This is the second part of our (planned) three part (I) look at how some ‘tribal’ or more correctly, non-state agrarian peoples raised armies to fight the Romans (and others) in the third through first centuries BC. Last time, we looked at the subsistence basis of these societies – they’re agricultural – and the social structures that subsistence base encouraged: a society of aristocrats at the top of networks of patronage ties reaching down into the majority peasant population, with horizontal ties of hospitality, marriage and so on linking members of both groups to other members of their same status.
This week, we’re going to turn our view to the large-scale organization, the communal governing structures by which tribes – civitates – and their towns – oppida – governed themselves. After all, just because there is no state in these communities doesn’t mean there is no organization, law or custom at all. Humans have, in fact, never lived in a truly lawless ‘state of nature,’ for we seem to have always lived in family and clan units (at least as long as we’ve been anatomically modern humans). The civitates of the Celtiberians, Gauls and Germani we’re discussing today are quite a bit larger than clans, of course, and so require more governance structures.
At the same time, we’re also going to look at why these governance structures do not amount to a state. This is, I think, an important distinction and one I’ve found that some folks like to blur, but it ought not be blurred. Absolutely there are societies that are in stages of transition from state to non-state organization or vice versa (e.g. ‘proto-states’ and ‘failing states’), but there is a real difference between a state society and a non-state society, so we’ll explore that too.
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What is a State?
But I think we have to begin with a very basic question, what is a state and what does it mean for a society to be non-state? This is one of those distinctions that is very important, but one generally doesn’t learn until fairly late in education (typically in specialized undergraduate courses), with the result that a lot of folks never cover it.
Now “the state” is one of those phenomena that wasn’t born as an ideological construction, it is not a product of thought, but of reality. Humans had states before they theorized about them and could recognize that some societies (‘state societies’) were noticeably different than other societies (‘non-state societies’). So we’re attempting to describe a real social phenomenon, not prescribe an ideal or ‘pure’ form of something. Consequently, defining the state is an exercise in observing those qualities states have that non-states do not and then refining that list down to the essentials, to push towards an objective definition more concrete than, “you know it when you see it.” But to be clear, you do know it when you see it.
So we have A cloud of general differences that recur in multiple cases.1 States tend to have a relatively rigidly defined territory, whereas non-state societies do not. States tend to have more complex social stratification with both a greater degree of labor specialization and a greater degree of social hierarchy than non-states, though complex non-state societies certainly do not lack social hierarchy and often have the full suit of ‘underclasses’ (like enslaved workers) – do not mistake non-state societies’ less complex social organization for a more egalitarian one. States tend to have centralized institutions – that is, permanent social structures which are larger than and outlive their individual human members – which can impose rules on society, backed up by the use of force, while non-state societies tend to lack these institutions (or they are very weak or failing). We tend to understand states as autonomous entities with a degree of permanent, at least an assumption that the state, as an entity, is supposed to persist over generations in more-or-less its current form.
And before we move on, I do want to stress that bit about “multiple cases.” ‘The state’ as an idea wasn’t invented once, but rather independently created several times in several places in history. We generally call these self-developed states (as opposed to cases where the state was adopted in imitation of or pressure from existing states) ‘pristine states’ (or ‘primary states’). I don’t know that there is agreement on the precise count of pristine states, but the core examples are broadly agreed on: states independently developed (in chronological order) in at least 1) Mesopotamia, 2) Egypt, 3) India, 4) China, 5) Mesoamerica and 6) the Andes mountains. Variously appended to that list are the developments of states in what is today Bolivia, Hawai’i, Polynesia and Ghana. So this is a basic pattern of human organization that emerged many times, with very similar structures each time.2
At the core of all of these recurrent factors is a central definition, famously stated by Max Weber, which reduces the state down effectively to a single point. The state is, “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”3 There are a few quirks there, of course. The monopoly is on legitimate force, not all force: every society has criminals, which is the word we use for individuals who wield illegitimate force; in a sense, the creation of the state is the process of getting a critical mass of people to reclassify all of the wielders of force save one as criminals. But crucially the definition is centered on physical force, which is to say on violence and the threat of violence, direct or remote.
In a state, one community – and really one political institution in that community – has abrogated to itself the sole authority to authorize the use of force. That political institution might be a king or a parliament or a congress or a popular assembly. It might delegate its authority to elected officials or appointed generals or even down to subordinate local departments or provinces. Note that, like all social institutions, the state is a question of perception and customs: it is the perception of legitimacy that matters, precisely because that perception is what enables the state to recruit the purveyors of physical force to deal it out and to ensure that the broader society does not resist its application.
When I present students (and modernists) with this definition, they often balk at the idea that there existed any states prior to 1600 AD or so, but just because medieval Europe was a politically fragmented place with often very weak central governments doesn’t mean that everywhere was. Or everywhen, for that matter. The Roman Republic, for instance, is pretty clearly a state. Only the duly elected officers of the republic – those with imperium from their office – can raise and command armies or use violence to enforce the laws, laws which make it illegal in most circumstances to rely on ‘self-help’ (that is, blood feuds) to seek justice. Indeed, the Romans go so far as to prohibit the carrying of weapons inside the sacred boundary of Rome (the pomerium). One of the very real signs that the republic was collapsing was that the prohibition on private armies begins to break down, although I’d note that the age of private Roman armies was relatively short. It seems long because this is the period of Roman history we talk about most. But the Roman Republic was founded in 509, the last ‘clan’-based army we hear of is in 477 (though purportedly, this was authorized by the Senate) and the first private army is Pompeius’ (that is, Gnaeus Pompey Magnus) muster in 84, in preparation for Sulla’s return in 83, so that’s 393 years of a state monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. The era of private armies then slams to a close again, arguably as early as Sextus Pompeius’ (son of Gnaeus) defeat at Naulochus in 36 (since that left the armies of Octavian, Lepidus and Antonius, which were all authorized in law), but surely no later than Antonius’ defeat at Actium in 31. In short, the period of ‘state failure’ where Rome had all sorts of private armies (as opposed to civil wars where participants wielded chunks of the state army against each other) was only about fifty years long.
So what is a non-state society? Well, that’s quite simple: it’s any society which does not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. As you might imagine, this can be a rather broader category! In the case of our ‘barbarian’ non-state societies, however, the matter is fairly simple. As we saw last week, these societies have a bunch of fellows who wield legitimate military force: the Big Men, who can mobilize their network of clients. As we’ll see, the military system relies on these fellows to function. But note the distinction: a Roman general only wields military force when the state authorizes him to do so, whereas a Gallic or Celtiberian Big Man wields military force in his own right, as a function of his social position and that force is regarded as legitimated by his social position, rather than some delegated power from a central authority. Indeed, as we’re about to see, these civitates do have ‘central authorities,’ but they’re very weak, in part because the people in those societies understand that certain men are allowed – indeed, ‘supposed’ – to wield military force independent of those communal governing structures.
In a sense, it is the very fractionalization of military powers, its division between aristocrats who can mobilize it personally through their network of clients, that makes our non-state societies non-state. At the same time, I think we should be careful about treating the state as too normative. Humans have been around for a very long time, but the state is only about 5,000 years old; in many areas of the world, the state only arrived in the last few hundred years. Thus, we may equally say that it is the centralization of force in a society, its monopoly that is the strange, outstanding, unusual and aberrant thing: the state which is the monstrous Leviathan of our own construction and non-state societies which are the more typical environment for humans.
In any case, just because Gallic, Celtiberian and Germanic-speaking societies were non-state in this period does not mean they did not have communal governing institutions, it just means those institutions were weak. So let’s look at the institutions and then at their weaknesses!
A Senatus By Any Other Name
Some immediate caveats are necessary: governing institutions are not generally visible archaeologically. Sometimes, very developed state institutions might leave visible remains, like palaces or large assembly places, but equally as often they don’t – or they leave ruins that are impossible to interpret confidently unless you already know the form of government. The case for the weak institutions of non-state peoples is naturally even harder to assess archaeologically, because these governing institutions might well lack specialized spaces that are clearly political in nature. Consequently, we are almost totally reliant on our written sources to chart these institutions. I can see the Gallic aristocracy in their burial customs, but I only know about their governing institutions because Greeks and Romans – mostly Romans – wrote about them.
That source problem imposes two limitations. The first limitation is chronological: our sources generally don’t have any knowledge of political institutions in the deep pasts of other cultures, so what we have is a period of sustained interest from the sources. That period, quite naturally, follows the contours of Roman military involvement, with some distortion from the fragmentary nature of the source tradition. In practice, we only start to get frequent, reliable details in Gaul beginning with Roman advances into Cisalpine Gaul (really starting in the 220s BC), in Spain with the beginning of the Second Punic War, which brings the Romans there (in 218) and in Germany when Caesar’s campaigns bring him into contact with Germanic-language speakers (58). Meanwhile in Gaul and Spain, there is an obvious twilight for these institutions: the Roman conquest of each area. In practice in Spain that means the fall of Numantia in 133, though Roman interest was not yet wholly done. In Gaul, it means the end of Caesar’s campaigns there in 50. So we can talk about these institutions in the third, second and first centuries BCE, but will struggle to do so much earlier.
The second problem is translation. Our sources are, recall, writing in Latin and Greek and they generally do not speak and do not care to learn Celtic or Germanic languages at all. They are writing for an audience that also reads Latin and Greek and equally does not know any Celtic or Germanic languages. Consequently, they’re going to have to translate local governing institutions into the political terminology of Greece and Rome. Moreover, with just a few exceptions, most of these details we get do not come in what we might term ethnographic contexts: we’re not getting them in the context of long, detailed descriptions of governments. Instead, we’re hearing about this council or that senate or this chief in the context of narratives of wars or campaigns, where our author is just going to choose the closest Greek or Latin equivalent to the institution in question, use that word (without telling us anything more, like how it may differ) and move along.
All of those caveats out of the way, what sort of governing structures do we see? We’ll start with Gaul and the Germani and then discuss how things look only a little different in Celtiberia. Governing institutions in Gaul and among the Germani seem to have existed primarily at the level of the civitas, that is the larger regional grouping. Civitates tend to be small – anywhere from 50,000 to 300,000 individuals – but consist of multiple settlements, often with one serving as the ‘capital’ seat of these governing structures.
