Samuel Finer, The History of Government, Conceptual Prologue [Part 1]
Preface, 1. Recurrent Themes: 1.1 State Building
In Samuel Finer’s The History of Government From the Earliest Times,
The Editors wrote:
Preface
… For all its size and weight and number of years in preparation, the History is manifestly a single, sustained exercise in comparative analysis over time and space. It is the product, by the same token, of a single, magnificently sustained 'retirement' programme of research, consultation, and writing, for which he never lost zest and courage. Even so, Finer acknowledged towards the end that, for all his own repeated efforts to cut down on the length of the manuscript, it might prove physically impracticable to produce the History in one volume. This has indeed turned out to be the case, and it is for this reason, none other, that the present publication consists of three volumes to be brought out simultaneously. …
… The idea of writing the History of Government as his retirement project had struck Finer—with typical aplomb—as a stroke of genius. Once settled on the idea (a matter of days rather than weeks), he could hardly wait to get started. As he saw it, and as has so emphatically turned out to be the case, it was to be the summation and culmination of all that he had worked at and stood for, throughout his long career as a political scientist and historian of seemingly tireless imagination, inventiveness, and sheer appetite for the mix of scholastic erudition with street-level realism he had made his own.
To be sure, this great idea did not necessarily strike others with the same force at the time. The then Social Science Research Council, for instance, was politely sceptical as to the entire projects viability, given its proposed 'combination of historical and analytic typologies' (the essence of Finer’s approach in this consummate case), the dubiousness of the proposed periodization, and the insufficiency of the proposed selection of regimes from one period to the next. Consequently his request for research grant funds was reluctantly turned down by this particular gathering of peer reviewers and it was left to the Nuffield Foundation generously to support Finer's endeavours thereafter, with a recurrent grant-in-aid of secretarial and manuscript production costs. Inevitably, for all his meticulousness as scholar and author, the text Finer finally left behind was in an unfinished state. But this was a point—indeed likelihood—he had already anticipated and for which he had prepared. The 'Editorial Notes' left on the hard disk of his computer, continuously updated from 1987 for the benefit of whomsoever might be faced with the task of sorting out the unfinished manuscript, have themselves, lightly edited, furnished 'The Conceptual Prologue' to the entire work as now presented.
The range, depth, and complexity of the original enterprise, compounded by the varying state of completion of its different parts, meant that preparation of the final total manuscript for publication had very much to be a collective endeavour. All the experts that Finer himself had originally approached for advice and comment with regard to particular topics and/or periods were, so far as practicable, approached again—in addition to others variously suggested or deemed appropriate—for final points of correction with regard to facts, dates, and above all footnote references (one of the major practical problems being that Finer's own bibliography program had proved disastrously overambitious for his computer to cope with). The names of those thus consulted are listed at the end of this Preface. Their generosity of response is testimony to a continuing academic sense of community, with which Finer himself would have been as proud as he was happy to be associated. There has, of course, been no attempt to interfere with Finer's own interpretation of events and developments. Since specialists are prone to have their own views about particular episodes, if not entire epochs, in a country's or a continents experience of government—not least when confronted by a comparativist on the grand scale at which Finer operated—their restraint on this occasion has been exemplary.
The British Academy, of whose Politics Section Finer was such a distinguished member, provided a grant of £2,500 towards the editorial costs of preparing the enormous manuscript for publication, for which we are most grateful. …
Specialist Advisers:
Professor J. R. Baines (Oriental Institute, Oxford), Dr Jeremy Black (Oriental Institute, Oxford), Professor P. Brunt (retired), Mr George Cawkwell (retired), Dr Patricia Crone (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Professor Sir John Elliott (Oriel College, Oxford), Dr David Faure (St Antony's College, Oxford), Mr Peter Fraser (All Souls College, Oxford), Professor G. Holmes (retired), Dr J. Howard Johnston (Modern History Faculty, Oxford), Mr Peter Lewis (All Souls College), Professor J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz (retired), Professor D. L. McMullen (Oriental Institute, Cambridge), Professor F. G. B. Millar (Brasenose College, Oxford), Dr E. W. Nicholson (Provost, Oriel College, Oxford), Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri (retired), Dr John Robertson (St Hugh's College, Oxford), Dr Ann Waswo (St Antony's College, Oxford).
