French Revolution as Chinese dynastic crisis

This is an essay on the interaction between states and social orders, using China as a prism to examine European patterns, rather than the other way around. According to Japanese historian Naito "Konan" Torajiro, the history of modern China began in the Song dynasty (960-1279), making China the first modern society; an analysis known as the Naito Hypothesis. Given that Song dynasty China had paper money, meritocratic bureaucratised autocracy, tax-paid soldiers, public rituals but private religion, scholar-gentry replacing vanishing landed aristocracy--even the offering of prizes for better crossbow designs--I find Naito's proposition to be very plausible.

I see no reason to presume that modernity began in Europe. Especially given the way various Enlightenment folk thought Chinese government more advanced in its forms of management than European states. Britain, for example, did not introduce civil service examinations until the mid C19th, over twelve hundred years after China had pioneered them and about nine centuries after they had become the only path to officialdom.

I am, however, uncomfortable with calling the previous period in Chinese history "medieval", as Naito often did. I prefer the term he also used of middle antiquity (chuko in Japanese), though I would call it China's late antiquity. And yes, that means I hold that China did not have a medieval period as such; it went straight from its late antiquity to the early modern.

It is remarkable how much fine scholarship is available at one's fingertips thanks to the Information Technology revolution. Many scholars and researchers make their papers available for free download. An even vaster array of papers are available for purchase. Due to the prevalence of the "working paper" model, and various public institutions (notably central banks), economics papers tend to be particularly prone to being available for free.

China's dynastic cycle
In particular, there are some very revealing economic history papers available on the historical political economy of China. One of particular interest (pdf), part of a dissertation by T.H. Sng, examines Chinese dynastic cycles as a principal-agent problem. A related paper by Debin Ma looks at incentive and information issues (pdf) across Chinese imperial history, including some revealing comparisons of the income available to various central governments, notably that of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the UK, from the C17th to C19th. Both papers concentrate on the period from the Song dynasty (960-1279) onwards, when the bureaucratic form of Chinese imperial government crystallised.

Song emperor hosts banquet for scholar-officials.

The Song dynasty made civil service examinations the only path to appointment as an official, creating a meritorious bureaucracy with the Emperor as the only hereditary element in government, leading to the eclipse of the landowning aristocracy. The three-tax system on individuals, households and land levied as silver and grain taxes plus labour service was replaced by the two-tax system on individuals or households and land levied as silver and grain taxes. (There were also various commercial taxes but these were not a significant source of revenue.) As land was now taxed without any connection to labour service (either military or civilian), the imperial government lost interest in land redistribution, something which had been a facet of imperial government in previous imperial dynasties.

The history of the Chinese imperial state demonstrates particularly clearly the principle that the state creates social orders at least as much as any social order creates a state. The more dominant the state, the more it creates the social order. (The history of revolutionary Marxism demonstrates this very clearly, as Leninist states created the social orders according to the convenience of the Leninist state an its agents.) If we look at the origins of states as a process of experimentation to find how to sustain the relevant level of specialisation in control, the process seems to be at least as much moulding the social order to sustain the state as adjusting the state to fit in with the local social order.

In the case of imperial China, the imperial state was clearly the dominant factor driving the form of the social order. Even the gentry were simply those with status from the civil service examinations who had not done well enough to get an appointment, but well enough to gain various legal exemptions and privileges.

First emperor.

The more acquainted with Chinese history one becomes, the more that Mao's comment that he hadn't changed China, merely a few places around Beijing, makes sense. He really does seem to have been the First Emperor with a Marxist gloss rather than a Legalist one. Said Marxist gloss proving to be highly dispensable under his successors. Post 1979, the Beijing regime even looks like the Han (206BC-220AD) trying not to repeat the mistakes of the Qin (221BC-206BC). Ironically, contemporary China is far more like the vision of Mao's great rival Chiang Kai Shek than Mao's; Chiang certainly seems to have had a clearer idea of what really would constitute changing China.

The key element in T.H. Sng's analysis is that the Emperors had severe limitations in monitoring their agents, the imperial officials. Said officials numbered (depending on the period) from 10,000 to 20,000, with the lowest level being the magistrate who ran a county. His main duties were tax collection and running the local court. Under the "law of avoidance" he could not have been born or raised in his county. Local clerks, runners and other staff assisted him. Every three and a half years or so, he would be moved to another position. He would be subject to oversight by higher officials and the imperial Censorate; too little tax collection or too big a court case backlog could see him punished. The local gentry were those most likely and able to be the source of adverse reports. Both the magistrate and his local staff could increase their income via corruption, which would fall most heavily on the peasantry (who were not in a good position to complain) rather than the gentry (who were and enjoyed various legal exemptions).

Shang Yang, founder of Legalism,
looking suitably severe.

It was very difficult for the Emperor to get accurate information on the performance of his officials; a problem that worsened the further away from the capital they were. Especially as subjects had a range of techniques to hide information. Expanding the number of officials just magnified the information-and-control problem. Indeed, a somewhat perverse pattern developed whereby Emperors would send out special monitoring agents who would become absorbed into the formal bureaucracy leading to a new layer of special monitory agents who would also be absorbed; thereby expanding the layers of the bureaucracy, so worsening the Emperor's monitoring problem. Sng notes that there were more counties when China was disunited than when it was united, implying a scale limit on monitoring.

It being difficult to tell who were honest and who were dishonest officials (or the gradations in between) magnified the monitoring problem, as punishing honest officials created perverse incentives and sent very bad signals to the suffering peasantry. With the disappearance of the landowning aristocracy, there was a much lower risk to emperors of usurpation by elite conspiracy. The primary dangers facing the emperors were nomad invasions and peasant revolt, both being classic ways dynasties fell.

The nomads were dealt with by a mixture of military effort, investment in very long walls, trade and bribery. The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) famously went for "the" Great Wall. Though under increasing military pressure from the Manchus from the early C17th, the dynasty was actually brought down by internal revolt. The new Qing dynasty, being of nomad extraction itself, managed the nomad problem by territorial expansion and genocide.

Note that an expanding population (including official and gentry class), with declining agrarian surplus after a peak and expanding official responsibilities (the population per county increased dramatically) can produce the same effect (pdf) without presuming only extensive growth or falling peasant incomes until late in the cycle.

Qing army defeating nomads (1755).

