The modern state and the primitive accumulation of symbolic power

The exercise of symbolic power has become a privileged focus of scholarship on the state, but without much attention to how states acquired this power in the first place. This article lays a foundation for systematic historical inquiry into the primitive accumulation of symbolic power by modernizing states. It introduces an analytical framework for research on how new domains of administrative ac-tivity become recognized as legitimate state practices. This frame-work is deployed to analyze how a popular revolt in northeastern Brazil managed to frustrate the Brazilian state’s attempt to imple-ment civil registration in the mid-19th century. The conclusion con-siders broad implications of this analysis for students of modern state formation and suggests the need for comparative historical analyses that historicize the naturalization of state power. Drawing inspiration from Max Weber’s enduring definition of the state as a compulsory political organization that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within its territory (Weber 1978, p. 54), accounts of the rise of modern states in Western Europe have devoted sustained attention to the political-military dimensions of state formation. Struggles to wrest the capacity to legitimately coerce from the array o