CATHERINE JONES FINER & JACK HAYWARD, Oxford, November1995
Samuel Finer wrote:
THE CONCEPTUAL PROLOGUE
The intention of this work is to provide a history of successive forms of government throughout the world from the earliest times to the present day. Not every form will be described. This would be quite unnecessary. The regimes discussed will be selected; and the criteria of selection remain exactly the same as I anticipated as early as 1983: 'first, the historically great and mighty politics, next the archetypal polities, thirdly innovators great or small; and, finally, the vivid variant.'1
This being so, this History will, inter alia, attempt to do the following things:
1. establish the space/time distribution of the selected forms of government, ground each one of these in its geographical/historical context, analyse each according to a standard format, and assess its general character, strengths, and weaknesses according to a standardized set of criteria;
2. identify similarities and differences between the forms of government described, according to a standardized TYPOLOGY; identify RECURRENT THEMES; and identify, with the aid of the Typology, those elements in these various forms of government that can be described as INVENTIONS.
For the purposes of this introductory discourse, we will take the Recurrent Themes first, before explaining and expounding the Typology; leaving the identification of Inventions to the last.
1. Recurrent Themes
This History of Government is a history of polities, which can be defined as 'the structures of government under which groups of men live, and its relationship towards them'. This concept therefore subsumes tribes as well as states. Yet my concern is with states. Significantly, Easton and, for that matter, other functionalists like Almond dispensed with the word and the concept of the state; the word does not appear even once in the index to Easton's Systems Analysis of Political Life. It is heartening to know that in swimming against the functionalist tide of the 1960s, I was in fact riding the wave of the future. Everywhere today 'the state' is back in fashion, and the discussion of the polity and its evolution is everywhere conducted in terms of it.
1.1. State Building
As the History makes clear, the state may have antedated writing, and, in my view, it certainly did. At all events it is coeval with the first written documents, whether these are located in Mesopotamia, or Egypt. It is therefore coeval with 'history' as we understand this term. Unquestionably tribes have government and are polities; and there have been times when the tribe conquered the state—for example, this happened many a time in China, when the northern tribesmen—be they Huns or Mongols or Tartars or Manchu invaded and took over parts of the empire and, at times, seized the whole of it. But in all such cases the tribesmen either disintegrated if they tried to retain their tribal identity in the midst of the settled population, or alternatively they so adapted themselves to becoming its ruling class that they assimilated to its form of polity. As a form of polity, the tribe was, in Patricia Crone's expressive phrase, an 'evolutionary dead end’.
How, then, define the state? Contemporary states possess five characteristics; but premodern ones usually possessed only the first three of them, and in many contemporary states the fourth and the fifth characteristics are still not present, or are present only to a slight degree. The characteristics are as follows:
1. They are territorially defined populations each recognizing a common paramount organ of government.
2. This organ is served by specialized personnel; a civil service, to carry out decisions and a military service to back these by force where necessary and to protect the association from similarly constituted associations.
3. The state so characterized is recognized by other similarly constituted states as independent in its action on its territorially defined—and hence confined—population, that is, on its subjects. This recognition constitutes what we would today call its international ‘sovereignty'. As we shall see, many premodern states merely approximated to these three conditions. For instance, many had fluid boundaries, in many the organs of government were but poorly differentiated, and the mutual recognition of each other's 'sovereignty' was irregular, intermittent, and served by very imperfect instruments.
The last two characteristics are more problematic. They are:
4. Ideally at least, but to a large extent in practice also, the population of the state forms a community of feeling—a Gemeinschaft based on self-consciousness of a common nationality.
5. Ideally at least, and again to a large extent in practice, the population forms a community in the sense that its members mutually participate in distributing and sharing duties and benefits.