Which left peasant revolt as the great danger. The establishment of a stable order under a new dynasty lead to expanding population and economic activity. According to Sng's model, as the population expanded faster than the economy--economic growth being extensive (more inputs) rather than intensive (better skills and technology)--this led to declining peasant incomes, though there is no strong evidence in a drop in average living standards until the mid C19th: this was, however, compatible with falling living standards at the margin. (The Rev. Thomas Malthus very much had China in mind when he did his famous analysis.) The expansion in population and economic activity increased the opportunities for corruption. But said corruption was regressive, so the burden of corruption increased over time (more corruption + falling peasant incomes). The only lever the imperial government reliably had to relieve the pressure on the peasantry was to freeze or reduce taxes.

Gone but not forgotten.

Which led to the perverse pattern of an expanding Chinese economy leading to falling central government income ( both relative to demands and then absolutely) and increased risk of peasant revolt. At some point, the central government's income fell below a level able to maintain itself, leading to collapse. Borrowing was not an option because the autocrat was too unconstrained: there was no mechanism by which the autocrat could credibly commit to paying loans back. (And revealing one's wealth so explicitly opened up the risk of unwelcome official attention, up to and including simple expropriation.) Building up silver reserves was the central administration's only reliable financial cushion. The Qing government built up silver reserves equal to about two years' revenue from the final consolidation of its rule in the 1680s until the reserve was largely expended suppressing the White Lotus rebellion (1794-1804). The Qing finances then never recovered.

Hence the dynastic cycle. The issue was not having "good" emperors followed by "bad" emperors. It was that the constraints emperors faced got worse over time, while their levers of power became more and more ineffective. The similar duration of the bureaucratised dynasties--the Song dynasty lasted 319 years (and spent much of that time ruling over only part of China), the Ming dynasty 276 years and the Qing dynasty 267 years--does look like a strong pattern.

The Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) only lasted 97 years but it had significantly different ruling structures--being far more troubled by usurpations and powerful local warlords--imposed much more onerous taxes and suffered the Black Death, so is rather a separate case.

Under the Ming and Qing dynasties, the central governments were able to extract probably less than 3% of GDP in revenues, but corruption (i.e. the extralegal income of officials) likely reached around a fifth of total agricultural production. One can see why stability might be a higher imperial priority than promoting economic development. One also wonders whether President Li's anti-corruption drive might have something to do with analysis of the patterns of Chinese history.

(Claims that Chinese government was particularly cheap compared to (pdf) that of, say, Tokugawa Japan, have to be regarded as dubious or, at least, overstated. Japan's political system suffered far less from peasant revolts. It also turned out to be far more effective at dealing with the Western challenge.)

Meanwhile, in Britain
An obvious role for representative institutions (such as the English-cum-British Parliament) is as checks on executive (i.e. kingly) power. But that is not why rulers such as Alfonso IX of Leon (r.1188-1230) or Edward I of England (r.1272-1307) decided to expand the use of representative institutions. Representative assemblies were techniques for kingly management. They were forums for negotiation. The king found out what was bothering the folk who mattered--including acting as information sources about the performance of his officials--and lowered his enforcement costs through getting consent for taxes. In other words, representative assemblies operated to lessen the king's information and other agency issues.

By allowing tax-public good trade-offs to be more efficiently managed, such representative institutions permitted taxation levels to be higher than otherwise, with less corruption costs. To put it another way, there was both top-down and bottom-up monitoring of the performance of officials. The commercial-representative polities of the Serene Republic of Venice, the Dutch Republic and the United Kingdom were the highest taxing polities of their time. They also delivered the most effective level of public goods. (Even today, the Scandinavian countries--with their small size and cultural homogeneity--have had the highest tax-expenditure trade-offs because they have the least information, management and monitoring issues.)

In each of these polities, the state got more "bucks" and the political nation got more "bangs" for their "bucks". In the case of the Serene Republic, the Dutch Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain (after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 entrenched the trade-off of Parliamentarianism), they were the polities least troubled by popular revolts. The main exception being the restive Highlands of Scotland but the mixture of religious difference, geographical distance and lack of connection between the clan and Parliamentary systems explains that--i.e. they were only minimally part of the trade-off, monitoring and information system centred in Parliament and shire government.

It was surely no coincidence that the biggest failure of C18th British politics--the American Revolt--was precisely by folk not connected into the Parliamentary system. "No taxation without representation" may have been a brilliant political slogan but it also pithily expressed the coordination failure at the heart of the American Revolution. The British political class learnt from that mistake and, in the absence of overseas representation in Parliament (probably not all that practical due to transport and communication costs), it subsequently minimised demands on settler colonies.

A feature of the Serene Republic, the Dutch Republic and the United Kingdom was that all three polities gained extra military capacity through their ability to borrow because of the greater credibility to potential creditors their representational systems imparted. The Serene Republic invented bonds, the prestiti, in 1177. When Dutch Billy (r.1689-1702) became King of England, due to the last successful invasion of England (which apparently doesn't count as an invasion because he was invited), Dutch financial institutions were introduced to England, culminating in the Bank of England (1694) and consolidated public bonds, the famous consols (1751).

The United Kingdom was able to spend as much on warfare as its rival France--even though France was much bigger in population and land area--and do so without anywhere near the continental distractions of its rival. Hence its record of military success against its French rival. By 1815, the British public debt was 200% or more (pdf) of GDP (or 20 times or more the annual revenue of the British central government), the joke being it has acquired half of the debt pushing the Bourbons off the throne of France and the other half putting them back on. (The current US public debt of about 100%of GDP--or about five times the annual revenue of the US Federal Government--is not nearly as scary.)

Because the UK had much greater taxation capacity, much better capacity to monitor officials and economic development expanded the financial strength of the British state, by the first half of the C19th, the annual revenue of the British central government was four times (pdf) that of the Qing central government measured by silver value (6,156 tons of silver to 1,367 tons), its per capita revenue was close to fifty times that of the Qing central government by silver value (334 grams of silver to 7); even by wage value, it was over nine times that of the Qing central government (19 days of urban unskilled wages to 2). So, in the first Opium War (1839-1842), the Qing Empire was taking on a state with four times its annual income (plus the capacity to debt-finance) and better military technology while lacking significant silver reserves. It wasn't going to end well for the Qing Empire.

We have the Bank of England, the British Parliament,
steam engines and bigger guns and they have not.

