The nineteenth-century reforms created the modern state, not the reverse

Evidence

The direct and indirect imposition of the state on the Muslim world has largely gone unnoticed as a field of inquiry. Like its Western parent, the Muslim state (that is, the state in the Muslim world) was deeply embedded within latent assumptions of “natural” progress, and was therefore seen as a natural and timeless phenomenon. This is in part due to the ideological formations to which the Western state itself was subject, but it was also because it developed through various stages of imposition over a century. In other words, both in British India and especially in the Ottoman Empire, the modern state arose by virtue of its institutions, together with the ideological props that cushioned and legitimized them by necessity. Conversely put, it was the so-called reforms of the nineteenth century that created the state structure, not the other way around. The reforms, rarely if at all seen to produce such effects (precisely because the modern state lives in an ideological web), were far more potent and effective than even the critical historian has accredited them. They were not a series of acts that just changed the law, education, administration, and similar spheres (however important these are); they had the effect of raising a state, which, as it was evolving, designed and implemented them. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the conventional ‘reforms as state response’ narrative; connects to theories of state formation in Milgrom (law merchant institutions as state-building) and the reader’s interest in how institutions get constructed. — connects to: Nineteenth-century judges actively reshaped common law to fit American conditions. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2837
• DEFINE: Clarifies the dialectical direction: reforms raised the state, then the state designed and implemented further reforms.