With regard to characteristic (4), in antiquity, only a few populations can be said to have felt such a sense of separate identity. The ancient Egyptians certainly did and so did the Jews—'a nation apart'—as they called themselves. It is difficult to see how the earliest Chinese fit into the definitions of 'nationality'. ‘Chineseness’ was, originally, a matter of a superior civilization imposed by force by people whose origins we cannot identify but who recognized themselves as 'Chinese' by virtue of certain distinctive marks, which included, inter alia, dress, comportment, the ideographic script, and living in walled villages or towns. If we are contemplating only Europe, then there was no self-consciousness of nationality under the Roman Empire. By the fifth century AD its citizens were beginning to think of the Empire as 'Romania' and themselves as 'Romanians', but these were hazy concepts which recognized that they were members of a political community rather than that they had a common nationality; that is, it was the recognition of a Gesellschaft, not of a Gemeinschaft. In post-Roman Europe it took centuries for the sense of common nationality to emerge, and even then it began, earliest, in the peripheral regions—first in England in perhaps the thirteenth or fourteenth century; in France perhaps in the fifteenth and certainly by the sixteenth century. The sense of common Spanish nationality developed very late: the regional differences were far too great. Catalonia spoke a different tongue altogether from Castilian Spanish, and it straddled the Pyrenees in geography and sentiment. The same is true of the Basques—and so forth. Not till after 1713 did the kings of Spain refer to their kingdom as 'España'—previously they had called it 'las Españas'. The sentiment we call 'national' develops in the eighteenth century and then, widely, both in Europe and other continents after the great French Revolution.
The final characteristic is again a very recent phenomenon; a state could well have a sense of national identity, like eighteenth-century France, but nevertheless be governed in an authoritarian fashion by a ruling house, usually sanctified by a myth of divine election. Such dynastic states, or Hausstaaten, were regarded as in some sense the property of the ruler. The notion that the state's destinies are decided, in the last resort at least, by the politically significant members of its population, that is, that it belongs to the nation and not the ruler, arises distinctively late outside England, and for the explicit recognition that 'sovereignty resides in the nation' we must wait till the French Revolution and the enunciation of this doctrine in Sieyès's Que’estce que le Tiers État?
An important question of terminology arises here. Many authors use the term ‘nation-state’ although sovereignty does not reside in their population their 'nation'. I think this very misleading. When I talk of fourteenth-century England and fifteenth-century France I shall call them 'national' states. When such national states are ruled by the members of the nation, that is, sovereignty is democratically exercised by the nation, then and then only shall I call it a nationstate.
So much for definitions of the state: the issue here is how these states came to be built. The reason for such interest is that the way in which they were built usually has most important consequences for the way they come to be governed. Now ‘state-building’, particularly in the 1960s, when so many new states were spawned as the great European colonial empires broke up, became an immensely fashionable research topic for the numerous, mostly American, scholars who were interested in what they called 'development' or 'modernization' in these new states. In nearly all cases, these terms concealed the assumption that the new states ought—for their own good, of course—to develop into states on the EuropeanAtlantic model. The 'modern European state', as it came to be called—the state that possessed in full measure all five of the characteristics mentioned above—became, implicitly or explicitly, the paradigm of a 'developed' or a 'modern' polity. And great attention came to be paid to the way in which the states of Western Europe had come into being after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, as they stumbled from feudalism to absolutism and from absolutism to democratic and national states, that is, nation-states.
This entire line of research was mistaken. It tacitly assumed that the state had originated only in Europe and at the dose of the Middle Ages. This is completely wrong. In fact the development of states in Europe is—in a world-historical perspective—highly idiosyncratic. Feudalism represented breakdown; a previously highly organized state being fragmented. Furthermore, even for post-Roman Europe it begs the main question. That question is the one of territoriality. … [The] strikingly original characteristic of western feudalism is that political allegiance was divorced from territoriality: it was not a question of 'what country do you live in?' that determined whom you obeyed, but 'whose man are you?' Feudalism was trans-local. Such a phenomenon is found almost nowhere else, though it has been said to have existed in part under the Chou in China (c.1100-772 BC), and in some sense in Japan. However that may be, the formation of the 'modern European state' starts effectively with, and is built around, the erection of known frontiers. It is fashionable in many quarters today to mock the premodern states for the fuzziness of their frontiers, to point out that they usually consisted only of a limes or border, not a black line as they do today; and to make this one of the hard-and-fast criteria for the difference between the premodern and the modern state. It is true that the notion of territorial sovereignty as we know it in international law today was not finally defined till the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Yet, however wavery their frontiers, these premodern states were states precisely because there was a core area whose boundaries did not fluctuate, whose people recognized a common superior. The notion that the emperors of China did not have a dear idea of what were their dominions and where individuals had to have the imperial passport is quite ridiculous. There was a multi-state system in China in the stage that begins with 722 BC and comprises the ‘Spring and Autumn' period followed by the 'Period of the Warring States'. During the latter—by which time some 180 petty states had been reduced to just seven—a pattern of coalitions emerged based on the opposition of a 'horizontal' (EastWest) coalition to a 'vertical' (North-South) one; and the principles that governed such interstate conduct were all described with a wealth of quasi-historical detail, in a treatise that bears the tide Chan kuo ts'e ('The Intrigues of the Warring States').