Given that, during the C18th and early C19th, wages in Qing China were a third or less of English wages (in purchasing power terms) and interest rates were four or five times higher in Qing China than the UK, the combination of much more expensive labour and much cheaper capital no doubt helps explain why the UK pioneered what became transformative patterns of sustained intensive growth and China didn't. Of course, the higher wages and cheaper capital were a product of much more plentiful capital, which itself was a product of institutions much friendlier to private accumulation because the would-be accumulators had a say in the political system and the state gained higher revenues from increased economic activity while the United Kingdom was big enough to gain benefits from economies of scale and scope (particularly in innovation). That between the mid C18th and mid C19th the British state greatly reduced the ambit of official discretions, further massively reducing corruption, just magnified the effects. (It is instructive to compare the reputations of British politicians c.1750 with their reputations c.1850.)

Using the measure of tons of silver, the revenues of the English-cum-British central administration increased forty-fold (pdf) from the mid C16th to the end of the C18th. Per capita revenues, measured in grams of silver, increased twenty-fold in that time. Measured in days of average wages, per capita revenues increased fourfold. While the C17th was a period of civil war and Revolution, the UK had a very successful C18th, winning the Second Hundred Years War (1689-1815), and setting it up for an even more successful C19th (despite all that debt).

The other path to the modern state
The C16th and C17th in France were also periods of turmoil and civil war, with the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the Huguenot Rebellions (1620-1628) and the Fronde (1648-1653). The outcome was not a Parliamentary system, but an absolute monarchy with additions; provincial estates in the outer provinces plus semi-autonomous Parlements--courts that could refuse to register and enforce royal edicts that conflicted with custom. There was also considerable tax-farming, sale of offices, and granting of pensions as favours.

The upper offices, notably the Parlements, were dominated by the noblesse de robe and had become increasingly hereditary. Under them were around 50,000 royal officials (pdf), who had mostly purchased their offices. Hence the reliance on tax-farming--it was a way of dealing with purchased and often hereditary officeholding. France may have been an absolute monarchy but it was very far from an absolute autocracy.

The revenues of the French central administration measured in tons of silver increased increased twelve-fold from the mid C16th to the end of the C18th. Measured by grams of silver, per capita revenues increased seven-fold. The French state shared in the general increase in revenues of European states, just not as dramatically as its British rival. For there were two paths (pdf) to the development of the modern state in Europe--the parliamentary path discussed above and the autocratic path exemplified by the Hohenzollern Kingdom of Prussia and Romanov Russian Empire.

C18th Prussian infantry.

The latter path worked particularly well in highly rural societies. The autocrat wanted reliable extraction of income and soldiers, the landlords wanted official positions and control over the peasantry and no other group was sufficiently organised to matter but valued internal and external security. The Prussian and Russian crowns backed the landlord cartel (aka en-serfing the peasantry) and the landlord class provided the officers and cavalry for their armies. When it looked like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth might, after a prolonged period of paralysis, get its act together, the neighbouring Prussian, Austrian and Russian autocracies cooperated to partition this potentially disturbing Parliamentary example into non-existence.

The Parliamentary path worked best in urbanised, geographically small polities (so lower communication costs) with geographical advantages (sitting on islands in the middle of a lagoon, being an archipelago, having dykes, being an isolated peninsula, having protective mountains) lessening the need for a powerful standing army (a classic basis for autocratic rule and subjects accepting the permanent royal taxes-for-security trade-off). Good sea access also helped, so commercial interests would favour military effort to secure and protect trade income.

France as betwixt and between
France was neither one nor the other. It had a landlord class that wanted dominion over the peasantry and access to official positions. But it also had an extensive free peasantry that was an important source of tax revenue. It was large, militating against Parliamentarianism. (The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth managed to be a large Parliamentary state, but even before the Partitions, it had become a less than inspiring example.) The urban-commercial sector was significant, but not large enough to collectively force its way into government and its political aspirations were diverted into purchase of offices. Expenditure on overseas military effort diverted resources from the territorial expansion which was a more reliable source of royal income. Focus on continental expansion undermined overseas military effort, reducing the relative importance of trade income and lowering the growth path of the urban-commercial sector. France was too rural-territorial to be Parliamentary and too urban-commercial to be fully autocratic.

The Parlement of Paris: really not a Parliament.

Hence the autocracy-with-checks that evolved. But the checks (notably the Parlements) provided constraints on the autocracy without being effective forums for negotiating trade-offs. They manifested France being caught between the two paths, they were no solution to the problem. The French state found it difficult to either mould the social order to its needs or to adapt to the social order as it was evolving. Such persistent discontinuity between state and social order was not likely to end well.

The fiscal crisis of the Bourbon monarchy
The difficulties manifested, as they often do, as a fiscal problem. France failed to develop a central bank on the English model--John Law's disasters during the Duc d'Orleans regency (1715-1723) tainted the entire idea. The French crown could borrow, but on less favourable terms than the British crown. Where the British state would finance war by borrowing and then tax to service and pay down debt in peacetime, the French crown found that its ability to service its debt tended to get worse over time, with both taxes and expenditures being relatively inflexible.

John Law, the paper notes man:

more of a good thing is not always better.

The result was recurring defaults. The swapping out of debt for John Law's paper notes wiped away a considerable amount of debt in the subsequent inflationary collapse. This was followed by converting debt into perpetuals and life annuities with considerably less capital value followed by an interest rate cut being imposed in 1726: a combination of actions that reduced the debt service ratio to tax revenues from 80% to 30%. A second episode involved another conversion of debt into perpetuals and life annuities in 1759, along with halting of scheduled reimbursements on fixed-term loans.

In 1770, the French crown resorted to a partial bankruptcy, defaulting on a significant proportion of its debts. Upon coming to the throne in 1774, the 20 year old king Louis XVI (r.1774-1792) promised that such defaults would not be resorted to again (a promise he kept). Slow, grinding effort by various Ministers of Finance enabled some periods of recovery. Not helped by the American War of Independence (1776-1783), the one stage of the Second Hundred Years War Britain actually lost--France was able to put together an anti-British coalition without continental distractions. France's minimal territorial gains hardly matched the huge financial expense, however.

