In doing research some years ago on the relationship between public finance and political transformation of the state,Footnote 1 I was struck by two interesting phenomena. One was the intensive collaboration between state and society over infrastructural facilities and even defense in England between 1600 and 1640, Japan between 1820 and 1853, and China between 1820 and 1840, periods when each state was encountering sustained fiscal difficulties. Such state–society collaboration in public goods provision such as famine relief, water control projects, and even national defense contributed significantly to the resilience of these early modern states with limited fiscal capacities.Footnote 2 The other was the popular demands to reduce military expenditure and the tax burden in England after the 1750s and in Japan between 1890 and 1895. The recent establishment of modern fiscal states had greatly enhanced the state capacity of both England and Japan, and yet the question of whether the state should spend more on domestic welfare or instead on foreign wars or military expansion was the subject of serious public debate. Late nineteenth-century China, by contrast, remained a traditional fiscal state; despite a somewhat enhanced state capacity, it faced much less acute conflict over such issues than did England or Japan.
The tension between domestic welfare and foreign wars poses challenges to the dominant paradigm that takes warfare as the driving force of state formation. Is the state capacity exhibited in domestic governance simply a byproduct of its capacity developed for fighting foreign wars? Or is the state’s ability to take care of domestic welfare different from its capacity to launch wars? Likewise, how shall we account for the surprisingly close collaboration of state and society in public goods provision given the hierarchical political order of the early modern state? What is its relationship to the popular contention that has figured so largely in our understanding of state formation and political change? What was the political nature – and the consequences – of the participation of social actors in public goods provision in nondemocratic systems in the early modern era? Attempting to answer these questions pushed me to reexamine state formation from the perspective of how the state legitimates its power by providing public goods necessary for domestic governance.
The state’s provision of public goods such as infrastructural facilities plays a vital role in both domestic governance and economic development.Footnote 3 In authoritarian regimes, the state often appeals to its performance in the safeguarding of socioeconomic welfare to justify a power that is not acquired through free and fair elections.Footnote 4 Even in well-governed democracies, the legitimacy of the state is also undergirded by its specific performance in social welfare.Footnote 5 The failure of a democratic state to meet the basic welfare needs of its citizens can increase the likelihood of its collapse.Footnote 6 The state’s performance in public goods provision is thus closely connected to the justification of state power to society. However, the implications of the state’s provision of public goods for state legitimacy and state–society interactions in the process of state formation have long been neglected in the literature, which instead focuses on the contribution of warfare, religion, and the networks of royal households to state formation.Footnote 7
Economic historians have recently noted that the development of a market economy benefits greatly from the provision of public goods by nonmarket means, particularly the active role played by local communities and regional associations.Footnote 8 Inspired by historical research on early modern England, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that good governance in Tudor and early Stuart England mainly resulted from the participation in local governance of the “middling sort of people”: yeomen, craftsmen, traders, and so on. These unsalaried amateurs – rather than salaried state bureaucrats – occupied the lower levels of the early modern English state by serving as parish officials and local constables; they also managed local public goods such as repairs of roads, bridges, and river banks, as well as providing poor relief.Footnote 9 The inclusion of transportation facilities, river control, and poor relief makes public goods more broadly defined than in the standard economic theory of state capacity, which mainly treats defense as a public good.Footnote 10 This inclusion, however, implies that we need to go beyond the contribution of local communities that Acemoglu and Robinson have highlighted. Large-scale and cross-regional infrastructural facilities are obviously beyond the ability of local communities. Moreover, in the case of cross-regional or cross-sectoral conflicts of interest, a higher authority above local society is a necessary condition of peaceful resolution.
The central theme of this book is to explore the political nature, process, and significance of the state’s involvement in public goods provision in state formation. I argue that such participation is vital to domestic governance, the legitimation of state power, and the development of state capacity. Instead of viewing state formation simply as a process of overcoming resistance from society, I emphasize an interdependence between the state and society in overcoming various problems of domestic welfare. In particular, I argue that the state’s role in public goods provision is intimately tied to its efforts to legitimate its power to society by proclaiming a duty to safeguard the public interest of the realm. This public interest-based discourse of state legitimation provides a common normative platform upon which both state and social actors can collaborate to complement their respective weaknesses in the public goods provision vital to domestic governance. The state capacity exhibited in and developed by such provision is of a different nature from that measured by fighting foreign wars.
