50:

Some minor adjustments were made to the years 1–1950 CE data of a few countries, but the correlation with the initial index, considering year 1 to 1950 CE periods only, is 99%.

The 5% discounted extended Statehist score (for the 3500 BCE to 2000 CE period) has a correlation of up to 99.3% with the 5% discounted 1–1950 CE score.

The 1% discounted (extended) Statehist index at 2000 CE (covering the full period beginning from 3500 BCE) has a 0.93 correlation with the 1–1950 CE 1% discounted Statehist index and 0.89 correlation with the 1–1950 CE 5% discounted Statehist index. We do, however, use the 0.1 and 2% discounted index in alternative estimations, as reported below in Sect.  5 .

Note that State index world(t) describes the “flow” level of state development in the world in period t and not the cumulative “stock” of state experience.

Since many modern-day countries did not have full states in the spirit of our definition during the entirety of the last time period 1951–2000, the aggregate percentage in the graph is about 88% at the end of the time series. Many states were de-colonized part way through the period, a number emerged from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (and thus lack home-based governments until the 1990s, following our conventions), others experienced contending governments or state failure, etc.

The division into agricultural core areas follows the practice in Morris ( 2010 ) and Olsson and Paik ( 2013 ) (see also Diamond and Bellwood 2003 ). Combining the two or three distinct agricultural cores of the Americas identified by some writers is a convenient simplification.

See Morris ( 2010 ) for a detailed comparative analysis of Western and Eastern history since the Neolithic.

In Figure C2 of the online Appendix, we zoom in on the last 550 years of state history and show trends for Western Offshoots including the U.S. and Canada (along with Australia and New Zealand) and for the rest of the Americas (Latin America and the Caribbean). The latter two regions are shown to come from behind to overtake even Europe in internally controlled state presence by the mid-1800s.

These variables are taken from the Portland Physical Geography dataset and from the dataset compiled from various other sources by Ashraf and Galor ( 2013 ). See the online Appendix A for more details on variables’ construction and collection.

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this method of testing whether our estimated hump-shaped relationships have rising and falling portions. This method with wide applications in social sciences, is proposed and discussed in Simonsohn ( 2016 ).

We also fitted similar regression models where technology adoption and Statehist correspond to year 1 CE. The results in Table D14 display some evidence of a concave, albeit less robust relationship between Statehist and technology adoption, as the coefficients are reduced in magnitude and become insignificant when controlling for the time since the transition to agriculture. As a robustness check, we have also redone the estimations for 1500 CE and 1 CE using the overall technology adoption index excluding the agriculture components; the results for 1500 CE are very similar to those in Table  2 , and they display a significant quadratic relationship in the most complete specifications for 1 CE (see Table D15 in the Appendix).

We also fitted similar regression models where these economic outcomes correspond to year 1 CE, and depend on Statehist up to that year, linear and squared. The results displayed in Table D16 display some evidence of a concave relationship between Statehist and historical economic outcomes, but one that is less robust in 1 CE than in 1500 CE, because the coefficients are reduced in magnitude and become insignificant when controlling for the time since the transition to agriculture.

In the mentioned appendix tables, that is, we check that the concavity of the quadratic form in Table  4 has significant upward and downward sloping portions by splitting the sample at the implied maximum of the dependent variable with respect to Statehist, and estimating regressions using only the linear Statehist term for the samples to the left and right of that maximum. Significant estimated coefficients on that term are taken as confirmation that the concavity of the quadratic form entails both upward and downward sloping portions.

This quadratic relationship is also suggested by the scatter plots displayed separately for internally- and externally- originated states (i.e. the rule in the first ever state or paramount chiefdom on a certain territory was imposed from within that territory and from without, respectively) and when we use the ancestry-adjusted Statehist index. See Figures C4–C6 in the Appendix.

Note that we obtain similar estimates if we use the 1–2000 CE Statehist index instead, meaning that the 1951–2000 CE period is not what is driving the quadratic relationship documented in panel A.

With a lower discount factor of 0.1%, we still find a negative, (albeit insignificant for log GDP per capita) linear relationship on the portion above the maximizing level of Statehist implied from the quadratic specifications not including any controls. We find a significant negative linear relationship for the high Statehist countries with discount factor 2%, so a qualitatively similar outcome appears over the broad range of discount factors, at least spanning 0.1–2%. Hence the results are not ultra-sensitive over a range of potential weights the BCE part could receive.

