Category Archives: State Formation

Building an Economy: The Struggle Between Urban and Rural

10 Tuesday May 2022

Posted by in Economics, History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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As Trotsky noted, much of politics is about “who and whom?” In other words, which social group gets to benefit at which other group’s expense? This plays out vividly in the conflict between rural farmers and city workers—and governments often take the side of the city. This clash of interests can be a fantastic engine for fictional conflict, in your stories and your worldbuilding.

(This post is largely based on Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa, with some flavor from Charles Tilly, James C. Scott, and David Graeber.)

We said before that cities play important roles in generating wealth and projecting state power, but that their size is limited by their access to food (or more abstractly, the energy surplus of the society). This also means that city dwellers and farmers have precisely opposite interests with regard to the market price of food: farmers are selling food and would like a high price for their crops, but city dwellers must buy food and want a low price.

Another limiting factor is capital, the fuel not for people’s lives but for their ability to produce goods and infrastructure. (This often takes the form of money, but remember that money is simply a convenient representation of other things people need—natural resources, machines, human labor, et cetera.) This presents a problem for state rulers in a dangerous world: if they want to develop modern industries and manufacturing in a country that is presently agrarian, where do they get the capital from? Often, the best available source of capital is the rural farmers—who might be individually poor, but still collectively have the largest available source of capital: their crops.

Worse, keeping the cities happy is often far more important to states than is keeping rural provinces. The reason is simple: the state officials are in the cities. If the state antagonizes a bunch of farmers a hundred miles away, they can do little to the state officials; but if the state antagonizes a bunch of city dwellers, the city dwellers will riot and perhaps lynch state workers or even overthrow the government entirely.

Thus, states trying to build up their cities must somehow balance off three competing priorities:

  • keep food prices low;
  • extract capital from the rural populace and use it to develop city industries (or perhaps to build a military, or other purposes); and
  • don’t leave farmers so poor that the food supply dries up.

In ancient times, this was done straightforwardly. Taxes were levied on food directly, which the government then distributed to its own personnel and to associated artisans; and people were also drafted for terms of forced labor (“corvée labor”), their own bodies providing the capital that the state needed. (The Bible, for example, attests to people being drafted for three months out of every twelve during the period of King Solomon’s great building projects.) If taxes became too burdensome, the people would resist, but as long as the state didn’t push the populace to the breaking point they could access a fair amount of resources with little trouble.

In more modern times, states had some fancier tools available. Robert Bates writes of postcolonial African states, which were able to make use of a preexisting colonial institution, the monopsony—a single buyer which farmers were obligated to sell all of their cash crops to at a given price. (As opposed to a monopoly, a single seller of a good.) This allowed states to extract foodstuffs from the rural populace at artificially low prices, which could then be sold to urban workers or exported for cash. (To do so, they often had to ban export of crops as well when the world market price was higher than what they were paying.) This meant that urban workers could pay low prices for their food, and the state had lots of capital available for economic development (or other, less useful purposes).

But how to sustain the farmers if you’re paying dirt-cheap prices for their goods? The answer was to subsidize farming inputs, such as machinery, fuel, and access to cheap credit. This had the additional advantage to the state that you could direct the subsidies to chiefly benefit your own supporters, often wealthy members of the government who entered farming specifically to soak up all the subsidies they could. In practice, therefore, a regime of subsidized inputs and too-low output prices would squeeze the peasants while benefiting large farms owned by elites.

(Meanwhile, farmers often resisted by shifting some of their crop production to goods not covered by the monopsony, and by selling some of their goods on the black market. Bates estimates that no more than 30% to 40% of agricultural production was captured by the monopsonies, on average.)

Such systems in real life often performed worse than expected, because the states’ programs of economic development were poorly run, frequently corrupt, and prone to pursue prestige industries such as heavy manufacturing that were impossible to sustain with the countries’ given level of technology, human capital, and infrastructure. But that is a story for another post. For now, the point is to highlight the conflicting interests between urban and rural populations—and how the state, trying to augment its own power and economic resources, will favor the city over the countryside.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

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Building an Economy: Types of Cities

06 Friday May 2022

Posted by in Economics, History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War, Writing

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Part of worldbuilding is deciding on the map of your territory, whatever that looks like. (A vast empire sprawling across continents, or a tiny province nestled in the hills, or a series of star systems?) And part of that process involves deciding where the cities are. As my last post indicates, cities play a vital role in the economy—but they can also play a key role in politics directly. We’ll discuss that aspect in more detail in future posts, but for now, the key point is that cities can be built for several different purposes—and which purpose a given city was built for will explain where it is located geographically.

So this post will inventory those purposes, to set the stage for our future discussions of cities in politics.

(The concepts here are largely taken from Jane Jacobs’ Cities and the Wealth of Nations, as discussed in the previous post; Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, which we’ll discuss more in the future; and my hazy memories of Fernand Braudel.)

