Instituting the state : European state formation in Europe and the Americas 800-1800 A.D

This is a thesis about the place of the long term process of state formation in the development of the West. Conventional historiography and historical sociology have under-theorised the longue duree of the institutional creation of the apparatus of power. Theories of state formation have sought to explain the long term transformation of Western states in a variety of ways. Weber and Elias privilege processes of monopolisation and rationalisation of force and taxation in their historical sociologies. Perry Anderson throws into relief the long-lasting legacy of Antiquity in the West. Others, such as Anthony Giddens and Charles Tilly, focus on the institutionalisation of coercion. This thesis takes issue with these images of state formation, arguing that the monopolisation of power is, in fact, a process of the creation of symbolic, administrative, and coercive institutions through which ruling elites can effectively govern. Following Cornelius Castoriadis' social theory of the imaginary institution, this is called the institutional imagination. The creation of the means and meaning s through which central authorities can rule, occurs within a field of tension that is present throughout most of the Middle Ages and the early modern period in Western Europe. The generation of the institutions of governance is shaped by a tension between major power elites located at the centre of regal authority, and provincial and urban contenders who are relatively independent of the central monarchical court state. This tension is most pronounced in the feudal and standestaat figurations of power in which the command of monarchies is historically weakest. Provincialism and urban autonomies endure under absolutism, sparking major conflicts that mostly revolve around claims to further power by the court state. Some of these dissolved the absolutist figuration, instituting new state forms (the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War), whilst retaining some of the tension that characterised it. Others (the Fronde, the comunero revolt) resulted in the institution of stable monarchical forms. The tension was not limited to the legislative, fiscal, and military capacities of the court state apparatus. It is a major argument of this thesis that mercantilism was a crucial source of the origins of modern capitalism. The court state sought to curtail the influence of urban guilds and councils over the economy. In doing so, it was eroding the lingering relative independence of provincial and urban bodies. Accompanying the mercantilisation of economic life was the expansion of states into the Americas. The mercantile imagination was the driving force behind European exploration and colonialism. The empires created by court states were empires of absolutism, and they extended the tension of state formation into the societies of the New World. However, this was no simple reproduction of the patterns of state formation that had characterised Western Europe. Imperial states were also altered by the conditions of colonial life in the Americas. The republics that were created after the upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected the Spanish and English legacies of imperial state formation. The new republics were also modern states insomuch as they generated new types of institutions. American republicanisms came at the end of the millennium long process of state formation that began with the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. The millennium ended at the cusp of the empires of absolutism and new republican state forms