Segmented early states made revolutions break vertical ties rather than horizontal ones
Evidence
Nevertheless, the stakes of national revolutionary coalitions changed fundamentally from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. In sixteenth-century Europe, rulers and their rivals sought to control lowcapacity states with the modest revenues, intermittent military support, and prestige that rule provided. Powerful rulers did not run unitary states, but governed patchworks of segmented states (te Brake 1998; Tilly 1992). Every state above a very small scale depended on indirect rule, in which intermediaries enjoying substantial autonomy retained control over their own territories, clients, and military means, but collaborated with nominal national rulers’ military, fiscal, and religious programs at a price. Hence revolutionary situations always involved the breaking of vertical ties, as multiple communities banded together in resistance to top-down demands, warlords withdrew their contingent support from rulers, and dynastic rivals of current incumbents drummed up followings. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1020
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Early state consolidation produced early contentious peaks that subsided under high-capacity rule (similarity 0.83)
- Revolutionary coalitions vary along territorial-interest and direct-indirect connection axes (similarity 0.79)
- Pre-modern states worked as mechanical blocs of semi-autonomous social groups with dual power (similarity 0.78)