First, we should define our terms. A city, as I’m using the term, is a large settlement of people, most of whom are not producing food. This distinguishes a city from a village, which might feature a few specialists like a blacksmith or cartwright, but will mostly consist of farmers or ranchers. By contrast, a city depends on the efficient production of food by others, and its transport to the city, often from the surrounding rural areas.

A society’s capacity to support cities will depend on the size of its energy surplus and its ability to efficiently transport and distribute food. Tilly notes that during the Middle Ages, perhaps 10% of the European populace lived in cities because agriculture and especially transportation could not support more. An oxcart of grain could travel perhaps a few hundred kilometers before the oxen had eaten more than they carried. The most efficient transport was over water, either by sea or on the rivers. It was not uncommon for waterfront warehouses to be filled to bursting with grain that could not find a buyer, while a few hundred miles inland villages were starving.

By contrast, today over 80% of the North American population lives in urban regions, and over 56% of the world’s population. We commonly transport food across the globe, and many people have never even seen a farm, much less worked on one.

So why do people live in cities, and why do they get built in the first place? For our purposes, we’ll focus on the following:

  • commercial cities,
  • industrial cities (loosely defined), and
  • administrative/garrison cities.

And of course, once a city exists and starts to grow, it often takes on aspects of the other roles as well.

Commercial Cities

Cities that naturally emerge to facilitate commerce and trade are the most common, the most “natural,” and the most easily sustained. The simplest model for a commercial city would be one that grows up in the middle of a collection of rural villages; all the villagers from the different villages converge in the center to trade with each other, and somebody has the bright idea to build houses there and set up permanent establishments to more efficiently cater to the villagers. It grows over time as more industries set up, and eventually could start trading with other more distant cities as well; eventually its size reaches the limit of what its food supply can support, but its wealth might continue to grow if more valuable industries develop.

The Platonic ideal of a commercial city springs up on its own, as a result of people freely coming to the city and setting up shop. People are attracted by the prospect of working in a trade, or markets for their goods produced back at the farm, or even finding a spouse. If economic prospects in the city dim, it will lose population as people head for greener pastures.

The biggest commercial cities are at the intersection of trade routes and along the coast or rivers (the highways of the old world), especially where a river reaches the sea or several rivers intersect—or even better, if they don’t actually intersect, but pass close enough together that one can transport goods overland from one river to the other, passing through the city in the process. Think of Paris, Lyon, London, Amsterdam, the great Italian cities, and the like.

Conversely, if the trade routes shift, the city might find itself cut off from much of its commerce. For example, when the railroads were laid down across the United States, they largely ran along flat terrain since trains could not climb slopes of more than a few degrees. Communities that had previously lived in hilly regions near small rivers found themselves sucked inexorably into the lowlands as trade patterns shifted, and many towns and cities dried up as a result.

Industrial Cities

By “industrial,” I mean a city whose main purpose is to provide a place for people to live while they work at their jobs. This could include “factory towns” or “company towns,” essentially the dormitories of a major company’s factory workers; mining camps, where a bunch of individuals collect together as they work in the surrounding areas; or even “college towns,” where a college or university is placed in the middle of nowhere and a town grows up around it to support it.

Naturally, the industrial city will be placed convenient to the site of the work, be it a factory, a region rich in raw materials, or the like. It will have to have access to a food supply, but will pay for it with the proceeds of its production, rather than as a hub for trade in general. In some cases, the industrial city itself is a center for food production (making it an edge case for our definition of “city” above), but differs from a large village due to its size and that it mainly produces for export.

Industrial cities are common in supply regions that disproportionately produce materials for export (see previous post). Over time, industrial cities may develop elements of the commercial city as well, which might form the basis of more durable prosperity; but if such development is limited, the industrial city will rise and fall with the fortunes of its industry.

Sometimes, industrial cities will emerge spontaneously, especially of the mining-town variety. Other times, these cities will be built at the initiative of the cornerstone company or industry, which invests heavily in the city as a part of its production base and might even import workers from elsewhere. Sometimes, industrial cities can be built by governments trying to encourage particular industries or patterns of development, and sometimes they are populated by force—with slaves, or serfs, or other captive peoples carried off from their homes.

Administrative/Garrison Cities

These cities have little or no commercial basis, at least not initially; they are typically created and supported by governments, to project government power and authority.

Garrison cities are bases for military units; some might be in the heartland, where they can be easily supplied, but others might be placed on the frontier for defensive or offensive purposes. Often they are walled, or might be actual castles or fortresses. Such garrisons must be provisioned at great expense if they are outside the normal trade routes; sometimes they even grow their own food. A garrison would feature the soldiers themselves, plus their families and whatever camp followers or support specialists would be necessary, such as smiths or doctors. Depending on the garrison, other civilians might live there as well to sell services to the soldiers, hoping to drain the cash of a captive populace of bored young men (or women?) with little else to do.

(Some garrison towns might play host not to state military units, but to strong mercenary units.)