Perhaps the most common element that we hear about is an aristocratic council, often understood by our sources as a senatus (that is, a senate) or as a collection of ‘elders’ (variously seniores, senatores, or maiores natu, or in Greek πρεσβύτεροι or πρεσβύτατοι all of which mean effectively mean ‘elders’). These are typically fairly large bodies, seeming to range from around 300 to 600 members (e.g. Caes. BGall. 2.28, Strabo 12.5, Tac. Hist. 5.19; note that this would make these civitas senates about the same size as the Roman senate, but for polities at most something like a tenth the size) and while they’re called elders and clearly age plays an important role in status, it sure seems like, from their size and also how they seem to function, that powerful aristocrats who aren’t necessarily old might be members. It is perhaps most accurate to understand these bodies as a gathering of all of the aristocratic Big Men. These elders or their senates tend to be the primary ‘point of contact’ for diplomacy in most cases, which suggests they have some understood authority over foreign policy. The functions of these bodies also seem to be deliberative, that is, they debate and discuss, so you could really make policy here.
We also hear about a sub-group of these senates, which our Latin sources will call the principes (singular princeps), which literally means “first or foremost ones.” In translations, this often gets rendered as ‘chiefs’ or ‘chieftains,’ but I think that’s a mistake: these are not necessarily office holders or figures of singular political authority the way we might understand a tribal chief to be; that’s not what principes means (indeed, the Romans would instead term those fellows magistratus, ‘magistrates’). Instead principes here means something like the ‘leading men,’ the biggest of the aristocratic Big Men, regardless of if they hold any specific office or duty. These are the fellows with the most clients, the most wealth and lands, and the largest retinues who then sit atop the clientelism pyramid and thus around whom political factions cohere. This is a much smaller group than the elders of the civitas senate – indeed, in a few instances we see Roman generals initially address a civitas senate, but shift to talking to just the principes when a smaller audience is required (e.g. Cethegus recieves assurances from the senate of the Cenomani, but plots in secret with their principes, Livy 32.30.7-11; Caesar delivers a speech to the senate of the Remi, but it is the principes who offer hostages as a pledge of loyalty, Caes. BGall 2.5). According to Tacitus, the Germani too are largely governed by the principes (Tac. Germ. 11.1-2).
The last common element is a public assembly, which in Latin is generally termed a concilium. These are broader voting bodies that seem to consist of all of the armed populace of the civitas. Ownership of weapons seems to have been the key criteria for entry: explicitly for the Germani (Tac. Germ 11.2-6) and implicitly for the Gauls where the clash of weapons was how approval was signified (Caes. BGall. 5.56, 7.21). We’ll get to the Celtiberians in a moment, but I suspect for them too, these bodies were, as it were, ‘warrior’s assemblies’ consisting only of the armed populace.
These assemblies don’t seem to deliberate or debate, but rather vote by ‘acclamation’ – that is, by making noise – a notably inexact voting method! What they probably serve to do is to adjudicate disputes between the principes but also to build consensus around the decisions the principes have already reached. Once the Big Men decide to go to war, they summon the assembly, which doubles as the muster (as everyone comes armed), give speeches explaining their decision (which also serve to signal the very powerful and influential men who favor a result and thus whose clients ought to support it) and the assembled host clash their arms in approval, creating the sense among everyone that the majority present supports the matter. You may recall the Spartans had a similar ‘consensus generator’ assembly.
Finally, some of these polities – but by no means all or even most of them – have some sort of singular leader. Sometimes this is framed as a king and sometimes as a magistrate (a summus magistratus, ‘supreme magistrate’), though the kings tend to be so limited in their power as to differ from a magistrate mostly in having a permanent appointment. Where kingships appear, they don’t seem to be purely hereditary and in some cases are clearly elective. These kings are first among equals among the principes, not a distinct higher type of noble the way, say, a medieval king was. Indeed, one such king, Ambiorix of the Eburones, is said by Caesar to have remarked that, “his rule was of such a nature that the people had no less authority over him than he had over the people” (Caes. BGall. 5.27.3). The Aedui had a summus magistratus called a Vergobret who notionally had supreme power, but in practice when Caesar arrives was weaker politically than the greatest of the Aedui principes, a fellow named Dumnorix (Caes. BGall. 1.16-17). Tacitus also describes what seem to be magistrates among the Germani – they’re elected officials who administer law, adviced by an aristocratic council (Tac. Germ. 12.3) – but we also hear of singular leaders, sometimes termed kings, like Maroboduus or Arminius.
We never get sustained ancient ethnographic literature (for all of its many problems) about the Celtiberians the way Caesar does of the Gauls and Tacitus of the Germani, so we have to work with what are mostly campaign histories in Polybius, Livy and Appian and try to make sense of the social systems we see in those sources. In contrast to the civitas level government of Gaul, in Celtiberia governing structures primarily exist at the level of the fortified town, called an oppidum (plural: oppida). Banding together a bunch of oppida was, of course, necessary for military action but this seems to have been understood as an alliance or confederation between them, rather than an act as a single polity.4 When the Romans engage in diplomacy in Celtiberia, they do so negotiating with single towns or else with groups of ambassadors, each seemingly representing his own town. Now, Celtiberia – the region – probably has at most something like 320,000 people in it,5 which is then split into about a dozen civitates (chiefly the Arevaci, Belli, Lusones, Tithii, of which the Arevaci were the strongest) so these are small polities, essentially centered, it seems, on a single major oppidum (Numantia, for instance, in the case of the Arevaci), but hardly controlled. Numantia, for instance, appeals in vain at one point for assistance from the other towns of the Arevaci, their own civitas (App. Hisp. 94), whose leaders opt not to become involved in what was evidently seen at Numantia’s war.
So what sort of government did a Celtiberian oppidum have? Again, the institutions are hard to see, but we have some indicators. The point of contact for diplomacy with Roman authorities is almost always an ‘elder’ or ‘elders’ (πρεσβύτεροι and πρεσβύτατοι in the Greek sources, Diod. Sic. 31.39, App. Hisp. 51, 94), though Livy also refers repeatedly to Celtiberian principes (e.g. Livy 22.21.7) and it’s not clear if these are the same fellows or how they relate. We aren’t told at this point that they have councils of elders (that is, senates), but after the Roman conquest they certainly do and the relative smoothness of that transition has always suggested to me that they probably have such senates in this period as well, albeit probably small ones. They certainly have aristocrats with lots of personal power and large retinues (e.g. Livy 26.50, 40.49).
They also seem to have a public assembly, which we see convene to elect war leaders (App. Hisp. 45-6, 62, 75). These seem to be consensus generating mechanisms, often apparently voting essentially at the point of muster to elect their leaders before embarking on a war already decided on. Those war leaders, in turn – the most famous of this sort being the Lusitanian Viriathus (the Lusitani are not a Celtiberian people narrowly understood, but are reasonably closely related and he has a lot of Celtiberians in his coalition) who gives the Romans no end of trouble for more than a decade in the amazingly named “War of Fire” (155-139) before the Romans bribe some of his aristocrats to assassinate him and his coalition collapses.6
So while we have less information, we can see the outline of at least a similar (though perhaps not identical) system: elders (maybe in a senate?), principes, a public assembly that mostly rubber-stamps the decisions of the elders and principes and relatively limited executive magistrates, in this case in the form of war leaders apparently elected to lead for the duration of a single conflict only.
And you may now be thinking, wait, this sounds an awful lot like the Roman Republic or Greek polis government! We have an assembly, a council or senate, and some executive magistrates! Why do we consider the Greeks and Romans to have states but the Celtiberians, Gauls and Germani to be at this point non-state or at most proto-state?
And the answer is that just because you have governing structures doesn’t mean that they wield real power, much less a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. And so we get into:
Weaknesses in the Governing Structures
Fundamentally the problem here is actually simple to state: military force isn’t wielded by governing institutions, it is wielded by individual aristocrats who are only loosely directed by governing institutions. The council doesn’t raise an army, each of the aristocrats does, at which point they can cooperate or not cooperate. Because military force isn’t centralized into the governing institutions, but is distributed among the aristocracy (and even beyond that, more broadly among the armed populace), we see it wielded regularly against the governing institutions or in contravention of their wishes. In short, power in these societies isn’t institutional, it is personal and thus fragmented.
So while in theory – from a state-oriented perspective – we might imagine the way the system is supposed to work is that first the principes (or at least some of them) decide on a course of action, which they then debate in the civitas senate, which then marshals the armed populace and puts the final decision to them in an up-or-down by-acclamation vote, in practice aristocrats can mobilize military force legitimately on their own. In practice, we see this lack of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force play out in two kinds of independent aristocratic military action: war by warlords and war by ‘youths.’
‘Warlords’ here is a modern term I am using for any aristocrat engaging in what is effectively private warfare, but I should note that ancient sources don’t make this distinction. Still, examples are numerous, both within and outside of the civitas. Orgetorix, a powerful aristocrat of the Helvetii, evades trial by raising an army of 10,000 of his clients and dependents, which only avoided triggering a civil war among the Helvetii by his timely death (Caes. BGall. 1.4; if Caesar is to be believed, Orgetorix’ private army represented fully 1/6th of all of the military aged males in the Helvetii civitas, Caes. BGall. 1.29). That same year, the summus magistratus (‘supreme magistrate’) of the Aedui has to sheepishly inform Caesar that while he doesn’t want to fight the Romans, the most powerful princeps in his civitas, a fellow named Dumnorix, does and that Dumnorix’ network of alliances and powerful retinue would enable him to force a war over the summus magistratus‘ objections (Caes. BGall. 1.16-17). The Bellovaci later claim to Caesar that their communal governing institutions didn’t want war, but an influential aristocrat, Correus, had been able to essentially bully them into war, though I will note that Caesar is said to have expressed skepticism (Caes. BGall. 8.21-22).7
The beginning of Vercingetorix’ war against Caesar is a striking example. Vercingetorix decides to move against Caesar and so first summons his clients and dependents into an army, at which point the actual civitas government, lead by his uncle, exiles him. Vercingetorix responds by using his personal charisma to to raise a general army in the countryside (alongside his clients) and then calls in his aristocratic alliances with neighboring tribes and – having achieved military superiority – overthrows any institution or aristocrat who resists (Caes. BGall. 7.4). In short, this fellow, by dint of personal charisma, takes not one but half a dozen civitates to war over the objections of their notional governments!