Before I discuss the logic of case selection and comparability of England between 1533 and 1780, Japan between 1640 and 1895, and China between 1684 and 1911 in this comparative historical analysis of state formation, let us first look more closely at the meaning of public interest. In particular, the organic conception of public interest is the linchpin connecting provision of specific public goods to the general issues of domestic governance and state legitimacy in early modern politics, as is the conception of “passive rights” derived from the state’s duty to the public interest. This theoretical framework that connects discourses on public interest with state performance in domestic governance ultimately casts new light on the ramifications for state formation of state–society interactions surrounding public goods.
Public interest or the common good is widely held to be vital to state legitimacy.Footnote 11 In the early modern world, public interest was typically substantive; it was often associated with concrete public goods: relief from famine or disaster, or provision of infrastructural facilities, for example. But public interest as a concept is, and was, flexible. Its different dimensions might include domestic welfare, national interest, and/or a nonmaterial good, such as a particular religion or a specific conception of a good life.Footnote 12 Then as now, it could be stretched and adapted by state and social actors to respond to changing socioeconomic conditions.
In modern liberal democracies, public interest has become less substantive than its early modern counterpart. Neoliberalism often views public interest as a consequence of rights-conscious individual citizens pursuing their private interests in an idealized free market economy.Footnote 13 Liberals committed to egalitarianism take “public interest” as the necessary background condition of basic political and economic institutions so as to attain the goal of treating all citizens as equals.Footnote 14 In contrast, a substantive definition of public interest such as economic growth or social harmony is often found in present-day authoritarian regimes that stress a corporate conception of society as an organic whole rather than an assembly of rights-conscious individual citizens; Singapore or China comes to mind. This organic conception of public interest has been largely discredited among advocates of a liberal democracy that values inalienable individual rights or human rights over any substantive collective goal.
However, in early modern states, as in many nondemocratic states today, the public interest was conceived as an organic one that ties members of a hierarchical political system into one united entity. Official declarations by the state of its duty to protect public interest cannot be – and were not – taken at face value. Yet such proclaimed responsibility constituted much more than an empty discourse; it was embodied in providing specific public goods through various welfare policies. These included infrastructural facilities and particular institutions and measures to address welfare concerns of the populace. The state’s provision of concrete public goods was thus inherently connected to the general idea of public interest, and the acceptance by social actors of such norms of state legitimacy rested to a large extent upon the same conception of public interest.
The welfare of various communities and even that of individuals were in principle coherent components of an organically conceived public interest. The acknowledgment of the state of its duty to safeguard the organically conceived public interest therefore allowed social actors to engage with the authorities in domestic governance. This conception of public interest shared by both state and social actors thence constituted a common normative platform upon which state and society could interact over how to deliver concrete public goods to safeguard the public interest in specific circumstances. In this way, the obligation of the state to protect the public interest opened up a space for political participation as it entailed certain rights to the subordinates; most importantly, a right to petition the authorities for redressing welfare grievances so as to safeguard public interest. Such rights were, however, passive, as they were derived from the obligation of the state to protect the public interest.
In contrast, active rights, at the level either of the local community or of the individual, are conceived as independent of the state.Footnote 15 While passive rights are derived from obligation, active rights are often held to be entitlements of individuals. Examples of such inalienable rights include absolute private property rights or human rights, or freedom of conscience in religion. These are crucial to justify political constraints on the sovereign viewed as a delegate of the people.Footnote 16 Popular protests instigated by theories of active rights were revolutionary because they were not simply based upon obligations of the existing state authority.Footnote 17 Such theories were crucial to justify armed resistance to kings of another faith in the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe.Footnote 18
This conception of active rights independent of the state has greatly influenced the classic work on contentious politics, which considers the rise of democracy and expansion of citizen rights in Western Europe as victories attained by rights-conscious social movements.Footnote 19 This scholarship accordingly views nondemocratic state regimes as repressive and their state–society relationships as confrontational.Footnote 20 However, the intellectual history of theories of active rights is different from the political and social history of popular contention in Western Europe. Let us look briefly at how this unfolded in the classic example of England and consider how a different understanding of this dynamic might lead us to rethink both contention and state formation.