Administrative cities might overlap with garrisons, but are generally placed in the heartland. Their main function is to collect taxes, or otherwise enforce the laws. They act as nerve centers for the bureaucracy, often including the state security services if these are different from the military. While garrisons are placed where military necessity dictates, administrative cities are placed where the people are, the better to control them. People living in an administrative city are usually state functionaries, or those selling services to them. (Think of Washington DC, for example.)

Such cities produce few or no economic goods and rely on tax revenue, and when the state stops supporting them they wither away (unless they have developed a commercial or productive basis in the meanwhile). The exception is when a garrison city, or an administrative city hosting a police force, simply takes food from surrounding regions at swordpoint to support itself once the tax money dries up.

Cities and Power

As we noted above, cities can play multiple roles at once, and many do once they have existed long enough. But the initial location of a city is determined by its starting role; and once it takes root, it influences economic, political, and strategic changes around it. Cities are critical tools for the development of economic and political power, so where you put your cities will condition the conflicts that break out in your stories.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Energy

11 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by in Economics, History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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In my quest to give worldbuilders powerful tools to make their stories cooler, I’ve hesitated for a long time to tackle the subject of wealth and economics. Economics matters for politics quite a lot, and authors who want grist for compelling conflicts can find an embarrassment of riches here, so to speak. But how the heck do you turn such a complex subject into a useful model?

However, my recent post on the vicious internal politics of the Russian economy proved illuminating. I now think that the correct approach is not to try and jam all of political economy into a single model. Instead, we’re going to lay out several distinct lenses that you can pick and choose between, to organize your worldbuilding the way you want it. No one lens will tell the whole story, and we’re not going to try. But each lens will highlight a specific set of conflicts that can play out in economic behavior. In your own stories, you can focus on a single lens that clarifies the conflict you want to write about, or layer several lenses on top of each other if you’re feeling ambitious.

(This is similar to how we discussed empires in a previous post.)

We begin with the most fundamental level of economic analysis: energy.

(The following is largely based off of ecologist Joseph Tainter’s massively useful book The Collapse of Complex Societies. It also takes some from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization.)

By “energy,” I don’t just mean electricity or oil, although these are important. “Energy” includes any accessible way to turn a resource into work. The most fundamental energy source is food. If we don’t eat, we die. So, much of our activity is organized around producing calories and other nutrients that we can then consume. We invest the energy source of human labor and transform it into calories, which then are turned into more human labor to produce more calories.

Let’s say that it takes a full day’s work for a man to get enough food to feed himself. If so, the man would be in a desperate state: no clothing, no shelter, no leisure activities other than collapsing at the end of the day in total exhaustion. All activity would be directed toward getting food. A group of people in such a state would have a low level of culture, hardly worthy of the term.

Now, suppose that this group developed some way to get food more efficiently. It could be a new division of labor between male hunters and female foragers that raises the productivity of each; it could be finding a new, energy-dense food like tree nuts or buffalo. In either case, suddenly the group has a new surplus of food production. People have a few hours in their day to do something other than produce food. Or, the work of one person can now feed more than one person; so not everyone needs to gather food, and some people can devote their time to other kinds of work.

Note that the availability of an energy surplus presents options for how to benefit from it. Perhaps everyone gets to work a little less hard, but then devotes the rest of their time to leisure. The society that results would have about the same low level of material wealth, but might develop a rich culture of games and storytelling. Perhaps everyone spends less time gathering food, but they also develop different arts and crafts with the rest of their time; people might make better clothing and live in more comfortable shelters, and accumulate various prestige goods. Perhaps most people keep gathering food as before, but the surplus food goes to feed a small class of artisans who do useful work for the group: blacksmiths, potters, tanners. And perhaps another class of functionaries who do rather less work: chiefs, priests, poets, or professional warriors.

The development of a group and its culture depends on the availability of an energy surplus, its source, and its size. Possibilities for cultural development are very different if the average person works 12 hours a day to produce enough food for everyone, compared to 11 hours, or 3. How a culture responds to the availability of an energy surplus will dramatically influence its future development. Perhaps everyone will benefit, or perhaps some people will benefit from the surplus and others will work as before. And the manner in which they work and benefit could vary widely.

But back to the source of the surplus. A surplus can be generated in three main ways:

  • exploiting a new energy source;
  • using existing energy sources more efficiently or productively; or
  • allocating the surplus unequally between persons.

Suppose a farmer is working a small farm with hand tools. It’s grueling work and long. But then she gets the idea of yoking a donkey to a plow. Suddenly, she controls a new source of energy than just human labor: animal labor. The animal can do a lot of the work, and the farmer needs to work less hard, or can produce more food. And the animal eats food that people would not. The energy surplus grows.

Then, benefiting from the strength of her donkey, the farmer develops a new and heavier plow that can produce more food with the same effort. The energy surplus grows again.

