Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these positions on state formation from the most Eurocentric application to the most careful.
- Tilly's sequence explains European state formation and can be exported as a model
- Tilly's sequence explains Europe; elsewhere the form arrived through colonialism
- Tilly's sequence explains one competition among several possible outcomes, in Europe alone
- Tilly's sequence is the path every society follows towards statehood
Hints
- The most careful version claims the least.
- The version that mentions colonialism is more careful than the one that exports the model.
Show the answer
- Tilly's sequence is the path every society follows towards statehood
- Tilly's sequence explains European state formation and can be exported as a model
- Tilly's sequence explains Europe; elsewhere the form arrived through colonialism
- Tilly's sequence explains one competition among several possible outcomes, in Europe alone
Why
The gradient matters because the first version is still common in teaching. Most states outside Europe acquired the state form through colonial rule and decolonisation rather than through fiscal-military competition, which is a large part of why so many borders cut across the communities inside them.
Practise The Formation of the Modern State
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Political Science I is free to start.
More questions on The Formation of the Modern State
- Arrange these steps of Tilly's account in the order the mechanism runs.
- Why does Tilly say the origin of parliaments is fiscal before it is democratic?
- Which are true of authority in medieval Europe before the modern state?
- The territorial state was one competitor among several, rather than the inevitable outcome of European…
- Tilly describes the state as an unplanned by-product of warmaking rather than a planned project. What follows…
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to the MEDIEVAL order or to the MODERN state.
- Complete the account of state formation.
- Match each development to what it replaced.
- Tilly's comparison of state-making to organised crime is a rhetorical flourish rather than an analytic claim.