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I thank George Steinmetz, Howard Kimeldorf, Margaret Somers, Michael Kennedy, Ronald Suny, Shinasi Rama, Mark Gould, Nathalie Clayer, Enis Sulstarova, and Miguel Centeno for help with this project. Assistance from the staff at the Central State Archives of Albania was indispensable. The paper benefited immensely from the feedback of the anonymous CSSH reviewers. Research for this paper was supported in part by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and a grant from International Research & Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State through the Title VIII Program and the IREX Scholar Support Fund. None of these organizations are responsible for the views expressed. All shortcomings should be attributed to the author.
Since Max Weber's classic work Economy and Society (1978), sociologists and other social scientists have shared the insight that rational-legal authority is one of the definitive features of modern state power. Defined as the power to set, enforce, and govern populations on the basis of codified legal rules over a territorially defined society, legal authority is a unique feature of the rise of the modern state. Following Weber's footprints, historical sociologists are increasingly recognizing the significance of law in the emergence of modern political and economic systems, including the rise of mass democratic regimes and capitalist forms of production (Somers 1993; Steinberg 2003). Yet some states have failed to gain a monopoly over the administration of law, and been unable to displace alternative norms, institutions, and mechanisms of social regulation that gain hold among significant portions of their population, and we must ask why.
Establishing a monopoly over legal authority seems most problematic for newly centralizing states that are expanding their authority to incorporate "stateless" rural regions with traditions of communal autonomy, tribal organization, and customary law. The classic literature on modern state formation has long recognized that national authorities have often faced rural populations that are reluctant or refuse to cooperate with them (Scott 1976; Tilly 1978; Weber 1976). Such communities remain significant to understanding the development of states and legal authority in the non-Western world. In northwestern Europe such communities were common until the early modern period, when they were defeated by the church, feudal lords, towns, states, and other powerful, translocal organizations (Berman 1983;...