Then she realizes that if animals can be made to work for a larger energy surplus, so can people. Slavery is born: slaves are made to work for more of their day than their owners would have, and the surplus is captured by the owners. The benefits of the energy surplus are divided unevenly. It gets even worse if the slaves are fed less than free people would eat; the energy surplus grows and the slavers benefit, but the slaves may waste away and die. The slavers would have to capture new slaves, perhaps by raiding other groups, perhaps by enslaving unfortunates within their own group.

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For most of human history, the main energy inputs were human labor and animal labor. Firewood too; the chemical energy from fire was used in cooking food and keeping us warm, and later for other things as well. The invention of the sail turned wind into an important energy source, which made ocean transport much easier. But then the gear was invented: suddenly, kinetic energy from other sources could be transformed into useful work. The windmill and watermill were able to replace labor that was previously done by animals. Then came the steam engine, and suddenly coal became a useful energy source. Then the combustion engine and the battery, then nuclear power, and so on. Each new energy source brought benefits with it, but also brought political changes—in part because the people who controlled that energy were different.

In our time, the computer has revolutionized all of society. In this model it is not a new energy source, but allows us to use existing energy sources more productively. It also changes the allocation of our energy surplus, as unskilled labor becomes displaced and technical expertise becomes massively more productive than at any previous time in human history. The rise of robotics is already having similar effects, and those effects will grow as robots replace more and more human labor. We now must ask what we will do, as a society, with all the available human capacity that is no longer needed for its former employment.

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This discussion was quite brief, but you can already see how it provides a powerful way to think of economic conflict in your stories. We can add another layer and ask what happens when energy surpluses suddenly shrink. Suddenly, societal arrangements that worked with a given level of energy become unsustainable. If you want to know what happens next, check out Tainter’s book. (The title is a spoiler, though!)

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Is War Good for States?

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War

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Randolph Bourne, an American pacifist, famously wrote during World War I:

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

Was he right? Only some of the time.

Recall the context. America’s entry into World War I gave the Progressive movement of the day, led by Woodrow Wilson (our first totalitarian president, and a key influence on the development of Fascism), the opportunity to dramatically reshape the relationship between citizens and state. Before the war, American government had a light footprint, and states jealously guarded their powers from Federal intrusion. But during the war, the Federal government greatly expanded its powers due to the wartime emergency; and it set a precedent which would be eagerly seized on during the New Deal fifteen years later.

In early modern Europe, frequent war was a great spur to the development of powerful states, but also to the increasing role of popular representation in government and strong social-welfare policies. As the eminent political scientist Charles Tilly put it, “War made the state, and the state made war.” His thesis, briefly put, is that rulers desperate to raise soldiers and money to pay them had two options: ratchet up their control over the populace and squeeze them until they comply, or else offer them valuable rights and privileges to get their willing cooperation. (Or both.) The enduring effect was that the state’s power over citizens grew, but in some states frequent wars also laid the groundwork for expanded political rights.

The story gets more complicated, of course, but it seems to be a recurring pattern. Peter Turchin argued convincingly that most empires first developed under the pressure of frequent barbarian invasions, which forced the rapid growth of strong state structures to defend against them. More contemporary examples come easily to mind. So is that the end of the matter? Should all states be fomenting wars in order to extend their control over the populace?

Not quite. Miguel Centeno reminds us that not all states grow stronger during war. War is a tremendous stressor, and some states crack under the strain. States that began the war with weak institutions, with tenuous control over their populaces, may never achieve the longed-for unity in the face of the enemy. Instead, the desperate need for money and manpower may force states into bad deals, where they accept long-term problems for the sake of short-term survival. Different factions may harden among the people, undermining the development of healthy patriotism and breeding disloyalty for generations to come. Struggles over government power and taxation may hobble the state likewise.

The key question seems to be: is a state that is facing wartime stresses stable enough to survive them and thrive? If so, then its power will likely grow, justified by the emergency but lingering long after the war is over. If not, then state dysfunction may be the result.

(Of course, in real life you can get both outcomes, in different domains. The military-industrial complex is many things, but a rational exercise of government power is not one of them.)

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post is at the intersection of the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Tyranny for Worldbuilders and War for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)

Empires versus Nation-States

16 Sunday Jan 2022

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What’s the difference between a country and an empire?

It depends. Annoyingly, “empire” is one of those terms that picks up several different meanings, and gets used in different contexts. So first we have to decide, “Why do we want to know?”

In this blog, we focus on worldbuilding for fiction writers. So to me, “empire” is useful as a concept when it helps you think about complex ideas in a straightforward way, and make cooler invented worlds. Let’s talk, therefore, about three lenses through which we can think about an “empire” compared to a “state”: indirect versus direct control; multi-national populations versus a single nation; or rule for the benefit of the imperial class/caste at the expense of the subject peoples, versus rule for the (nominal) benefit of all subjects.