Sometimes these warlords also work in favor of the Romans. For instance, after taking Carthago Nova in Spain, Scipio-not-yet-Africanus comes into possession of the hostages the Carthaginians had been holding there, including the bride-to-be of a young Celtiberian aristocrat named Allucius; Scipio uses the return of the woman to her family and fiance to forge an alliance with them and Allucius responds by joining Scipio with a force of 1,400 cavalry drawn from his clients, despite the fact that the Celtiberians were, in theory, neutral in this war (Livy 26.50). Thirty years later, when Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (the elder) captured the family of the Celtiberian aristocrat Thurrus, he is able to get Thurrus to switch sides in exchange for their return, leading him to fight against his former allies (Livy 40.49).
The other recurrent problem were ‘youths.’ Here the Latin word is iuvenes (sing. iuvenis), a word generally used of young men who are of military age but not yet of ‘family starting’ age, so we’re talking about an age bracket from 17 to the late 20s (sometimes into the 30s).8 These are warriors – probably mostly aristocrats – who are adults but who probably aren’t yet the heads of their households and certainly aren’t yet old enough to carry much weight politically. Warrior bands of young men show up in other Celtic-language speaking societies, most notably the Irish fian, and while we can’t say with any certainty that these are the same institution, they sure seem similar and scholars of both Gaul and Spain have tended to analogize from the fian to assume these iuvenes reflect warrior societies of young men, not without some justification from our sources (e.g. Diod. Sic. 5.34.6).
The communal governing institutions of these non-state polities seem fairly frequently to struggle to control these fellows. In 218, we’re told the Allobroges were seemingly on the verge of civil war, as Braneus, who led the senate and the principes was being pushed out of power by his younger brother, leading a large band of iuvenes, before Hannibal intervened in Baneus’ favor (Livy 21.31.6). We get another example in Cisalpine Gaul in 197 where the Insubres and Boii were making war with the Romans and the iuvenes of the Cenomani decided to join in, without the consent of the senate or the principes or the public assembly (Livy 32.30.6; the Roman commander, Cethegus, is able to get the principes to get their troops – those iuvenes – to stand down, so the principes were hardly powerless). When Scipio Aemilianus lays Numantia to siege and the rest of the Celtiberians sensibly try to stay out of it, the youths of Lutia begin arming themselves to intervene, leading the elders of the town to call the Romans to try to avoid a war; Aemilianus responds by cutting the hands off of several hundred of the youths (App. Hisp. 94).9
What is important to note here is not merely the ability of these aristocrats to dispose of force, but the legitimacy of that force. Allucius is, as far as we can tell, entirely within his rights – indeed, his obligations – to fight for Scipio to return the favor. The iuvenes are acting within expectations in their bellicosity (it was traditional! Diod. Sic. 5.34.6) and relative independence. When an aristocrat raises their private army to redress a grievance, that isn’t a malfunction of the system, but the system working as intended, working as everyone understands it should work. Caesar notes as much, that of the aristocrats, “no one suffers his own to be oppressed or defrauded, for if he does otherwise, he has no influence at all among his own” (Caes. BGall. 6.11.4). In short, this sort of self-help and independent use of physical force was expected; it was failure to use one’s power and influence that way which damaged legitimacy.
But that doesn’t mean these polities were incapable of unified military action. Instead the purpose of these communal governing institutions, as we’ll get further into next week, was to coordinate and focus all of the military force held by the aristocrats towards shared goals – and then we’ll look at the kinds of armies these societies produce as a result of their social structures and institutions!
- There’s actually a handy definition discussion of this with respect particularly to ancient states in W. Scheidel “Studying the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, eds. P. F. Bang and W. Scheidel (2013).
- I should note this touches on the arguments in Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021), asking “how inevitable” this form of the state was, and in fact attempting to present evidence that it wasn’t inevitable. For all of the very real interest in that evidence, one can, I think, readily see the logical problem here: this was an experiment humans ran anywhere from six to ten times in our history and it turned out the same way every time, with the emergence of strong social hierarchies, central control and states oriented primarily towards the dispensation and control of violence. That all of the other interesting experiments Graeber and Wengrow attempt to document (to be fair, some of them on very thin and perhaps tendentiously read evidence) ended up failing in the face of the violence-machines we got, speaks to the actual inevitability of this sort of system. For those looking for a solid, detailed critique of The Dawn of Everything, I strongly suggest looking up Walter Scheidel’s review of it, “Resetting History’s Dial” (2022), which one can find easily enough online.
- You can find the quote and the essay it comes from in H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), 78. Emphasis is in the original.
- On this point, see Pérez Rubio, A., Sánchez Moreno, E., Per Gimeno, L., Martínez Morcillo, J.A., García Riaza, E. “Symmachíai celtibéricas (220–133 a.C.): coaliciones militares en el horizonte del imperialismo mediterráneo.” Acta Paleohispanica XI Paleohispanica 13 (2013): 675-697.
- On this, see Quesada Sanz, F. “Los Celtíberos y la Guerra: tácticas, cuerpos, efectivos y bajas. Un análysis a partir de la campaña del 153.” In Segeda y sui context histórico. Entre Catón y Nobilior (195 al 153 a.C.), edited by F. Burillo, 149-178. Zaragoza: Fundación Segeda, 2006b.
- Note that these leaders are not generally reguli, ‘little kings,’ a sort of warlord we hear a lot about among the Iberians (who live on the coast), but only very infrequently of the Celtiberians or other Indo-European speakers in the interior. Iberian reguli are their own odd topic, though.
- Note that book 8 of Caesar’s Comentarii de Bello Gallico are not written by Julius Caesar, but by Aulus Hirtius, thus the ‘Caesar is said to have’ rather than ‘Caesar expressed.’ We don’t have Caesar’s word for it, but rather the word of his lieutenant. For what it is worth, I think it’s a bit rich for Caesar to claim shock at the idea that just one man would bring an entire civitas to war, given that (see the paragraph below) he described exactly that thing happening the year before. Perhaps more telling of his actual view is that he lets the Bellovaci off without further punishment.
- Note that age at first marriage in Greece and Rome shows a sharp gender disparity, with women generally marrying first in their mid-to-late teens, while men generally only marry first between their mid-20s and early 30s. Note that while the iuvenes we’re talking about here are young men, the word can also be used of young women.
- If the actions of those elders sound heartless, consider that the alternative was Aemilianus sacking the town (as he pointed out). The youths and the Romans were, together, presenting those elders with a brutal trolly-problem, with 400 youths on one track and the entire town on the other, since they had little hope of winning. This is presumably why Numantia’s call for aid got no response, not even from the iuvenes, in any other town.
Are you by any chance familiar with the book “Killing Civilization” by Justin Jennings? It touches on a lot of the same concepts as The Dawn of Everything (going through many of the same examples, even), though the goal in contrast is to try to argue that things like polity formation and the formation of a cultural horizon were consequences of the messy process of urbanization.
Given that a few of your posts now have been regarding the early process of state formation and the like, I think it would be a very handy resource.
Weber’s definition is a good start, but the words ‘monopoly’ and ‘legitimate’ are doing a lot of work. Take, say, medieval Iceland. It had a hierarchy of governing/judicial institutions (district and quarter things and the annual Althing), a set of laws with arrangements for altering them and the institutions were recognised as the legitimate sources of authority for the use of force (via sentences of lesser or greater outlawry). Unapproved use of force was punished, either by fine or outlawry. Yet the actual force was left in private hands(so if Bjorn brings suit against Thorold for, say, theft and Thorold is found guilty by a jury on two counts and declared outlaw, Bjorn and his neighbours are licensed to seize his goods and/or kill him). Is this a state? It’s more than half-way there, but looks pretty rough from our or a Roman POV. The scanty descriptions we get from Caesar and others don’t really let us see how far along the continuum Gallic society was.
This semi-ties into stuff on the senate page, so if I’m revealing secrets here, my apologies: But what made the Carthaginians so good at leveraging these non-state societies into producing a lot of manpower for Carthaginian armies. They definitely recruit heavily among the Iberians and the Gauls. More to the point, they seem to do so very reliably, picking up a cohort of soldiers pretty much any time a Carthaginian general marches through the area, and I would have thought that a system that involves getting buy in from several individual personalities who have to be appeased any which way that they might personally desire would be a bad thing for uniformity.
Is it something as simple as waving a lot of money around can get this ball rolling, or was there more to it? They certainly seem to draw a lot heavier than say, the Romans did, but on the other hand, the Romans have plenty of manpower from their own systems and also don’t have long relationships with these people in what’s now Spain and France.
I’m not sure your premise is correct. Were the Carthaginians particularly effective at this? Or is it that Celtic societies had a a large pool of willing mercenaries that could be easily recruited by any general who asked? Considering the wide use of Galatian mercenaries through out the Hellenic east, I suggest it’s the latter. That the Romans didn’t draw on them probably reflects their lack of desire, rather than their inability, to do so.
That such pre-state societies dominated by warrior aristocrats would be a large source of mercenaries is not a surprise to me. Contrary to what Adam said, you *don’t* need buy in from several aristocrats. You don’t need to convince the whole assembly, or even the whole council, to join you in the way that you would for a state society. You only need need to convince a single wannabe warlord to join your side, and you get a cohort of his clients in your army. Considering the glory, reputation, and loot that could be made in a campaign, getting a Big Man who’s feeling adventurous (or down on his luck and willing to throw the dice to change things) to sign up doesn’t sound too difficult. In the case of the _iuvenes_, you even have a whole group of youth who are desperately looking for any war to take part in order to grow their personal influence, it must have been even easier!
Sure, it’s probably not that hard to look around for a bit, grab a Big Man or two, and get his personal retinue. But by the time that we get to see the Carthaginian system in action, they’re typically fielding tens of thousands of men from these communities, and they’re recruiting them very, very quickly. Their own armies aren’t in the area to set up the recruiting apparatus and make their own overtures to the local Big Men for much longer than it takes to pass through.
