6000 years of Patrimonial States: Then, Now
Sifting Meal, Tomb of Rekhmire, Ancient Egypt (Date: c.1504 - c.1425 BC)
This post presents a collage:
#1 precaution about patrimonialism
#2 patrimonialism predicated and promoted as a concept
#3 patrimonialism: born in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt
#4 patrimonialism: still alive and kicking in Egypt and Iraq
A credible proposal is that the first pristine states emerged in Mesopotamia as a consequence of the expansion of households and the evolutionary fitness of some households to administer and staff ever larger agricultural territories and populations by absorbing other households in ‘cities’ under administrative and military conditions that permitted reciprocally advantageous (though highly discretionary) exchange of obligations, loyalty, favour, labour, protection and social order legitimated over time through a variety of artificial or third-party devices, e.g. religion, art, script.
That, in a nutshell, is the ideal type early ‘patrimonialism’.
[1] Precaution
In my Capitalism book I wrote about patrimonialism as ‘precapitalism’:
The concepts Weber used to define ‘patrimonialism’ generally remain accurate for describing the characteristics of contemporary precapitalist societies. Patrimonial political domination is normatively opposed to the impersonal division of powers in the modern legal-administrative state with formal checks and balances. Leadership may revolve on dispensation of status or economic benefices in return for political support. Citizens expect rulers not to exceed their powers and to remain within traditional bounds of legitimate rulership. Yet rulers wield great personal power and can exploit their authority almost as though it were a private economic asset. Public and private spheres are not clearly demarcated in public decision making. Public office is often indirectly or directly the source of private power and wealth. Elite structures are concentric circles of declining power wielded through patron–client affiliations in economic and political life. On the inner and outer rims, individuals are at constant risk of losing influence if they fall from favour for purely personal reasons. Justifications for authority are arbitrary, and policy is unpredictable. Interpersonal states operate a form of closure and exclusion that depends on concrete social relations between individuals as opposed to abstract relationships mediated by impersonal institutions. Social mobility depends in many ways on informal microlevel connectivity. In comparison with capitalist states, precapitalist or patrimonial states are less meritocratic and more informal, discretionary, arbitrary, unpredictable, and inter-personal.
Now as I prepare a History of Society I have different aims. I am classifying different types of society since the beginning of human time, long before capitalism. This post introduces two ‘types’: the type 4 administered society and the type 9 elite society. I do not intend to define either type as patrimonial. But I will suggest that ‘patrimonial’ describes their shared feature. The examination of early states in Mesopotamia and Egypt directly alongside elite societies of contemporary Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia) and Egypt offers a unique window for observing the reasons for the persistence of premodern governance in a world that already offers far better type 8 alternatives.
The migration flows from type 9 towards type 8 indicate preferences. Type 9 is not means-ends efficient. The innovation and dynamism that permitted the growth of capitalism and fostered technological advances is only to be found in type 8 ‘free’ society. However type 9 may be stubbornly tolerable. Indeed type 9 elite society demonstrates evolutionary fitness of really remarkable longevity in our history of human society. It is unstable. The threat of usurpation and fall from favour is constantly present. Like every longterm (micro) patron-client relationship type 9 society’s (macro) political ‘trading’ requires personal sensitivity with give-and-take for maintaining balances of informal power among elites, and constant imaginative and intelligent upkeep of the balances of reciprocity and ‘sympathetic subjection’ between master elite and governed mass. I emphasise the durable fragility of elite society.
[2a] Patrimonialism Defined: Fathering Further
The concept of patrimonialism is principally developed in the writings of Max Weber. The kernels of all useful social science knowledge about states are found in Weber’s works. In this post I highlight the kernel in all Weber’s writing on patrimonialism: the difference between personal and impersonal features of rulership (quotes below).
Patrimonialism is a useful concept for introducing a basic procedural similarity between the original ‘state’ of type 4 society (‘administrative differentiation’) and the world’s current typical contemporary ‘state’ of type 9 society (‘elite differentiation’).
There are several points to keep in mind
The neatness and insight of the concept of patrimonialism in evolutionary terms derives initially from a type 1 society individualistic-biological criterion centred on the dominant patriarchal figure, i.e. chief elder male, father or head of household who continues to be analytically relevant throughout all subsequent societal types. I am also pairing the concepts ‘patrimonialism’ and ‘patronage’ (for reasons that will become clear). Both derive from pater, i.e. the father as the head of a household, a near-universal human source of comfort and control or protection and subjection. It should be recalled that in ancient Roman law (as much as two millennia after the first Mesopotamian and Egyptian states) the ‘pater’ was society’s supreme individual authority with absolute life-death prerogative power over the social, spiritual, and economic lives of family and household. Yet, because there was no single supreme father figure (as king or emperor), republican Rome was not a patrimonial society.
Weber viewed patrimonial domination principally as an evolutionary outgrowth of patriarchal domination. The almost literal lingering image is of the first states emerging initially in a land of many households as one household administrative structure becomes the strongest among the many, and as the male ‘potentate’ patrons settle their lands, animals, and tools upon their sons and other favoured male heirs. Weber refers to this as a process of “decentralisation” of authority, giving rise to dependency relationships that prize traditional customs over innovations.
