How to build a state

That's the title of a useful article by Anton Howes appearing in Works in Progress, 28 August 2020. The opening paragraphs:

It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic as they are today. Certain policies, like the widespread granting of monopolies in the seventeenth century, or the presence of a powerful landed aristocracy, seem like archaic products of a past that was simply more corrupt. The fact that governments rarely got involved with healthcare or education before the mid-nineteenth century seems the product of a lack of imagination, or perhaps yet another product of our ancestors’ venality – simply what happens when you put the war-hungry knights and nobles in charge.

But the bureaucratic state of today, with its officials involving themselves with every aspect of modern life, is a relatively recent invention. In a world without bureaucracy, when state capacity was relatively lacking, it’s difficult to see what other options monarchs would have had. Suppose yourself transported to the throne of England in 1500, and crowned monarch. Once you bored of the novelty and luxuries of being head of state, you might become concerned about the lot of the common man and woman. Yet even if you wanted to create a healthcare system, or make education free and universal to all children, or even create a police force (London didn’t get one until 1829, and the rest of the country not til much later), there is absolutely no way you could succeed.

For a start, you would struggle to maintain your hold on power. Fund schools you say? Somebody will have to pay. The nobles? Well, try to tax them — in many European states they were exempt from taxation — and you might quickly lose both your throne and your head. And supposing you do manage to tax them, after miraculously stamping out an insurrection without their support, how would you even begin to go about collecting it? There was simply no central government agency capable of raising it. Working out how much people should pay, chasing up non-payers, and even the physical act of collection, not to mention protecting that treasure once collected, all takes substantial manpower. Not to mention the fact that the collecting agents will likely siphon most of it off to line their own pockets.

As a monarch in 1500, you would be forced to rely heavily on delegation. As the economic historian Jared Rubin emphasizes, every ruler requires agents to propagate their rule. These can take the form of big burly blokes with heavy weapons — your enforcers — and they can take the form of people spreading the ideology of your right to rule, lending your orders legitimacy and more generally spreading social norms of obedience — the local officials, jurists, and clerics. Crucially, these propagating agents needed to be kept on-side at all costs. Hence the tax exemptions for nobles, many of whom were rich enough to support their own private armies, and whose ancestors might have been granted such a privilege by one of your predecessors.

The demise of monarchies allowed the rise of the modern state:

Yet, ironically, it was when monarchs lost control that they did most to boost the capabilities of the centralised state. It was under Parliament, first in the 1650s when it briefly overthrew the monarchy, and then from the late 1680s following its deal with the usurping William III, that British state capacity began to most rapidly and inexorably grow. Likewise, in France, it was following the French Revolution that the steady rise of state capacity was boosted — it was then, over three centuries after the fact, that the perpetual tax exemptions for Joan of Arc’s village were finally rescinded.

Parliaments, as bodies of legitimising agents, despite their lack of representation in any modern democratic sense, had the unquestioned legitimacy with which to raise taxes, change policy, and undo the deals of previous monarchs. In the process, they often trampled on the ancient liberties of citizens and subjects. But, unlike monarchs, they found it much easier to force the changes through. When motivated by the needs of war — often the one thing members could agree on — parliaments in the eighteenth century were able to raise cash that would have been unfathomable to the monarchs of even a few decades before. And it was parliaments, also, that were eventually susceptible in the nineteenth century to the lobbying of those who wished the state to involve itself in areas like education, health, and policing.