That (at least to my possibly flawed intuition) is a system that pretty easily nets you troops in the hundreds to maybe low thousands range, but consistently getting 5 figures of men is something the Carthaginians did. And that is well beyond what the Diodochi are pulling from the Galatians, or anyone else seems to be getting from these societies.
Did the Carthage get 10,000s from the same community? Or did they get ~1,000 from ten different communities? I would expect the latter. If it’s the former then, yes, I agree that something different is happening than I described. In such a case I would view it more as an alliance between a whole tribe and the Carthaginians, rather than as mercenaries integrated into the Punic army. Admittedly, the distinction between the two is rather blurry.
Luckily, there may not even be a distinction to begin with. Once the societies have the concept of horizontal ties and clientelism between aristocrats, they can easily reproduce the concept between polities. Even if oppida are supposedly “independent” (as much as that means), they are accustomed to fighting as alliances or confederations. Thus (even due to random noise) there will be pairs and groups that usually fight alongside each other (just like aristocrats who are ritual friends) and ones who usually fight on opposite sides (just like aristocrats with a feud). Carthage, as the heaviest hitter around by an order of magnitude, will very easily gather clients if they are willing to get drawn into regional affairs. (Compare the socii-system of the Romans and peel back a few centuries of development.) So the force holding the locals to the Carthaginian army is the same force as holds an army of the locals to each other.
Adam: they don’t need a recruiting apparatus as such, and I would think that “overtures to the local big men” can be very swift. As in, take a few dozen horseback messengers from your army (or hire locals), ceremonially designate them Postmen, assign them rough geographic areas of responsibility, and tell them to inform local big men over several days of the following:
There is going to be a Carthaginian army at X on day D, going on campaign against Y, lead by Hannibal. If you want to join, we welcome you. We will not wait for stragglers. We are not particularly interested in receiving your yes/no/other response to this message; the presence or absence of troops will be sufficient reply. Then (with a small sum of money to buy food and fodder for a few days) they can move 5-10x faster than the core infantry.
or did they get second sons so to speak, that needed a a way to make a living?
With their fathers having such high expenditures, all sons have interest in accumulating loot they can give away.
It’s kind of explained in the prior post: in a reciprocal gift-giving culture, high-prestige (that is, downward) gifts ultimately become synonymous with foreign-made gifts. The entire Phoenician colonial system was built around profiting from that fact financially, Carthage rose to take over that system because they also focused on profiting diplomatically.
I do note that as we get into the late roman empire the romans themselves gets very good at this kind of thing, and “going to serve in the roman army” seems to have enough attraction that it reaches way beyond the reach of actual roman borders.
I’m struck (though not surprised) by how the descriptions here of how governments function and the role of armed youths mirror Wayne Lee’s descriptions of warmaking among Eastern North American indigenous nations in “The Cutting-Off Way.”
Should be “arrogated to itself”; commonly confused.
Yep, was recently reading a book on that. They were an order of magnitude smaller than these polities, but a lot that hits home. Hotheaded rebellious youth groups was something that popped up several times. Whites are poking around, doing quite provocative things, chief doesn’t want to do anything silly given they know the whites are incomprehensibly powerful, a bunch of young men go off and massacre some whites. Then that chief is forced to run a doomed war effort or lose their standing.
One point to question: Was Medieval Europe really non-state societies, or more like weak-state societies? I would suggest that it varies widely over time and space. Some fairly well-organized states get thwacked right down to the non-state level, as in much of the Danelaw. To some degree, MedEurope accepted a level of non-state violence and force, but many successful polities were capable of firmly restraining it for extended periods of time.
I think the consensus is ‘weak state’ rather than ‘non-state’. There was general recognition that England/France/the Empire et al were united polities, that their rulers were the ultimate source of legitimacy and various institutions (parlements, diets, church councils, assemblies) were legitimate sources of law in their different jurisdictions. The right to resist illegitimate demands with force was recognised – the arguments were over what was illegitimate or not.
Weak state societies. The English kingdom seemed to be the most state-like while the French kingdom were rather a failed state.
It’s hard for me to understand why Norman England, say, 1087-1283, is considered a state: rebellion isn’t treason, is punished by private imprisonment after battle rather than legally/corporeally after a trial, and really doesn’t seem to have a coherent set of proto-institution norms – for example, “who should the next king be” (or indeed, “who is the king right now” for rather more than none of it) – that survive more than a single monarch.
I understand that it _is_ seen as a state. I just feel that if we were reading a work of fantasy about the Kingdom of the Angl-Esc and their warlords from Robby Shortpants to Harry of Fortventa, we’d be very willing to assign it some very definite liminality.
A better question might be what organizational level is the state. The kingdoms which arise out of Roman provinces were generally extremely weak, but there were still very clear rules on legitimate use of violence in a more local capacity. The noble or other institutional forces which held a monopoly on violence held an actual monopoly; laws were real and meaningful, but only on that level.
(Note that city states, bishoprics, knightly orders, and clan leaders, amongst others might be the landed authority in a region, but it’s basically always a matter of finding what the biggest landholder or their representative is in a region).
Hence Avignon was a state, Normandy was a state, Burgundy was a state, but *France* was just an approximation, a remnant of a title. This doesn’t mean the king of France has no power, no authority, but unless he was willing to wage a war he couldn’t contradict the Duke of Normandy errantly; his actual authority was limited to his personal holdings and the rest is international relations.
England had a more complex relationship with this marred by the fact that the King was also the largest landowner in France for some time, while the holy Roman empire is such a clear example no one bothers talking about it as a state except in very specific time periods.
This is also useful for describing warlord states or confederated clans or state unions. It’s an intermediary between a single nation and a true stateless society. A collection of allied, legally and culturally affiliated, states. It also works for the early Roman Republic or many Greek hegemonic polities. The states are the component cities, clans, duchies, but the overarching institution is still *real*, just limited. Oh, and the very, very early USA under the articles of confederation.
That seems like a good point to me: the hypothetical “nation” might not be a real state in itself, even though it may be composed of states (and eventually, a central authority either asserts itself or one of the states probably takes over).
What helps the consolidation process is that once a national identity exists the component states will generally jockey for it. In a medieval context, this means that if the Duke of Burgundy had successfully eclipsed the king of France, the obvious step for him was to take the title himself (usually through marriage claims, but historically other methods including blatant autocracy were used).
This means that from an outside perspective we see “France” persist since before Charlemagne, but in truth the Capetian, Caroligian, Valois, Bourbon, etc. dynasties were pretty noticably different, and even different rulers in those dynasties had different centers of power. We see this most clearly with the Capetian succession; they had tenuous continuity with the Carolignians at best.
In Frances case what made the succession more contiguous, by which I mean kept the dynasties similar, was the fact that Paris was such a prize and hence a natural continuity of power. In fact, the states that clearly centralized over this period had a pretty clear trend here; if the capital was truly the most important urban center then power naturally concentrated there. This means that any regional power naturally relocated it’s power base there if it successfully asserts hegemony, which slowly forged a central authority. This can actually strengthen the capital region in turn, creating a neat feedback loop.
This isn’t purely necessary, but it’s such a natural consequence of how manorialism and feudalism create power structures that it’s almost ubiquitous to medieval nation building.
This group of iuvenes sounds remarkebly similar to the way that the Masai (and Zulu) were, and to a certain degree still are, organised. They have basically three age groups: kids, military youth, and elders/family people, both for men and women. The Masai were less organised than the Zulu, but the middle group was used for raiding and war. And was expected to make their fortune and/or name. Shaka used the same organisation with the Zulu army, with the caveat that he decided when the youths could leave the army, and then could settle and build families. One of the reasons that he was overthrown was apparantly that he kept the older regiments in the army far longer than was custom.
Age-grade systems actually seem to be pretty common all over Africa, among cultures from a lot of different language families. My understanding is that it’s usually more about ensuring proper socialization of youth- teaching them about social duties, roles, values etc.- than it is about war. Although I bet it’s a very convenient institution if you *do* want to co-opt it for military purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_grade
“My understanding is that it’s usually more about ensuring proper socialization of youth- teaching them about social duties, roles, values etc.- than it is about war. ”
That may be true in the present tense, but I wonder what it was like in precolonial times, when warfare was presumably a lot more common.
I mean some of these cultures have a similar system for women too, which of course wouldn’t have had military purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sande_society
If some of them have a similar system for women, that would imply that most of them don’t. Which would suggest that the core reason for the system is male specific. And there are very few things that are important and male-specific, over an area as large and culturally diverse as Africa, other than warfare.
Consider also the word “cohort”…
Regarding Gaul as portrayed by Caesar in particular, I agree Gallic governing institutions as Caesar portrays them seem weak, but I can’t help but wonder to what extent that was due to things Caesar’s own actions in Gaul. In the case of Liscus and Dumnorix, the immediate issue at had was Liscus’ failure to provision the Roman army with grain, and Liscus’s explanation of why he couldn’t get Caesar his grains was that there were malcontents among the Aedui (Liscus doesn’t explicitly name Dumnorix at first) arguing that “if they cannot any longer retain the supremacy of Gaul, it were better to submit to the government of Gauls than of Romans, nor ought they doubt that, if the Romans should overpower the Helvetii, they would wrest their freedom from the Aedui together with the remainder of Gaul” (W. A. Macdevitt’s translation). And that’s in Book I of Caesar’s Commentaries—one imagines such arguments would’ve only gotten easier to make with time.
We’re certainly seeing Greek and Roman influence and prejudice in these observations — Dr Deveraux admits as such. But they are our only view into these societies, so we must take what we can get.
What does “we must take what we can get” even mean here? We could just admit that we don’t know rather than taking a snapshot of Gallic society covering less than a decade and assuming we can validly extrapolate it to cover many centuries.
Two reasons:
First, we humans have an annoying habit of trying to understand even when we cannot say for certain. But, in addition, we often only come to understand by putting in the hardest of hard work to interpret limited evidence. Gallic, Germanic, Brittanic, Iberian and other Celtic cultures are also important to understanding how they interacted with other cultures that we do know much more about.
Second, the limited evidence we do have actually paints a *reasonably* consistent picture. Not a *perfectly* consistent one, of course. But one that conforms to the archeology, what we know of similar societies in similar conditions.
