page_title: Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 / Overview
caption_attribution_description: Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 august 1792
context_page_description: Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 is a 1990 book by the American political scientist Charles Tilly.
  The central theme of the book is state formation. Tilly writes about the complex history of European state formation from the Middle Ages to the 1990s - a thousand-year time span. While examining political, social, and technological change, Tilly attempts to explain the unprecedented success of the European nation-state as the dominant polity in the world, claiming that "the origins of the modern European state lay in war and preparations for war."
context_section_description: Tilly asks a double question in Coercion, Capital, and European States, namely: "What accounts for the great variation over time and space in the kinds of states that have prevailed in Europe since AD 990, and why did European states eventually converge on different variants of the national state?"
  According to Tilly's theory, military innovation in pre-modern Europe, especially the use of gunpowder and mass armies, made war considerably more expensive. In order to continue to fund warfare, conquest, and security, only states with sufficient capital and a large population could afford paying for their security and ultimately surviving in a hostile environment. Those in power were forced to develop a means of extraction by, for example, introducing taxation and conscription. Subsequently, these means of extraction resulted in the creation of state bureaucracies and a centralized state.
  The type of state that develops is dependent on the structure of the area. In areas where merchants and capital were the predominant class, city states arose, such as Venice. In areas where independent landlords were the predominant class, centralized absolutism arose, such as Russia. If an area would have both classes more or less equal, a combination of state forms would develop, for example as happened in France and England, according to Tilly. Eventually, all states will develop into the type of state form that Tilly calls the nation state.
  With this theory, Tilly questions previous formulations of state development in Europe, arguing that they are unsuccessful in explaining the great variety in kinds of states that have prevailed at different stages of European history since AD 990. He say that they fail "because they locate explanations of state-to-state variation in individual characteristics of states rather than relations among them, and because they assume implicitly a deliberate effect to construct the sorts of substantial, centralized states that come to dominate European life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
  Unlike other theories, like the idea of the social contract, Tilly stated that "[w]ar wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of states within it."
  Interaction between the rulers on one hand and the manipulators of capital on the other, resulted in three state formations, Tilly argues. These state formations are tribute-taking empires, systems of fragmented sovereignty, and national states.
caption: According to Tilly, the French Revolution unfolded from protests against the high taxes the French rulers imposed to balance for the expensive American War.
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