After 1688 and well into the nineteenth century, the protests and collective actions justified by active natural rights were persistently repudiated by the English state. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, they were characterized as dangerous “continental radicalism” or “republican radicalism,” and leaders and organizers faced charges of sedition and even high treason.Footnote 21 Demands made by the national Chartist petition campaigns for universal manhood suffrage, repeal of property qualifications in elections, an annual Parliament, and secret ballots were likewise rejected, as the state authorities could not accept their grounding in an active conception of rights.Footnote 22 This hostility on the part of the state forced even radical petitioners to phrase their demands as based on passively conceived rights: imagined Saxon constitutional rights, the rights of “free-born English,” or the Bills of Rights of 1688.Footnote 23 Dressing radical political demands in the familiar and relatively acceptable vocabulary of passive rights entailed by the state’s duty to protect the public interest made such claims less threatening to the authorities and more likely to receive a hearing.
The calls to reform parliamentary elections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to make Parliament more representative of an industrializing nation and thus to better serve the public interest were largely presented upon the basis of passive rights; claims framed in this way resonated with reform-minded ruling elites as well.Footnote 24 In England in the early nineteenth century, popular petitioners often invoked the state or the crown as the “Father of the people” who was bound to protect the livelihood of the ruled, albeit on a much larger scale in an industrializing economy.Footnote 25 Organizers of petitions consciously presented the welfare grievances of the working class and middle class as common components of the organically conceived public interest.Footnote 26 In response, the English state accommodated redress of specific welfare grievances such as high food prices, factory conditions, and unemployment.Footnote 27 The idea that a government should safeguard the organically conceived public interest remained strong and politically efficacious in England even in the late nineteenth century, despite facing increasing challenges from radical advocates of inalienable individual rights.Footnote 28
Given the distinction between passive and active rights and the state’s different reactions to them, we need to reexamine the role of passive rights in popular contention in England before the mid-nineteenth century. For this time period, the work of Margaret Somers has been particularly influential, especially her careful examination of the legal rights to which textile workers appealed in demanding wage and apprenticeship regulations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such contention was truly important in the transition toward democracy; however, these rights should not be understood as actively conceived general citizen rights, which became dominant largely after the late nineteenth century.Footnote 29 They were in fact still passive rights granted by the Tudor Statute of Artificers, which incorporated the state’s paternalistic responsibility to protect labor’s livelihood as a component of the organically imagined public interest of the realm.
The difference between passive and active rights is also important in recognizing continuity and discontinuity in popular contention. Between the 1760s and 1830s, both the volume and number of signatures on petitions presented to Parliament increased dramatically.Footnote 30 Charles Tilly views the remarkable rise of contentious collective actions on a national scale in eighteenth-century England as representing a discontinuous development of contentious claim-making from local to national and from specific issues to general political concerns.Footnote 31 However, growth in the scale and organization of contentious collective actions does not necessarily imply discontinuity in popular political participation if petitions were about redressing specific welfare grievances and the claims made were still justified by the political duty of the state to safeguard the organically conceived public interest. The dominance of passive rights derived from the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest in England before the mid-nineteenth century suggests that we should not underestimate the significance of passive rights to political change.
The responsibility of the state to the public interest empowers subordinates to expect or even demand that the state fulfill its proclaimed duty through popular petitioning and even protests. Social actors who justify their claims by terms acceptable to the state are not necessarily obedient subjects. Instead, the political duty of the state to protect the public interest allowed and even invited society to make rightful – that is, passive right – claims on the state. Contentious collective actions were thus often a means to remind the state to fulfill its officially proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest or to contest the effectiveness of specific state welfare policies. Even in nondemocratic states, the significant expansion of popular political participation in the form of collective petitioning or protests thence does not necessarily indicate resistance to or rejection of state authority if such protests are justified by the duty of the state to protect the public interest.Footnote 32
State formation, then, is a political process in which state and social actors interact upon a common platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation and contend over how to provide specific public goods essential for domestic governance and how to safeguard that public interest by redressing grievances. Moreover, passive rights derived from a state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest can be found not only in early modern England, but also in non-Western countries such as Tokugawa Japan and Qing China; this is not a peculiarly English or European phenomenon. Such a comparative investigation of state formation through public goods provision can thus help us better reconceptualize the relationship between state formation and popular contention and build a more general and robust model of state formation.