This is the value of the occasional citations to Livy – the fact that he has the same institutions in his narrative of evens for the late third or early second century suggests they had been around longer and were more broadly common.
I have read a historian discussing the internal evidence that Caesar slanted his writing in a way that puffed up his accomplishments.
Plus the effect of assuming that it was like the structure he knew.
Really, there ought to be more fiction that displays these kinds of government in the form of gathering council of all influential people.
Hmm, on reflection, I feel as though a disproportionate amount of things that actually do show things that kind of look like that might tend to present them as Scottish.
Like, even when they’re supposed to be “Vikings” (thank you “How To Train Your Dragon”).
HTTYD had the Berkians using trebuchets, and Hiccup is weedy despite being a blacksmith’s apprentice. I didn’t exactly expect them to get anything else right.
The Council of Elrond? It draws many of the principes, or at least their representatives (Boromir and Legolas, rather than Denethor and Thranduil in person) of an informal anti-Sauron coalition. (“Containment war.”) Of course, a more cynical author would quickly run into the problem that this subject maps onto the “backroom deals” of contemporary politics (and corporate governance). And by necessity, the deliberation in such a meeting would not normally happen at the level the modern reader would understand.
“And unlike at Minas Tirith, there is no naive, peaceful Hobbit here to have the matter explained to – only Théoden, Éomer, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf, all of whom understand this all perfectly well without explanation. Unfortunately, we may not be able to include Peter Jackson in their number…”
On the other hand, a Senate meeting would probably make for poor literature. Even if cut down, it’s still on the order of a hundred characters. Even if the majority don’t get to speak, surely some who do would be insufferable windbags (and the culture may outright encourage this, see the Plains Indian governments).
“Anthony McGinnis also notes how oratory was an important part of diplomatic rituals between native peoples and was quite developed, with meetings that “consisted of many elaborate orations, an art form at which the plains Indians excelled. These flowery, metaphorical speeches continued for hours…”“
I think Boromir was the envoy of the goverment of the state of gondor
Legolas, Gloin, and Galdor were also there as envoys from their respective governments. And Elrond, of course, is the ruler of Rivendell.
I am not sure they were send by a “state”
Was Gondor a state, though? It seems that lords of southern fiefs hold significant military power pretty independently from the central government, and the Stewards were only “first among equals” of those lords.
Given that the Council of Gondor is a thing and that we never see the authority of the kings or seneschals contested unless there is a (rare) civil war, I’d say Gondor is a state: regional nobility exists, is important and doubles as commanders of armies, but the state does have a monopoly on the use of force. We never see Gondorian armies form without the authorization of the rulers of the state, and Gondor can (unlike the Diadochi monarchies) divide its army and count on the loyalty of its generals, like in the case of General Eärnil.
Gondor is most definitely a state IMO. It’s still ultimately the King or, in his absence, the Steward, who directs and disposes of military power. IIRC Brett likened it to the Theme system before and that seems right to me. The main force is a standing state army centered on Minas Tirith and Osgiliath while the lords in the west and south have immediate command of smaller local forces that can respond to local threats or be summoned to the larger force. None of these lords have the right to refuse such a summons however, it’s pretty clear to me that failure to respond would be treason.
I would say the Elven kingdoms are probably not states, the Dwarves, imo, are definitely states but not very strong ones. Evidence is thin for the Dwarves though. Most Northern men are not states but Gondor and Rohan are. The Easterlings and Southrons are some of both, etc.
“the Elven kingdoms are probably not states,”
Elf (and maybe hobbit) psychology are different enough from (mainline) human that the usual definitions of ‘state’ may break down. Talking about monopolies on legitimate violence is a bit moot when there is almost no violence or major crime. Plus we know little about elven subsistence, though they don’t seem to struggle with shortages, nor why they have monarchical government (though I headcanon that elven ‘kings’ were more like “club president” than “leader of the warband”.)
As someone mentioned, the immortality of Big Elf also blurs the distinction between “power because authority” and “authority because power”.
After Finwe’s death, the Noldor largely coalesced around his sons, with the second son getting the majority; non-state. But Doriath and Gondolin had royal power to execute people, and rule passing to the son/granddaughter/daughter, even when the sun and granddaughter were mortal; state.
At any rate, if non-state, they were a different non-state than human societies, with different concerns.
The film version of the council is kind of weird with the idea that such a group could be summoned as a deliberate process of collective decision making, compared to the book being like “these varied people have fortuitously arrived seeking advice at around the same time, it’s a good idea to gather them together to explain the common source of their problems”.
Gondor was a state, and I’m pretty sure that by the Third Age, the diminished Elven polities were more or less states following a single Big Elf (it helps that the Big Elf can live forever and therefore can continue to accumulate influence and prestige)
But the Noldor during the start of the Silmarillion definitely seemed like a non-state society with each member of the House of Finwe having his own independent retinue
Well at that point are they states or is it that Elven immortality and social stability have the remaining Noldor living as each Big Elf with all his/her clients?
Other than language, what *are* the cultural differences between the Shetlands and the Faroes?
Also, reflecting on some of the points of the varied ideas of what it means to be “honourable” (particularly the extremes between positions of “it is rough and uncouth to hold grudges over insults” and “it is a dramatic loss of face to not respond to insults with overwhelming violence”), I like hearing the point about how part of the way substructures in such societies work is that local magnates are assumed to have certain responsibilities to look out for them and theirs.
I have a question about the definition of a state. On violence, in How to Roman Republic, our host says “Roman law understands the legal power of the pater familias within the familia to be absolute, to the point of being able to put any member to death.” To me that sounds like a culturally legitimate use of violence being practiced by an entity other than the state. But the Roman Republic clearly is a state. Should we understand this not to count as violence because is in within a familia? Or would we say that this is an delegated authority from the state to each pater familias? If the state attempted to ban this violence but found itself unable to do so effectively – perhaps due to it being to culturally engrained – would it cease to be a state because it no longer successfully monopolized violence? Or would itr remain a state because this violence is not legitimate, even though most of the people in the community culturally see it as legitimate.
As for territory, could a state ever be nomadic? I don’t mean the members of the state, who clearly could be nomads while still claiming all the territory they need even while not typically occupying it all at once. I mean if the state itself didn’t claim any fixed territory. For example a large fleet exists in international waters with long lived institutions, internal laws, internal monopoly on violence, etc, but the steam around from place to place and don’t claim any territory. Is this a state?
Oh, to get SF on the second questions since the Mass Effect videogame series has been mentioned here before, do the Quarians have a state in the game’s present day?
Yes; the Admiralty Board and assembly have a monopoly on the use of violence, they have laws, and the Migrant Fleet is arguably a clearly defined territory, since it usually sticks together.
I suspect the question comes down to whether the admirals are on a leash or not. Some of them (most notably the heavy fleet commander) apparently have a rather long leash, but it’s open to argument whether that’s because they wouldn’t be able to remove Han’Gerrel from command, or if it’s because he’s just kind of an Admiral Halsey (or worse, General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove) kind of character who lacks restraint.
But broadly, I agree: the Admiralty Council is portrayed as having enough authority to keep the captains in line on more than personal relationships.
The existence of the Heavy Fleet speaks for the statehood in itself, Han’Gerrel’s character aside. Getting all captains of combat-worthy ships to agree to be clustered into a single entity with a clear chain of command is evidence of the legitimacy and power of the structures of the Admiralty board.
In a non-state fleet, you would expect the combat captains to be “spread out”, each in charge of a small clump of non-combat ships, over whose clientship they would constantly squabble.
Hmm. I would say probably. The Admiralty Board appears to have the ability to compel Quarians of all ranks and even when, behind the scenes, admirals are off doing as they please and dragging everyone else with them, they present a united front outwardly. Most importantly however, it seems to me that each admiral’s power derives *from their institutional position* rather than “We just appoint the Big Men to the admiralty board.” It is certainly a weak state, however, with admirals influence over government seeming to be strongly tied to their popular support, which likely has at least some measure of unseen clientelism.
> For example a large fleet exists in international waters with long lived institutions, internal laws, internal monopoly on violence, etc, but the steam around from place to place and don’t claim any territory. Is this a state?
I’d say they do have a defined territory: Their territory is the vessels they live on. Their territory happens to be able to move. This seems unlikely on Earth imo, but if we ever get to a point where we have interplanetary and interstellar travel I think this is a sensible way to arrange the society of a fleet travelling between stars and taking a century to do so.
In CJ Cherryh’s “Downbelow Station” and related books, each merchant ship is an independent nation. This is one of the central issues that The Company War in those books is about.
Originally, merchanter starships took a decade or two between slower than light visits to star stations. After the invention of faster than light jump drive that is reduced to a few weeks, but there are time distortion effects.
Another fictional example is the quarian Migrant Fleet from Mass Effect.
Yes, several kinds of violence are excluded from consideration. Even our present-day societies semi-legitimize some domestic violence. (I mean this both in the sense that even when most outside observers (including the relevant agents of the state) consider something to be illegitimate, if the victim acts as if they assented to it, very little can end up happening; and also in the sense that there is ongoing public debate on where to draw the line.) Likewise, various extensions of self-defense (incl. catching a thief red-handed) legitimize, at least, the threat of force (even if not actual use of force, nowadays). I would say that organized violence is the inner core, surrounded by initiated stranger-violence to catch solitary muggers but exclude self-defense (which is reactive) and domestic abuse (acquaintance).
It is further noteworthy that, legitimate or not, in most societies violence up to and including murder was treated as what we would call a tort. It was up to the wronged party (relatives of the deceased victim) to sue. However, if both parties were the clients of the same big man, almost certainly “private arbitration” would solve the issue. (When a king says that he owns all of his subjects, thus he is a wronged party when someone kills his subjects, is when you get a state criminal prosecution of murder.)
I would take exception here. At least in Nordic law, the crown prosecution grew out of the concept of edsöre, breaking of the royal oath of peace. The crimes that were breaches of some well-defined forms of peace were also crimes against the king’s oath to keep the peace in the land. (Typical cases were crimes in church or at the thing, or against people on their way there or from there, rape of a woman, breaching the sanctity of another’s home, or assaulting someone while they are defecating or urinating.) These could not be simply condoned by the aggrieved party, and carried a much heavier penalty.
