Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon wrote:
Adopting a provisional working definition of the “state” that encompasses yet allows us to identify what is unique about “empires” would therefore seem appropriate [in the context of this volume]
… At one extreme of social-political organization, the term “state” can refer to a relatively short-lived grouping of tribal or clan communities united under a warlord or chieftain who is endowed with both symbolic and military authority—in anthropological terms, a “Big-man” confederacy. Such “states” rarely survive for long, however, and are sometimes referred to as “proto-states”, since they have not yet attained a degree of institutional permanence and authority is generally exercised over a mobile people rather than a sovereign territory. Examples include the majority of the “nomad empires” that arose on the Eurasian steppe zone from the beginning of the first millennium BCE and periodically re-appeared until the seventeenth century CE … At the other extreme we find more or less territorially unified political entities, with an organizational “center” (which may be peripatetic) from which a ruler or ruling group exercises political authority and that maintains its existence successfully over several generations; a key element in the formation and degree of permanence of such formations is that the authority of the ruler or ruling group is recognized as both legitimate and exclusive. In this respect, the ideological aspect is absolutely fundamental to state-building, a point to which we will return later.
This more permanent type of state formation might be defined in the first instance as a territorially demarcated region controlled by centralized governing or ruling establishments, which may or may not have a monopoly over the use of coercion but which usually have the coercive power to assert their authority over the territories they claim, at least on an occasional “punitive” basis when needed. If the central state had a monopoly on coercive power, this would fit Weber’s “ideal type” definition of the state.
How exactly such central authorities achieve these ends varies enormously from state to state and society to society. In all premodern states there have been gaps in the extent of state authority—border or mountainous regions, for example, difficult of access and untouched by state supervision, or “tribal” groups nominally owing allegiance and occupying territory claimed by the state but not always easily brought under the state’s authority or control. Where geography has favored a tribal pastoral and/or nomadic economy, the nomads have frequently formed important elements in the armies of conquest states, certainly in the initial stages of their evolution. However, this has also meant that, because of the mobility of such pastoralists, because of their internal social cohesion and self-sufficiency, and because their wealth is generally easily moved out of the reach of state officials, they are both able and sometimes inclined to resist any central authority that does not directly favor their own interests.
By the same token, the relative patchiness of central control may represent a point on the line from local state to supra-local state to empire (and back again), as with Assyrian control over neighboring territories in the early period of expansion (ninth century BCE). Ideological power can overcome this at certain times, but by itself generally remains a short-term means of cementing such power relationships. The very different configuration of power relationships within … late ancient or early medieval states … provides striking examples of the ways in which the features of official military versus nomad militias, and central control versus central authority with varying local control, were combined.
A key element in state formation is the generation of fairly complex ideological and legitimating systems, on the one hand, and at the same time more impersonalized and institutionalized modes of surplus extraction than proto-states or clan or tribal groupings are capable of developing. In Weber’s concept, a focus around sacred monarchical and priestly authority is seen as one important initial stimulus to the formation of administrative-bureaucratic institutions evolved to secure the surpluses required for the temple and related religious-social functions. Administration based on kinship and lineage relationships, and the exploitation of kin-based modes of subordination, tend then gradually to be replaced by nonkinship-based bureaucratic or administrative systems (although kin and lineage are rarely entirely absent …).
In most examples, a bureaucratic-administrative structure of some sort confers a clear advantage and appears to be a necessity if the political system is to retain its nontribal existence and cohesion …
… A relatively open-ended account, allowing for both variety and evolution in state forms, is thus to be preferred to a closed and descriptive formulation, which would otherwise exclude features found in some state formations but perhaps not in others. An obvious reason for this preference is the fact that the formation of a state, and the civilizational system it may represent, is never a single event but rather a longer-term evolutionary process in which social habits and institutions and state organizations respond to changing conditions through what Runciman refers to as “competitive selection” of practices—where they fail to respond adequately, the state fails to develop further and fails. There are many different shades of “state-ness”, both in respect of the degree of actual physical control and in the degree of ideological integration of the varying and often antagonistic elements occupying the territory claimed by a given central authority.
Some historical states have been represented by claims to legitimacy based on consensus, having little or no power of coercion, and have survived generally for only a relatively short time.