Like patriarchy, patrimonial domination is based on personal loyalty. It is not a legal relationship but it is subject to customs and conventions of support and reciprocity. The obligations inherent in patrimonial domination must be seen to benefit both sides in the master-servant or patron-client relationship. This self-interested exchange and requires constant servicing. Over time the authority or power of a patrimonial potentate can be consolidated to the extent that capacity for compulsion outdistances the obligation to cooperate. But conditions are fluid, so that reversals are equally in prospect.
Weber pays special attention to the insecurity of patrimonial kings who govern over proud and powerful potentates who may acquire potential to replace him. This point is underlined in the Moreno García extracts (below, probably the important work on the emergence of authority in Egypt). He does not characterise Egypt as “patrimonial”. But his analyses of ancient Egyptian patronage indicate interactions occurring in the style and structure usually associated with traditional patrimonial rulership.
The political science literature on patrimonialism I am most familiar deals with Southeast Asia and Mexico [citations can be found in my Capitalism). The equivalent academic literature on contemporary Iraq, the Gulf states and Egypt quoted in the final section of today’s post is unfortunately of much poorer quality. However its empirical content is reliable and serves to illustrate the 6000 years of continuity.
Today nation states in these geographic areas display all the institutional facades of modernity—presidents, legislatures, judiciaries, elections. The facade looks modern. But procedurally governance remains ‘patrimonial’. Political process is personalised, dependent on patronage. The state is an ‘elite only’ centralised power zone. The state lacks separations of power. Power machinery is functionally equivalent to ancient state patrimonialism. The claims made by those who study Egypt and Iraq today may not systematically trace this pattern back to ancient times, and may lack the insight that would come of a careful reading of Weber’s writings, but they do at least identify the features of ‘patrimonialism’ and ‘patronage’ as defined in any standard Dictionary of Sociology. So in his post I juxtapose original classic meanings of ‘patrimonialism’ as theorised by Weber with a collage of writings on (a) early state and (b) current state.
[2b] Essential passages in Economy & Society
The following are a series of definitional statements about patrimonialism in the order in which they appear in Economy and Society (new and old translations, with my emphases). As I have said, I am highlighting the ‘personal’ aspect of patrimonial rule. I am sidelining distinctions Weber makes between impersonalised bureaucratic state and personalised patrimonial state. These were useful for conceptualising capitalism but are not directly relevant to the parallel that I now wish to draw across a time span of nearly 6000 years between the earliest and the latest patrimonialisms.
… Bureaucracy first developed in patrimonial states, as a body of officials recruited from extra-patrimonial sources [i.e. as specialists who were not necessarily part of the ruler’s own household]. But these officials were …initially personal servants of the ruler. …
… Domestic officials and favourites were often recruited on a purely patrimonial basis from among … dependants of the ruler. Or, if they were recruited extra-patrimonially, they tended to be the holders of benefices whom he transferred at his own (formally free) discretion. … Promotion was entirely a matter of the ruler’s caprice and grace …
… Patrimonial rule is every form of rule that is traditionally oriented but whose exercise is characterised by a fully personal rule with a form of administration that is despotic and unrestricted by tradition. …
[here ‘Chancen’ = “calculable probabilities” according to translator]
… Hierarchical rule is that form of patrimonial rule in which economic Chancen linked to ruling powers are appropriated to the administrative staff of particular lords. As in all similar cases, such appropriation can be a) to an organisation or a category of persons with particular shared characteristics, or b) to an individual, either for life, or heritable, or as free property. …
Hierarchical appropriation implies appropriation to the members of the administrative staff of at least part of the means of administration. While with full patrimonialism there is a complete separation of the administrator from the means of administration, the exact reverse is true of hierarchical patrimonialism: the administrator possesses the means of administration, either fully or at least substantially. …
… The pure type of patrimonial rule, and especially its hierarchised variant, treats all powers of rule and the corresponding economic rights as if they were privately appropriated economic Chancen. …
… So long as judicial authority and other rights with a purely political origin were treated as if they were private entitlements, then it seems terminologically justified for our purposes to talk of “patrimonial” rule.
The patrimonial character of officialdom is expressed above all by the way that acceptance of a personal relationship of subordination as a client is required. …
[inc. the role of law]
The delimitation of the spheres of public and private law is even today not entirely free from difficulty. It was even less clear in the past, and there was once a situation in which such a distinction was not made at all. Such was the case when all law, all jurisdictions, and particularly all powers of exercising authority were personal privileges, such as, especially, the ‘prerogatives’ of the head of the state. In that case the authority to judge, or to call a person into military service, or to require obedience in some other respect was a vested right in exactly the same way as the authority to use a piece of land; and just like the latter, it could constitute the subject matter of a conveyance or of inheritance. Under this condition of ‘patrimonialism’ political authority was not organised as a compulsory association, but was represented by the concrete consociation and compromises of individual power-holders, or persons claiming powers, and by the concrete arrangements made between them. It was a kind of political authority which was not essentially different from that of the head of a household, or a landlord, or a master of serfs.
