Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D.990-1990

In this pathbreaking work, now available in paperback, Charles Tilly challenges all previous formulations of state development in Europe. Specifically, Tilly charges that most available explanations fail because they do not account for the great variety of kinds of states which were viable at different stages of European history, and because they assume a unilinear path of state development resolving in today’s national state.In his concise and readable style, Tilly demonstrates how various interactions between the wielders of coercion and the manipulators of capital produced three major types of states which prevailed during long periods of European history: tribute-making empires, systems of fragmented sovereignty and national states. Drawing on the contributions of Barrington Moore, Stein Rokkan and Lewis Mumford, Tilly puts to rest the conception of European state development as a single, unilinear process and, in so doing, places relations among states at the center of the analysis of the process of state formation.