We cannot properly understand state–society collaboration in public goods provision, however, if we view the state–society relationship as fundamentally confrontational before the rise of liberal democracy. Such a vision grows out of understanding the state mainly as a violent machine: “war makes the state.”Footnote 33 According to this bellicist view, the state first emerged through a series of wars to wipe out political rivals, and the growth of the state apparatus in Europe is often attributed to the increasing cost of war, particularly after the military revolution in the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 34 The incessant wars in Europe have been linked to the political incentives of rulers to prize glory.Footnote 35 Although Charles Tilly distinguishes two different methods used by the state to extract resources from society, a capital-intensive one in the capitalist mode of economy and a coercion-intensive one in less commercialized economies, both serve the same purpose of fighting wars.Footnote 36 Some scholars have shifted the focus from fighting foreign wars to suppressing domestic opponents; however, they continue to view the state mainly in terms of violence.Footnote 37
This important body of scholarship has taught us much about how states came into being, how they acquired many of their effective powers, and how violence plays an inescapable role in politics. This paradigm, which is derived largely from European experiences, has also been applied to non-European parts of the world such as ancient China and Latin America.Footnote 38 Yet the intense focus on war and coercion has in other ways skewed our understanding of the nature of the early modern state and its relations with society, and has overlooked the political space of participation provided by the very terms of state legitimacy.
From a methodological perspective, the bellicist approach suffers from a subtle yet serious problem of selection bias caused by the preference in traditional political history for “high politics.”Footnote 39 The revenue and spending recorded by the central government in early modern times were mainly for wars and diplomacy; yet many important state functions, such as local welfare provision, typically occurred outside the center, though not isolated from the guidance and coordination of the central government. This is particularly the case in a decentralized fiscal system in which a great deal of the funds spent on local infrastructure or welfare provision were raised and spent locally without going through the central government.Footnote 40 Theories of state formation built upon this kind of traditional political history thus tend to give too much weight to the contribution of warfare.
The stress on violence as the driving force of state formation makes the state appear as an entity externally imposed upon society. Society for its own self-protection has to resist the state’s ever-increasing demands for resources and penetration; such resistance manifests itself in various forms of anti-tax protests and social movements.Footnote 41 However, to conceive the state–society relationship only in confrontational terms makes it hard to understand the state’s role in providing public goods, as well as social actors’ demands that the state intervene in issues related to the public welfare of communities.
One solution to this problem is to look at the social origins of state power. In this view, the provision of public goods by the state resulted from demands by an assertive and strong society. For example, Michael Mann argues that the early modern state prior to the availability of modern communication and bureaucratic techniques could still achieve high “infrastructural power” by seeking society’s cooperation and consent; such consent endowed the early modern state with a better capacity to coordinate social resources and implement policies than would be the case with a despotic state that only relied upon violence.Footnote 42 But how could the state collaborate with society if the state is conceived by society primarily as a machine of violence?
Neoclassical political economists have sought answers in the bargaining power of society over the state. If property-owning elites could force the state to grant political concessions by allowing more representation and autonomy in local governance, they would be willing to contribute money to the state, which enhances the infrastructural power of the state.Footnote 43 If economic elites consider the political agenda of the state to go against their interests, they could block the efforts of the state to develop capacity, leading to a weak state.Footnote 44 In Western Europe, it has been argued, where the society still possessed late medieval political legacies such as rural assemblies, urban self-governments, and territorially based representative bodies, these institutions could force the ruler to make political concessions in return for the consent to contribute taxes. The negotiations produced a constitutionalist state with strong infrastructural power. In contrast, if the state could depend upon foreign loans or nontax revenue to suppress resistance, then absolutist regimes would emerge, despite their limited capacity to mobilize resources from society.Footnote 45
In this view, despotic states would prevail in regions lacking a tradition of self-governance and representative bodies; such societies would have little bargaining power vis-à-vis the state. However, the stress on the social origins of state capacity leaves little space to even imagine the state’s autonomous role in domestic governance and public goods provision. In constitutionalist regimes, these would be the responsibility of self-governed local communities, whereas despotic states would only be interested in extracting resources from society.
Acemoglu and Robinson have further proposed a model of coevolution of state and society so as to explain the emergence of a strong state without appealing excessively to the negotiating power of society vis-à-vis the state. In this model, the active participation in local governance by social actors could effectively defend the interests of society against the intruding state. Social actors were thus not afraid to see state capacity develop. Instead, once the national economy became integrated, local actors would demand the state provide large-scale public goods.Footnote 46 State capacity thence grew as a result of competition with an assertive civil society that had enough power to tame, rather than merely bargain with, the leviathan in order to advance the interests of society. Such coevolution ultimately gives birth to what they call “inclusive political institutions” in which the state has a strong capacity to deliver public goods, yet political power is widely enough distributed to make the state accountable to society.
