Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology

Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology. By Kaspersen Lars Bo. and Strandsbjerg Jeppe., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 333p. $120.00 cloth.

Ask any old hand in a social science department to list the 10 most influential contributions within the discipline, and the late American sociologist Charles Tilly’s laconic quip that “war made the state, and the state made war” is bound to make the cut. Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg’s edited volume Does War Make States? therefore takes on one of the “big questions” of social science. The aim of the volume is “to provide an assessment that brings Tilly’s agenda forward” (p. 1). To that end, Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg have enlisted some of the biggest names in the field. In their Introduction, cowritten with Benno Teschke, they nicely situate Tilly’s work in a broader literature on state formation and summarize his claims about war making and state formation, which they single out “as Tilly’s most influential and enduring legacy” (p. 14).

The volume is divided into four parts. In the first – on Lineages – Teschke argues that Tilly lacks an explanation of warfare, and that this makes his argument about war making and state making circular. Thomas Ertman next presents the Prussian historian Otto Hintze’s “late” explanation of European state formation, which he sees as offering more nuance than Hintze’s “early” summary of the German notion of Das Primat der Aussenpolitik that so inspired Tilly.

The second part, Challenges, also contains two chapters. Hendrik Spruyt takes the Tillyan or bellicist literature to task for having neglected the unique European environment that produced the modern state. To understand the effects of warfare, we need to understand how outside pressure was mediated by these “preexisting social and institutional arrangements” (p. 90). Philip Gorski and Swaroop Sharma present a different...