We ought, therefore, to bypass the European experience and generalize from the entire universe of past polities. We can also forget the preoccupations of the 1960s with development and modernization. Our interest in state-building goes simply as far as it affects how a polity is governed. This requires us to distinguish between the (primarily) territorial format of different states.
These fall into four main classes: city-states, 'generic' states, national states, and empires.
City-states are independent governing units consisting of a town or city with a narrow band of dependent territory around it. The earliest states in Mesopotamia are of this kind, as are, of course, the poleis of Greece and the medieval city republics of Europe. The term, as far as its use in English is concerned (its equivalent in European languages is but rarely found), seems to have first been used by Warde-Fowler, in his The City-State of the Greeks and Romans, published in 1893. But Sidgwick was using the term freely in his Development of European Polity. Although this work was not published until 1903, the lectures on which it is based were delivered every year from 1885/6 to 1898/9; so perhaps he was the initiator. Sometimes such a city-state extends its territory. The principal examples of this are Rome and Venice. The cities themselves are governed by their own, usually republican, constitution, but rule over the territories which they hold in subjection, as dependencies. They thus become empires as this term is defined below.
But what name to give to the much more common form of polity, rarely a republic, being nearly always governed by a king or prince who rules over an extensive tract of territory, usually contiguous territory? Various names have been volunteered. To call them 'kingdoms' or 'principalities' does away with the difficulty by begging the entire question as to what kind of state it is that the king or prince is ruling. Kingdoms and principalities are, in fact, subtypes of the states concerned here. Three names have been volunteered. One is to contrast them with the city-state as 'territorial state'. Just so did Peter Burke. He asks, 'When did Florence cease to be a city-state (which controlled a substantial amount of territory in Tuscany) and become a territorial state (in which the metropolis remained dominant in many respects)? There can be no sensible answer, became these two terms ride on quite different planes. Malta is a 'territorial' state, although its territory is not very big. The term 'territorial state' has nothing to do with the size of a territory—it is the contradictory of the non-territorial state, and the only type of this to be found in this History is the purest form of feudal state, which counts allegiance in terms of trans-local, man-to-man relationships, whereas in the territorial state the subject's allegiance arises from the fact that he resides or was born in that territory.
This leaves us with the only two remaining alternative terms to be widely used. Sidgwick uses 'the country-state’. Nowadays it is more common to use the term 'national state' or wrongly, as we have already shown, ‘nation-state’. Sidgwick somewhat fudges the issue when he points out that the term 'country' as it is commonly used combines the notion of a specific territory with the notion of a specific kind of people inhabiting it. Effectively, though, we have only three alternatives: to call these states either 'country' states, 'national' states, 'ethnic' states. The last term would be a neologism, although it would exactly fit the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew states, where the territory and the ethnos are contiguous. The attractiveness of this term is that it would avoid using the word 'national', and hence 'nation', when, according to modern doctrine, nations and nationalism are a product only of the last two or three centuries, and even then only in Europe. Against it is to be set its novelty, and the argument that we can indeed speak of some ethnoi in the past as being nations in our present sense; but above all, the fact that many of the states we are considering were made up of a miscellany of ethnoi.