The inclusive state, which for Acemoglu and Robinson is exemplified by Tudor and early Stuart England, differs from both the despotic state, whose capacity is constrained by its lack of accountability to society, and the weak state, which cannot promote the public interest either due to resistance from powerful social groups, or because the weakness of society precludes the competition that would stimulate state capacity.Footnote 47 Steven Pincus and James Robinson demonstrate that such mutually reinforcing interactions between local political participation and the development of state capacity in England continued with the ascendance of parliamentary sovereignty after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, and the fiscal-military state in Britain also contributed significantly to domestic welfare improvement, which Joanna Innes has called the domestic face of the military-fiscal state.Footnote 48
However, this theory of the coevolution of state and society still attributes public goods provision to local self-governance. It neglects fundamental differences between local governance in small communities and domestic governance of a country that consists of various regions. Examination of the actual provision of large-scale cross-regional public goods shows that the inherent free-rider problem is often resolved by the use of compulsory means to raise money, not by depending upon the voluntary collaboration of the communities at stake. The political authority of the state is indispensable to such compulsory collection of funds backed up by the threat of coercive power.Footnote 49 Meanwhile, interregional or intercommunal conflicts of interest in public goods provision are quite common, and local authorities are frequently incapable of resolving them. In other words, the wide dispersion of political power in a society does not necessarily imply a consensus held across communities or across the social spectrum on how to resolve clashing interests and secure the general interest of society. The authority of the state is a necessary condition for a fair and impartial resolution of interregional and intersectoral conflicts of interest.
What motivates the state to participate in the creation and management of large-scale infrastructural facilities that local communities are unable to afford and to intervene in conflicts of interest over public goods provision? Acemoglu suggests that fiscal incentives may lead the state to initiate investment in public goods provision even without demands by social actors; this self-interested motivation can be applied to both despotic and inclusive states.Footnote 50 State investments in public goods provision do contribute to meeting fiscal need, particularly by consolidating a future tax base through famine relief or repairing infrastructural facilities. However, fiscal need is not the only purpose of the state in public goods provision. For example, the state’s arbitration of conflicts of interest among different communities is not determined by its fiscal needs. Why should communities expect the state to provide impartial arbitration in interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest if that state is perceived by social actors as simply a violent machine or revenue maximizer?
Therefore, in order to fully understand the state’s involvement in public goods provision for domestic governance, we need to go beyond a positivist understanding of the state and investigate how the state legitimates its power to society by claiming to safeguard the public interest of society. If such terms are accepted by society, they would then serve as a common platform on which society and state could interact for the provision of public goods. In this manner, the political discourse on state legitimacy studied by intellectual historians and political theorists can be linked to the empirical research on public goods conducted by socioeconomic historians. Let us thus turn to the complex question of state legitimation.
Legitimation is one crucial component in the Weberian definition of the state as a governing apparatus that monopolizes the legitimate use of violence over a delimited territory.Footnote 51 The legitimacy in Weber’s theory is either source based (such as the charisma of the leader or the established laws) or procedurally derived (such as a bureaucracy or a democracy with fair and competitive elections).Footnote 52 Both these conceptions, however, suggest a one-directional conveyance of authority from the ruler to the ruled; neither says anything about how such transmitted or presented legitimacy is evaluated and accepted by the ruled. The appeal to popular belief to demonstrate state legitimacy runs the danger of circular argumentation: The state is legitimate because the people believe in it, and the people believe in a legitimate state.Footnote 53 Thus the measurement of legitimacy in survey research in terms of social actors’ belief in state authority may not capture the substance of legitimacy in practice.Footnote 54
Furthermore, a perfectly source-based or procedure-based state legitimacy can produce absurd consequences in practice: for example, rules of imperial succession that put an infant on the throne.Footnote 55 This top-down, one-directional conception of legitimacy can also be found in the study of how the state appeals to ideological slogans, symbols, rituals, or the hiring of Western experts to strengthen its legitimacy.Footnote 56 Yet legitimacy that rests upon symbolic power can be superficial and even misleading if it cannot secure the substantive consent of social actors. As James Scott has pointed out, the public transcript of legitimacy in authoritarian states is often mocked and ridiculed by subordinates who appear obedient and respectful to authority on public occasions.Footnote 57
State legitimacy has not been taken seriously in classic Marxist scholarship, which views the state simply as a machine of suppression wielded by the dominant class.Footnote 58 Scholars of state autonomy and state capacity treat legitimacy as a derivative product of a state that is capable of effectively maintaining social order and defeating foreign threats. Theda Skocpol contends that legitimacy only refers to acceptance of state authority by the politically dominant class. In this light, the loss of legitimacy is equivalent to the alienation of the dominant class to the state.Footnote 59 If the autonomy and capacity of the state are simply instrumental to achieving the goal(s) set by state actors, then the embeddedness of an autonomous state as emphasized by Peter Evans mainly serves the function of incorporating expert knowledge from dynamic classes, such as drawing on industrialists in making effective development policies.Footnote 60 However, this elite-based approach to state legitimacy underestimates its general significance and ignores the possibility that social actors outside the politically dominant class could turn the discourse of state legitimacy to negotiate with the state.
