Wars and State-Making Reconsidered - The Rise of the Developmental State

Abstract

This article argues that the term “fiscal-military state” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to one of the paradigmatic cases of early modern state formation, Britain. Britain devoted a significantly smaller proportion of government revenues to military expenses than any other European state. Moreover, its overall expenditure included important non-military elements and massive investment in colonial development, a fact that standard accounts fail to take into consideration. The existing fiscal historiography also ignores large swaths of other types of state activity. Finally, the article argues that the British state—and quite probably other early modern states—was not forged in warfare. If war did not make the British state, this would explain why the British state was less narrowly focused on making war.

O debate sobre as causas da Revolução Industrial

“…Dan Bogart apresenta evidência quantitativa que o ambiente regulatório para empresas nesse setor ficou mais favorável após 1688 e que o investimento na melhoria de estradas e rios aumentou substancialmente na década de 1690 (Bogart, 2011). Segundo Pincus e Robinson, em artigo subsequente, a maior atuação do estado durante o século 18 em áreas além do "modelo fiscal-militar" que dominava as despesas das nações da Europa transformou a Inglaterra no primeiro "estado desenvolvimentista" Robinson, 2016).…”

The Emergence of Weak, Despotic and Inclusive States

“…However, crucially, our framework also clarifies that the effects of structural factors are conditional -the same change in external threats can also shift a society from Region II to Region I, thus triggering the evolution of a despotic state and ultimately limiting the growth of state capacity. This, for example, explains why theories such as those of Tilly mentioned above, which emphasize the threat of war as a driver of state building, tend to have only limited explanatory power (see Pincus and Robinson, 2016, for a historical discussion).…”