Excerpt

Everyone who reads this chapter lives under the control of a state. We benefit from the security the state provides, from specialized organizations that deliver education at the beginning of life and health care at its end. We may be forced to pay taxes to sustain means of suppression we do not like, and we may be forced to fight in wars we do not accept. It is not surprising that scholars have been fascinated with the rise and spread of these polities during the last six millennia.

Early Studies

The first theories of state formation are constructed explanations of specific trajectories often found in epic poems or in mythohistoric texts. They focus on the founder’s character, whether it is the physically perfect and semidivine Gilgamesh, the ruler of Uruk in early third millennium BCE Sumer (George 1999), or the diligent and very human Yu of the early second millennium BCE Xia dynasty in central China (Nienhauser 1994). However, these actors do deal with the fundamental dynamic processes important in their worlds. The accounts of Yu focus on his efforts to organize farmers to build dikes and canals to control floods; the earlier portions of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which focus on the wars between Uruk and the city of Kish, seem to detail negotiations between councils of elders and councils of young warriors. If such sources can be taken as early efforts to understand state emergence, it must not be forgotten that these are literary compositions. Explicit efforts to verify accounts and frame explanatory constructs about early state formation come later, with the first historians of classical eras such as Thucydides in Greece and Sima Qian in China. Constructs based on comparative studies of different cases considering a diversity of interacting variables do not appear before the thirteenth century CE with the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (1958).

However, the early studies (and indeed all those up to the late nineteenth century) suffer from common weaknesses rooted in the nature of their sources. All used both written documents and oral—often eyewitness—testimony. Documents are written by someone with a point of view and are conserved by others, perhaps with a different point of view; oral accounts, especially eyewitness accounts, also have a point of view, and suffer further from the fact that a witness can only be at one place at one time and may have a limited understanding of complicated events. Historians are skilled at accounting for text biases and constructing a plausible narrative from the available evidence, but these studies are not data on the operation of whole systems, and they can only be used to evaluate ideas about the emergence of new forms of organization with many caveats.

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