Those state elites that have military coercion at their disposal, at least in the early stages of their development, may remain relatively isolated from the social structures they live off, surviving only as long as they are able effectively to coerce or persuade support and resources.
Others may move toward the establishment of a permanent and self-regenerating body of administrators, which draws its recruits from either specific groups within the state (tribal groups, for example), from particular family dynasties, or from those of a particular social or cultural background (which includes the establishment of slave bureaucracies and armies, deracinated from their original social and cultural context and dependent entirely on the system to which they owe their position).
They thus tend to evolve institutional structures—fiscal systems, military organizations, and so forth—that establish their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the daily practices of “ordinary” society. The state becomes a specialized and dominant set of institutions, which may even undertake the creation ab initio of its own administrative personnel and that can survive only by maintaining control over the appropriation and distribution of surplus wealth that this specialized personnel administers. … it seems also that this distancing of administrative apparatus from social base as well as from the kinship ties of the royal household represents a developmental shift, a process of maturation, as we follow the evolution of state formation through time.
Where the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires recruited their administrative infrastructure from the elite families of the center and provinces, bound through kinship ties or vested interests shared with the ruling dynasty and its kin, more developed bureaucratic systems recruited their personnel from a wider social range and depended upon more broadly available literary and educational possibilities. Of course, the picture is in all cases uneven and patchy, a mix of both “types”, and this simplification does a certain amount of injustice to the historical cases we examine. But where we find these phenomena, we have also found “states” in the more modern sense of the term …
State Success and Ideological Integration
The preceding discussion emphasized the importance of an integrated bureaucratic elite with its own resource base, as well as an ideologically rooted identity and legitimacy, to sustain state formation. Yet it is clear from a cursory comparison of a number of ancient and medieval state formations that a central authority can survive for substantial periods simply through the manipulation of key ideological and symbolic elements in the cultural system of the social formation as a whole …
Thus, states may have ideological lives that are not necessarily tied to their actual political and institutional efficacy or power. Political ideologies and belief systems, once in existence, are sometimes well able to adapt and to survive in conditions that have evolved significantly from those within which they were originally engendered, provided the contradictions between the two are not too extreme or insurmountable in terms of social praxis and psychology. Those that respond to long-term functional needs in human society provide the best examples and include religious systems in particular, such as Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. These systems did, to a greater or lesser degree, free themselves in certain respects from both the political and the social and economic conditions that produced them (although they may at the same time constrain the direction of social-economic evolution within those societies) …
Political ideologies too can be extremely flexible …
… These points suggest that a crucial element in the longer-term success of a state formation is a degree of acceptance of that state as normatively desirable, especially by elites, but even by the broader populace from which it draws its resources. We do not mean to revive the “consensus” theory of state formation but rather to stress the significance in the structuring of political relations of power and resource distribution of rules, “law,” and forms of normative behavioral patterns. These differed enormously in different historical cases…
The persistence of ideological integration can allow states to survive even with considerable administrative decentralization. State centers that are unable to maintain control and participation in the process of primary surplus distribution (through direct taxation, for example, or the ability always to coerce militarily) must attempt to survive by promoting their interests through alternative, secondary means of surplus re-distribution. Such means include the “devolution” of military and other authority, for example, to the level of the fief or an equivalent institution, as in western Europe during the period from the sixth to the sixteenth century. They include also networks of redistribution reinforced and operated through primarily religious structures …
States and Elites
… To what extent did emergent states incorporate existing elites? The relationships between these considerations and the origins of a given state system, on the one hand, and the appropriation, allocation, and distribution or redistribution of resources, on the other, constitute a series of focal issues.
These considerations are important because the state, through its need to establish and then maintain a regular and predictable structure for extracting revenues and resources, also enables or facilitates the evolution of new practices and relationships …
… Thus, the state also created spaces in which new developments could take place—the role of tax farmers in the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Mughal contexts, for example, both as extractors of revenue and as potential stimulants to changed patterns of investment or consumption of wealth, to changed structures of money use on the part of both producers and state administrations, and so on …
… As we shall see again and again in the chapters that follow, the evolution of states, as well as considerations bearing on their stability and collapse, turned on how rulers sought new ways to maintain control over state (and often nonstate) elites, while elites sought to maintain their authority, whether at the expense of the state or of rivals for local power. And this leads in turn to a consideration of how such state-elite relationships form part of a social totality, especially in the context of both local and international pools of influence—the concentric, overlapping, and reciprocally (but unevenly) influencing relationships that cross the boundaries of social formations.