French officials were well aware of the strategic advantage the United Kingdom and Dutch Republic's greater ability to borrow provided. In an unpublished manuscript, a senior finance official wrote in the 1770s (pdf):

Great Britain finances by taxation neither all nor part of the costs of war, it finances them by loans and increases the annual tax burden only by the amount necessary to face the interest and redemption of the loan. That is the regime that France must adopt, and will adopt sooner or later because its value is only too obvious, and our mistakes will force us to return to this policy. In wartime it is our habit to increase taxes, at a time when perhaps they should be decreased. Indeed in wartime the country suffers enough from the labor withdrawn from agriculture and manufactures to be sent into the army, the navy, and into the production activities necessitated by war.

They were also well aware of the source of the French disadvantage. The aforementioned official also wrote:

Which European states now enjoy the soundest credit? Those where the authority of a single man is less prominent, and we cannot disguise the fact that Holland and England have a great advantage over France by their constitution. ... If we faced the sad alternative of sacrificing the [French] constitution to finances or finances to the constitution, we should not hesitate to choose the former.

In 1784, Jacques Necker, French Finance Minister (1777-81, 1788-89) wrote:

The absolute power of a monarch and full public trust are two notions which need intermediaries to be perfectly conciliated. This authority is in France subject to certain restraints when it comes to an increase in the sovereign's revenues, since the laws which levy new taxes must be registered in the Parlements, and these courts can then enlighten the monarch's justice by their remarks; but a simple arret du Counseil [Order in Council] or a ministerial order authorized by the sovereign are enough to suspend reimbursements or impose a reduction in interest. ... Therefore one can rekindle or sustain public trust only by giving reassurances on the sovereign's intentions, and by proving that no motive can incite him to fail in his obligations.

Necker also observed that:

... suspension of payments is a much less a cause than a result of the lack of trust.

Necker had a very clear grasp of what is known in modern terms as credible policy. Then again, a compare-and-contrast across or along the Channel provided all the "natural experiment" one needed.

Faced with the enormous debt burden left by Louis XIV's (r.1643-1715) wars, the Regent had considered recalling the Estates-General, but had been warned the consequences would not be controllable. Three default episodes and 74 years later, Louis XVI and his ministers decided that a forum able to negotiate new tax-expenditure trade-offs was the only way forward and the Estates-General was recalled, for the first time since 1614.

The results proved to be every bit as uncontrollable as feared; particularly coming during a period of famine/rising food prices that the monarchy lacked the fiscal resources or policy flexibility to deal with effectively. (A typical late-in-dynastic-cycle Chinese experience, even if pulling the Parliamentary lever was not a Chinese response.) Reading a history such as David Andress's The Terror: the Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, it is striking how poorly schooled in political negotiation the participants were. The nobles (led by Louis's brothers) would not compromise, the members of the third estate increasingly framed their demands in absolutist terms (which, I would argue, was by far the most important influence of the French Enlightenment on the Revolution: reading their speeches, the contrast between the rhetoric of the American Revolutionaries and that of the French is striking) and Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette could never be trusted to stick with any deal. (Something that Louis shared with Charles I and Nicholas II; which does much to explain the other thing they also share.)

But the participants also had no experience in such politics-by-negotiation (unless they had participated in the provincial estates, which did not exist across most of France). After all, the British only learned how to do it after executing one king, deposing another, a prolonged period of civil war and a Revolution or two. The crown had the examples of Charles I (r.1624-1649) and James II (r.1685-1688) as warnings. The political nation had the death, disruption and chaos of the Civil Wars, the oppressions of the Major-Generals and uncertainties of the Glorious Revolution as warnings. All parties were well aware that there were much worse consequences than a bit of compromise and deal-making.

Back in France, as the immediate outcome of the Revolution was to make the fiscal position much worse (folk stopped paying taxes) and merely having a Parliamentary body--even executing the King and Queen, lots of nobles, then quite a few revolutionaries--did not mean that state and social order automatically cohered, the Revolution fluctuated through various political and monetary regimes, uprisings, massive inflation, bankruptcy and war.

Here comes the man on horseback
to impose order and sound finances.

The outcome of the Revolutionary decade--Napoleon's rule (1799-1815)--was a classic "Chinese" solution. A successful warlord unencumbered by previous obligations, with tried and tested supporters and appealing to a desire for order and stability, seizes power and imposes a vigorous new autocracy. Napoleon's meritocratic, bureaucratised, rationalising (i.e. simplifying functionalist) autocratic rule was very like the Chinese imperial model. He even introduced civil service examinations. Particularly as he eschewed borrowing and stayed on a bimetallism (i.e. specie) standard. A policy choice that was rational for an unconstrained autocrat offering stability after an intense inflationary period. Meanwhile, the UK--having the benefit of much greater policy credibility--could suspend gold convertibility and operate with paper money from 1797 to 1821.

Unfortunately for Napoleon, the European state system proved to be stronger than he; a problem that did not confront a dynasty-founding Son of Heaven--rulers of the centre of the universe with an established, if intermittent, history of unity.

Autocracy as management problem
In 1750 (pdf), Qing China had one civilian official per 11,250 people; Tsarist Russia had one per 10,000 people. Fifty years earlier, Louis XIV had one official per 7,700 people just for France's direct tax system and, already by the C16th, England had one official per 4,000 people. Given the limitations in transport and communications technology at the time, the more autocratic the system, and bigger the territory ruled, the greater the difficulty for the ruler in monitoring his or her agents and the less the penetration of officialdom into society.

In the case of the Tsardom of Russia; as well as providing income for the throne's officer and cavalry class, binding the peasantry to the nobility and gentry may have also been attractive as a way of lessening the management burden of the state. Conversely, the improved communications and transport technology of the C19th increased the administrative reach of the state which, along with rising revenue, made the bondage solution increasingly less attractive, culminating in the Emancipation of 1861.

There is considerable evidence that autocracy and corruption are intimately connected. Contemporary China, for example, can be usefully analysed as a kleptocracy while command economies become, as the initial revolutionary enthusiasm wears off, notoriously corrupt.

This is hardly surprising. Corruption is the market for official discretions. Other things being equal, the greater the official discretion, the greater the likely level of corruption. If monitoring is only from above, that in itself will increase the effective ambit of official discretion and so the likely level of corruption.

Genghis Khan with a telephone: master race version.

Those inclined to extol the virtues of autocracy tend to assume that officials are simply extensions of the autocrat's will. As we have seen, that is not so. They are agents of the autocrat, which means that the autocrat has a serious agent-monitoring problem.