A proper understanding of state legitimacy is thus crucial to fully appreciate the importance of state autonomy. In the case of contemporary advanced capitalist societies, Gramsci argues that there is a sophisticated combination of coercion and consent. The cultural hegemony of the ruling class is embodied in its ability to speak as the representative of the general interest of society. However, this hegemonic class does so by relying upon the state to engineer the consent of the rest of society to the dominance of the ruling class as the representative of public interest to the rest of society.Footnote 61 Both Ralph Miliband and Bob Jessop point out that the state in an advanced capitalist society proclaims itself as the “guardian of the good of all” or the “national interest,” rather than as a servant of the narrow interest of the capitalist class.Footnote 62 However, consent is not the only possible result of the autonomy of the state defined by its duty to safeguard the public interest; such a definition can serve as a platform from which subordinates are able to criticize the dominant class for sacrificing the public interest to its own narrow interest.
The importance of the general interest or public good of the society as the normative basis of state legitimacy is not unique to modern capitalist society. We can trace its historical roots in the process of state formation. From the late medieval era, political discourse on the meaning of kingship in Western Europe stressed the guarding of the common good or public interest of the kingdom or city-state.Footnote 63 The monarch was presented as a public figure who would safeguard the public interest, which was different from the monarch as a private person.Footnote 64 The rise of absolutism in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also carried a normative implication that the monarch as the public figure of sovereign power had ultimate political authority within the territory under his or her jurisdiction.Footnote 65 Even pro-absolutist political thinkers such as Hobbes insisted that the divinely ordained absolute sovereign was subject to the duty to “procure the common interest” embodied in the welfare of the subjects: the “commonweal” or “commonwealth.”Footnote 66
Recognition of the vital connection between the state’s responsibility for the public interest and its legitimation is important to both normative and empirical studies of the state. When the state provides public goods and services that go beyond the capacity of local communities, its coercive power, exemplified in the collection of taxes, can be justified to and accepted by the ruled. Meanwhile, to the extent that it is perceived as protecting the general welfare of society, the state becomes morally autonomous of the special interests of particular social groups or classes. This is the normative basis for state autonomy.
Empirically, the grounding of state legitimacy in public interest is connected to specific state performance in addressing actual welfare problems caused by famine, calamities, economic disruptions, and so on. In such an organically conceived public interest, the concrete common interests of communities are viewed as integral components of the general interest. However, the complex and multifaceted linkages between public interest and welfare concerns in specific circumstances imply that the discourse over public interest is both interactional between state and society and dynamic, as socioeconomic changes often disrupt the extant balance between general interest and particular interests. Meanwhile, the scale and scope of “public” in the term “public interest” vary greatly. Different scales of public goods exist, ranging from those common to a small community or a city-state; to those of concern to multiple regions consisting of many different communities; and finally to those associated with the entire realm under the jurisdiction of the state. The complicated relationships between these different levels compound the negotiation and contestation between state and social actors over how to safeguard the “public interest” in specific circumstances.
Given this interdependence between state and society, state capacity should not be measured only by the amount of resources directly mobilized by the state for fighting foreign wars or held solely at the discretion of the central government.Footnote 67 The capacity exhibited in providing public goods for domestic welfare shows that the state could appeal to its normative justification of power to mobilize resources across regions for the purpose of safeguarding the public interest; and in so doing it could rely on broad cooperation from social actors. Such cooperation, predicated upon sufficient acceptance of state claims to legitimacy, complements the state’s ability to directly deliver public goods, which in early modern states is rarely adequate. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation is thus performance based or outcome based.Footnote 68
Nevertheless, the measurement of such performance is not monopolized by the state, because the state’s efficacy in public goods provision and redress of specific welfare grievances can be measured and evaluated by social actors independent of the state. This is crucial to understand the interactions between state and society upon a common platform of state legitimacy. An empty belly cannot be filled with symbolic power or empty words; nor can the state entirely control or monopolize the interpretation of a legitimacy evaluated by its delivery of public goods. Social actors with specific stakes can judge the state’s performance independent of the official discourse or ideology; more importantly, they have some room to contest rightfully whether or not the state is fulfilling its proclaimed duty in concrete welfare issues. Performance-based state legitimacy therefore does not necessarily imply rejection of political participation.