It would be possible to coin a word 'toponymous', so that a toponymous state would be one defined as it were by its place-name, that is, a state whose frontiers enclose a tract of territory that is specific enough to have a certain name, but without any implication that the people therein are of common ethnic, linguistic, or religious stock, and so on, or have any self-consciousness of being a single community, except in so far as all are subjected to the same ruler. A good example, because it is so exotic, is Transylvania, an area inhabited by a mixture of Magyar and Romanian elements. For a long period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this was an independent principality. It was certainly not a national state, but can with justice be called a toponymous state. But 'toponymous' is perhaps too bizarre an expression for common use in the text.
The intention, after all, is to distinguish 'national' states, that is, those inhabited by a 'nation' (whatever that may be) from others which cannot be so called—a sort of residue. After much deliberation, therefore, I have settled on a nondescript term, to wit, 'genetic'. When there is no reason to think that a communal self-consciousness exists among the inhabitants of a region, and there is reason to underline this fact, the state will be called generic, or a generic-type state. Where, on the other hand, there are elements of such self-consciousness, as in fourteenth-century England, that state will be called a national (not a nation) state.
Finally we come to the much-abused term 'empire'. It connotes, first of all, bigness. An empire is a very large state. Yet to apply the term to any very large state would occasionally defy common usage; for instance, the United States is a very large and populous state, but we do not call it the American Empire. If we use that term at all—just as when some people talk of the Soviet Empire—it is not mere size we are talking about but the connotation of a second characteristic as well—domination.
The word derives from the Roman term imperium, which is difficult enough to translate in its specifically Roman context, but which always carries the connotation of domination. Empires are commonly thought of as having been brought into existence by conquest, and with good reason, for the term 'empire' carries the implication that an identifiable ethnic or communal group, and/or a core territorial unit (which might be a state-generic, national, or, indeed, a city-state) exert dominion over other ethnic, territorial, or communal groups.
A difficulty arises when we consider the Roman Empire after the Edict of Caracalla (AD 212) and Diocletian's reorganization (AD 284-305). First, when citizenship is applied to all free inhabitants of the empire, we can no longer talk of an identifiable ethnic group ruling the remainder; and next, once Diocletian treated Italy as simply one province among many, one cannot even consider this multiethnic state as being ruled by one privileged locality. The later Roman Empire was becoming a multiethnic state, exemplified by the introduction of the term 'Romania'. A similar puzzle arises with the Byzantine area; the issue here is whether it consisted of the Anatolian heartland ruling over the Balkans, or whether Anatolia and the Balkans together constitute a core area in themselves. Arguably the former interpretation should prevail, because the Asiatic part of the empire always enjoyed a status superior to the European part. We might get over this difficulty by adopting the suggestion that at this stage we have moved into an 'Empire Mark II' where, consequent upon the situation we have just described, there has evolved a common imperial culture which acts as the 'ticket of entry' for any who want to enter the ruling stratum. This extended definition would apply to Rome, Byzantium, and, as will be seen in the next paragraph, to China as well. Islamicists recognize, indeed stress, the difference between a large state founded on particularist domination, and the very same large state where a common Islamic culture predominates. They call the former the Arab 'Kingdom', and reserve the term 'Empire' for the Abbasid period, after 750. But we do not here have to follow this usage at all. We prefer to think of the Caliphal Empire Mark I (the four 'righteously guided' Caliphs and the Ummayads) and Mark II (under the Abbasids).
China is still considered as consisting of two parts—China Proper and Outer China (which includes, for example, Sinkiang, Tibet, and Mongolia). For most of its history China consisted only of China Proper. Yet this was called an empire. Originally this usage might be justified because the cultures south of the Yangtse were being colonized from the north. This would be the Chinese Empire Mark I. But by the Sung at the latest, China Proper was an Empire Mark II. The imperial culture was the passport to rulership. This is what successive waves of conquering northern nomads found—that unless they adopted Chinese imperial Culture, they would not be able to legitimize and hence consolidate their rule.
We should note in passing that there is an entirely trivial usage of the term. The reason why some genetic or national states are referred to as empires, for example, Bismarck's 'German Empire' (or even what used to call itself the 'Central African Empire'), is simply that their rulers chose to call themselves 'emperors'. These 'empires' are purely honorific.
This is a very long preliminary to the central question: how do states come to be what they are?—leaving aside the extremely obscure and contentious question of how states emerge from primeval and tribal societies.