A recurring criticism of Hitler's autocracy was his habit of creating overlapping responsibilities. This was deeply rational on his part--it meant that his subordinates reported on each other and had to come to him as final arbiter. Stalin used the triad of government (civilian and military), party and secret police to provide multiple lines of communication and responsibilities. The danger was that local government, party and secret police officials might start colluding. The solution to that was regular purges. Mancur Olson was correct; purges were not some homicidal dysfunction, they were a rational (and highly effective) means to entrench Stalin's control. Mao used the same technique as part of the Cultural Revolution.

Genghis Khan with a telephone:
revolutionary vanguard version

The autocrat has to juggle revenue raising, corruption costs and risks of revolt--both popular revolt and elite conspiracy. (Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for example, was overthrown by a combination of the two.) From the Song dynasty onwards, the Chinese imperial state minimised the risks of elite conspiracy (at least until the Qing dynasty was forced to give provinces more autonomy to deal with the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864) via hereditary emperors (increasing the ruler's credibility across time), making the civil service examinations the only route to official office (eliminating the landowning aristocracy) and rotating officials regularly (breaking up local loyalties).

The combination of monitoring difficulties, corruption costs and risks of popular revolt created the Dynastic cycle (pdf) whereby stable rule leads to rising population and economic activity increasing corruption possibilities but also creating falling peasant incomes at the margin (as population increases faster than economic activity) leading to downward pressure on government revenue (to avoid revolt) and, eventually, fiscal failure and dynastic collapse (either due to domestic revolt or foreign invasion or some combination of the two).

The state and social order
The French Revolution, at least in its origins, was a manifestation, within a European context, of a similar fiscal crisis of autocracy arising out of the difficulties in monitoring agents of the autocracy, the costs of corruption (or, to put it more neutrally, the gap between income extracted from the society and income received by the central government) and the lack of means for adaptive negotiation of new tax-expenditure trade-offs. The ancien regime of the Bourbons fell because it fell between two stools, France being insufficiently urbanised and commercial to adopt the Parliamentary systems of the Dutch Republic and the United Kingdom but too urbanised and commercial to run the fully autocratic systems of Prussia and Russia. A problem that continued until the advent of the Third Republic, when a republic had become the form of government "that divided them least".

The ancien regime lacked the will, and likely the capacity, to change the social order of France to fit its needs but also failed to adapt itself to fit in with France's evolving social order. Hence its collapse and France's subsequent cycling through of various forms of government (two Empires, three monarchies, various republics) as its successive rulers and political classes tried to find a state structure that could manage both sufficient domestic tranquility and external military effectiveness to survive. (It is currently on Republic number five, the Third Republic having failed the latter test and the Fourth a combination of the two.)

The paradox of politics--the desirability of a state as protection against social predators, yet states are the most dangerous social predators--can be managed more or less badly, but never solved. The difficulties in matching state with social order and social order with state are just another manifestation of that paradox.


[A previous version was posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Violence and the state

The always worth reading Prof. Gene Callahan posted -- citing Jared Diamond’s example of warfare among the Dani of New Guinea -- that violence is rooted in human nature, not the state. Prof. Callahan observes:

The problem isn't the State: the problem is human beings. And the problem with admitting that problem is you're not left with an easy slogan with which to get funding: "Hate the State" is catchy, but "Hate the human being" isn't going to get you many speaking engagements.

In a subsequent comment, he further cites Steven Pinker on the comparatively low rate of violence of the C20th. In Pinker's words:

If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

If one is going to cite the state as a net generator of violence, one has the dreadful problem that the evidence is against you. (Which does not stop people telling comforting stories about Somalia.) That agricultural (as in permanent-field) societies tend to be considerably less violent than foraging societies is easily explained by the incentive effects of large stationary asset (one’s land) increasing the risks from violence, and so reducing the willingness to engage in it, while increasing the pressure to evolve effective mediation or other constraints. Though the intermediate state of slash-and-burn horticulture appears to actually drive up the rate of violence, possibly due to increased competition for resources being greater than increased vulnerability of assets. (To put it another way, it does not create strong assets but it does create more production to fight over and more capacity to do so as population density goes up.)

A much bigger problem for the violent-state thesis is that the establishment of the modern state with its effective monopoly of organised violence has clearly led to a fall (pdf) in homicide rates starting in the C16th and C17th in North-Western Europe and spreading south and east in subsequent centuries. And the evidence Pinker adduces from a wide range of scholarly studies in Pp47-56 of his The Better Angels of Our Nature that even the most violent of state societies is far less violent than almost all non-state societies.

Control/violence trade-offs
Not that there really is anything particularly surprising about this. First, economic theory does rather predict that a monopoly generally results in less production of that which is monopolised – the monopolist restricts supply to drive up the return. While pre-modern states rarely achieved a monopoly of violence, they usually aspired to a dominance of organised violence: a dominance they certainly sought to drive up the rate of return.

Second, the state both has the standard producer interest in blocking competition (i.e. being the dominant, and preferably only, provider of organised violence in its territory) and, via the taxing authority, an interest in more taxable activity. Less private violence or risk of private violence leads to more production and more transactions. Rulerships have a basic interest in law and order, that’s why they provide it. As the state’s administrative capacities expand, the more it can act on both these incentives. So, other things being equal, stronger state means less violence. Hence the rise of post-medieval organised-violence-monopolising states has seen falling rates of violence and non-state societies being strikingly more violent than state societies.

The notion of the state as a net generator of violence seems to be based on two things – war, and confusing oppression with violence. Yes, of course states wage war but, as Diamond, Pinker and others point out, war predates the state (or even rulership). Indeed, amelioration of the dangers of war is an incentive to an effective state (as Somalia has recently discovered). Rulers have perennially boasted about their war-fighting prowess; both to intimidate rival rulers and encourage confidence to produce and transact. The larger the territory of the ruler, the further away raiders are likely to be. Borderlands might be less subject to the control of the ruler but they were also more violent.

It is also true that being the dominant provider of violence creates the capacity to oppress. The paradox of rulership is precisely that the ruler is both protector against predators and the most effective predator. Oppression may be based on the threat and capacity to engage in violence but it does not mean there will be more violence. Indeed, given the point is to extract a surplus from one’s subjects, the opposite will tend to be true. There is something of a control/level of violence trade-off here; one that C18th and C19th British opponents of an organised police force generally acknowledged, as do some modern American opponents of gun control.