Results of this test are very similar if we control for the time since the Neolithic transition.

We also explore alternative specifications in Tables D9 and D10 in the Appendix, where we include linear and squared variables such as the time since transition to agriculture, state age, absolute latitude, migratory distance from Addis Ababa, and predicted genetic diversity (where the latter two are taken from Ashraf and Galor 2013 ). Our main coefficients of interest are robust.

The exact calculation based on estimates in column 2 of panel A is [( \( 7.010-2\cdot 9.842\cdot 0.254)/10]\cdot 100\%=20.1\%\) .

Note that we use state history only up to 1500, rather than to 2000. This is because there are no systematic data on the timing of the migrations during the half millennium 1500–2000. We have estimated the same model using an alternative measure of state experience combining the ancestry-adjusted Statehist of 1500 CE with the unadjusted Statehist score for the period 1500–2000. The results are similar to the estimates in Table  5 .

The explanatory power in column 7 across all the tables is around 1% point larger than when we only include the linear Statehist (results available upon request). As with the unadjusted Statehist , we also explore alternative specifications in the online Appendix Table D10, including various controls in linear and squared form and the results are consistent across all columns.

We also run some sensitivity checks to see if the estimated concavity conditional on controls is merely reflecting some unobserved heterogeneity between countries or regions, such as the Middle-East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. In the online Appendix Table D11 we present the baseline specifications from Tables  5 and  6 , panel A, column (7) followed by similar specifications amended to include controls for the aforementioned regions (column 2), a dummy for former European colonies (column 3) and legal origin controls (column 4). The estimates are very similar to those in the baseline specifications.

For convenience of interpretation, the exercise in this section uses state age (years since first state appearance) rather than discounted \(z^1\) . While the latter can revert to 0 or 0.75 after periods with value 1 due to state collapse or existence of a macro-political vacuum following contraction of an outside empire, such cases are extremely rare in practice, hence the difference between discounted \(z^1\) and state age is almost entirely attributable to not applying discounting to the latter.

Note that even though a discount rate of 1% only is applied, more weight is nonetheless placed on the past two and especially the last millennium than on earlier times. Hence, the long periods following earliest antiquity during which such ancient cradles of civilization as today’s Egypt and Iraq were colonies of the Roman, Byzantine, Mongol, Ottoman, and other empires, can cause their relatively low incomes today to be attributed in part to this term. The ancient experiences of parts of today’s UK, Germany, or Belgium as one-time Roman colonies, on the other hand, receives less weight given the many centuries of home-based rule that were present thereafter. Countries with no state in our sense prior to the European colonial epoch, coded as colonies during that time—for example Dominican Republic, Brazil, Zambia, Mozambique—have \(z^2\) of 0 or 0.5 in those eras, their middle or low incomes today also accordingly helping to explain the strength of the coefficient on \(z^2\) .

The idea is that covariance matrices are weighted by the inverse of the distance between countries, with the weights becoming null after a specified threshold. In this case, we have set a threshold of twenty coordinate degrees, but the results are robust to various thresholds.

Spatial autocorrelation models are increasingly used in long-run growth studies. See e.g. Ashraf and Michalopoulos ( 2015 ) and Ashraf and Galor ( 2013 ). The typical approach, which we also adopt, is the maximum likelihood estimator from Drukker et al. ( 2013 ), implemented in Stata through the spreg command.

SARAR models are \(\mathbf {y}=\lambda \mathbf {W}\mathbf {y}+\mathbf {X} \varvec{\beta }+\mathbf {u}\) , with \(\mathbf {u}=\rho \mathbf {M}\mathbf {u}+ \varvec{\epsilon }\) , where \(\mathbf {W}\) and \(\mathbf {M}\) are \(n \times n\) spatial weighting matrices, n is the sample size, \(\lambda \) and \(\rho \) are scalars, and \(\mathbf {W}\mathbf {y}\) and M u are \(n \times 1\) vectors representing spatial lags. We estimate a model where \(\mathbf {W}\) = \( \mathbf {M}\) is a matrix with diagonal elements equal to zero, and off-diagonal elements representing the inverse great-circle distances between geodesic centroids. In a SAR model, the difference is that \(\mathbf {u }\) is assumed to be independently and identically distributed.

