Space for Capital, Space for States

Space for Capital, Space for States Charles Tilly Theory and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1/2, Special Double Issue: Structures of Capital. (Jan., 1986), pp. 301-309. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0304-2421%28198601%2915%3A1%2F2%3C301%3ASFCSFS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O Theory and Society is currently published by Springer.

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Space for capital, space for states

CHARLES TILLY New School for Social Research, New York

If you open your nearest historical atlas to the political map of Europe around 1500, several features will strike your eye at once. First, the large monochromas that represent more or less continuous sovereignty over extensive territories spiral around the map's periphery: the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish domains in the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, France, England, Scotland, Denmark/Norway, Sweden, the lands of the Teutonic Order, Russia, Poland/Lithuania, Hungary. Within that ring the largest contiguous realms - Bohemia, Austria/Styria, mainland Venice, Savoy, Lorraine, the Burgundian Netherlands, Brandenburg, and (to stretch the word "realm") the Papal States and the Swiss Confederation - generally occupied less than a quarter of the terrain controlled by their peripheral neighbors. And in the arc from the Baltic's south shore over to Flanders and down to Florence swarmed hundreds of formally autonomous principalities, archduchies, bishoprics, free cities, and other statelets. To be sure, a Habsburg-run Empire claimed suzerainty over many of these small domains, and the scattered territories ruled directly by the Habsburgs claimed a significant share of the European core. On the other hand, the nominal rulers of such medium-sized states as Brandenburg and the Burgundian Netherlands imposed their control only intermittently, weakly, and with the often-grudging mediation of regional oligarchs. In general, that map of 1500 shows us the outer two thirds of Europe in a ring of relatively large states, encircling a plethora of ministates and semistates. Taking as rules of thumb for statehood the rights to send ambassadors, maintain an army, police the territory, defend its boundaries, wage war, raise taxes, and treat with major states, in 1500 Europe contained on the order of five hundred states, most of them tiny.

Theory and Society 15: 301-309 (1986)

O Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

Now inspect the map of European cities in 1500. Jan de Vries has recently recast that map, with superior evidence, in an interesting way. De Vries calculates the "urban population potential" (essentially, its accessibility to other cities) for every city of ten thousand or more inhabitants, then prepares a contour map that delineates the regions of highest potential. De Vries's map of 1500 comes close to inverting the map of states, except that it displays three peaks: one around Naples, another spanning Italy from Genoa to Milan to Venice, and a third around Antwerp. Looking forward in time, he notes the similarity between his series of maps and Fernand Braudel's sketch of the succession of dominant cities in the European world economy: Braudel argues that Venice, having assumed the functions of centre in the fourteenth century, held onto its position until the early sixteenth century. The leadership position then passed to Antwerp, only to revert after a relatively brief reign of fifty years to the Mediterranean area again. This time, after the mid-sixteenth century, the leader was Genoa, the beneficiary of Habsburg commercial policy. Genoa's leadership was also of short duration. A decentring of the world economy in the period 1590-1610 was resolved only as Amsterdam consolidated its position as the centre of European capitalist economic activity. This consolidation in Amsterdam possessed a durability that the previous centres had lacked. Only after a protracted period of rivalry between Amsterdam and London did the locus of leadership change once again. According to Braudel London's position became clearly preeminent toward the end of the eighteenth century. London's leadership spanned the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, until the mantle crossed the Atlantic Ocean to New York in the crisis of 1929.'

De Vries points out that Braudel's timetable corresponds closely to shifts in the peaks of urban potential within Europe. Of these centers of capitalism, all were deep-water ports, but London was the first to be located within a large territorial state. Its priority only became clear in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thus for almost three hundred years after 1500, during a time of tumultuous statemaking, the maps of national states and of dense urban networks remained rough mirror images of each other. Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees consider that relationship a causal one. Cities, they say played a dual role in the early modern European political system, depending upon their geographic location and the regional intensity of urbanization. Clustered and armed with the resources of active trade, protoindustrial production, or sophisticated finance, cities retarded the development of nation-states until well after 1800. To the west and east of the core, where postfeudal monarchs and their armies could dominate them, cities were turned into agents of centralization by princes intent o n binding the territories of the realm ever more tightly to the crown.2