The common murder became an edsöre only much later, and only as a development of the older edsöre concept.
“assaulting someone while they are defecating or urinating”
I’m very curious what the reasoning behind that would be.
Based on what I know second-hand about the Icelandic sagas, their concept of murder was that it was secret. There were valid and invalid reasons to kill somebody, but if you had a valid reason to kill someone, you still couldn’t creep into their house at night and stab them in their bed and then claim you don’t know who did it. So I suspect there’s an idea that valid interpersonal violence definitionally can’t involve attacking someone who is unaware or indisposed.
Probably because they’re not in a position to defend themselves. You’re literally catching people with their pants down.
This seems like a good excuse to post a link to this book review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga
It’s important to note that the scope of the state/non-state definition concerning violence is about violence between political actors – that is, Big Men or people with positions of authority within the state. Thus, the question of whether Rome is a state comes down more to the question of “Can a pater familias attack another pater familias?” than “Can a pater familias attack his child?” because the political actor, the one who is recognized by the state he lives in, is the pater familias.
On that scale, the answer becomes rather clear: In Rome, two heads of household in a dispute do not get to start a brawl over it (especially not one that gets to pull all their clients in), society will force them to take it to court. In Gaul, that would be frowned upon, but unless they belong to the same Big Man who can knock their heads together, nobody might want to stop them.
And on some level that’s still to small a scope, because the question is really “Is a pater familias allowed to gather 1000 men to mess up the lands of another familia?” The definition is concerned with large-scale structures, not one-on-one violence, because it’s about how large masses of people organize themselves.
The question of violence against not politically empowered members of a society (slaves, serf, children, wives) is one about equality, and morality, less about whether it’s a state. All of those pristine states on that map had inequalities and classes of people it was okay to be violent against.
I like this way of putting it. Not to argue modern politics, but to reference it: it reminds me of the abortion debate.
I think it is pretty obvious that, even today, “the family” or “the household” is considered to not to be fully inside the purview of the state. So I would argue, that there probably just was a social border between the what happened inside the family, and what happened outside of it.
If I recall our hosts discussion of the Greek polis correctly, this was even more explicit there.
The way I understood it was that the Roman state existed *between* familia, but not *within* them.
I think it is probably not necessary to have a defined territory to be a state, especially if no one else lives in the areas you are moving through.
RE Rome: I think one key test here is that the state freely circumscribes/abolishes this power. However, virtually no (exactly no?) states claim to be the only ones who may legally wield force but they do get to decide what force is legitimate and what is not. E.g. a legal right of life and death over ones family does not infringe on the state’s monopoly the same way that the right of self-defense does not *so long as* the state is the ultimate arbiter.
The oppida are fortified towns, but most of the people of a region would be living and farming outside of these towns, right? Are they members of the same civitas as a nearby oppidum, or do the belong to some other non-state but also not opidum based social structure?
Boring answer: our sources don’t say.
That said, the city states in Greece and Italy encompassed both an urban core and the rural hinterlands surrounding them, and I’d expect that it was the same in Spain. The oppida needs grain from the surrounding farms, and the rural big men need the prestige goods that only the oppida can provide, as well as a place of refuge during war. Add in the inevitable ties of kinship and you’ve got a civitas.
Not necessarily, especially at these sizes. It’s entirely possible, especially if the communities are small, that most live in the oppida and go out to their farms, albeit possibly with peripheral homesteads/hamlets. However, you are probably right that many/most live nearby and only withdraw to the oppida for defense.
Given that the Big Men’s power comes from landholding, and given societies we can see more clearly, I would be shocked if the economically linked countryside of each oppida was not the same civitas, certainly I expect that in any arrangement most people actually living in the oppida were still farmers themselves. If the outlying villages are large enough they’ll have their own localized slice of the clientele network but it should be fundamentally the same.
I am not receiving email notifications about new posts, despite subscribing and resubscribing and resubscribing. What is wrong with WordPress???
Somehow I have ended up with a weekly email. Which comes on Wednesday.
It’s been doing that for weeks. To everyone.
New posts aren’t the problem; Bret posts something every Friday, it’s very predictable. But email about _comments_ stopped happening April 6th.
To nitpick a bit, the Andes seems out of order on your chronological list of pristine civilizations. The oldest civilization in Peru is typically cited as the Caral–Supe / Norte Chico civilization (on the Peruvian coastal plain, not in the mountains), and is typically estimated as starting in the fourth millennium BCE, which would place it at either 3 or 4 on the list, beginning at about the same time as the Indus Valley Civilization.
Rome is a state by this definition. At a certain point Rome “fell” in the west, and most of the people that at one point were under Rome basically ended up not associated with Rome as such.
At what point later on would you say that the successor areas became states? I say “areas”, because e.g. there is a thing called “France” but by the “monopoly on legitimate force” definition I’m not certain it’s a state at least until Louis XIV or so (possibly not until the French Revolution!).
Does the English regimental system count as “non-state”? Or does that count as a state because it’s a regiment raised by a local lord (he did the work and equipped them, which is why the uniforms differed) but enrolled into the king’s armies?
A lot of words refer to “cluster concepts” – a cluster concept is a concept that’s defined by a list of criteria where no single criteria is necessary or sufficient.
Cluster concepts have central cases, ones that everyone agrees is an example, and other cases that definitely aren’t, and a lot of in-between cases.
E.g. what is a planet? Mars is a planet, the sun definitely isn’t, a comet isn’t, is Pluto a planet?
Debating whether an in-between case is truly X or not-X may be very interesting but seldom leads to an objective answer.
Thanks very much for this term “cluster concept” and definition. Especially useful on a pedantic blog 🙂
According to the International Astronomical Union, a planet:
a. orbits its host star, just as the Earth and Jupiter orbit the Sun,
b. is large enough to be mostly round, and
c. must have an important influence on the orbital stability of the other objects in its neighbourhood.
The IAU explicitly defined the criteria to prevent it being a cluster concept.
No, Pluto isn’t a planet, because it does not fit criteria c. It’s part of the Kuiper belt, on parts of which it does not have important orbital influence. Pluto is a “dwarf planet”, but that’s a different definition than a “planet”.
I claim no expertise but my impression is that England was state-like by the late Anglo-Saxon period, and Alfred the Great’s anti-Viking measures. Not sure about Norman England; it was more ‘feudal’ and you have a lot of “barons rise in rebellion” moments, but I’m not sure you saw legitimated private warfare, rather than civil wars against or over the Crown. OTOH, you also have the “livery and maintenance”, basically gangs of thugs wearing some lord’s colors. So maybe it doesn’t get state-like again until the Tudor period.
Typo in footnote 2: “Graber” should be “Graeber”, twice.
Fixed!
These depictions of places without state seem to perfectly fit the depiction of hell in Hazbin Hotel. It seems like that show is actually doing a good job depicting a failed state.
You have the remnents of a state that once exerted a monopoly on legitimate force; Lucifer lead hell by virtue of his might and divine sanction but he no longer does so because he got depressed and became a hermit. This state still has vestigal functions; when hell needs a diplomat to speak to heaven Lucifer sends his daughter Charlie not because she is important or influential (she is neither) but because she can be his representative. And everyone on both sides thinks it makes sense that Lucifer can do such things.
The “principes” are there in the form of the overlord’s council. They hold no formal office, they are just powerful and important. Alastor can show up without explanation after years of absence because his power is respected. The overlord council talks about coordinating for a common defense in the case of external war but they exert no control over policy. When Velvette wants to start a war all the other overlords think is monumentally stupid, they don’t do anything to stop her besides expressing disapproval.
When Charlie raises an army she does so against her father’s wishes and without taking the matter to the council of overlords or any other deliberate assembly. She only needs to get permission from an overlord because she want’s to recruit from that overlord’s followers. Her army doesn’t fight because she is the legitimate authority, they fight because she promised them good spoils when they win. She equips the new army not through taxation or broad social mobilization but by coming to an agreement with another overlord.
And hell is very violent of course. Powerful groups might keep their own members safe by threat of retaliation but they don’t offer general stability. Cannibal town is peaceful but the cannibals are literally preying on people outside their community. Meanwhile there is a constant backdrop of fighting from the analogues to the “youths”, fights between petty troublemakers.
While the central authority of hell has largely collapsed, the Pride Ring was ruled directly by Lucifer himself. The other six are the domains of the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins, some of whom may have kept things together in their own rings.
Is this from the webcomic stuff? I’ve only seen the show.
It is from its sister show Helluva Boss.
Last thing I’d have ever expected in ACOUP comments…
I think Helluva Boss shows that society is more functional in the other rings, yeah.
Even in Pride, there’s the nebulous question of demon aristocracy and the Ars Goetia (who seem somewhat unconcerned with Sinners).
I am a subscriber, but I cannot figure out how to sign in. I hope this comment is registered anyway.
I have long thought that the Weberian definition is question begging (assumes the consequent). What is the source of the legitimacy that is its core. I think it is in the creation of institutions that grant that legitimacy and that can regulate the function of those institutions.
A power holder is a king not because he holds power, but because the institutions have made him king and verified his kingship according to their rules. The King may be elected (e.g. the Papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor) or he may inherit it (contemporary UK). Kingship will often have rituals to demonstrate to the subjects that a person is the king. The American Presidential Inauguration is one of those as was King Charles III’s coronation.
The Weberian definition isn’t question-begging about legitimacy; it’s intentionally vague. It’s trying to be as minimal a definition as possible, so that it doesn’t accidentally exclude polities that look different from the states Weber is accustomed to.
We can say that empirically state legitimacy always involves long-running impersonal institutions, but I’m uncomfortable with making that part of the definition.
Institutionally, in the 1930s / 1940s, the leader of the USSR was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin. This is because the Presidium itself was the highest, most authoritative assembly of the Soviet Union.
Yet, as we all know, due to all the politicans of the Presidium also being members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was the Communist Party’s General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, that held all the power. Even though the position itself was marginal during Lenin’s reign.
I imagine that, if Kalinin disliked an appointee of violence (say, a general of the Red Army), but Stalin liked him, then he stayed. Likewise, if, during the purges, Stalin saw Kalinin as a threat, he could have purged Kalinin as well, despite being below him in the hierarchy.
