Bellicist theory of state formation

Why did Europe end up with a system of large, centralised, territorial states with bureaucracies, standing armies and national tax systems? The bellicist (war-centred) theory answers: because rulers fought wars, and wars had to be paid for. Charles Tilly summarised the argument in a phrase from his 1975 essay "Reflections on the History of European State-Making" (p. 42): "War made the state, and the state made war."

To survive in a competitive environment, rulers needed armies; to pay for armies, they had to extract resources from their populations; to extract resources, they built tax administrations, courts and records, and bargained with the groups that held wealth. The modern state was a by-product of preparing for war.

War making as organised crime

In "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" (1985), Tilly compared early modern rulers to racketeers who sell protection against threats they themselves create. He identified four activities: war making (eliminating rivals outside the territory), state making (eliminating rivals inside it), protection (eliminating the enemies of clients) and extraction (acquiring the means to do the first three). Extraction required administrative apparatus, and resistance to extraction forced bargains that gave rise to rights and representative assemblies.

Coercion and capital

In Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (1990), Tilly distinguished three paths. Coercion-intensive regions with few cities, such as Russia, built states by squeezing landlords and peasants through large bureaucracies. Capital-intensive regions dense with cities, such as the Italian and Dutch city-states, relied on merchants and borrowing, producing smaller, federated or republican polities. Capitalised coercion, combining both, as in England and France, eventually produced the national states that out-competed the others, because they could field mass armies and pay for them.

The fiscal-military state

John Brewer's The Sinews of Power (1989) described how Britain between 1688 and 1783 became a fiscal-military state: a high-tax state with a professional excise administration, a funded national debt managed with parliamentary consent, and the capacity to sustain long wars against France. The British case became a model of how war finance can build capable and constrained states at the same time.

Economic models

Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson modelled investment in fiscal and legal capacity and found that common-interest public goods such as fighting external wars, along with political stability and inclusive institutions, favour building state capacity. Nicola Gennaioli and Hans-Joachim Voth argued that the military revolution after 1500, which made war more expensive, raised the importance of fiscal capacity and drove a divergence between states that invested and states that fell behind.

• England and Britain: parliamentary taxation and debt management after 1688 supported a long series of wars with France.
• Prussia: a small, resource-poor state built a large army and an efficient bureaucracy, often cited as a coercion-intensive path.
• Warring States China: Victoria Hui argued that ancient China experienced a comparable dynamic of competition and self-strengthening reforms, but that it ended in the unification of 221 BCE under Qin rather than in a balance of power.
• Africa: Jeffrey Herbst argued that low population density, abundant land and borders fixed by colonial powers and guaranteed by international norms meant that post-colonial African states rarely faced the existential inter-state wars that forced European rulers to build capacity.
• Latin America: Miguel Centeno argued in Blood and Debt (2002) that wars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America were limited and often financed by customs revenues and foreign loans, so they did not produce strong states.

• Eurocentrism: the theory generalises from a specific European context; later scholars stress that state formation elsewhere followed different paths.
• Economic origins: Scott Abramson, using data on European states from 1100 to 1790, found that small political units persisted well into the "age of the territorial state" and argued that patterns of economic development and urban growth, rather than changes in war making, explain where large territorial states formed.
• Alternatives to war: Hendrik Spruyt argued that the sovereign territorial state defeated competitors such as city leagues and city-states because it reduced transaction costs for trade and offered credible commitments, not simply because it fought better.
• Selection bias: the theory looks at states that survived; many that fought wars were destroyed rather than strengthened.
• War can weaken states: civil wars and debt-financed wars can hollow out capacity, as in many twentieth-century cases.
• Normative concerns: some critics worry that the theory can be read as implying that war is necessary for development; Tilly himself presented it as a sober description, not a recommendation.

The bellicist theory is one of the most influential accounts of European state formation and has shaped research on taxation, representation and state capacity worldwide. Its strongest version, that inter-state war was the single main driver, is contested by economic and institutional explanations, and its export to other regions largely fails, which is itself informative: where external threats are absent or managed by international order, states can persist with weak capacity. For designers of new polities, it highlights how strongly fiscal capacity and representative bargains are linked: rulers who need revenue from citizens have to give them something in return.

• Besley and Persson, "The Origins of State Capacity" (2009)
• Gennaioli and Voth, "State Capacity and Military Conflict" (2015)
• Scott F. Abramson, "The Economic Origins of the Territorial State" (2017)
• Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton University Press, 1975)
• Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" (1985)
• Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Basil Blackwell, 1990)
• John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (Unwin Hyman, 1989)
• Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2000)
• Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002)