[inc. like patriarchy]
We shall speak of a patrimonial state when the prince organises his political power over extra-patrimonial areas and political subjects—which is not discretionary and not enforced by physical coercion—just like the exercise of his patriarchal power. The majority of all great continental empires had a fairly strong patrimonial character until and even after the beginning of modern times. Originally patrimonial administration was adapted to the satisfaction of purely personal, primarily private household needs of the master.
[inc. potential competitor potentates]
The establishment of a ‘political’ domination, that is, of one master’s domination over other masters who are not subject to his patriarchal power implies an affiliation of authority relations which differ only in degree and content, not in structure. The substance of the political power depends upon the most diverse conditions. The two powers which we consider specifically political: military and judicial authority, are exercised without any restraint by the master as components of his patrimonial power. By contrast, the judicial ‘power’ of the chief over those who are not members of his household has conferred only the position of an arbitrator in all periods of peasant communities. The lack of autocratic authority which can employ physical force constitutes the most distinct difference between merely political domination and domestic authority. But as his power increases, the holder of judiciary authority tends to consolidate his position through the usurpation of … powers, until it is practically identical with the basically unlimited judicial power of the patriarch.
[inc. like patriarchy]
In the patrimonial state the most fundamental obligation of the subjects is the material maintenance of the ruler, just as is the case in a patrimonial household; again the difference is only one of degree. At first, this provisioning takes the form of honorary gifts and of support in special cases, in the spirit of intermittent political action. However, with the increasing continuity and rationalisation of political authority these obligations become more and more comprehensive …
… Patrimonial domination inherently tends to force the extra-patrimonial political subjects just as unconditionally under the ruler's authority as the patrimonial subjects and to regard all powers as personal property, corresponding to the master's patriarchal power and property. On the whole, the extent of the ruler's success depended upon the power constellation and, apart from his own military power, especial)y upon the mode and the impact of certain religious influences…
[inc. discretion, discretion, and more discretion …]
The patrimonial office lacks above all the bureaucratic separation of the ‘private’ and the ‘official’ sphere. For the political administration, too, is treated as a purely personal affair of the ruler, and political power is considered part of his personal property, which can be exploited by means of contributions and fees. His exercise of power is therefore entirely discretionary, at least insofar as it is not more or less limited by the ubiquitous intervention of sacred traditions. With the exception of traditionally stereotyped functions, hence in all political matters proper, the ruler's personal discretion delimits the jurisdiction of his officials. Jurisdiction is at first completely fluid … Of course, each office has some substantive purpose and task, but its boundaries are frequently indeterminate. … At first, only competing powers create stereotyped boundaries and something akin to ‘established jurisdictions’. However, in the case of the patrimonial officials this derives from the treatment of the office as a personal right and not, as in the bureaucratic state, from impersonal interests—occupational specialisation and the endeavour to provide legal guarantees for the ruled. Therefore this quasi-jurisdictional limitation of the powers of office results primarily from the competing economic interests of the various patrimonial officials. Insofar as sacred tradition does not prescribe certain official acts, they are discretionary …
[inc. personal loyalty, obligation, favours]
The position of the patrimonial official derives from his purely personal submission to the ruler, and his position vis-a-vis the subjects is merely the external aspect of this relation. Even when the political official is not a personal household dependent, the ruler demands unconditional administrative compliance. For the patrimonial official's loyalty to his office is not an impersonal commitment to impersonal tasks which define its extent and its content, it is rather a servant's loyalty based on a strictly, personal relationship to the ruler and on an obligation of fealty which in principle permits no limitation. … All patrimonial service … are ultimately nothing but purely subjective rights and privileges of individuals deriving from the ruler’s grant or favor; in fact, this can be said for the entire system of public norms of the patrimonial state in general. It lacks the objective norms of the bureaucratic state and its ‘matter-of-factness’, which is oriented toward impersonal purposes. The office and the exercise of public authority serve the ruler and the official on which the office was bestowed, they do not serve impersonal purposes.
[inc. maturations of patrimonial rule, continuing discretion]
As the appropriation of offices progresses the [patrimonial] ruler’s power, especially his political power, disintegrates into a bundle of powers separately appropriated by various individuals by virtue of special privileges … which, once the definition has become established, cannot he altered by the ruler without arousing dangerous resistance from the vested interests. This structure is rigid, not adaptable to new tasks, not amenable to abstract regulation and thus a characteristic contrast to bureaucracy with its spheres of jurisdiction, which have a purposively abstract organization and can be reorganised at any time if need be. In juxtaposition to this stands the completely discretionary power of the lord in areas in which this appropriation of offices has not occurred, permitting him to appoint, his personal favourites especially to administrative tasks and power positions which are not pre-empted by appropriated powers. The patrimonial state as a whole may tend more toward the stereotyped or more toward the arbitrary pattern. …
The more appropriation takes place, the less does the patrimonial state operate either according to the concept of jurisdiction or to that of the ‘agency’ in the contemporary sense. The separation of official and private matters, of official and private property and powers was carried through more or less only in the arbitrary type of patrimonialism …
[inc. everything personal, personal, personal]
In general the notion of an objectively defined official duty is unknown to the office that is based upon purely personal relations of subordination. Whatever traces of it there are disappear altogether with the treatment of the office as benefice or property. The exercise of power is primarily a personal right of the official: outside of the sacred boundaries of tradition he makes ad hoc decisions, just like the lord, according to his personal discretion. Hence a typical feature of the patrimonial state in the sphere of law-making is the juxtaposition of inviolable traditional prescription and completely arbitrary decision-making, the latter serving as a substitute for a regime of rational rules. Instead of bureaucratic impartiality and of the ideal based on the abstract validity of one objective law for all-of administrating without respect of persons, the opposite principle prevails. Practically everything depends explicitly upon the personal considerations: upon the attitude toward the concrete applicant and his concrete request and upon purely personal connections, favours, promises and privileges.