The diagonal elements of this spatial weighting matrix are zero, and the off-diagonal elements are 1 if countries i and j have the same legal origins, regardless of whether they are British, French, Socialist, German or Scandinavian

The latter supports not only the robustness of our general finding about the inverse-u shape, but also Putterman and Weil’s point that effects of early state experience on current day economic outcomes are better manifested when we take into account that the contemporary populations of many countries, e.g. in the Americas and Oceania, are mostly descendants of people from other countries who carry those countries’ cultural and institutional experiences with them. This is also consistent with Lagerlöf ( 2016 ) results showing concavity with the CE part of Statehist when accounting for migration.

Acemoglu et al. ( 2001 ) argue that there was also a reversal among former colonies such that relatively less advanced pre-colonial societies had an inflow of European migrants who installed strong institutions that still persist today, although Glaeser et al. ( 2004 ) and Chanda et al. ( 2014 ) question whether European institutions rather than European human capital is the decisive factor. Hariri ( 2012 ) argues that non-European countries with older states that resisted European colonization had worse economic outcomes in the modern era due to the persistently autocratic nature of their states.

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We are grateful for useful comments from Carl-Johan Dalgaard, Jakob Gerner Hariri, Sascha Becker and four anonymous referees and from seminar participants at University of Copenhagen and Brown University. We also thank Taewan Roh and Nicholas Carter for valuable research assistance.

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Borcan, O., Olsson, O. & Putterman, L. State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia. J Econ Growth 23 , 1–40 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-017-9152-0

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Computer Science > Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Title: collaborative interactive evolution of art in the latent space of deep generative models.

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown great success in generating high quality images and are thus used as one of the main approaches to generate art images. However, usually the image generation process involves sampling from the latent space of the learned art representations, allowing little control over the output. In this work, we first employ GANs that are trained to produce creative images using an architecture known as Creative Adversarial Networks (CANs), then, we employ an evolutionary approach to navigate within the latent space of the models to discover images. We use automatic aesthetic and collaborative interactive human evaluation metrics to assess the generated images. In the human interactive evaluation case, we propose a collaborative evaluation based on the assessments of several participants. Furthermore, we also experiment with an intelligent mutation operator that aims to improve the quality of the images through local search based on an aesthetic measure. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach by comparing the results produced by the automatic and collaborative interactive evolution. The results show that the proposed approach can generate highly attractive art images when the evolution is guided by collaborative human feedback.

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My experience as an emergency patient soured me on Tennessee's Certificate of Need law

State's con laws should be repealed before more people face devastating experiences like i did..

Leslie Huggins is a former first responder and a Murfreesboro resident.

Last January, I was experiencing pain and went to the hospital. During my initial visit, I was triaged and sent back to the treatment area where I waited on a gurney in an open area to be seen. I was sent home and told to reach out to my primary care doctor.

I eventually spoke with my doctor about the medical issue and he advised me to go back to the hospital for admission.

My concern was immediate, as he explained that I would need to go to the emergency room to have any chance of being admitted.  My blood pressure at that time was extremely high.

I checked into the emergency room at around 9 a.m. and then I spent at least 18 hours on a gurney. I spoke to a nurse in the hallway during my wait who informed me that it could be days before the hospital had an open bed. I felt completely helpless.

At one point, an elderly gentleman was admitted who was suffering from difficulty breathing. He needed immediate medical attention, but because there were no rooms, he was treated alongside me and other patients in the hallway. On top of feeling helpless, I was now scared for his well-being and the health of the patients who had now been exposed to his illness. He went into cardiac arrest behind me and the medical staff struggled to find him a bed.

After leaving the hospital, I thought to myself, “there must be something wrong here.”

Eventually, I learned from a friend who works in the health care industry that Tennessee’s Certificate of Need (CON) laws are at least in part to blame for lengthy wait times in hospitals around the state. These laws have been blocking access to affordable, quality health care in Tennessee for decades.

Counterpoint: Tennessee Certificate of Need health care laws can be improved but should not be repealed

Why we need to allow more health care centers to compete

Like so many Tennesseans, I had absolutely no idea what CON laws were before my incident, nor had I even heard the term.

CON laws require hospitals and other health care providers to demonstrate a “need” for their services before they can be granted approval to open a new health care facility or provide new services. While this may sound reasonable at first, the fundamental problem is CON is essentially a government permission slip to provide care. Any health care providers must ask a government board in Nashville for permission to provide essential care to Tennessee communities.

