Practice question · Multiple choice
Tilly describes the state as an unplanned by-product of warmaking rather than a planned project. What follows from this distinction for understanding why modern administrative structures arose?
Hints
- Did monarchs establish permanent bureaucracies as part of a forward-looking plan?
- What happened to emergency wartime revenue mechanisms once active fighting ceased?
Show the answer
C. Institutions persisted because extraction tools outlived conflict
Why
Rulers did not design administrative machinery to modernise society or maintain peace; rather, emergency fiscal improvisations hardened into permanent institutions. Treating the state as deliberate misreads an evolutionary process of survival as purposeful constitutional design.
Practise The Formation of the Modern State
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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…
- 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.
- Arrange these positions on state formation from the most Eurocentric application to the most careful.
- Tilly's comparison of state-making to organised crime is a rhetorical flourish rather than an analytic claim.