[inc. unpredictable]
Even the privileges and appropriations granted by the lord … are very often revocable in the case of very vaguely defined ‘ingratitude’; their validity beyond the grantor's death is also uncertain because of the personal quality of all relationships. These grants are therefore submitted to the successor for confirmation. Depending upon the always unstable distribution of power between lord and officials, confirmation may be considered the ruler's obligation and thus pave the way from revocability to permanent appropriation as a well-deserved privilege, but it may also be an occasion for the successor to enlarge his own realm of discretion by cashiering such special rights …
[inc. unstable ground, requiring nurture and renewal]
The continuous struggle of the central power with the various centrifugal local powers creates a specific problem for patrimonialism when the patrimonial ruler, with his personal power resources—his landed property, other sources of revenue and personally loyal officials and soldiers—confronts not a mere mass of subjects differentiated only according to sibs and vocations, but when he stands as one landlord above other landlords, who as local ‘honoratiores’ wield an autonomous authority of their own. … The patrimonial ruler cannot always dare to destroy these autonomous local patrimonial powers.
[inc. discretion as hunting ground]
… The patrimonial state offers the whole realm of the ruler's discretion as a hunting ground for accumulating wealth. Wherever traditional or stereotyped prescription does not impose strict limitations, patrimonialism gives free rein to the enrichment of the ruler himself, the court officials, favourites, governors, mandarins, tax collectors, influence peddlers, and the great merchants and financiers who function as tax-farmers, purveyors and creditors. The ruler's favour and disfavour, grants and confiscations, continuously create new wealth and destroy it again. …
[inc. evolutionary maturation, specialisation tempered by personalism]
… As soon as the household administration has passed the stage of discontinuous administration through companions and intimates, the addition of purely political tasks regularly leads to the establishment of special central offices and most of the time to the rise of a single political official, who may have various characteristics. Because of its very nature patrimonialism was the specific locus for the rise of favouritism - of men close to the ruler who had tremendous power, but always were in danger of sudden, dramatic downfall for purely personal reasons. …
Evidence in Ancient Mesopotamia
Steven J. Garfinkle, ‘Ancient Near Eastern City-States’, in The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press 2013
The urban revolution that took place in fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamia was one of the few examples of the pristine development of complex civilization and its attendant characteristics, such as the rise of the state. …
… The development of the city-state depended on the ability of predominantly agrarian communities to generate a surplus, and then on the elite to pioneer ways of appropriating that surplus for communal purposes. How these two things were accomplished determined much of the social organization of the city-state. The basic building-block of these communities was the household. …
… The economic patterns of the Near Eastern city-states were based entirely on the interactions of the great and small households. The resulting social networks were the product of negotiations among these households. Often these negotiations were coercive, but they were also based on the shared ideologies of urban life that became established in Mesopotamia over the fourth and third millennia BCE. …
… The household was the essential socioeconomic unit for the whole of early Near Eastern antiquity. …
… As the urban population grew, over the course of the fourth and early third millennia BCE, the central administration moved from an emphasis on organising distribution of rural surplus and of trade goods, and the control of some corvée labor for the maintenance of canals and public buildings, to the management of production as well. This established the patterns for the tributary economy that remained characteristic of city-states throughout their history in the ancient Near East. …
… The literate functionaries of these administrative groups were not bureaucrats in the modern sense. This was not a rational bureaucracy but rather a patrimonial administration in which the organizing principles of the large households were extended in scale and authority. This model also served to aid in the creation of the larger polities that developed in the ancient Near East. The growth of the territorial state was enabled through institutions, the military foremost among them, which were built on patrimonial models and bound to the households of the ruling families. …
Piotr Steinkeller, ‘The Sargonic and Ur III Empires’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021
[Babylonia: ancient region of Mesopotamia, formed when the kingdoms of Akkad in the north and Sumer in the south combined in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC.]