My case is one of many and shows that the CON requirements are preventing access to care for Tennesseans. Existing hospitals and other providers can block another hospital from being built in or near the area they are already operating. This is as disturbing as it sounds. We should not be protecting businesses and their bottom lines at the expense of access to care for patients.

I live in Murfreesboro, and it is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Vanderbilt University Medical Center sought to build a new hospital in our county last year to meet increased demand. Unfortunately, the Tennessee Health Facilities Commission in Nashville denied the CON required for the project to proceed.

State senator is working to chip away at the current law

I am devastated that more Tennesseans will likely have the same experience I did. It’s simple math: as our state’s population continues to grow, we must allow our health care infrastructure to grow unimpeded along with it. Wait times will only continue to worsen.

Tennessee’s state legislature has taken steps in the past to repeal portions of the state’s CON laws, but I have seen firsthand that the regulations remaining today have real life consequences for Tennesseans. 

These bureaucratic laws continue to decrease access to the care we depend on and unnecessarily delay and deny much needed care. I am thankful state Sen. Shane Reeves , R-Murfreesboro, realizes the importance of repealing many of these harmful laws and is supporting legislation to do just that.

I urge the rest of the General Assembly to join him in working to repeal many of Tennessee’s remaining CON laws this legislative session.

Herald, Foster's, News-Letter, Union and York Weekly mail delivery starts April 1

Starting April 1, the U.S. Postal Service will begin delivering the Portsmouth Herald, Foster's Daily Democrat, Hampton Union, Exeter News-Letter and York Weekly newspapers.

"The move from driver delivery to postal service delivery is another step in Seacoast Media Group's evolution from a print-first to a digital-first news and marketing source," said Executive Editor Howard Altschiller. "Our unwavering commitment to the Seacoast communities and readers we serve remains rock solid. Readers looking for the latest Seacoast news, sports and advertising can count on Seacoastonline , Fosters.com and our printed newspapers to deliver."

Like many other newspaper publishers, Gannett Co. Inc., which operates more than 200 daily newspapers, including Seacoast Media Group's papers in New Hampshire and Maine, has already successfully introduced the switch from driver delivery to mail in dozens of markets across the country, and is expanding the initiative.

The markets which have switched to mail delivery report high customer satisfaction rates. While the paper will arrive later in the day with the mail, it will arrive consistently in the same place at the same time. In recent years it has been a challenge to adequately staff the delivery force needed to hand deliver papers across the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and Maine.

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Delivery of non-Seacoast newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, previously handled by Seacoast Media Group drivers, has been taken over by a new company. Questions regarding delivery of non-Seacoast papers should be directed to those other newspapers.

The change to postal delivery will not impact subscription rates.

“For many years now, the printed newspaper has served as a culmination of the stories that will become our collective history, while our websites and mobile apps deliver the news of the day,” said Michael A. Anastasi, vice president of local news for Gannett. “We know that by the time our informed readers pick up the paper, they know what happened yesterday — the print newspaper should provide additional context, to help readers better understand their community and the world around them.”

Readers can also visit Seacoastonline.com and Fosters.com to access the eNewspaper at seacoastonline.com/enewspaper and fosters.com/enewspaper .

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The Supreme Court Got It Wrong: Abortion Is Not Settled Law

By Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw

Ms. Murray is a law professor at New York University. Ms. Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer.

In his majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the high court was finally settling the vexed abortion debate by returning the “authority to regulate abortion” to the “people and their elected representatives.”

Despite these assurances, less than two years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is back at the Supreme Court. In the next month, the justices will hear arguments in two high-stakes cases that may shape the future of access to medication abortion and to lifesaving care for pregnancy emergencies. These cases make clear that Dobbs did not settle the question of abortion in America — instead, it generated a new slate of questions. One of those questions involves the interaction of existing legal rules with the concept of fetal personhood — the view, held by many in the anti-abortion movement, that a fetus is a person entitled to the same rights and protections as any other person.

The first case , scheduled for argument on Tuesday, F.D.A. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, is a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s protocols for approving and regulating mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortions. An anti-abortion physicians’ group argues that the F.D.A. acted unlawfully when it relaxed existing restrictions on the use and distribution of mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. In 2016, the agency implemented changes that allowed the use of mifepristone up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than seven; reduced the number of required in-person visits for dispensing the drug from three to one; and allowed the drug to be prescribed by individuals like nurse practitioners. In 2021, it eliminated the in-person visit requirement, clearing the way for the drug to be dispensed by mail. The physicians’ group has urged the court to throw out those regulations and reinstate the previous, more restrictive regulations surrounding the drug — a ruling that could affect access to the drug in every state, regardless of the state’s abortion politics.