States, Empires, and Complexity
One important aspect of any discussion of states and their histories must be the differential processes of evolution reflected in their age or maturity. “Mature” states must confront very different problems from “young” states. The degree to which their various institutional and ideological systems become well established and embedded into the basic fabric of the social formations that support them must play an important role.
In newly formed conquest states, the conquerors are rarely integrated into the wider structure of social and economic relationships; they remain, in effect, parasitic consumers of wealth extracted by force, or the threat of force, alone. The “empire” of the late Roman Republic can be examined from this perspective. In others, while this may once have been the case, centuries of “state embedding” have occurred, so that the state elite, its apparatuses, and its ideology are inextricably interwoven into the social fabric of society at large.
Mature states also have a sense of identity and tradition, one based on generations of continuity of ideological and power structures, that is very different from that of newly founded states. These factors also influence both the contemporary and the modern views of certain states. The Byzantine “empire” was, in many respects, just a small, territorially unified state; its “imperial” aspect was both short lived and occasional, yet it retains the image of an empire because of its “imperial” origins, as part of the Roman imperial system.
This brings us at last to the question at the heart of this volume: the nature, constitution, and dynamics of empires … [Empires] have been described very straightforwardly as the effects of the imposition of political sovereignty by one polity over others, however achieved, and the key marker of an “imperial” state was thus the degree of “foreign-ness” perceived to exist between rulers and ruled, conquerors and conquered.
In the simplest terms, then, the study of empires becomes the study of the subordination of one “state” or social formation by another and the extent to which the conquerors are successful in converting these peripheral zones into a part of their original state, both ideologically and in terms of fiscal, military, and administrative structures.
In some respects, this definition overlaps with the notion of the “segmentary” state, intended to suggest a multicentered, confederated political structure in which ideological elements and consensus play as great a role as centrally exercised coercive power. Although many early states functioned on the basis of a series of concentric zones of power distribution, focused around a political core, we might reasonably describe “empires” on the same lines, in which case the issue of their success and longevity will revolve around the same key questions: to what extent are empires of conquest able to impose upon the conquered lands and cultures their own ideological and cultural values and patterns of administration and elite formation and thereby create out of a range of different sociocultural formations a more or less homogeneous set of political values and ideological identities? Of all the “empires” discussed in this volume, the Roman—and its successor in the east Mediterranean basin, the Byzantine—states were perhaps the most successful in this respect. Of those not discussed here, the various Chinese states, especially from the T’ang onwards, and perhaps with the exception of the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing dynasties, achieved similar rates of successful integration, although the vastness of the Chinese lands and the regionalization of Chinese elites meant that this process was always contested and achieved at some cost.
Historians have generally referred to the expansive political entities of the East and pre-Renaissance Europe as “empires”—whether that of China, of Charlemagne, of Rome, Russia, Persia, Byzantium, or many others. The “national state” is then something that emerges with the renaissance monarchies of Europe. Yet in fact most so-called national states emerged through conquest or inheritance of previously distinct political or cultural domains, even in Western Europe … “Empire” was thus arguably the normal or modal form of large political entity throughout Eurasia until quite recently.
The true national state claimed by citizens as their own through their identification with a ruling elite to which all (or very nearly all) members of society could legitimately aspire is a quite recent phenomenon, perhaps visible only from the end of the eighteenth century in the United States and France and from the nineteenth century in South America and most of Europe …
… While some empires evolved through strategic alliances based on kinship or inheritance through gift or marriage, the majority of those political formations that we conventionally label empires were the direct result of military conquest. However, the key element that defines “empires” here is not simply their origins but rather the mode through which states and elites exercised power and defined their relationships to each other and the broader society. In our terms, an “empire” is a territory (contiguous or not) ruled from a distinct organizational center (which may be mobile) with clear ideological and political sway over varied elites who in turn exercise power over a population in which a majority have neither access to nor influence over positions of imperial power.