Part of the appeal of gun control precisely being that society is made up of people of diverse motives, risk assessments and rationality. In the face of such diversity, state management of weaponry both economises on one's own efforts (purchasing weapons[s], learning how to use them, managing their possession and use) and potentially lowers the risks of such diversity. A judgement that depends on one's level of confidence in the state and fears about one's neighbours -- hence Steve Sailor's real estate theory of gun control (which also helps explain the rural-city gap in attitudes to gun control in Australia without the American slavery-and-race baggage).

The failures of drug prohibition illustrate this control-violence trade-off. The state withdraws its protection from particular transactions (sale and use of specified narcotics) and associated property. The result of the state’s withdrawal is increased violence. Of course, the presumptive claim is that the state has the capacity, via its bans, to stop such transactions. This turns out not to be true but its falsity exposes the control-violence trade-off.

Wars of righteousness
Where war and oppression not meaning that the state is a net generator of violencer becomes murkier is when states wage war against some section of their subjects. Most notoriously, the Nazi and Leninist wars of class, ethnic, religious, etc extermination; what political scientist R.J. Rummel calls democide and attempts to quantify.

In a grim sort of way, such wars of righteous extermination are examples of how greed is often preferable to other negative motives, as greed is, indeed, self-limiting. You cannot tax the efforts of the dead. But if your sense of righteousness entails that some group should not exist, then the state, as the most effective predator, is the most effective means for putting your sense of righteousness into exterminatory effect. (To the extent, for example, that the Nazi state actually harmed its war-fighting efforts in its drive to exterminate the Jews and other targeted groups.)

Monotheism started righteous extermination with queers and apostates but the process has since been secularised and expanded. (Righteousness meaning normative claims that trump morality: being enjoined to lead the community into stoning your own brother or sister to death for worshiping another deity counts as trumping morality.) The combination of expanding administrative and technological capacity for states with secularised righteousness has been a grim one, starting with the French Revolution (of course) and its brutal (as in over-the-top use of violence) suppression of the Vendee (the secular version of the Albigensian Crusade: the former being in revolt against the State of Virtue and the second in "revolt" against God) and moving on to the aforementioned Nazi and Leninist wars of social extermination.

Yet, even with all those slaughters added in, the C20th of the most powerful and capable states history has known was still less violent than the forager norm. The state is not a net generator of violence compared to the no-state alternative, though different forms of states have different propensities to violence. Which is to say, managing the paradox of rulership is the central problem of politics precisely because we cannot escape from it.

[An earlier version was posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Thinking about states

While writing a paper on state dynamics in Latin Christendom, it was useful to try and think (think out aloud indeed) coherently about states as historical entities. State understood as an institutionalised structure of expropriation and coercion dominant in a particular territory.

The notion that a state has to have, or even aspire to, a monopoly of coercion does not make much sense in the context of medieval Europe. Indeed, for much of human history, the right to bear arms was a defining capacity of a free person. And even the notion of a state requiring to have a monopoly of organised coercion fails the medieval test. Though, as post-medieval states increasingly aspired to a monopoly of organised violence, there was a long-term decline in (pdf) private lethal violence.*

The OED definition of a state used by Wikipedia of:

an organized political community living under a single system of government

is both too abstract and assumes too much; a political community, according to Wikipedia is:

a geographic region accepted to be in the jurisdiction of a particular governmental entity

which constitutes a community, being

a social unit of any size that shares common values.

This is way too touchy-feely. And inaccurate--how many empires were social units sharing common values? These definitions are too modern, too nation state, too Westphalian. 

What do I mean by institutionalised? Wikipedia uses political scientist Samuel Huntingdon's definition of an institution as:

stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour.

Which is a good short definition, though "valued" bothers me (valued by whom, how much?). Economist Douglass North defined institutions as:

the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human action (p.3).

Which, in the formal version, somewhat misses the stable, recurring element. Economist John Powellson defined institutions as:

an accepted mode of behaviour protected by the culture (p.9).

which also implies a bit too much social coherence. States only conform to ethnic or similar boundaries if the trade-offs of coercion, expropriation and dominance lead them to do so. 

The key features institutionalised is trying to get at is persistent structure. That is, providing continuing and specific constraints on human behaviour. A street or criminal gang might be organised expropriation and coercion dominant in a particular territory, but it lacks the persistent structure of a state. Besides, such gangs are generally only dominant in a very narrow sense; much more narrowly than the persistent structure of a state provides.

Underlying these various definitions cited above tends to be some idea of states as epiphenomena of societies, as products of societies. That is fundamentally mistaken: societies with states are at least as much products of states as the other way around. Hence my first principle for thinking about states.

(1) State societies are significantly different from stateless societies.

State societies are larger in scale in almost every sense: including in population and production. They have less retail violence, but their organised violence is on a (typically much) larger scale. Their constructions are larger and more enduring. They are far more urbanised. They are more stably hierarchical. To have a state profoundly shapes and changes a society: in simplest terms, the state acts as a social multiplier compared to not having one.

(2) States depend crucially on the capacity to expropriate.

As this paper (pdf) by Mayshar et al points out, the notion that farming automatically produces a social surplus is fundamentally mistaken. All farming produces is more babies and somewhat more specialisation. The only way to produce a continuing social surplus is by expropriation. Which farming (specifically cereals farming, as cereals are less perishable) permits because then food is stored across seasons and so can be expropriated. But that creates a "chicken-and-egg" problem: the social surplus requires expropriation, the apparatus of expropriation requires a social surplus to support itself. This is a "chicken-and-egg" problem which the mere existence of cereals farming does not solve.

Which is why it took thousands of years for farming to produce states. Solving the "chicken-and-egg" problem requires a multi-generational authority with increasing coercive specialisation. The most likely way to produce that is by conflict, especially across an ecological frontier (pdf) (classically, river valley farmers versus oasis, savanna or steppe pastoralists). What historical demographer Peter Turchin calls (pdf) multilevel selection.

While priesthoods can provide multi-generational authority, coercive specialisation is also required to create and maintain a state. Hence hereditary autocracy is the simplest (and historically most common) form of the state--if a multi-generational authority has enough coercive dominance to establish and maintain state, then it will likely have enough coercive dominance to centralise power.

(3) The scale of state activity is primarily driven by its capacity to extract revenue.

The state is a structure of coercion, expropriation and dominance. The more revenue it can extract, the more it can do. It will tend to do so extract up to the level at which the trade-offs of capacity and consequence balance out for state agents. Remembering that all rulers confront principal-agent problems: indeed, these were plausibly central to dynastic cycles, particularly in China (pdf).