Thus Berlin, Paris, and Madrid bore very different relations to the surrounding states and their rulers than did Antwerp, Cologne, or Venice. To some extent, that dense band of cities at the center of Europe prevented the early formation of large national states in the core. The experience of the Netherlands epitomizes the complex relationship among national states and capitalist cities. On the one hand, Antwerp and Amsterdam served as great mobilizers and managers of capital for Spain, England, the Netherlands, and other European states. Aware of the advantages of controlling those and other Dutch cities, the dukes of Burgundy spent much of the fifteenth century extending and consolidating their control in the Netherlands. On the other hand, governing the Netherlands involved building temporary coalitions among the ruling classes of prosperous, independent, and rivalrous cities. In 1581, for example, when the Estates General of the rebellious Netherlands declared Emperor Philip I1 of Spain deposed from his Dutch principalities and established the duke of Anjou (brother of French king Henry 111) in his place, the deputies proposed to give their new prince "lordship and government" but not "sovereignty," made his tenure contingent on the prince's fulfillment of all articles of their treaty with him, demanded a major say in the naming of his successor, and insisted on both the obligatory annual convocation of the Estates and the right to assemble on their own initiative; the Estates were acting as instructed deputies of the Netherlands' major ~ i t i e sThose cities' rulers, further.~ more, generally resisted the building up of armies and had a strong interest in seapower and the maintenance of maritime trade. Within cities, of course, patrician landholders, financiers, and leaders of craft guilds regularly struggled for power, with the consequence that the power of mercantile interests varied from time to time and city to city. It is also true that the burghers of Flanders and Brabant resisted the expansion of royal power less effectively than did their neighbors in Holland. Nevertheless, the sixteenth-century Netherlands sum up the interests, coalitions, and political processes that blocked the building of large territorial states in Europe's central urban zone.

The Chinese Connection

Because of the great fragmentation of sovereignty in Europe's heartland, an interesting parallel between European and Chinese experience has es-

caped historical attention. G. William Skinner portrays the urban structure of imperial China as the intersection of two hierarchical systems. The first, built largely from the bottom up, emerged from economic transactions; its overlapping units consisted of larger and larger market areas centered on towns and cities of increasing size. The second, imposed mainly from the top down, resulted from imperial control; its nested units constituted a hierarchy of administrative jurisdictions. From the county seat upward, every city occupied a position in both hierarchies. (Within counties, the Chinese empire conducted routine government indirectly by means of its gentry.) The bottom-up system expressed the spatial logic of production and distribution, the top-down system the spatial logic of coercion and extraction. Skinner represents the Chinese economic hierarchy as a modified central-place system - resembling geographers' classic abstract models of ranked retail markets, but incorporating topography, the importance of water transport, and other real-life influences on regional structure. In the China of 1893, he counts 39,000 central places, from roughly 28,000 standard market towns (averaging about 150 inhabitants) up to six central metropolises (averaging about 667,000 inhabitants). Of those 39,000 cities and towns, some 1,549 were imperial capitals at one level or another. They constituted the top-down system, created by centuries of imperial expansion, consolidation, and contraction. Although every imperial capital was also a market center of some importance, the imperial hierarchy was not simply a truncated version of the market hierarchy. First, the areas of control differed: the market system consisted of overlapping regions, with many markets standing at the boundaries of larger regions than their own that depended on the market at the next higher level. The imperial system, in contrast, involved a relatively neat nesting of smaller administrative regions within larger ones. Second, the relative positions of cities within the two hierarchies often differed. Near the frontiers, for example, where trade was commonly thin and defense exceptionally important, cities typically occupied higher ranks in the imperial than in the commercial hierarchy. From this interaction between the two systems, Skinner draws challenging conclusions:

. . .. I argue that revenue and defense were inversely related in regional space such that in the central areas of regional cores local government was preoccupied with taxation to the virtual exclusion of military affairs, whereas along regional frontiers local government was preoccupied with defense and security to the virtual exclusion of fiscal affairs. As for the potential threat of local power, I would suggest that in core areas the chief danger lay in concerted action

by the leading elements of society, whereas in peripheral areas it lay in the mobilization of heterodox elements. Finally, I believe it can be shown that the political structure, and above all the leadership of local social systems, varied according to place in the overall regional structure in such a way that the burden of societal management to be shouldered by local government was relatively lighter in cores than in peripheral areas.4