… The Ur III Dynasty ruled over Babylonia for slightly over one century (2112– 2004 BCE). It numbered five rulers in five generations: Ur- Namma, his son Šulgi, the latter’s son Amar-Suen, Amar-Suen’s son Šu- Suen, and Šu-Suen’s son Ibbi-Suen. …
... Around Šulgi’s twentieth regnal year there began a period of reforms that were to affect every aspect of Babylonia’s political institutions and its social and economic organization. In view of their highly coordinated character, and since they were implemented during a relatively brief period of time, one suspects that these reforms were carried out according to a specific blueprint. As a result of these reforms, which took some 10 years to complete, Babylonia was transformed into a highly centralised patrimonial state. Structured as a pyramid, and comprising a hierarchy of individual households, this state constituted one vast royal domain. …
… the patrimonial principle, all of the economic resources of the state became the exclusive property of the king and his extended family. Correspondingly, the entire population of the state (excluding slaves), regardless of their economic and social status—and including the king’s immediate relatives—assumed the status of king’s dependents. In this relationship, which mirrored that existing between the junior members of a household and their master, all of the king’s subjects were required to provide services to the state. In exchange for those services, they were offered protection and economic support, which usually took form of the usufruct grants of agricultural land. …
… As is typical of patrimonial systems, in the Ur III Empire political power rested with the king, who was both its ultimate source and its exclusive possessor. The king dispensed this power through a hierarchy of royal dependents, at whose top stood his extended family. The royal princes and the king’s sons- in- laws held some of the top positions in the empire’s military forces, at the same time controlling vast economic resources, in the form of rural estates that had been granted to them by the king on the right of usufruct. Other princes and princesses occupied many of the most important priestly offices. Queens too wielded much power, mainly through harem politicking and their ability to influence the king directly, but also through their extensive— and largely independent— economic activities. While all this necessitated some power sharing with his innumerable kin, the actual decision- making and the daily running of the state were exclusive prerogatives of the king ...
… … Also the subjugated polities along the northern frontier toward Phrygia and Urartu were left under indirect rule. There, patron-client relations were established with local rulers to create a band of strategic buffer states between the two contending empires.
Gojko Barjamovic, ‘The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021
… From the earliest well-documented manifestation in the twenty-fourth century BCE, imperial states built on a formation of composite statehood that was tied to the joint rise of city and state on the alluvial plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers a millennium earlier. This shaped the conditions under which early empires rose and ruled, and city-states remained the chief building blocks of most larger states until the first millennium BCE ...
… From the Assyrian expansion in the eighth century BCE, the heartland of Mesopotamia essentially remained under control by changing empires for nearly three millennia. Such continuity of imperial rule is distinctive to the region, and although a sweeping historical overview conceals major political and social breaks, there appears to be a remarkable bias at play in favor of large-scale territorial integration in the region where states first arose ...
… One may conceptualize institutions and individuals as operating within vertical patrimonial structures, rather than referring to abstract entities, such as “administration” and “empire”. But crosswise forces were also always in operation, with authority being shared and contested between urban officials and kinship groups, popular assemblies, merchant councils, and religious institutions. …
Evidence in Ancient Egypt
Christopher Eyre, The Use of Documents in Pharaonic Egypt, Oxford University Press 2013
… The argument of this book focuses on the personal nature of Egyptian administration, based on patronage structures and the model of a patrimonial household in which hierarchical relationships were not those of clearly defined patterns of line management, but personal relationships, and in which the boundaries of individual authority were not narrowly defined by departmental responsibilities. Titles themselves were for a large part honorific or ranking, giving authority and status, and were only to a limited extent specifically functional. Many titles focus directly on closeness to the patron, and the fact that a translated titles includes a term such as ‘overseer’ does not necessarily mean that the person has a particular line management or extensive departmental structure under him.
The size of government certainly increased over the 2,000 years covered in this book, but central government remained small, and based on the model of a patrimonial household: the ‘Great House’ personified as the king … the Pharaoh. At the centre of this hierarchy was the vizier as primary agent of the king: his core titles seem originally to refer to a personal closeness to the king, while his secondary title of Overseer of the Town has no obvious functional meaning in the historical period. … At no period was there a clear separation of powers: there are no purely judicial titles, and judicial function, so far as it existed, was a component part of administrative office or hierarchical rank. …
… The primary test of a bureaucracy lies in the degree of autonomy attributed to written documents, to the completeness with which documents hold information, and the impersonality of their use. Markers for a bureaucracy are found in the requirement to use a particular document for a particular purpose, in a rule-based administration of documents, and in the corresponding ambition of political authority to exercise social and economic control: the ambition of government to penetrate deeply into society, at the level of the individual. There is no activity in pharaonic Egypt for which the use of a document can be shown to be necessary, and the impersonality of government was extremely limited: only expressed occasionally as the ideal of treating the stranger in the same way as an associate. The measure of pharaonic administration then lies in the balance between the impersonality of a rule-based use of documents and the culture of face-to-face administration, mediated explicitly by patronage and patron–client relationships. Bureaucracy and patronage are, of course, not exclusive. A regime in which bureaucratic ideals are mediated by the imperatives of personal relationships and patronage structures is normal where government is either too small to be completely impersonal, or too poorly paid for official culture to operate in a disinterested way.