Such empires may over time acquire a great deal of cultural unification and identification between rulers and ruled (as in Ming China or late Imperial Rome), or there may be a clear gulf between rulers and ruled (as in the Ottoman rulers of Christian territories in Europe and most of the Mongol empires); or there may be partial integration of local elites and even limited pathways for certain ordinary individuals into broader imperial structures (as in the Janissary recruitment system of the late Ottoman Empire or the multinational elite of the Austro-Hungarians). While the particular patterns of state/elite relations and how they were institutionalized in systems of revenue extraction and distribution varied over space over time, “empire” in this sense was the typical formation by which large territorial states were ruled for most of human history, from several thousand years BCE until the past century or two …
… [W]here the empirical data are available, [we can/should] attempt a detailed analysis of the evidence for what have been referred to as the “unofficial infrastructures” within which and upon which the more obvious “official” or public forms of government and state administration in most states are built. This may take a variety of forms, but its premise is that only rarely do novel forms of political structure arise from a vacuum (i.e., the complete annihilation of all that went before). Rather, elements of processual and structural continuity as well as change are universally present in the growth of any “new” system. The analysis may be focused on a range of themes, including, for example, the role of household administrations, of accounting systems, of clerical and exchange media, of networks of inherited rights and jurisdictional claims, and of popular socioeconomic solidarities and local ideologies and identities …
… State systems are usually the result of a long-term evolution of a wide range of highly inflected localized modes of micro-structural social organization, each operating in its own immediate context according to local traditions and practices, which coalesce at a higher level to produce interlocal and interregional networks of resource management, distribution, and exchange. Such networks always preexist the actual state formative moment itself …
… The reason for emphasizing this collective, many-headed, and sometimes random development is that it provides the essential ground in which systems of rule and administration began to develop, and these are fundamental elements in the medium- and long-term success of state-like political entities. Networks of elite household administrations, the “bundles” of rights and privileges they gained over productive resources, through both long-term processes of kin-based inheritance and rights granted from higher political authorities, and their intra-elite relationships, all contributed to situations in which “states” were in effect many-centered, functioning through progressively decentralized pools of administrative effectiveness, and dependent upon mutually beneficial relations of support, tribute, and upward redistribution of revenues and resources. These are only rarely visible in the case of the majority of the ancient states for which we have evidence, but they can be highlighted and brought out in the analysis of more recent state formations …
History and the Evolution of Imperial Forms
… For the purposes of this volume, we thus suggest … that the series of empires that has arisen and fallen in overlapping succession in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean region represents a series of equilibria, stable formations in which imperial structures have managed to find a balance with the resource production and distribution, the local elite authority, the settlements and networks of social interaction, and the belief systems that characterized varying swathes of this region. Of course, rulers and imperial systems act to restructure resource production and distribution, local authority, population settlements and networks, and belief systems, sometimes quite radically, as with Babylonian deportations of conquered people or with Roman assimilation of conquered peoples as citizens and their states as provinces. Yet, imperial states rarely have total control over their infrastructure and their physical and political environment. They are thus subject to both sharp shocks and to gradual changes in those environments. In this way, the “meso-” and even “micro-” levels of social and political relationships influence the longer-term … “deep structures” to which imperial structures are generally fitted during their periods of inception, growth, and success.
Reproduction—in both the literal biological form and the more metaphorical form applied to institutions, beliefs, and practices—thus is central to understanding the full cycle of the rise, stability, decay, and displacement of empires.
The essays in this volume examine … the institutions and “reproductive processes” of ancient, classical, and early medieval empires. Each makes its own choice of focus on micro- or meso-processes, although with some attention to the very macro-level of general ecological, economic, and international conditions … by bringing together these cases, we can produce greater insights into the varied bases for imperial “success” at different times and places and into the pattern of imperial declines and successions that have characterized world history for most of the past five millennia.
The Source:
Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, ‘Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives’ in Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel editors, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium, Oxford 2009 [pp. 5-8, 10-11, 14-18, 21-22, 26-27]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.