There is a theory of state formation, associated with people like Mancur Olson and James Scott, in which which early states are modeled as parasitic predators. Matt Yglesias:
A settled farming community can produce more food than it needs to survive, which means that raiders can profitably steal it. But as Mancur Olson pointed out in his later work, as profitable as banditry may be, a skilled group of warriors might decide that it’s even more profitable to act as “stationary bandits.”
Instead of sporadically raiding farming communities, stationary bandits live nearby and tax them — they are, in other words, the government.
As a generalized model of state formation, I find this lacking; in particular I do not think it applies to the earliest states we know anything about, in Sumer and Egypt. But there certainly are cases in which conquering elites have acted in exactly this way. As Yglesias puts it, this view is "cynical about government, but not entirely negative."
One of Olson’s points is that stationary bandits, unlike roving ones, have some genuine interest in encouraging the communities they govern to prosper. They need to protect their victims from other bands of bandits. If they provide things like law and order, basic infrastructure, and other growth-oriented public services, then there’s more tax revenue to secure.
So they may end up being pretty good governors; a famous example here might be Tamerlane, who was a brutal conqueror but under whose rule the cities of central Asia thrived like never before.
In a fascinating paper, an American professor named Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra uses the chaotic eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a laboratory for considering stationary bandit theory. The most valuable products of this region are two minerals, gold and coltan. The prices of both have fluctuated dramatically over the past twenty-five years. When the price is high, the returns to controlling the trade are very high in local terms. So those high prices lead local armed groups, whether militias or units on the Congolese Army, so set themselves up as stationary bandits:
The first result is that, in response to an increase in the price of coltan, armed actors create monopolies of violence; that is, they emerge as “stationary bandits” (Olson 1993), create illegal customs to tax mining output, and provide protection in the mines where coltan is produced— thus creating Tilly (1985)’s “essential functions of a state.”
Sánchez de la Sierra also found that price spikes in the two different materials led to different behavior by armed groups:
A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as “stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal, leads to stationary bandits in the villages where income from gold is spent, where they introduce illicit mining visas, taxes, and administrations.
They also set up courts that adjudicate disputes, punish thieves, and other judicial functions.
The hardest part of the study, and the one that raises the most questions for me, concerns the incomes of people in these areas. The methods used are described in detail in the paper, but for me they did not inspire confidence; basically, Sánchez de la Sierra and his assistants did a lot of interviews. But, anyway, this is his finding:
Having a stationary bandit from a militia or the Congolese army increases welfare. These findings suggest that armed actors may create “essential functions of a state” to better expropriate, which, depending on their goals, can increase welfare.
Very interesting.
4 comments:
What do you mean with “American profesor”? He is Spanish, and now he teach in an American University…. But maybe it will be sent back to Europe if some ICE officer cross his way….
I'm not sure Tamerlane makes a good example. In standard historiography, Tamerlane benefited the cities of Central Asia by lavishing upon them some of the loot from his extremely devastating conquests and raids in places like Delhi. So it amounts to an urban version of the warleader rewarding his followers.
Yes, I'm sure a revisionist argument can be made that the bulk of the benefit derived by these cities came from commercial protection, giving local disruptive forces something to do far away, etc. Still not convinced Tamerlane is a good example. Better and clearer might be to find someone who matches the type of the brutal conqueror's third-generation successor who becomes the wise manager of his state, founding cities, giving privileges to people who build windmills or carve irrigation canals, and so on. However, in the medieval Middle East, the tendency was that, roughly in the fourth generation, the successors of brutal conquerors would predictably lose their states to new brutal conquerors. This is Ibn Khaldun's famous thesis, for which there's plenty of roughly-approximate empirical evidence in the medieval Middle Eastern context. In medieval Europe, however, some feudal dynasties whose family beginnings were also those of brutal conquerors (more or less) were able to found relatively permanent states--whose obvious successors still exist in some cases, regardless of changes in political constitution--by adopting a more "managerial" style (while still pursuing military enterprises aplenty).
That said, my impression is that the push for "governmentality" in most of these societies didn't only come from the "stationary bandits" above; a substantial portion of any human group wants order, safety, and predictability, and in both medieval Europe and Islam, I sense deep up-from-below instincts for "government." People don't have to be ordered to form things like boundary commissions or enact market regulations; this kind of activity seems to be an emergent property of humans in groups (as also is the tendency toward breakdown).
It occurs to me that, if one wants an example of a successful third (or so) generation manager type in a medieval Islamic/south Asian context, one could do worse than to cite the Akbar in India. He arguably fits this profile, and the Mughals managed to last as a large empire several generations longer than the usual. Mehmed the Conqueror may fit the model for the Ottomans, who lasted even longer.
@David-
I agree with the from-below demand for government. Anarchists like Scott think of all government as imposed, but I don't. I was also thinking about the hierarchical model, in which the presence of the king supports all the lesser lords in ruling their domains, down to the father in the household; so all the fathers, bosses, ship captains, etc. are getting something out of a model that enjoins respect for authority.
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