Here we have an example where the appointed “king” / “tzar” is separate from the actual power holder, and yet the real power holder’s power is near-absolute, and therefore the country itself is a (totalitarian) state. The monopoly of violence does not rest with the person / assembly the institutional hierarchy says it should – but it still obviously exists.
The map of pre-Roman Gaul looks bizarre. What’s going on with the coasts of Great Britain and the Netherlands? I see it’s meant to be modern coastlines, but Wales in particular looks, er, overfed.
That book review (“Resetting History’s Dial”) that’s mentioned in the footnote is absolutely brutal. It’s funny to see such an evisceration wrapped up in the language of academic politeness.
I mean, I know that academics can be snippy or petty at times (I’m applying to grad schools myself), but “We are left to marvel at reasoning as perfectly circular as Basque communal ideals” is an absolutely devastating line
It’s all the more devastating because it gives praise where praise is due. Sometimes academic snippiness is obviously so petty that it reflects worse on the person who wrote it than on their target. But that review avoids doing that, so its criticism (closely linked to the text they quote) hits all the harder.
The way the nobles are expected to defend their honor reminds me of the Godfather quote “Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”
> Variously appended to that list are the developments of states in what is today Bolivia, Hawai’i, Polynesia and Ghana.
I have two questions here. The first is shouldn’t Rapa Nui/Easter Island be on this list? Or do we just count it to the possible state formation in Polynesia?
And the second is, didn’t the Kingdom of Hawai’i only emerged under impression, if not preasure of contact to Western sailors, that were very much part of a stated societies?
It’s an interesting question. First contact with the Western world happens in 1778, when Kamehameha I was probably in his early 40s. He first starts attempting to unite the islands, and has his first major victory, four years later in 1782 after the death of his uncle Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the previous aliʻi nui (to use this series’s terminology, the Biggest Man) of the island of Hawaiʻi. Kamehameha consolidates control over Hawaiʻi by 1791, then Maui in 1793. The formation of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi is generally counted from his conquest of Oʻahu in 1795 (though it wouldn’t be until 1810 when the independent ruler of Kauaʻi and Niʻihau would peacefully submit to his rule), so there isn’t THAT much time (~17 years) for contact.
On the other hand, there definitely WAS contact during that time period; he made use of gunpowder weapons (and had to fight cannons on Oʻahu!), had a few westerners as trusted advisors, and, once he’d achieved unification, he set about consolidating it by instituting a constitutional monarchy similar to European monarchies. So it’s hard to argue that there isn’t at least *some* influence there with the way things turned out, but it’s a fascinating counter-factual to ponder: might Kamehameha have managed to unite the islands on his own if Cook hadn’t stumbled upon them when he did, and, if he had, would he have centralized control into a state as he did? Or was he aided (or just plain lucky) in his attempt (he was hardly the first to try to unify the islands) by striking in a period of unstable equilibrium initiated by outside contact?
Macedonia, Carthage and Egypt were states before Rome united them.
So the question is not so much whether Kamehameha´s unification was influenced by contact, but whether precontact society of Kalaniopuu ruling just Big Island was already a State, or not yet.
Caesar (and other Romans) also raised tensions inside Celtic and Celtiberian civitates by presenting them with high-stakes decisions (peace and war) that lacked easy consensual answers.
Rome had these too. Like 200 BC… when Senate voted for war and then the Popular Assembly voted against. Or at some point Popular Assembly elected a Scipio to lead a war over Senate objections. Senate retorted by refusing Scipio the right to draft men – Scipio went on to recruit a volunteer army. But he did have an underlying formal permission to wage war and lead an army, from popular assembly.
That´s a comparison of what a powerful minority might do when finding themselves a minority in a matter of peace and war. Some men might employ his personal wealth and connections – or popular eagerness for the case – to raise an army with no formal institutional at all. Others might employ institutions against each other and get some formal approval from an institution that is more favourable than the others.
The vergobretus of Aedui was a long term elected politician who found he was supporter of the minority policy at the moment (supporting Romans). Athens, also a strong state, has the example of Nicias who was against a war in Sicily and tried to persuade Athenian people that it was too hard task and likely to lose – the Athenians hearing of his warnings about strength of enemies voted to send more men. And Nicias to lead them. Nicias duly lost and was executed by enemies.
The subject of starting unofficial wars reminds me of a science fiction novel by Poul Anderson “The Star Fox.” An alien race is doing something hostile to humanity but the Earth world government won’t do anything about it.
One guy has been trying to get something done and convinces the government for France (which is subject to the world government) to help. France can’t send forces of it own, but advances some complicated historical logic that France never completely gave up the right to commission privateers. And thus France is authorizing one, the “Star Fox” of the title.
(Anderson later wrote another novel in the same setting “Fire Time” where year later the guy from “The Star Fox” shows up explaining why his war was good an necessary, while the official war starting up now is stupid and unnecessary.)
I seem to remember there being some debate about how undefined a lot of non-state territories actually were in eg. North America, a lot of early stuff and maps from eg. traders and trappers often have fairly clear and very fine-grained depictions of what territory is controlled by what native group. (presumably because it was very important to know) That doesen’t mean they were neccessarily stagnant, but it seems clear that the *notion* of groups controlling defined territory wasn’t particularly unusual.
I suspect that Weber didn’t know a lot about what non-state societies we have.
Humans are *extremely* territorial, but “territory” depends on the resources they can extract within that area and what they have available to guard those areas.
From OGH’s recommended book “The Cutting-Off Way” a few months back, one of the sources of conflict between Indians and settlers was that the settlers often thought anything not fenced was unclaimed. The Indians had villages, areas close to the villages which were obviously being used, and areas further out that were not as obviously used. Those areas were generally used for hunting. Trespassing led to reprisal raids.
Jared Diamond was describing a trip he took with some men in New Guinea. They started out very confidently, but at a certain point the guide got really cautious, as they were getting close to another tribe’s territory. The signs were perfectly obvious to the guide, but Diamond couldn’t figure them out.
The control of territories may be less obvious because a state generally has a well-defined border, often with signs and fences and patrols (depending on tensions).
Members of a non-state society will know perfectly well where their lands are. Some of the lands may be ‘fuzzy’ because they’re currently engaged in raiding etc. to expand them, rather like those maps of a war where the lands of various nations have cross-hatched areas…
I’m starting to wonder if the big difference is that e.g. Rome had a declared war where a guy threw a spear and they opened the doors of a building, while the non-states generally had a charismatic guy get a bunch of other guys together to do some raiding. I.e. the difference is the level of ceremony around violence.
It may not even be that. Certainly a band of raiders, depending on the society, might go seek ritual purification, omens, etc. before heading out and even before coming back. The idea I guess being to separate the raid mentality from the “at home” one.
Yes, a gang of a dozen guys going cattle-rustling would — if their society believes in omens — want omens. Likewise, they would benefit from doing the stab-the-ground ceremony. “First, this is the point where our actions trigger strategic consequences, and yes, we are doing it. Second, the cost of inattention, stupidity, etc. goes up sharply around here, so shape up.” To be a bit tongue-in-cheek, the difference is that in a non-state any fool had their own shrine to Bellona they could open.
Likewise, I’d be concerned that the early-modern agricultural traders and trappers brought the idea of crisp boundaries (and maps) with them and hammered reality into a shape that was more comprehensible/describable with the tools — mental and literal — they were accustomed to.
Jared Diamond was describing a trip he took with some men in New Guinea. They started out very confidently, but at a certain point the guide got really cautious, as they were getting close to another tribe’s territory. The signs were perfectly obvious to the guide, but Diamond couldn’t figure them out.
yea, the comment about nonstate societies “not having well defined territories” made me blink, precisely because I remember Jared Diamond writing about the San of southern Africa and how they *intensely* police their territory and who’s allowed to travel through it. And unlike the New Guineans, these aren’t even agriculturalists.
In areas where there is good fertile land and other resources, yeah, people are going to have very firm boundaries. However, a lot of land wasn’t fertile or good, and boundaries were more hazy. Like, if you’re separated by your neighbors by a mountain range, it really doesn’t matter where you put the line–few people (if any) will be in the range anyway, so “control” is purely nominal. If our cities and their associated hinterlands are separated by dense woods, again, we may not have a clear boundary where my control stops and yours starts. And what do you do when a river moves? These aren’t static features of landscapes and people of the past had far less capacity to restrain them.
In a lot of ways, the notion of territory boundaries we have is as much a product of the development of land surveying as it is of politics or war. This has actually led to some rather amusing borders. For example, Colorado has something like 600 sides because of the way its northern border works when you survey it accurately. Prior to this the best method was to patrol your boarders, either aggressively or the way the British walked their lands (reaching consensus about who’s land ends where), both of which are polite ways of saying “The border is what you can control.”
Further, just because you have a line on a map doesn’t mean it’s real. India and China are currently disputing their boarder, for example. Both have very clear lines on the map, and if you looked at the map you’d think the boundaries were solid. But boots on the ground, the issue is being rather hotly contested. Same thing happened more frequently in the past (see England and France with regards to Normandy, for example). So who draws the map is going to be a huge factor here.
[Vercingetorix decides to move against Caesar and so first summons his clients and dependents into an army, at which point the actual civitas government, lead by his uncle, exiles him. Vercingetorix responds by using his personal charisma to to raise a general army in the countryside (alongside his clients) and then calls in his aristocratic alliances with neighboring tribes and – having achieved military superiority – overthrows any institution or aristocrat who resists]
Suppose that Vercingetorix had less personal charisma and the civitas’s exile had worked and no one answered his call. Would we then conclude that they are in fact a state and had a government after all? The “real difference” between states and non-states still seem very contingent on results. If the civitas can effectively restrain the aristocrats then it’s a state, if it can’t then it’s not, but whether it can or not is dependent a lot on the individual.
I think the Roman Republic demonstrates examples in which the governing institutions remain functional even in the event of mediocre consuls. In the Second Punic War, when an existential threat was perceived to the state and there were consuls who had failed disastrously to oppose it, the aristocrats didn’t all splinter off and do their own thing, they employed the institutions to select new consuls.