The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation that is embodied in concrete public goods provision thence serves as a common normative platform to allow state and society to interact in two opposite directions. On the one hand, the state can initiate or intervene in large-scale public goods provision in the name of serving the public interest. On the other hand, social actors are legally and morally justified in calling on the state to discharge its acknowledged responsibility to resolve specific welfare grievances. For example, when a market economy threatens the social order, social actors can demand that the state protect society from being ruined by unregulated market forces.Footnote 69 Social actors can also contest the fairness of the state’s adjudication of interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest in similar terms, as both parties in disputes are members of a political community tied together by an organically conceived public interest. Because in practice the connections between specific welfare issues and the “public interest” are complex, such state–society interactions are processes of negotiation and even contestation, in which neither state nor social actors have total control over the interpretation of public interest.
These two-directional state–society interactions thus represent an important space of political participation for both elites and nonelites. On the one hand, such engagement with the state in the form of popular petitions or even protests is not in essence a challenge to state authority: It rests upon the same set of norms regarding the duties of the state. Contention does not automatically imply rejection of state authority. This contrasts sharply with the appeal to a “hidden transcript” to evade the state or the use of passive resistance to undermine the state’s authority, as James Scott has brilliantly described.Footnote 70 On the other hand, its roots in concrete policies and particular interests make such contestation different in nature from the debates over general political ideas or abstract principles held in the print media or coffee houses of eighteenth-century Western Europe described by Habermas.Footnote 71 Nonetheless, its intimate connection to state legitimacy lends it a general political significance. Petitioning and contentious claims over specific welfare grievances justified by the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation are therefore inherent components of the political process of state formation.
Having proposed this theory of state formation in which a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation serves as a common basis for state–society collaboration in public goods provision, how might one test it? For this purpose, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of England between 1533 and 1780, Japan between 1640 and 1895, and China between 1684 and 1911. Each case has been prominent in the scholarship on state formation. Just as importantly, these are all cases with an extensive historical literature, as well as rich primary sources, in languages of which I have a reasonably good command. Relatively equal familiarity with the cases studied and competence in their respective scholarships are, I would argue, vital to a truly contextualized comparative analysis.Footnote 72 The empirical strategy adopted throughout is to delve deeply into the respective historical contexts of state formation and bring each case into dialogue with the others. This methodology of contextualized comparative historical analysis allows me to identify similar patterns across seemingly different cases, as well as continuity and discontinuity in the development of state–society interactions. The theory of state formation developed herein is thus more general in nature, but still well grounded in historical context. Moreover, by integrating domestic governance with state legitimacy, it casts new light on the transition from early modern to modern politics; in particular, it helps us rethink the nature and role of popular contention in that process.
The analysis is divided into two parts. Part I examines an earlier period for each state and focuses on how public goods provision secured state legitimacy in domestic governance. Part II looks at a later period in which the understanding of the public interest expanded to include nonmaterial dimensions, and how that expansion transformed state–society interactions. Let us begin with the earlier episodes: Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840.
These three cases are comparable in important ways in examining state formation from the perspective of public goods provision in domestic governance. All were early modern states that legitimated their power by safeguarding an organically conceived public interest that entailed passive rights to subordinates. None was involved in consecutive and expensive foreign wars, so state power was mainly used for domestic governance and public interest was defined primarily in terms of domestic welfare. Moreover, the interactions between each state and society in public goods provision crucial to domestic governance were largely independent from each other. In contrast to the focus on the extraction of resources in the conventional scholarship of state formation and state capacity, I pay special attention to the spending on public goods provision vital to domestic governance and maintenance of social order.
These three cases varied greatly in territorial size, population, political institutions, and culture. In particular, early modern England and Tokugawa Japan were much smaller than Qing China. Still, their territorial scale was large enough to generate many cross-regional welfare problems that self-governed local communities simply could not resolve by themselves. Furthermore, all had serious defects in their respective fiscal institutions. Decentralized fiscal systems seriously weakened the fiscal capacity of the royal government in early modern England and the shogunate in Tokugawa Japan. The Qing state possessed a centrally managed fiscal system, yet its fiscal capacity was restricted. This was due to the fixed quota in both tax collection and government spending, as well as a rigid fiscal management that did not give even provincial governments independent budgets.