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One way you can think about an empire is that it controls a bunch of smaller cities or even states, but not directly. Instead of levying taxes on individuals, an empire might levy tribute on an entire town, or even a whole region or state. How the tribute is collected, and how its burdens are allocated between people or social classes, is not the empire’s concern; these decisions are usually made by local authorities from the native population. Similarly, law and order might still be run by the natives, subject to the dictates of the empire; if matters are getting out of hand, an imperial legion might sweep through to put some heads on spikes, pour encourager les autres, and perhaps replace the local leadership with more cooperative local personnel. But usually, the empire doesn’t want to be bothered, beyond a necessary minimum.

By contrast, a state (in this lens) has direct control over its populace, applying taxes and laws on a more granular basis. Where an empire wants most of the benefits of dominating people without having to worry about controlling them, and having a large staff of functionaries, the state exerts more control, with a more developed staff of bureaucrats and enforcers to do the controlling.

This is just one way to think about empires. But if this is the distinction you are looking for, you now have terminology to express what you mean.

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Another way to think about an empire is in contrast to the nation-state: where the state is inhabited predominantly by people who are part of a single nation, with a shared history and culture and often a shared language. The state is seen as the agent of the nation; the role of the government is to see to the nation’s welfare. The state of Japan is made up of the Japanese nation, for example; people from other nations might be allowed to live in Japan (if they behave themselves), but can’t really become Japanese. And the role of the state is to defend the Japanese people and further its goals. Nearly the same could be said about Finland, or Nepal, or many other states.

An empire, by contrast (in this lens), is multi-national. Think of the Hapsburg Empire (AKA Austro-Hungary), a royal dynasty ruling over several different nations (which typically despised each other). The Roman Empire, too, ruled over many different peoples, using the carrot of Roman citizenship and the stick of the Legions to keep the whole thing together. If an empire of this type is to justify itself, it cannot be with reference to nations; perhaps the empire will claim some sort of functional value, or a unifying mission like the Pax Romana, or (like the Hapsburgs) it might simply claim to exist from the privileges of the ruling family at its head.

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In the third lens, what makes an empire is that it dominates other peoples for the benefit of the original people who formed the empire, whether or not the other peoples benefit as well. If taxes, slaves, and commerce are drained toward the imperial homeland, while the welfare of the conquered peoples is neglected or seen as an afterthought, we have an empire in this sense.

A clear example is the Congo Free State. Massive amounts of natural resources (primarily rubber) were shipped from the Congo back to Europe, and rivers of native blood were shed in the process, often with very little purpose. (The Belgian Parliament concluded in its investigation that the native population had been cut in half during the Free State period.) The Force Publique did build roads and other infrastructure, but only where it was necessary to improve resource extraction. They largely did not train native officials or improve native health or education.

By contrast, a state (at least ostensibly) cares about the welfare of all its citizens. This may not hold in practice—favored ethnic groups or social classes, or particular provinces or cities, might get the lion’s share of state largesse—but this would be seen as a deficiency in the state, a failure to carry out its duties to the citizenry. A Nazi official would laugh if you suggested that he ought to care about conquered French or Poles or Ukrainians as much as he cares about Germans; but even during the darkest days of Jim Crow in the United States, segregation was justified as being ultimately for the benefit of the oppressed black community (however absurd an argument this was). Supporters of segregation could not baldly state that they wanted to keep blacks as an underclass, at least not in public, because the United States is formally based on the equality of citizens.

An empire dispenses with such hypocrisy, at least to some degree. The conquered peoples are seen as livestock to be farmed by the empire, and little more. The British Empire at least had pretensions to benefit the locals, a bit; the Spanish Empire scarcely bothered.

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You’ll notice that these lenses need not all be true at the same time. Many empires did not levy tribute on cities or provinces, but collected taxes from individuals; similarly, even some states would levy taxes on a whole city or village. Many states are not nation-states, like the United States or Canada, and some combine several distinct nations, like Switzerland or Belgium. And some empires act on behalf of a single nation, such as the German Reich. And whether a state acts for the benefit of all its citizens is always a fraught question.

But now you have a rich series of concepts you can apply in your worldbuilding. You can pick and choose to express what you want your setting to look like, how you want your empires and states to act, and where you want the conflicts to be.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Unity, Division, and State Formation

08 Saturday Jan 2022

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One of the tricky things about recognizing a country that is becoming dysfunctional or tyrannical is that many tyrannical practices are the same as the normal practices one would find in a “healthy” country, but amplified to unhealthy levels.

A key example is patriotism/nationalism on one hand, and conflict between groups on the other.

For a community to work, its members need to feel a sense of shared fate. A selfish attitude of “I got mine, you can go to Hell” must be seen not only as immoral, but actually against your interests—because if members of the community are harmed, the community as a whole is harmed as well, and therefore the community is less able to advance the interests of any of its members.