The most obvious point is that states such as we know them today are the product either of aggregation from smaller territorial units or the disaggregation of large territorial units. Well over two-thirds of the states of today have been created Since 1945, mostly since 1960, as a result of the liquidation of those vast multiethnic states which, rightly, were called the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Portuguese colonial empires. But this is only the latest manifestation of a very old and regularly recurring phenomenon. The states that emerged with the breakdown of the western Roman Empire, and which themselves disintegrated into hundreds of principalities and city-states, were the detritus of that large and multiethnic state. Likewise, the estimated 130-80 petty states of Northern China that emerged after 722 BC were the detritus of the Chou Empire. From the detritus of the breakup of the Arab Caliphate were (after a long interval, admittedly) to emerge a succession of states such as Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the various states of the Maghreb.
On the other hand, many states which survive to this day—England, indeed the UK, is an example, as is France or Spain—were built up by the aggregation of smaller units. We do not know where this process started. If we simply took the Mesopotamian experience as the starting-point—and it is prior to the Egyptian one—then the process begins with the formation of city-states which then become aggregated, in ways to be discussed, into a larger political unit. But there is no evidence that this is how Pharaonic Egypt came into being. It was not urbanized, and for millennia it had no fixed capital. It was ruled from wherever the dynasty had decided to put their tombs. All that we know is that it gives every evidence of having been the product of the uniting of two territories, Upper and Lower Egypt; whether by conquest of the North by the South or vice versa is in dispute.
But in either case we assume there was an area from which the aggregation proceeded. It is usual to call these 'conquest centres', though in many cases the aggregation might well have been peaceful, and in many well-attested cases (Francia and the Regnum Francorum, or Wessex and the Kingdom of England, or Ch'in and the unification of China in 221 BC), the petty state that aggregated the remainder lay on the periphery, not at the centre. We could, I think, recognize two paths by which a 'centre' expands to form a larger territorial aggregate. The first case assumes a 'centre' with weak and fragile neighbours into which it can expand with relative ease. An example would be the Roman expansion into Iberia and Provence, and finally Gaul and Britain. The paradigm is a 'hard' centre and a 'soft' periphery. Here the limits to expansion are set, for the most part, by the sheer logistical problems of distances, sometimes compounded—as in the case of Varus' lost legions in respect of Augustus' Rome—by a defeat at the frontier (itself usually occasioned by these same logistical problems). The problem of maintaining Chinese garrisons beyond the Great Wall, or indeed, up at the Wall, provides another striking example. Sinkiang and Central Asia could be and were lost more easily than they had been gained. In these cases the tide of expansion stopped, not at an internationally agreed frontier—a product, really, of the last two centuries—but at a limes. (In Britain we call a hard line, which marks out sovereign territory, a frontier; we call a blurred, fluctuating, and debatable area a border (the Latin limes). The Americans use the terms in exactly the reverse sense.)
The limes was wherever the ruler decided to stop. Augustus, after the disaster of the Teutoburgian Forest, ordained that the Empire must not expand any more, and by and large it did not. It certainly never expanded into Germany proper. Likewise, the Chinese expansion into Turkestan and points west was stopped, partly by logistical problems but equally by Confucianist nagging about the uselessness and, indeed, the perniciousness of these caravan trails. In the eighteenth century the French invented the doctrine of 'natural frontiers', not in order to pursue further conquests to the east but, precisely, in order to put a limit at the Rhine. Sometimes, however, the would-be aggregating 'centre' found its progress checked by another, similar, 'centre'. This was the case in ancient Mesopotamia and in classical Greece. Sometimes, as we have already pointed out, the large, multiethnic unit disintegrated to give rise to a large number of smaller political units roughly equal in power. In either case, this may be described as a 'balance of power situation': so it was among the various petty states of Italy after the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, or among the much larger national and country states that had emerged in Europe by the eighteenth century. In that event the result might be the perpetuation of a states-system as, notably, in Europe. Or, alternatively, it might end with one of the local states conquering the others. This is what happened in England, where Wessex gobbled up the other Saxon and the Danish kingdoms, or in France where the Île de France region—Francia—acquired the rest of the provinces by a mixture of conquest, marriages, inheritances, and escheats.