The historical roots of Egyptian administration lie in extremely limited writing systems, used to label objects with their ownership and origin, and then to make lists. …
Joseph G. Manning, ‘Ptolemaic Governmental Branches and the Role of Temples and Elite Groups’, in A Companion to Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt, edited by Katelijn Vandorpe, John Wiley & Son 2019
How, then, should we think about the institutions of Ptolemaic governance? Often, earlier studies have assumed that the basic structure was simply inherited from ancient Egypt. But that is too simple. Throughout the first millennium BC, Egypt was governed by many outside political forces, each of which brought new things. To be sure, an important part of establishing a political order in all phases of Egypt’s history was the creation of an administrative hierarchy of state officials that linked villages and towns to regional centers and ultimately to the political center(s). …
… A tension existed between the king’s ability to appoint some officials and the patrimonial power inherent in Egyptian social structure that resulted in the hereditary tendency of local families to control official functions. That was an ancient problem. The Ptolemies attempted to control it by the sale of certain offices, with limited success; the Ptolemaic system, as earlier in Egypt, remained dominated by the patrimonial power of local families. The so‐called “nome strategoi” … seem to have been a direct appointment of the king. Royal control may also have been asserted … by the demand of physical presence at the royal court. …
J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in the Ancient Near East, Brill 2001
The important role played by the image of the father in ancient Egyptian culture … The idealized role of the father as procreator, provider, and educator was both a feature of ordinary family life and the basis of royal legitimation …
… In general, householders in Egypt imitated on a smaller scale many of the attributes of the supreme ruler and his household; thus pharaonic Egypt had a segmentary structure, consisting of a hierarchy of households within households with little functional differentiation at each level. …
The essentially personal, patrimonial character of ancient Egyptian administration explains why the elaborate and numerous administrative titles conferred on royal officials defy rational analysis. As in other patrimonial regimes, official titles are more an index of the closeness of their bearer to the ruler than a description of a rationally delimited set of responsibilities. …
… there is evidence that smaller, poorer houses tended to cluster around a wealthy house, providing an architectural indication of a patrimonial hierarchy of dependency. Pottery-making and other basic manufacturing activities were … integrated into a complex hierarchy of patronage and dependency at whose apex stood the house of the pharaoh.
… Egyptian economic transactions were normally embedded within personalised social relationships patterned on the household model. …
Some patrimonial regimes were governed in a more centralised fashion than others because of functional factors (e.g. the effect of geography on the maintenance of military control) or personal factors (e.g. the political and military skill of the ruler). But these variations should not be allowed to obscure the remarkable power of the simple household metaphor to provide a common framework for Bronze Age civilization. …
Juan Carlos Moreno García, The State in Ancient Egypt: Power, Challenges and Dynamics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
… The pharaonic state managed several kinds of resources, some of them material (taxes, manpower, raw and luxury materials), and others immaterial (information, dominant cultural values, legitimacy, allegiance and obedience). … Obviously, this was a desideratum, an ideal constantly challenged by the potential appearance of alternative poles of accumulation of wealth, information, force and legitimacy. Their more conspicuous manifestations were the lavish display of private wealth in the form of monumental tombs, chapels and temples; the cult of ‘deified’ ancestors; the existence of extensive patronage networks centred on potentates; corruption and the capture of income due to the state; imprecise limits between public duties and private interests in the activities of the ruling elite; the existence of a powerful provincial nobility as well as families entrenched in senior administrative and court positions, etc. ….
… in the competitive environment of the court, where contacts and integration in powerful networks of patronage were crucial, the support of high-ranking officials was as essential as royal favour. …
… integration in patronage networks was always essential …
… In a society dominated by patronage networks, in which officials were also linked to their superiors through personal bonds of constraint, allegiance and even dependence, loyalties might appear divided in some cases when the interests of the monarchy and those of an official were in conflict. …
… The absence of an impersonal referential order, comprised not only of ethical claims but of actual laws and a corpus of regulations, means that the conditions in which the agents of the crown operated left them a great deal of autonomy, which could be open to abuse or, simply, to personal interpretation. …
… it is only at the very end of the third millennium BC that ‘citizens’ and cities appear as a force to be reckoned with by local rulers. In the end, towns and cities were ruled by powerful families and patrons (‘great men’) and they were probably prone to the kind of vertical relations, based on hierarchy, patronage and obedience to kings and local nobles, so prevalent in the pharaonic world. …
… Horizontal structures were formed of family links, relations with peers and membership of a village or an urban neighbourhood; vertical structures were based on hierarchy and patronage. Formal hierarchy is constantly evoked in official texts and scenes: we hear of peasants reporting to scribes, scribes reporting to dignitaries, dignitaries reporting to kings and kings reporting to gods. … Patronage was perhaps the most important of these. It pervaded both vertical and horizontal relations as it was based on protection and (unequal) reciprocal support. …
… Contrary to the practices common among the elite, many Egyptians were forced instead to depend on powerful or influential fellow citizens and to join the patronage networks they headed, to the point of being considered part of their households. Such networks provided a kind of ‘vertical integration’ in addition to the horizontal path constituted by family and neighbours, which is how senior officials could be linked to minor ones, local potentates to courtiers, officials to ordinary workers and citizens, and so on. …
… In a society dominated by patronage networks and extended families, this also meant that divided loyalties had the potential to become a challenge for, but also a tool at the service of, kings, especially when rivalries erupted between palace and noble factions. And, as the monarchy and the governmental apparatus collapsed periodically, bureaucrats would have found it difficult to become a durable distinctive sphere of power in themselves. Also note that administrators could always be sourced from within the many branches of the royal family, while the expansion of bureaucracy and governmental departments in periods of ‘mature’ monarchic rule probably led not to increased efficiency but rather to stifling decision- making procedures. For all these reasons, there are no traces of a raison d’état based on a clear separation between state and kingship. …
Evidence in Egypt today
Mohamed Fahmy Menza, Patronage Politics in Egypt: The National Democratic Party and Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Routledge 2013
With the dominance of political patronage … the Islamists' rise to political prominence was … attributable to the withdrawal of the state institutions, which were no longer capable of delivering the services needed by the people …
… The political regimes of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak all attempted to benefit from patron-client networks … political patronage was quite prevalent throughout the eras of Egypt's three chief regimes after 1952. …
… [It] is safe to assume that [given the role] patronage politics … has played in shaping the features of the Egyptian polity … [in] the twenty-first century … [it will continue to be] reliant on … patronage politics to build alliances with relevant political agents … [The] presence of a powerful group of patrons within the system is vital for this complex network to survive and prevail. …
[Given] the features of the patron-client stratagem in the post-Mubarak phase …. it will be unlikely that the machinations of patronage networks will be drastically changed … The people's dependence on informal networks of clientelism represents an attempt to create and solidify an alternative set of socioeconomic and political institutions vis-à-vis failing formal state institutions. And, as a result, the legitimacy of the state as a sovereign entity that is capable of maintaining law and order … has become questionable.