A state, trying to create a sense of political community among many, many people who have never even met, does this by fostering patriotism. That is, the welfare of other Americans (for example) would be important to me because they are Americans, even if they are richer than me or poorer than me or a different skin color or a different religion. To create a sense of patriotism usually requires creating a national myth (loosely based on the truth) about our shared mission on the planet, our creed, the heroic circumstances of our founding. Citizens must be proud of the nation before they can be proud of the state, which (ideally) is an expression of the political values of that nation.

But a national myth fostering patriotism can very easily shade into a state ideology justifying compliance, and finally become sheer propaganda justifying whatever acts of tyranny the state chooses to carry out.

One waypoint in this direction is when political disagreement with the ruling ideology is condemned as disloyalty to the nation. This might not be tyrannical, depending on the nature of the disagreement (anyone agitating for blacks to be returned to slavery, for example, gets little sympathy from me if the cops break down his door), but it should perk up one’s ears at the very least. Political opponents can be reasoned with, bargained with, compromised with. Traitors are hanged.

For a nation to avoid tyranny, it must preserve the ability of its members to disagree about political things, without jeopardizing the larger sense of shared fate that unites them. This is tricky, since we have a tendency for policy disputes to become partisan chasms. Seymour Lipset argued that for a democracy to work well, it must feature cross-cutting cleavages: the same people who disagree with each other on Issue A might be allies on Issue B, and so continue to see each other as people and potential comrades. By contrast, for every dispute to map itself along an existing party cleavage was extremely dangerous, as political disputes harden into cultural enmities. (Obvious analogies to the present situation omitted.) (See a fairly abstract discussion here.)

On the other hand, if political disputes rage without end or without moderating tendencies, to the point that the sense of shared fate is lost or never existed, this can also lead to a form of tyranny that has become proverbial: divide and conquer. In short, if a state rules over a collection of groups in endless conflict with each other (policy conflict, ethnic conflict, etc.), then it can credibly claim that only the power of the state can protect each group from the others. Thus, the people must acquiesce to whatever injustices the state chooses to perpetrate, because facing the wrath of their neighbors without the state’s protection would be worse. Yugoslavia, before its catastrophic breakup, would be a good example of this.

More diabolical would be for the state to deliberately encourage conflicts between its communities, to encourage dependency on itself and make a broad alliance of oppressed peoples unlikely. In then-Zaire, for example, Mobutu put in place policies designed to foment conflict within each province between its “autochthons” (so-called indigenous peoples) and those other communities arbitrarily decided to be foreign intruders. Those policies allowed Mobutu to maintain his grip on power, but after his eventual overthrow they culminated in horrible civil wars.

(Relatedly, a political leader might foment conflict between two communities even if he only leads one of them, in order to make cooperation impossible or even to drive the other community away and thus ensure that no one can challenge his power.)

Worst of all, perhaps, would be a state that manages to do both: enforce a suffocating official ideology, while at the same time turning all of its people against each other. The Soviet Union is probably the most terrible example we have of this so far; children were turned against parents, neighbors gleefully betrayed each other for a better apartment, and preserving one’s ethnic and religious identities was made tantamount to treason.

A tyrant might demand conformity and compliance. But the tyrant might also turn neighbors into enemies, cynically using social conflict as a lever to maintain power. Or both. As citizens and authors both, we should keep this in mind. Political conflict needs a way to be concluded, and for opponents to reconcile, or the social fabric will fray.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Turning People into Power Resources

07 Friday Jan 2022

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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Any state regime needs resources to function. At the most basic level, the state needs manpower; in ancient times, it was common for states to literally draft the populace for occasional terms to work on public projects such as city walls or irrigation channels (this was called corvée labor). Many states still do this for their militaries. In modern times, the state typically raises money instead through taxation or some sort of state industry, and then spends money on salaries and such. Law, too, is a resource for getting people to do what you want (provided that enough people obey the law).

Regardless of form, the state still needs to generate resources. Some states are in the happy position of being able to exploit outsiders rather than their own populaces—levying tolls on international trade routes, or selling commodities such as salt, olive oil, or petroleum, or else having regular programs of state piracy or conquest to seize plunder. But for most states, the resources they need are largely generated from the people they rule.

How does this work?

As James C. Scott teaches us, to levy taxes or otherwise extract resources, the state needs to make sure that the resources, and the people who provide them, are accessible. One of the key activities of states, therefore, is to actively change the way people behave to make their resources more easily collectable. For example, in southeast Asian statelets, it was common for rulers to force their peasants at spearpoint to live in the capital city, and work on farms that were adjacent to it, so that the rice grown could be easily assessed by tax collectors. By contrast, growing root vegetables was often forbidden, seen as a means of tax evasion because they were easy to hide.

Banking systems are a frequent tool for resource mobilization, because they literally gather money together so it can be used. Alexander Gerschenkron famously argued that the best way for a state to escape “economic backwardness” was to have a strong state banking system, so that capital could be mobilized for big infrastructure projects. Essentially, people’s savings would be borrowed by the state and used to accomplish state goals.

