State-formation

In 1500, Europe had five hundred independent political units. Four centuries later, it had twenty-something. How did this happen?

According to Charles Tilley ( The Formation of National States in Western Europe ), this was the result of deliberate efforts at state-building. He writes, “state-makers only imposed their wills on the populace through centuries of ruthless effort. The effort too many forms: creating distinct staffs dependent on the crown and loyal to it; making those staffs (armies and bureaucrats alike) reliable, effective instruments of policy; blending coercion, co-optation, and legitimation as means of guaranteeing the acquiescence of different segments of the population; acquiring sound information about the country, its people and its resources; promoting economic activities which would free or create resources for the use of the state.”

It wasn’t pretty. As Tilley notes, any consolidation of power like that of early modern Europe leaves a lot of losers behind, and victorious state-builders frequently consolidated by force: “For all their reputed docility, the ordinary people of Europe fought the claims of central states for centuries. In England, for example, the Tudors put down serious rebellions in 1489 (Yorkshire), 1497 (Cornwall), 1536 (the Pilgrimage of Grace), 1547 (the West), 1549 (Kent’s Rebellion), 1553 (Wyatt’s Rebellion), all responding in one way or another to the centralizing efforts of the crown.” During the seventeenth century, the revolutions “grew most directly from the Stuarts’ effort to concentrate power in the crown. The result was an enormous amount of conflict and resistance.” He quotes on historian: “By 1688 conspiracy and rebellion, treason and plot, were a part of the history and experience of at least three generations of Englishmen. Indeed, for centuries the country had scarcely been free form turbulence for more than a decade at a time.”