Bruce K. Rutherford, Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World, Princeton University Press 2013
Democracy and liberalism are different concepts, produced by different elite calculations, and embodied in different institutions. They can emerge at different times, for different reasons. … [In Egypt] the prospects for democratisation are poor. The regime retains a stranglehold on political life which it shows little sign of loosening. Through a combination of patronage and graft, it is able to secure overwhelming victories in electoral contests at both the local and national levels. It also wields a vast array of laws that regulate the formation and actions of political parties, civil society groups, and the press. If these laws prove inadequate, the regime can always invoke emergency powers … the political groups that emerge in this environment are weak and fragmented.
Evidence in Iraq, Gulf States today
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, Cambridge University Press 2007 [my former colleague at SOAS in the 1990s]
In this account of the troubled narrative of the state of Iraq, three interlinked factors stand out. The first is the resilience of patrimonialism … The networks of patrons and clients throughout Iraqi society have been decisive in the political history of the state, from the people who associated themselves with the Hashemite regime in the early years, through the groups that clustered around Saddam Husain [president 1979–2003] to the various factions that have colonised the state machinery in the aftermath of his demise. …
… patrimonialism has been a way of guaranteeing narrative consistency, founded on the belief that those who share your identity or are heavily dependent on you must to some degree share your fate. …
… Most importantly, whether the currency was land or oil rents, for much of Iraq's history they reinforced the patrimonial ties which have made the majority of Iraq’s population dependent on those who have taken control of the centre.
… [Abd al-Salām ʿĀrif, president 1963-1966] was determined to free his hands to rule Iraq in accordance with his own political instincts, suggesting a … more patrimonial form of government. For this he needed to placate the economically conservative as well as religiously conservative sections of society … this was a return to the policy adopted under the monarchy.
… ’Arif … succeeded in effectively linking two aspects of patrimonial power long evident in Iraqi politics: he had established a network of clients within the armed forces, many of whose members were also bound to him by other links of affiliation and obligation arising from the structures of Iraqi provincial society. …
…. [his death revealed] the fundamental weaknesses of the patrimonial system. All the lines of patronage, the networks of reciprocal obligation and the informal understandings and loyalties had been drawn into one pair of hands, embodying a key relationship on which the stability of the polity largely depended. It could not be assumed that this would be reproduced by a successor. …
… [This is the same] form of neo-patrimonialism that sustained Saddam Husain’s power in Iraq.
Matthew Gray, ‘Theorising politics, patronage, and corruption in the Arab Gulf’, in Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Laura Ruiz de Elvira, Christoph H. Schwarz and Irene Weipert-Fenner, Routledge 2019
[Gulf states] have a range of features such as oil wealth and royal networks of patronage and legitimisation … supporting neopatrimonial elite networks …
… The core feature of the Gulf political economies is neopatrimonialism, the elite networks through which political and other elites interact formally and informally, and by which the interests of these elites … are protected and promoted …
… patrimonial dynamics ensure elite solidarity, including by helping manage business relationships … even in the face of pressures for … economic inclusiveness.
… Although neopatrimonialism is widespread in the Middle East, in the Gulf it is especially effective because it exists concomitant with enormous per capita oil wealth and especially strong and long-term (multigenerational) family and tribal relationships.
Laura Guazzone and Daniela Pioppi, The Restructuring of State Power in the Middle East, Ithaca Press 2009
Today, a significant number of analysts agree that … transformation [over the last three decades] neither represents a process of democratisation nor is preliminary to such a process, and that, on the contrary, it has actually configured and legitimated a restructuring of the power system that has left unchanged the authoritarian and patrimonial nature of the Arab regimes.