(Today, we see how states are struggling to respond to the growth of cryptocurrencies, which provide a serious alternative to the banking system for people who want to evade government scrutiny of their money. In the US, some regulators are agitating for stablecoin funds to be regulated like banks—which is a ridiculous idea, but I digress.)

States can also force their citizens to become more productive, in specific ways. This can range from vagrancy laws that force people to work, to mandatory public education or civil service exams, to laws mandating that all farmers must practice archery on Sundays. Head taxes too have this function; if you require people to pay 50 ducats per year each, whether or not they have the money to pay, you force them to spend at least some of their time earning ducats, rather than simply engaging in subsistence gathering or barter (which is harder for the state to benefit from).

States can also encourage or direct their subjects to directly accomplish state goals through nominally private action. For example, if the Duke of Rotherheim offers a bounty of ten gold pieces for each elf ear turned in, bounty hunters will scour the land to wipe out elves without any need for the Duke to hire them formally. In the modern world, “private” financial institutions like banks are subject to a vast range of government rules and reporting requirements, which they must comply with or else lose their licenses. For many purposes, the banks are agents of government policy when it comes to detecting money laundering or other financial crime (to say nothing of economic policy).

Essentially, a crucial part of the art of rule is how to mold the people into cash cows—taking unruly individuals who pass through life in many different ways, and turning them into resources that can serve the state. This is not always bad—having a military draft, for instance, may be inescapable for a country surrounded by enemies. But it shapes people’s lives in fundamental ways that often we don’t even see. And those who resist the system become outcasts, living on the edge of society without documents, or even without homes.

There are stories to be written about all of this. And a good way to start, when considering your fictional kingdom, is to ask: how, exactly, does the regime get its money or other resources?

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

What is the Function of a State?

25 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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When doing worldbuilding, many authors or game designers assume as a matter of course that most of the peoples in their world will be part of an organized state (roughly meaning a defined territory ruled by a centralized government, in the sense of Louis XIV’s “L’etat, c’est moi”). Any “barbarian” lands lacking organized states might be dominated by roving nomadic bandits, or some other uncultured society; and in any event these would be rare curiosities, and most of the land mass would be controlled by one state or another.

That assumption is understandable, given that almost all people alive today live in consolidated states (indeed, any regions lacking a state are today declared “failed states,” rather than simply stateless). But it should not be the default for authors. In fact, for most of human history, the majority of people lived outside of states. Organized states only tended to control cities and their immediate surroundings, with most people living in tribal or clan-based societies in lands outside of the city’s reach. And for most of human history, one’s average life expectancy was actually lower as the subject of a state than otherwise.

Even as organized governments in general gained power, the modern “Westphalian” state (one that claimed unchallenged rule over a defined territory extending well beyond city walls) was not the only way to run things. The city-state was a perfectly reasonable way to organize political life, and persisted well into the 19th century in Italy. Similarly, the Hanseatic League was a loose collection of city-states allied with each other for mutual protection and benefit, but otherwise largely self-governing.

Why then have states at all? What advantages did they have, if any? For whom? What allowed the Westphalian state to eventually take over the globe? And how can we use these concepts in our fiction?

Generally, the state is built from three things: military force, bureaucracy (or some other way to enforce laws and collect taxes), and a source of legitimacy (an ideological framework justifying the demand of the state that its subjects serve loyally—religion, or patriotism, or similar). But these need not all emerge in the same order, and the initial character of the regime may vary as a result.

What happens if the military comes first? Then you have the state as a “stationary bandit,” essentially where some thug with an army gathers a group of people under his rule, and provides some of the trappings of civilized life in exchange for squeezing them for all the taxes he can get. This might not be all bad; a smart bandit can sometimes provide a better quality of life for people under her rule than what they had before, for the selfish purpose of generating more economic growth and therefore taxable wealth. But when push comes to shove, the entire purpose of the bandit state is to aggrandize and enrich the ruler, not to benefit the ruled. Slavery is frequent, taxation is heavy, the army is frequently used to squeeze the people even harder, and the desires of the people are only an annoying consideration to be managed.

What if administration comes first? You might suppose that a self-governing community, perhaps husbanding a common-pool resource, has to deal with increasingly complex problems of project planning and resource allocation; the community develops an organized bureaucracy in response, with codified laws. Then, as the community is threatened by invaders, the community raises an army for its defense (or maybe they feel like invading their neighbors!). Then it decides that keeping the army is a good idea, and becomes a state. In such a case, most of the state’s activity will initially still be focused on resource allocation and maintenance of social order, rather than sheer coercive extraction. Ancient Egypt might be a good case of this.

What if the community’s framework for legitimacy came first? For example, in the Bible, the Israelites had lived in a stateless society for centuries, but found themselves unable to repel invading powers like the Philistines. So the people approached the prophet Samuel and demanded a king “that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.” Yet that king was (initially) constrained by the cultural and religious expectations that the people already had. In such a case, one might expect the king to be relatively weaker than the other cases, at least initially, and not to diverge too strongly from communal expectations.