The second case, scheduled for argument on April 24, involves the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (known by doctors and health policymakers as EMTALA ), which requires federally funded hospitals to provide patients, including pregnant patients, with stabilizing care or transfer to a hospital that can provide such care. At issue is the law’s interaction with state laws that severely restrict abortion, like an Idaho law that bans abortion except in cases of rape or incest and circumstances where abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

Although the Idaho law limits the provision of abortion care to circumstances where death is imminent, the federal government argues that under EMTALA and basic principles of federal supremacy, pregnant patients experiencing emergencies at federally funded hospitals in Idaho are entitled to abortion care, even if they are not in danger of imminent death.

These cases may be framed in the technical jargon of administrative law and federal pre-emption doctrine, but both cases involve incredibly high-stakes issues for the lives and health of pregnant persons — and offer the court an opportunity to shape the landscape of abortion access in the post-Roe era.

These two cases may also give the court a chance to seed new ground for fetal personhood. Woven throughout both cases are arguments that gesture toward the view that a fetus is a person.

If that is the case, the legal rules that would typically hold sway in these cases might not apply. If these questions must account for the rights and entitlements of the fetus, the entire calculus is upended.

In this new scenario, the issue is not simply whether EMTALA’s protections for pregnant patients pre-empt Idaho’s abortion ban, but rather which set of interests — the patient’s or the fetus’s — should be prioritized in the contest between state and federal law. Likewise, the analysis of F.D.A. regulatory protocols is entirely different if one of the arguments is that the drug to be regulated may be used to end a life.

Neither case presents the justices with a clear opportunity to endorse the notion of fetal personhood — but such claims are lurking beneath the surface. The Idaho abortion ban is called the Defense of Life Act, and in its first bill introduced in 2024, the Idaho Legislature proposed replacing the term “fetus” with “preborn child” in existing Idaho law. In its briefs before the court, Idaho continues to beat the drum of fetal personhood, insisting that EMTALA protects the unborn — rather than pregnant women who need abortions during health emergencies.

According to the state, nothing in EMTALA imposes an obligation to provide stabilizing abortion care for pregnant women. Rather, the law “actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.” In the mifepristone case, advocates referred to fetuses as “unborn children,” while the district judge in Texas who invalidated F.D.A. approval of the drug described it as one that “starves the unborn human until death.”

Fetal personhood language is in ascent throughout the country. In a recent decision , the Alabama Supreme Court allowed a wrongful-death suit for the destruction of frozen embryos intended for in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F. — embryos that the court characterized as “extrauterine children.”

Less discussed but as worrisome is a recent oral argument at the Florida Supreme Court concerning a proposed ballot initiative intended to enshrine a right to reproductive freedom in the state’s Constitution. In considering the proposed initiative, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court repeatedly peppered Nathan Forrester, the senior deputy solicitor general who was representing the state, with questions about whether the state recognized the fetus as a person under the Florida Constitution. The point was plain: If the fetus was a person, then the proposed ballot initiative, and its protections for reproductive rights, would change the fetus’s rights under the law, raising constitutional questions.

As these cases make clear, the drive toward fetal personhood goes beyond simply recasting abortion as homicide. If the fetus is a person, any act that involves reproduction may implicate fetal rights. Fetal personhood thus has strong potential to raise questions about access to abortion, contraception and various forms of assisted reproductive technology, including I.V.F.

In response to the shifting landscape of reproductive rights, President Biden has pledged to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were far from perfect; they afforded states significant leeway to impose onerous restrictions on abortion, making meaningful access an empty promise for many women and families of limited means. But the two decisions reflected a constitutional vision that, at least in theory, protected the liberty to make certain intimate choices — including choices surrounding if, when and how to become a parent.

Under the logic of Roe and Casey, the enforceability of EMTALA, the F.D.A.’s power to regulate mifepristone and access to I.V.F. weren’t in question. But in the post-Dobbs landscape, all bets are off. We no longer live in a world in which a shared conception of constitutional liberty makes a ban on I.V.F. or certain forms of contraception beyond the pale.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “ Strict Scrutiny ,” is a co-author of “ The Trump Indictments : The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.”

Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.