There were three possible outcomes to such situations. In the first, the resources and mobilizing capacity of the would-be 'centre' were so much greater than those of the peripheric states that it could not only overrun them but also centralize its rule over them (that is, deprive the conquered units of discretion) and ultimately homogenize them culturally. This was what Ch'in did in 22x BC when it gobbled up the other six Chinese states; and the unifying work of its king, the 'First Emperor’, Shih Huangti, was never to be undone. In the second case, the resources and potential for mobilization of the peripheric states and those of the would-be centre were roughly equal. Here the outcome was the perpetuation of a country-state system (as between the various country-states of Europe) or a very slow unification in which the regional particularism of the peripheric regions was never lost. In these cases a race was being run between the 'centre' and the periphery, and therefore the ultimate unification was a slow business. England was unified from Wessex long before the corresponding movement in France, and the unity so gained was only strengthened by the Danish conquest, to be finalized when the Norman conquest made the entire country the 'terra regis', corseted by 3,000 mail-dad Norman overlords. In France the unification process, emanating from Paris, did not begin till the beginning of the thirteenth century and was certainly not completed till perhaps the sixteenth or even seventeenth century; with the result that regional particularism and a sort of ‘mosaic’-state was characteristic of the French monarchy until the Revolution. Finally, there is the case where the resources of the peripheric states are more powerful than those of the would-be centre. Here those states endure. No unification takes place.
So far we have considered the creation of a state by aggregation from smaller units or the disintegration of the larger units, and both presuppose unification from a special geographical area which we call a 'centre'.
But historically there is another and radically different way in which states and empires have been formed; and this is by tribal conquest: the overrunning of existing states from the outside.
The two principal examples of this are the Mongol Empire of Chinghiz Khan, and its successor-states; and the Arab conquests, resulting in the Caliphate which stretched from Spain to northern India. The latter example is, of course, of lasting and major historical importance. The Arabs are unique in history as the 'only tribal conquerors to have caused the cultural traditions of highly civilized peoples to be reshaped around their tribal heritage'; whereas the Mongols either took over the existing state structures and their values or, if they persisted in maintaining their original tribal customs and identity, fairly soon disintegrated and perished. What is so striking about the Mongol conquest of China is how soon the Mongol ruling group disintegrated, lost its military tradition, and was chased into the desert by a resurgent national Chinese revolt and never heard of again. The Toba Empire (c.440) provides a paradigm of what happened when northern nomads took over parts of China proper. In the event one group of Toba tribesmen assimilated themselves to Chinese and indeed Confucianist values; the others, however, wanted to retain the old tribal structure and values. The result was the breakup of the Toba Empire into the 'tribalistic' state of Chou and the Confucianist state of Ch'i. After decades of fighting, the former state was defeated, passed into pro-Chinese, then into Chinese hands, and its Toba tribesmen 'disappeared for all time'. The fate of the original ethnic Arab conquerors was not dissimilar, in that their ruling status in a huge land empire disappeared after perhaps a century and other ethnic groups, usually of Turkic extraction, took their place; but unlike the north Asiatic nomads—not before they had created a genuinely new civilization and a tradition which was common to all the lands they had conquered even when, bit by bit, these fell away from the central Caliphate and became effectively (and sometimes formally) independent.
We can summarize the diverse effects of these different modes of state-building on the form of government by considering two sets of summary variables. The first is whether and how far the rulers established a central and standardized administration throughout the state's territory; the second, how far in the course of that process they homogenized culture, language, and law.
The various modes by which these outcomes were or were not effected must be left to the individual case studies. Here, all we are considering are the outcomes.
The two sets of summary variables yield four cells.
(a) Centralized and standardized administration; homogenized culture, language, and law. Examples would include the later Roman Empire, Byzantium, China, the kingdoms of England, and at a later remove, France.
(b) Central and standardized administration; little or no homogenized culture, language, and law. Examples: the Persian Empire; the Ottoman Empire.
(c) Absence of centralized and standardized administration; homogenized culture. Examples: medieval Germany and medieval Italy.