… As far as the strategies of the regimes are concerned, renewed participatory mechanisms for compliant elites have been combined with repressive policies towards political actors that are potentially autonomous … Top-down political liberalisation has been accompanied by a marked decline in nationalist ideology … the diffusion of a pervasive pro-reform technical discourse and a parallel reinforcement of informal (neo-patrimonial, private–public symbiosis) and communitarian (tribal, ethnic, religious) affiliation or cooptation. One result of this process is increased elite variety and increased competition between different elite factions. The new and old elites blur the lines between opposition and regime more and more and have a primary interest in building their own constituencies but no interest in politicising social conflict for fear of undermining the status quo and hence losing their privileged status. This is why the main liberal, nationalist or leftist parties in the Arab countries evidently lack a popular basis and do not offer alternative political programmes. They are more tools for client-seeking than channels for the expression of competing social interests. …
There are obvious consequences in this neo-patrimonial system of governance: the substantial absence of the rule of law, since citizens rights are bestowed or withdrawn according to one’s loyalty to the regime …
Phebe Marr and Ibrahim al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq, Routledge 2018
As of 2016, more than a decade after the 2003 Iraq war, the creation of the new Iraq is still a work in progress. The country’s future direction remains uncertain, but Iraq has reached a modicum of stability and an uneasy, perhaps fragile, equilibrium among its domestic forces, while its political shape is emerging more clearly, despite the vicissitudes of its military campaign against ISIS. New, more democratic forms of governance have been introduced, along with more openness to the outside world, both of which promise a better future. But these forces of change have also been disruptive and difficult to absorb. Traditional patterns and habits of governance—authoritarianism, patrimonialism, and patronage-based relations—have proven resilient and difficult to change.
Back to Weber reminder:
... the entire system of public norms of the patrimonial state… lacks the objective norms of the bureaucratic state and its ‘matter-of-factness’ which is oriented toward impersonal purposes. The office and the exercise of public authority serve the ruler and the official on which the office was bestowed, they do not serve impersonal purposes. …
… Equality before the law and the demand for legal guarantees against arbitrariness demand a formal and rational objectivity of administration, as opposed to the personal discretion flowing from the grace of the old patrimonial domination. …
My Conclusion
The historian can learn much about a society and its mode of governance by employing the measuring rod of patrimonialism. The concept ‘patrimonialism’ is especially useful in a schema of society types that begins with the individual differentiations in which father figures are prominent as governors, and which forces the observer to recognise the logic in almost universal consistencies of an evolution of households into states. However there can only be limited utility in a concept feature that is so prevalent across time and place. Indeed it is true that the first administered societies of 6000-2000 BC, and the elite societies of 2023 AD, do display a lot of patrimonialism. But you find a modicum of patrimonialism in every society.
Conceptual limitations come sharply into focus when one considers that the theory of patrimonialism is also often applied to the evolving states governing medieval type 7 status societies. What we most need are concepts that distinguish between types. Why did complex status societies emerge, why did formal written law take root in status societies, and in what ways were such processes the building materials for a further transition to type 8 modernity? The really important question is what happened in status societies to change the direction of travel. Here at Social Science Files I am preparing the ground for a definitive answer to that question.
Patrimonialism is especially important at the earliest point of state emergence, before growth in size or functions make demands made upon state administrative capacity that force it to become more impersonally bureaucratic. It is also tremendously useful to draw patrimonial parallels with contemporary societies in the same geographical areas. It can legitimately be said that societies get stuck in patrimonialism, or, more positively, that patrimonialism displays evolutionary ‘basic survival’ qualities.
Not all people in the ‘neo-patrimonial’ societies of contemporary Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East can or want to vote-with-a-boat for a passage to an advanced ‘post-patrimonial’ society. I may have rational objective and strategic developmental reason to encourage transitions to capitalism and democracy with rule of law and separation of powers. But life in Iraq or Egypt is clearly much better today than it was 6000 years ago. That is significant evolutionary progress.
Conclude: Patrimonialism is a feature of both the type 4 and type 9 premodern state. But it is not the defining feature of either type. [MGH]
The patrimonialism-bureaucracy distinction towards which much recent scholarly discussion is directed is not the optimal conceptual framework for understanding the differences between personal and impersonal motives or methods of governance. Perhaps the greatest value in the patrimonialism concept is just that it shines the spotlight on ‘personalism’ in state governance of societies. But too many scholars trying to theorise the emergence of ancient states have been tripped up by one or two throwaway remarks by Weber about sharp difference between patrimonial states with personal features and bureaucratic states with impersonal features. The evolution of mixed balances between personal and impersonal features of governance has been rather more complicated, continually taking on different intensity or form in different states for 6000 years. Weber knew this, but never teased out the π formula.
It is tempting to declare categorically that the origin of my ‘type 4’ administered society (at least in its first historical manifestations in Mesopotamia and Egypt) was the patrimonial state whose powers were successfully appropriated by potentates utilising expansive household administrative staff and reciprocal networks of patronage. Over time more complex divisions of labour/specialisation in multiplying tasks of administration increasingly evolve towards more impersonal administrative bureaucracies while remaining within classifiably ‘administered societies’. The good reason for discussing contemporary patrimonialism alongside ancient patrimonialism is that exercise of administrative power can be seen as conceptually patrimonial and personal. The fake facades of modern states in elite societies are not procedurally subject to formal equality before law but rather to informal norms and personalism. As noted above, this is simultaneously an evolutionary achievement and blockage.
The ideas and interpretations in this post are original under copyright and must be attributed to ©2023 Michael G. Heller
This post is a ‘peer reviewed’ publication
If you have a question or comment contact me at mgs.heller@gmail.com
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Workers on the Threshing Floor, Ancient Egypt (Date: c.1422 - c.1411 BC)