Skinner provides evidence for each of his arguments. From these general propositions Skinner draws yet more hypotheses, for example that in cities that were secondary from an imperial point of view but relatively central in the market structure - which means, especially, cities in intensely commercialized regions near the center of the empire - prosperous merchants found themselves dealing with less powerful emissaries of the emperor, and played their politics accordingly. In cities holding high imperial rank but low commerical position, the opposite was true: merchants whose scope was quite limited confronted powerful administrators who had military force to back them. The political strategies of merchants, landlords, officials, and others differed accordingly. Within China, according to Skinner's analysis, geopolitics and economic geography interacted to produce strong and systematic variation in the quality of political life. Once Rome's grasp weakened, Europe never again saw an empire that approached the Chinese scale; only Napoleon and Hitler made serious threats to build such empires, and they failed. Yet, mutatis mutandis, the interaction between top-down systems of coercion and bottom-up systems of production that Skinner describes for China also appeared in Europe. Skinner's account immediately suggests the circumstances in which wielders of armed force were able to cow urban ruling classes and to create extensive states in the thinly-commercialized European periphery, but tried in vain to consolidate in the heartlands of capitalism. That comparison leads to another: given fragmented sovereignty, European rulers who built up their power in peripheral regions could not support armies and bureaucracies by straightforward and inexpensivelycollected taxes on trade; they had little choice but to build up the bulky fiscal apparatuses it takes to wrest taxes and the wherewithal of war from thinly-commercialized populations. Rulers of peripheral states were also very likely to bargain with financiers both inside and outside their own states in order to raise the ready cash required for warfare. To the extent that they succeeded in the twin efforts to raise support for military force and to subordinate large populations to their will, however, they created the elements of absolutism, made their own territorial expansion possi-

ble, and challenged neighboring states to invest in military strength for defense, and offense as well. The distinction Hohenberg and Lees make between the political role of cities in central and peripheral Europe springs to mind. More so than in China, however, the relation between cities and states was changing in Europe from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Although Chinese imperial control strengthened and slackened in a long, powerful dynastic cycle, China only had one empire, more or less, throughout the entire period. Between 1500 and 1850, according to order-of-magnitude estimates by Paul Bairoch, China's urban population roughly doubled and its total population quadrupled, with the result that the share in places of five thousand or more shrank from perhaps 12 to 7 p e r ~ e n t The . ~ already-enormous state, in a way, grew even larger relative to its system of cities.

Growing states, multiplying cities Nothing of the kind happened in Europe. From the sixteenth century onward, cities multiplied while states consolidated. According to Bairoch's estimates, the proportion of Europe's population in places of five thousand or more rose from about 11 percent (the same order of magnitude as China's) in 1500 to only 12 percent in 1800, but spurted to 19 percent by 1850. Today, that proportion is about 67V0.~ Over the same period, the number of European states was declining radically. Consider the simple statistics in Table I.7 (The "radius" of the average city-region or state is simply the radius of an imaginary circle having the mean area per city or state; it provides a rough indication of the normal span of communication and control implied by a given density of cities or states.) We must take these stitched-together numbers as orders of magnitude, and no more than that. The figures for urban population, ironically, become more uncertain with the twentieth century, when statisticians in many countries stopped publishing aggregate figures on anything so small as cities of ten thousand people. The early numbers for states are frank guesses based on atlases and a few peace settlements, and the later ones are subject to fierce debates over definitions. For example, my estimates of one hundred for 1848 includes twenty-two technically independent parts of Switzerland, seventeen papal states, and thirty-nine members of the German Confederation, plus de facto dependencies such as Luxembourg and Norway. By taking every federation as a single state, we could reduce the number of autonomous states in 1848 to twenty. Nevertheless,

Table I. Growth of cities and states.

number of cities of 10,000 or more population in cities of 10,000 or more (millions) percentage of population in cities of 10,000+ number of formally independent states cities of 10,000+ per state square kilometers per city (thousands) square kilometers per state (thousands) mean "radius" of city regions (kilometers) mean "radius" of states (kilometers)

so far as I can tell, adopting more stringent definitions across the board would not alter the general trends in the table. These numbers, for all their uncertainties, have some remarkable implications. As Bairoch's estimates also indicate, the proportion of Europeans living in cities increased rather little between 1500 and 1800, only to grow very rapidly thereafter. The average area dominated by a single city of ten thousand or more thus declined radically after 1800: its hypothetical reach into the hinterland extended 101 kilometers in 1500, only 18 in 1980. States plunged in number, and therefore increased in average size, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to stabilize between twenty-five and thirty during the twentieth. That meant the span of control for a hypothetical average state extended from 57 kilometers in 1500 to 239 in 1980. As a consequence of simultaneous changes in the distributions of cities and states, the number of cities per state increased enormously: from one such city for every three states in 1500 to about 180 cities per state in 1980. Behind the fragile numbers stand sturdy realities. Capital-concentrated production and distribution promoted the urbanization of Europe, as conquest, defense, and the concentration of coercive means promoted