(d) Absence of centralized and standardized administration; absence of homogenized culture, language, and law. Examples: the Empire of Charlemagne; the Mongol Empire.
These crude divisions take no account of the subtle variations in each case: the absence of regional particularism in England as contrasted with its powerful presence in France, for instance, or the unique way in which the city of Rome knitted together a league of Italian tribes and cities in the first stages of its imperial expansion. This History brings out the nuances in each individual case.
There remains one final set of distinctions. It relates to the 'stability' of political systems. For instance, if we looked at the statistics for the turnover of Byzantine emperors, we might conclude that that state was very unstable indeed. But this is to fail to distinguish between three possible objects of our attention. The first of these, following Easton, is what he calls the 'political community'. By this he does not mean a community in the sense of a Gemeinschaft, sharing common traditions; there need be no affect in the group at all. The political community is simply that aggregate of humans 'who are drawn together by the fact that they participate in a common structure and set of processes, however tight or loose the ties may be'. Such a political community may well in fact be composed of groups with different cultures, traditions, or nationalities, for example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the same token, that community can disappear. Sometimes it simply fragments into other smaller ones. Sometimes, as in the case of the Assyrians after the destruction of Nineveh, they simply disappear from history. The past is littered with the wreckage of political communities. After 722 BC the Chou Empire of China fragmented into some 13080 separate political communities, which in turn were reduced by conquest to a mere seven, which in their own turn were reduced to one and one alone by Shih Huangti in 221 BC. There are reckoned to be some 300 separate political communities in Europe c.1500. Today they number about thirty.
However, the stability or collapse of a political community must be distinguished from that of the regime. By this is meant the constitutional order, the ‘regularized’ method for ordering political relationships. It is much more than a mere ‘constitution’, for the term implies also the notions of the goals and limits of tolerance, the norms and accepted procedures and the formal and informal structure of authority, all rolled up together. It is obvious that a political community may collapse and become three or four political communities, each of which, however, perpetuates the same regime or a similar regime to that of the original united community. We could say that this is what happened when the Thirteen Colonies split off from the larger political community of the British Empire in 1776. In the text I sometimes use this term 'regime' as synonymous with 'form of rule', 'form of polity', or even 'polity' itself; but the last is a dangerous identification since the regime is as much the way, the manner, the temper in which the policy is conducted as the polity itself. When used in this way, the context must decide.
Regimes may also change rapidly but not, perhaps, as rapidly as political communities do. The European experience is particularly misleading in this regard. Europe has been much, much more protean, changeful, and innovative than any other part of the globe. It has moved from Roman imperial autocracy and law, through a Dark Ages, into feudalism, thence into absolutist and territorial states, finally into representative democracy, and then, beyond that, into the socialist collective autocracies until 1989 of the eastern part of the continent. Compare this with China where, from perhaps the eighth century BC (or, if this is regarded as too early a starting-point for the tradition of the regime, than at least from 221 BC) the regime—an autocracy—remained essentially unchanged until this century. Chinese history is punctuated by innumerable peasant uprisings, sometimes on a national scale, and in some cases bringing about the fall of a dynasty; yet in no case—until we come to the TaiPing revolt of the nineteenth century—did the rebels want to change the regime. They simply wanted to change the authorities.
With the authorities we come to the third possible subject of 'political instability'. 'The authorities' are simply those who hold the authority-roles at any one time. We could in fact make further distinctions between the political, that is, policy-deciding authorities and the bureaucracies, but this is not worth doing; the latter are relatively permanent and unchanging and are more usefully regarded as a fixture of the regime. But when we turn to the political, that is, the decision-making authorities, we find that here the turnover can be and often is very rapid indeed without in any way altering the central characteristics of the regime. The toppling of kings, emperors, and sultans in the Roman, Byzantine, and Mamluk polities is so frequent that it gives the appearance of great instability. And instability there was— in the top echelons of the government. But beneath the turbulence at the palace level, the regimes themselves persisted unaltered for century on century. China offers a contrast to these three examples in that there— apart from its periodic periods of breakdown—the succession to the throne was as regular as the regime was stable.
The Source:
S. E. Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times: Volume I, Ancient Monarchies and Empires, Oxford University Press 1997
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.