As time passes, any state will develop aspects of all three of the above aspects. The exact mix between them will vary; and in your own fiction project, you can of course emphasize the angle that works best for your story. But states tend to develop more rapidly, and to end up exerting more power over their societies, if the nation is under persistent military threat.

So far so good; but then why the modern Westphalian state? Why bother claiming all the territory in your neighborhood, and claim the power to control the behavior of the people living in it, when it might be too expensive and troublesome to control the “badlands”? Why not exist as a city-state, and simply trade for resources with the stateless peoples living outside your grasp (as was the model for most of history)?

In part, this becomes more of a factor when international diplomacy becomes more important. If other states want to make agreements with your state, they expect you to be able to fulfill your end of the bargain; that will force you to try to control “your” territory in response. If Florin makes a peace treaty with Guilder, it would be highly embarrassing if Florinian bandits start raiding Guilder territory. Florin will have to work harder to impose law and order in “its” territory, or no other state will trust its word.

If a state is less concerned with controlling its entire territory, and only with maximizing its tax revenue, it would tend to default to a city-state model, or perhaps a network of cities dotting a largely ungoverned landscape—cities are far more efficient to control. The same would be true if the state simply lacks the power to dominate the countryside. The countryside, meanwhile, would be largely self-governing by small communities of farmers or foragers, or perhaps dominated by local gentry, crime bosses, or warlords.

In your own stories, remember that the Westphalian state is not the only model you need follow, nor is it always the best one for your story. A world of uncertain political control can be really fun to explore.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Writing exercises for regime types: the Palace

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This series of exercises refers back to this post on “The Palace,” a regime type where power is centralized in a single autocratic figure like a dictator, a powerful king, or other ruler. If you like these exercises, first go back to the above-linked post and read it, then come back and work on the exercises.

  1. Thinking about your ruler, what is the source of his/her power?
  2. What claim justifies the ruler’s legitimacy? Why do the ruler’s followers obey? (Examples: is the ruler thought to be a god? Or anointed by God? Is the ruler part of a special bloodline? Or the victor in a ritual combat over the succession? Does the ruler have the most stock shares in the corporation? Is the ruler simply the richest or most powerful figure?) How does that claim to legitimacy exclude the possibility of popular sovereignty or other forms of rule?
  3. Does the specific form of legitimacy claimed by the ruler imply certain restraints on the ruler’s behavior? Must the ruler spend time propitiating the ancestral spirits, or delivering shareholder reports, or meditating and generating magical power?
  4. Who are the members of Palace “court”? How might their power or influence be dependent on the Palace? What privileges do “courtiers” have because of their proximity to the Palace?
  5. How might the Palace prevent the growth of independent powerful figures (“nobles”)?
  6. How can the courtiers influence the ruler?
  7. If the ruler is feckless or incapacitated, which courtiers might usurp effective (but not de jure) power?
  8. How might the ruler be overthrown? Is such an overthrow consistent with the existing ruling ideology, or would it need to put forward a new ideology?
  9. Looking back over all the ideas you’ve written down, which have the most resonance for your story?

Writing Exercises on “Keeping Power”

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This exercise is meant to apply to concepts of this post, which discusses a flexible model for quickly sketching out the key political conflicts in your setting—focusing on who the ruler must keep happy in order to stay in power. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, first read the linked post and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes thinking about your setting, then list all the kinds of people who have any influence at all on who the leader is. Are they powerful generals? Wealthy merchants? Priests? Voters in a democracy? Voters in an oligarchy or stratified society? Nobles? Regional governors? Board directors or shareholders of a corporation? This is the selectorate.
  2. Of all those people, what is the minimum level of support a leader would need to stay in power? How many different ways are there to put together such a support coalition?
  3. What could a leader offer his/her coalition members to keep them loyal? How could the leader threaten them?
  4. If a coalition member is disloyal, how easily could the member be replaced by the leader with another member of the selectorate?
  1. If the selectorate is unhappy with the leader, how easily could a new support coalition be built behind someone else?
  2. How might policies that favor the support coalition harm people outside of it? (For example, taxing the populace and giving a subsidy to coalition members.) How might potential policies to benefit outsiders harm members of the coalition, and thus be rejected? (For example, building a port that would make grain cheaper, when your supporters are rich landowners who sell grain.)
  3. How could new classes of people join the selectorate? (For example, women gaining the right to vote.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  4. How could existing classes of people lose their place in the selectorate? (For example, a democracy becoming a dictatorship; or powerful religious leaders being displaced by a religious purge.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  5. What might change to allow the leader to need fewer supporters, or to force the leader to seek more supporters?
  6. Looking at all the possibilities for conflict that you listed above, which has the most resonance for the story you want to tell?