the building of large national states. The relative urbanization of different European regions did not alter enormously: although the balance of urban growth shifted toward the continent's northwest coast and despite the fact that a few areas of coal production eventually built large industrial cities, in general today's map of urban population looks like an intensified version of the map for 1500. On the side of states, however, things went differently. Although many of them competed furiously to establish empires overseas, the large states that formed Europe's outer rim in 1500 did not enlarge their European territory greatly; in fact, the Ottoman Empire and then the Habsburg domains fell into fragments. The major consolidations occurred in the densely urban central zone; in that zone, the temporary conquests of Napoleon and the more durable unifications of Germany and Italy represented the three most decisive moments of consolidation. There, the relations between cities and states, between capital and coercion, altered much more drastically than my speculative statistics suggest. There, a multitude of city-states that were easily dominated by urban merchants and rentiers gave way to substantial states that overlapped with (but did not fully contain) extensive hierarchies of industrial, commercial, and administrative cities. Fiscal strategies, military organization, policing, information-gathering, and many other aspects of governmental action must have changed accordingly. Our challenge is to find out exactly how. For that purpose, we must spell out the spatial logics and histories of capitalism and statemaking, and integrate them with our already wellfurnished analyses of classes, wars, and national leaders.

Notes 1. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500- 1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 159- 160. 2. Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000- 1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 170. 3. Wim P. Blockmans, "Du contrat feodal a la souverainete du peuple. Les precedents de la dtcheance de Philippe I1 dans les Pays-Bas (1581)," Assemblee di stati e istitutuzioni rappresentative nella storia del pensiero politico moderna (secoli XVX X ) (Rimini: Maggioli, 1983), I , 135 - 150. See also Blockmans, De Volksvertegenwoordiging in Vlaanderen in de Overgang van Middeleeuwen naar Nieuwe Tijden (1384- 1506) (Brussels: Royal Academy of Sciences, 1978), Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480- 1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4. G. William Skinner, "Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems," in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 308.

5. Paul Bairoch, De Jericho a Mexico. Villes et economie duns I'hisfoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 460- 462. 6. Ibid., 282. 7. The figures on urban population come from de Vries, European Urbanization, 29 - 48 and Bairoch, Jericho, 282, with some interpolations; those on number of states come from my own compilations. (Since my compilations of states are very uncertain prior t o 1848, I would be delighted to hear from anyone who has prepared or seen comprehensive lists of European political entities for various points in time.) I have taken the land area of Europe west of Russia as 5 million square kilometers. 8. For some recent efforts to integrate political geography and political economy, see Edward Ames and Richard T. Rapp, "The Birth and Death of Taxes: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic Hisfory 37 (1977), 161 - 178, Richard Bean, "War and the Birth of the Nation State," Journal of Economic Hisfory 33 (1973), 203 -221; Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Michael Dunford and Diane Perrons, The Arena of Capital (New York: St. Martin's, 1983); David Friedmann, "A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations," Journal of Political Economy 85 (1977), 59-78; Michael Hechter and William Brustein, "Regional Modes of Production and Patterns of State Formation in Europe," American Journal of Sociology 85 (1980), 1061 - 1094; R. J . Johnston, Geography and fhe Sfafe.An Essay in Political Geography (New York: St. Martin's, 1982); Nurit Kliot and Stanley Waterman, eds., Pluralism and Political Geography. People, Terriforyand State (London: Croom Helm, 1983); Ted Margadant, "Proto-urban development and political mobilization during the Second Republic," French Cities in the Ninefeenth Cenfury, ed. John Merriman (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Jean Meyer, Le poids de I'Etat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); David R. Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 1560- 1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Stein Rokkan and Derek W. Urwin, eds., The Polifics of Territorial Idenfity. Studies in European Regionalism (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982); Peter J . Taylor, "Political Geography and the World-Economy" in Political Studies from Spafial Perspecfives, ed. Alan D. Burnett and Peter J. Taylor (New York: Wiley, 1981); Michael Timberlake, ed., Urbanization in fhe World-Economy (Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 1985); R. Bin Wong, "Les 6meutes de subsistances en Chine et en Europe Occidentale," Annales; Economies, Societds, Civilisations 38 (1983), 234 - 258.

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The Birth and Death of Taxes: A Hypothesis Edward Ames; Richard T. Rapp The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History. (Mar., 1977), pp. 161-178. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28197703%2937%3A1%3C161%3ATBADOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I 8

War and the Birth of the Nation State Richard Bean The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 33, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History. (Mar., 1973), pp. 203-221. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28197303%2933%3A1%3C203%3AWATBOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 8

Regional Modes of Production and Patterns of State Formation in Western Europe Michael Hechter; William Brustein The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, No. 5. (Mar., 1980), pp. 1061-1094. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9602%28198003%2985%3A5%3C1061%3ARMOPAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

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