War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Widening the Debate

Abstract

While the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe has ranged widely, the participants have not answered its most fundamental question to the satisfaction of most historians. The difficulty has been how to assess whether war was more important than other factors as a driver of state formation. In practice it is more fruitful to study the role of war within a multi-causal model, but to do this the interaction between war and other factors such as judicial, religious, ideological, and social change must be studied, preferably in detail but in comparative context. A t first sight it might be thought that the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe is quite wide enough already. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries between history, sociology, and political science. It subsumes the ever more ramified debate on the 'military revolution' thesis first propounded by Michael Roberts in 1955 and elaborated by Geoffrey Parker in 1988. 1 It has spread its influence geographically: from at least Parker's intervention it has been tied to the origins of European global dominance, and recently attention has been focused on what eastern European developments can tell us that western European cannot, and on why China did not have the same sort of state-building military revolution as Europe. 2 Discussion has drawn in the fourteenth century as the proposed site for an infantry revolution, the fifteenth century as the scene of a gunpowder revolution, the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the locus for a more convincing all-round military revolution than Roberts's, and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the 1 M.

Bringing the study of warfare into theories of nationalism

“…While war could extend the administrative and territorial reach of the state, it could also result in breakdowns of such key functions, as well as economic distress. (Gunn et al : 386–8).…”

The power to pardon in late medieval and early modern Europe: New perspectives in the history of crime and criminal justice

“…Historians also gave nuance to the role of State formation in the decline of violence, whether it was caused by the integration of self‐constraints by the population (civilizing process) or by the pressure of coercive external forces (social disciplining). Following Tilly's () famous statement that “war made the state, and the state made war” (p. 42), historians insisted on the bellicose spirit of the early modern State, its constant need for developing its armies, and the extreme violence carried out by war, which contradicts the idea that State formation automatically leads to the pacification of society (Gunn, Grummitt, & Cools, ). Criminal justice historians also offered a third alternative to the civilizing and disciplinary models of the decline of violence in the early modern period, insisting on the role of a global modification of social structures (Nassiet, ; Schwerhoff, ).…”

The Origins of the Idea of Conscription as a Major Civic Virtue in Renaissance Italy

“…Інші дослідники, зокрема Чарльз Тіллі та Жан Ґлете, розглядають усі ці зміни як частину процесу творення фіскально-військових держав у Європі [5, c. 2]. В основі такого підходу лежать ідеї Чарльза Тіллі про роль податків, бюрократії та регулярних армій у створенні нового типу держав у ранньомодерній Європі [6].…”