So, it matters how transparent production is to the state, because the more transparent, the easier it is to expropriate. Thus irrigation makes extraction easier because production is more transparent.

As the paper by Mayshar et al points out, Karl Wittfogel got it the wrong way around: irrigation favours state dominance not because the state provides irrigation (that is normally done locally and typically pre-dates the state, though the state may well expand its ambit) but because it makes production more transparent and so more able to be expropriated. Thus, given that production on the Nile was highly transparent (revenue could be predicted by how much the Nile flooded), Egypt was an early developer of a centralised autocratic state, despite being a relatively late adopter of farming.

Who said production was transparent to made a difference. In lower Mesopotamia, farming production was more transparent to local elites than any higher ruler. Moreover, unlike much of the Nile, everywhere in Mesopotamia was subject to pastoralist raids, requiring walled cities. The combination meant that the lower Mesopotamia was an early centre for urbanisation, yet its centralised (i.e. multi-city) states were more unstable than Egypt's as production was less transparent to any regional ruler and resistance to such rule was easier.

Rainfall farmland is less transparent again, given that rainfall is more idiosyncratic than irrigation. So, in areas of rainfall farming, farmer-owners tend to be the pattern as the state does not know enough to reliably extract without providing the farmer with more incentive--such as owning their land. Egyptian and lower Mesopotamian farmers did not own the land they tilled: as the state in the first instance, and the local elites in the second, could reliably extract revenue without having to provide that much incentive. That Europe is overwhelmingly a place of rainfall agriculture was an important factor in its history.

In the modern world, the Industrial Revolution hugely increased the power of the state to tax. In the words of Mayshar et al:

We prefer to describe this increased efficiency of the tax technology as resulting from the increased transparency of production. The latter was due in part to the shift to mass production by hired labor in large corporations — a shift that was accompanied by a massive accounting paper trail (see Kleven, Kreinerand, Saez 2009). This paper trail exposed productive activity to the state and transformed the state’s ability to tax, among others by turning private companies into efficient tax collection agencies, and by facilitating the taxation of income (p.45).

(4) Level of social friction involved in the appropriation process is a major constraint.

A factor in the evolution of states evolve is responding to various forms of social friction the appropriation process has to deal with. Thus, Parliaments reduce social friction in revenue extraction: hence Parliamentary states tended to have higher tax rates than non-Parliamentary states. Which is a reason for rulers to have Parliaments. Indeed, that seems to be precisely why Alfonso IX (r.1188-1230) of Leon engaged in his experiment (1188) of asking merchants to send representatives to his court to discuss matters fiscal. It worked so well for him, he kept doing it. This was well before Simon de Montfort's exercise of 1265, which had continuing historical significance because Edward I (r.1272-1307) repeated and institutionalised the arrangement.

While the notion of Parliaments being imposed on tyrannical monarchs makes for stirring historical narrative, monarchs were very actively involved in the development of Parliaments because it made the process of expropriation easier. It did so by:
(1) providing more information on the monarch's own agents;
(2) alerting monarchs to potential problems; and
(3) allowing trade-off bargains which enabled more expropriation to occur.
Parliaments comprehensively reduced social frictions while making the political nation more transparent to the monarch. (Of course, whether the monarch made good use of that was another matter.)

Cultural homogeneity also reduces social friction in extraction (and state action generally) and it does so the more empowered folk are. Thus, the relatively culturally homogeneous Scandinavian states can manage a higher tax/spend equilibrium than more culturally diverse settler societies such as Australia or the US.

The Industrial Revolution's explosion in technology (which only really took off in the 1820s with railways and steamships) increased the capacity of states, but also increased the capacity of organisations and individuals. Hence the Industrial Revolution resulted in much more pressure from upwards (nationalist agitation) and downwards (national identification and homogenisation) for states to conform to national boundaries. This was also an interactive process, as the power of states often determined the ethnic boundaries--if necessary, by massive processes of population shifts (some of which were population exchanges, some not: the Israel-Palestine conflict can be reasonably characterised as largely driven by an unresolved population exchange as the Jewish state integrated its refugees and the Arab states refuse to integrate theirs).

Strong kin networks increase social friction in extraction, as they provide ways for folk to organise to resist state power. Hence states in societies with strong kin networks (i.e. highly clannish societies) often make implicit or explicit trade-offs--they accept the clans's internal authority in return for acceptance of the over-arching authority of state and ruler. Indeed, use of clan patronage networks can result in substitution of such patronage for the development of state institutions (as in Palestine under Arafat), as well as of more (pdf) general institutions of formal (non-kin) cooperation.

The anti-kin-network family rules of Christianity (monogamy, no divorce, no adoption, no concubines, no cousin marriage) tended to undermine clan networks, encouraging more formal arrangements for social cooperation.** In economist Avner Greif's words (pdf):

The practices the church advocated, such as monogamy, are still the norm in Europe. Consanguineous marriages in contemporary Europe account for less than one percent of the total number of marriages. In contrast, the percentage of such marriages in Muslim, Middle Eastern countries, where we also have particularly good data, is much higher - between twenty to fifty percent. (Alan H. Bittles 1994.) Among the anthropologically defined 356 contemporary societies of Euro-Asia and Africa, there is a large and significant negative correlation between Christianization (for at least 500 years) and the absence of clans and lineages; the level of commercialization, class stratification, and state formation are insignificant. (Andrey V. Korotayev 2003.) (p.309).

The strong family networks of East Asia substituting for welfare provision likely has much to do with why East Asian states have a lower tax-spend equilibrium than other developed economies.

What might be called "the borough deal" was another way of increasing extractive capacity--in this case, over the longer term--by reducing social friction (specifically, fear of expropriation). A land-holding magnate wishes to encourage (taxable) commercial activity, so seeks to establish a local permanent market (fair or town). In the case of a town, it involves significant amounts of fixed capital, so increased risk of expropriation by said magnate. Thus the magnate grants a charter which allows the merchants of the town to make their own local laws, including regarding property rights, and build a wall around their town. That alleviates fears of expropriation and encourages local commercial activity, increasing the revenue of the magnate (including providing a local market for the products of his land). 

(5) Social bargaining can increase or stabilise coercive capacity.