I think even some Medieval European kingdoms show instances in which mediocre kings still manage the machinery of the state in the event that the aristocrats elect to not push it too far. They might press matters, but still within the structures of the institutions rather than simply being unruly (similar to how modern corporations try to use lobbying and court cases to advance themselves even at the expense of the state). That, however, being one where the state might not have failed, but is still tenuous; it survives by the good will of aristocrats who either don’t yet see an advantage in toppling it or are insufficiently united to do so.
But still distinct from a system in which the institutions are either robust enough to continue exerting effective authority while less capable individuals are at the helm, or the social elites are heavily invested in their continuing function rather than needing to constantly be held in check (if not both).
Similar to points made about how the Roman Republic didn’t really need individual military geniuses to have the strongest armies of their era.
And you may now be thinking, wait, this sounds an awful lot like the Roman Republic or Greek polis government! We have an assembly, a council or senate, and some executive magistrates! Why do we consider the Greeks and Romans to have states but the Celtiberians, Gauls and Germani to be at this point non-state or at most proto-state?
And the answer is that just because you have governing structures doesn’t mean that they wield real power, much less a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. And so we get into:
Fundamentally the problem here is actually simple to state: military force isn’t wielded by governing institutions, it is wielded by individual aristocrats who are only loosely directed by governing institutions. The council doesn’t raise an army, each of the aristocrats does, at which point they can cooperate or not cooperate. Because military force isn’t centralized into the governing institutions, but is distributed among the aristocracy (and even beyond that, more broadly among the armed populace), we see it wielded regularly against the governing institutions or in contravention of their wishes. In short, power in these societies isn’t institutional, it is personal and thus fragmented.
So in summation, the argument for the existence of states as a distinct concept is predicated on the divide between societies where military force is wielded by individuals and societies where it is wielded by institutions…
…but quite visibly, all societies involved possessed institutions which were capable of wielding military force, and the argument ultimately sinks into attempting to draw a line in the sand between varying levels of institutional power and legitimacy. “Weak” and “strong” being fundamentally relative and granular terms — and not getting into the degree to which differing scale of organization many be confused with the latter’s strength and authority — this isn’t particularly promising.
That we can see relatively similar levels of institutional power one or two hundred years apart is not necessarily convincing as evidence that there exists a normal and rapid transition between two common equilibria, since centralization can occur extremely gradually in many places; England’s institutions and political structures centralized from — as a binary hypothesis might put it — “tribal” to “state-like” over the course of more than half a millennium.
I would argue that the state, as defined by Weber, is more a consequence of grain production than anything else. First, as has been pointed out, non-farmers are less concerned about precisely defined territories. Grain production tends toward centralized markets, which lead to centralized monopolies on violence. I noticed this on your pristine state map, which I had previously seen as the locations where agriculture (and, specifically, grain agriculture) started.
You touched on agriculture briefly last week, arguing against significant differences between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, but I’m not so sure. My understanding has always been that there were land differences between the two areas which made grain production (and the centralization and increased populations which come with it) much easier in Italy than in transalpine Gaul.
This is all to say that our definition of a state is weighted toward grain production. That’s fine (and it’s clearly a recipe for success), but it’s good to acknowledge that.
‘Grain’ here needs to be used pretty broadly, given that states emerged based on other cereal crops (rice, maize, etc).
I might have my definitions switched around but I always thought “Grain” was a wider definition than “Cereal” (eg. Quinoa is a grain but not a cereal) and similarily pulses.
Until quite recently many states in Europe had no good idea of exactly where their territory ended. They marked key points (roads, rivers, coasts) but between there was a band where control was either contested or not exerted. This was in part an effect of size – no doubt Athens or mid-Republic Rome could know each farm and hill; France or Poland could not, and the locals in the border areas liked it that they could not (the first accurate survey of France was done under Louis XIV).
Foragers usually have a very good idea of their territory, but quite often the extent varies with the season and use (‘this stretch of river is ours in the salmon season; at other times others can use it”). Nomads often have the same notion of territory – these pastures are ours in winter, those in summer..
I’m reminded of three cases in the eastern United States: first, that the colonists who purchased the island of Manhattan did not purchase it from the group that controlled it, but rather from a different group who had already lost their rights to use the island in a war. Second, the northern border and the southern border of Delaware were defined before the western border was, and so the Mason-Dixon Line is supposed to turn at a right angle where it meets the preexisting boundary of Delaware and head due south to the the west end of the southern border, but those points aren’t precisely north-south of each other and the northern boundary is an arc…roughly 700 acres were ultimately not legally part of any state until 1921.
The third is a conversation I overheard visiting a clerk’s office in rural Virginia about a decade ago. They had to reject a voter application, and the younger assistant was surprised because they knew the street name in the voter’s address and knew the street was in Virginia, it was a loop and didn’t even connect to anything in North Carolina. The older assistant corrected them; both ends of the street were in Virginia and the county had been assessing taxes on the houses on the street since they were built, but they’d just discovered that most of the street *was* actually south of the state line.
It’s more a storable surplus. New Guines had (has) Big Men, but they are impermanent as each household is pretty much self-sufficient and surplus yams etc are therefore for display. The Big Men mediate, adjudicate and lead in war.
> as has been pointed out, non-farmers are less concerned about precisely defined territories
This has actually gotten pushback in the comments.
You can be a non-farmer and still deeply concerned about intruders hunting or grazing in your territory.
In one of his nomad-related posts, OGP noted that pastures that are apparently not in use *are* in use because they are busy regrowing the grass for next year, so any outsiders doing things that interfere with that will be extremely unwelcome.
Regarding states as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, since even today private citizens occasionally use force, even deadly force in self-defense, I think the key point is that a state enacts laws that define what force is legitimate and what isn’t. As pointed out in the comment on traditional Icelandic culture, a state can devolve a considerable degree of actual enforcement to private individuals but reserves the right to declare what is and what is not legitimate. Moreover this is defined by law and not merely by the whims of who the biggest Big Man favors or disfavors.
I think there’s a misconception here that stateless societies neccessarily are anarchic or *purely* just what the Big Men wants. That can become the case, but there’s often quite a few things (tradition/custom or just the fear of the slightly smaller men ganging up on the big men and murdering them in their sleep) that constrains Big Men. There are still expected codes of behaviour, even law. They just aren’t as comprehensive.
Moreover this is defined by law and not merely by the whims of who the biggest Big Man favors or disfavors.
And, as even in our times is extremely readily apparent, there is nothing binary or black and white about that distinction. The main cause for any perceived cut-off is really the popularity and, most importantly, survival of methods of information storage which would actually indicate the laws in effect. Thus our evidence for statehood is fantastic in Rome, wherefrom innumerable texts survive; exemplary in Greece, where the much of the same applies; good in Egypt, the Levant, and various Eastern Mediterranean areas where both environmental conditions and information technologies were generally propitious, and negligible in a majority of Europe where many conditions — environmental, political, and technological — were unfavorable to the survival of literature.
One nitpick: that “orbital” photography looks by resolution to be taken from plane.
Note that Google at all routinely use aerial photography and label composition of them as “satellite view”.
At least according to Wikipedia, some Gallic communities in this period minted their own coins. I find that odd; I am accustomed to thinking of coinage as a distinctive hallmark of the state; after all, someone needs to have the capacity to standardize them and the force to make people use them. Should we imagine such coins as being struck by the tribal senate, or by the biggest of Big Men?
Also, I note that these posts note very specifically “Celtiberians, Gauls, and Germanii.” Is there insufficient evidence to extend these governance structures to the British Isles?
I think people use specie more often because it’s useful* than because anybody is forcing them, in cases where it is abundant enough to be used at all. In cases where many small groups are issuing it, it probably isn’t standardised, which is why people need weighing scales to determine the precious metal content (unless it’s coming from a source with a good reputation).
I believe states more often restrict issuing coinage to themselves in cases where many would want to do it, than they try to push coinage into spaces that otherwise wouldn’t want it.
* Even if it’s not circulated internally, it’s really helpful for international trade. That’s how Roman silver kept ending up in China; it being made of a commonly valued material makes it effective tender even in a society who has no clue what the stamped images are depicting, and they can keep circulating it as is rather than recast it just to have local images (something that is generally saved for altering the precious metal content to change the overall supply, and occasionally to make a political statement).
“…after all, someone needs to have the capacity to standardize them and the force to make people use them.”
I don’t think that’s true. Coins originally started out as mere lumps of metal. Metal was useful because it could be divided up or added to essentially indefinitely (the scene in “A Knight’s Tale” where the guy hacks off a chunk of his prize to pay the smith shows a fictional example of this) and it survived a long, long time, making metals more useful than cows or grain or land. People started putting stamps on the coins to verify the weight of the lumps of metal, to make trade easier; prior to that you’d have to weigh the metal for each transaction. Interestingly the earliest coins show negatives, meaning the image was pushed into the metal, and were generally not a standard shape, because shape was irrelevant. Later coins could be divided (“pieces of eight” and “two bits” come from this practice), because again it’s not the artwork that matters but the weight of metal.
The only tricky bit is having an institution sufficiently trusted by the people that they’d accept your stamp as valid. But that’s not as hard as you’d think. When paper money started in Europe (possibly in Asia as well, but I’m not well-versed in that) it was notes issued by individual banks, not governments. Some people wouldn’t accept notes from certain banks, but while that made things inconvenient it didn’t stop people from using bank notes. Governments only got into the paper-money game after it was generally accepted by the population. Coins would be easier, especially in a small non-state society; after all, your entire society is based on trusting the Big Man, and he’s the one who said this lump is the proper weight. Once you’ve weighed a few of them (or seen someone do it) it would be even easier to trust the stamp.
(also replies to people above). Paper money started in Song Dynasty China as bank notes, c 1000 CE. Paper money was used by succeeding dynasties to various degrees, always plagued by a lack of enough copper (not to mention gold/silver) to make coins. When the early Ming dynasty paper money collapsed c. 1540, a huge flow of global silver into China developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries#Global_flow_of_silver
Spanish dollars aka Pieces of Eight were accepted as legal tender in China; successive Chinese governments never minted their own silver coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar#Asia
In both England and France in periods when central government was weak or absent coins were produced by local mints. In England Viking warlords produced coins copying Anglo-Saxon designs and weights with their own stamp. IIRC, Gaulish coins were produced to the same weights as Greek ones, copying from Massilia and other Greek colonies.