Mounted armoured warriors are expensive (the horse--i.e. war charger--alone could cost half the annual income of a large village), there are no significant economies of scale in their equipment or training (both of which are also very expensive), it is ideal for one generation to train the next and such a warrior can dominate local peasants. So, while having them extract their income directly from local peasants (by way of land-ownership or tax-collection grant) economises on extraction effort, it also leaves them significantly self-sufficient. So, some sort of implicit or explicit social bargain between ruler and warrior can usefully structure their relationship, providing the ruler more coercive capacity while economising on extraction cost. A franchising arrangement, if you like.

Suppose you have a large number of small city states in intense competition competition with each other. The geography is not very suitable for large-scale horse raising, so armies are dominated by (expensive to equip) heavy infantry which do have economies of scale in equipment and training. But the states are small and lack the coercive capacity to expropriate enough funds to equip large numbers of such folk. They are in a region of rainfall farming, and thus have lots of owner-farmers. So, how do you get said farmers and others to equip themselves and turn up for training? Give them a say in the running of the polity: or, more precisely, the polis. This allows you to have a larger and tougher army than your ordinary taxing capacity would provide: important in an intensely state-competitive environment. This would be the citizenship deal. 

It does require a certain social stability to make work: hence the more socially unstable--yet highly commercial--cities of Sicily tended to end up with tyrants. But versions of the citizenship deal recur with the self-government cities of medieval Europe. Particularly (but not only) in Northern Italy and the Low Countries; both regions with lots of cities in intense competition, with each other and with landed magnates.

(6) Persistent constraints matter.

States may be central to the evolution of state societies, but that does not mean they do not face serious constraints. One is geography: until the technology of coercion and dominance developed sufficiently, it was difficult to stably project state power across ecological frontiers. As discussed above, whether the state operated in an area of rainfall farming or of mass irrigation also mattered.

As we saw in the matter of clans and Christianity, religion could also matter (both as constraint and as opportunity). That Islam, and India after the Brahmin resurgence, both operated on the basis of divine law (Sharia in the case of Islam, Manusmrti, the laws of Manu, in the case of Brahmin India) mattered because it foreclosed a great deal of social bargaining.

Parliaments, the borough deal, the citizenship deal, all required folk getting together and making laws, laws that entrenched various social bargains. If human law making (in practice, ruler decree issuing) was limited to the silences of divine law, then it simply was not enough to sustain that sort of social bargaining. Hence no more Kshatriya republics in India once Brahmin dominance of law provision was established.

An issue that very much still resonates in Islam (though not in India; given the demands of modern commercial society, bringing back Mansumrti is not even in the interests of Brahmins). Nowadays, opinion polls show Muslims as in favour of democracy; in some Muslim countries as much as Westerners (the logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers). But central to the Salafi movement is re-establishing the primacy of Sharia. The movement comes in quietist (withdraw from corrupt world), activist (seek to expand the social reach of correct action) and jihadi (kill folk until they accept our version of Sharia rule) variants. Muhammad Nasir-ud-Din al-Albani (1914-1999) was widely regarded as the most important Salafi scholar of the C20th. An advocate of quietist Salafism, he had this to say about democracy:

Elections according to democracy are unlawful, and parliaments that do not govern in accordance with the Qur’an and the Sunna [orally transmitted traditions of Muhammad], but rather on the basis of the majority’s arbitrariness, are tyrannical. Parliaments cannot be recognized and Muslims can neither seek nor cooperate to found them, for they contend (combat) God’s revelation. And they are a Western technique made by the Jews and the Christians, who cannot be legally emulated.

By unlawful and legally emulated, he means by the laws of Allah, the only true legislator. When the jihadis say they are fighting tyranny and injustice, tyranny includes any democracy (since it is illegitimate authority) and injustice means anywhere not under Sharia rule, because Sharia is the only justice. Remembering that, in mainstream Islam, ever since al Ghazali (1058-1111), revelation has been taken to be the limits of morality (a consequence of the defeat of Aristotelianism in the Islamic world). Moreover, since Allah is the sovereign of the universe, Allah's law applies everywhere and to everyone. 

Which is why Parliamentarianism and democracy struggle somewhat in the Islamic world. They are clearly outside imports (problematic in itself) and exist in a level of tension with religion that simply does not apply anywhere else. (Only the Islamic world, for example, felt a need to issue its own, adjusted, declaration of human rights.) There are functioning (even stable) Muslim democracies, but still the attraction of anti-democratic religious totalitarianism is enduring. 

So, whether a civilisation accepted law as man made (as Christianity does) or not (as Islam and Brahmin India did not) was an enduring constraint that affected the evolution of states in the respective civilisations. Just as Christian doctrines undermining clan networks both encouraged and enabled the development of more formal institutions of social cooperation, affecting the evolution of states.
 

About the state

States--persistent structures of expropriation and coercion dominant in a particular territory--are not dependent products of their societies. The combination of coercive dominance and extractive-and-spending power makes them the most powerful element in their society--otherwise, you have a very weak state or no effective state at all.

States are not "instruments of the ruling class": indeed, in historically typical autocracy, the "ruling class" (a deeply problematic term at the best of times) owed their social position to their position as superior agents of the state, they were not superior agents of the state because of their social position.

The central role of states in history is why the technology of coercion is such an important factor in history in its own right. Neither the hand mill nor the water wheel produces the knight; the technology of armoured horsed combat does. But how the knight's--the armoured mounted warrior's--social role was structured had a great deal to do with how widespread mills became.

States create societies (or at least social orders) at least as much as societies create states. This is blindingly obvious in the case of Leninist states, which literally created the social orders that (functionally) suited them. But even without that level of brutally socially pulverising social dominance, states are fundamental to the structuring and evolution of their societies. If we do not see that, we miss some fundamental historical dynamics. As well as much of the why of the passions politics can engender.

* Economic theory does predict that monopolisation tends to lower output: though that is better described as its developing monopoly of violence increasing the capacity of the state to pursue its interest in not having its taxpayers kill each other.

** The persistence of clan in the Celtic fringe (Scotland--particularly highland Scotland-- and Ireland) is likely a result of the Celtic requirement for kin loyalty--in contrast to the Germanic idea of freely chosen personal loyalty--somewhat exacerbated by the lack of urbanisation. One can see the tension between Celtic kin loyalty (the whole Mordred/Lot's kin debacle) and Germanic freely chosen loyalty (embodied in the Round Table) in the Arthurian tales. 


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]