Given the inadequacy of state capacity to fulfill state obligations, a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was crucial to domestic governance and is common to these three cases. Upon this normative platform shared by state and social actors, similar patterns appear of state–society collaboration to deliver public goods vital to domestic governance. The direction of the collaboration, however, might differ. In Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan, the limitations of self-governed communities in building and maintaining large-scale public infrastructure were complemented by intervention from the royal government and the shogunate. In Qing China, the weakness imposed by a rigid central fiscal system was to some extent compensated by the active local participation in public goods provision encouraged by the Qing state. This common pattern of state–society collaboration was the major cause of the relatively good governance achieved in all three cases, despite the quite limited fiscal capacity of each state relative to its territory and obligations. The empirical identification of such similar patterns across mutually independent cases strengthens the generality of the theory of state formation that integrates domestic governance with state legitimacy. The comparative methodology used here is to uncover congruence among apparently different cases.Footnote 73
In examining the resilience of the early modern state with a weak fiscal capacity, the beginning and end year of each earlier episode are determined by the nature of the state and its circumstances. None was engaged in consecutive and expensive warfare. Each case had an early modern state characterized by the institutionalization of a governing apparatus that asserted sovereign power over a delimited territory. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, the emergence of the early modern state is a watershed in the development of the state, one that is embodied in the usage of the term “state” in its modern sense.Footnote 74 The early modern state is modern in the political sense as the state is conceived as an impersonal governing apparatus, which distinguishes itself from the ruler as a private person. It is early modern as it has not yet developed centralized institutions of public finance to regulate economy and society. The characterization of the early modern state as such does not imply a teleological trajectory to a modern state. A transformation into a modern state, as well as the resilience of an early modern state, can occur in different historical circumstances at different times.
The treatment of England (1533–1640) starts from the break with Rome that made the crown the head of both the secular government and the Church of England. England’s involvement in continental power struggles during this time was limited in both scale and duration, which contrasted sharply with the almost continual and increasingly expensive foreign wars that it fought with France and its allies after the Glorious Revolution in 1688.Footnote 75 In Tudor England, by the mid-sixteenth century, increasingly complex formal procedures in administration and legislation led to exponential growth in the amount of written documentation – proclamations, writs, and statutes – involved in the process of transmitting information and orders between the center and local offices. The personal rule of the monarch became impractical. The “Tudor revolution in government” described by G. R. Elton captures the core feature of this institutionalization of the royal government, even though the speed of institutional development and the degree of continuity before and after Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) are debated.Footnote 76
By the late sixteenth century, the English state had transformed into an impersonalized governing institution clearly distinct from the monarch as a person.Footnote 77 As Michael Braddick has pointed out, the English state in the early seventeenth century referred to the entire political apparatus; the center acted as the ultimate political authority and coordinated a network of offices within a delimited territory; and serving the public interest of the realm was held to be the duty of officeholders.Footnote 78 The royal government inculcated such a public duty into officeholders across the country even though they were unsalaried. Over time, the discourse of public interest engendered a sense of public duty among officeholders and a significant degree of public trust in the offices of the state, even though corruption remained widespread in practice.Footnote 79
Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) was not a tributary state of Qing China or any other power. After suppressing the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638, Tokugawa Japan entered into the Great Domestic Peace (tenka taihei; 1640–1853), the period examined as our first episode for Japan. This is a rare case of state formation in peaceful times without external wars at all. The year 1640 represented the beginning of the transition of the Tokugawa regime from a system of military mobilization to one of civil administration, and of the samurai from mostly illiterate warriors to well-educated administrators.Footnote 80
The formation of the early modern state in Tokugawa Japan was characterized by parallel processes of state formation both in domains governed by lords known as daimyo and in territory directly governed by the bakufu (the shogunate). In the domestic peace that ensued after 1640, the political authority of both the shogun and the daimyo was justified by safeguarding the welfare of the subjects in the territory under their respective rulership.Footnote 81 With the increasing complexity of the economic and social landscape over the course of the eighteenth century, both the shogunal and domain governments became more institutionalized. From the early eighteenth century onward, collective deliberation dominated the making of major policies in both the shogunate and domain governments; governance was based upon a massive corpus of codified laws and administrative regulations and precedents.Footnote 82 In consequence, the shogunate and ruling daimyo households (ie) emerged as impersonal governing apparatuses distinct from the shogun or daimyo as a private person.
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, both shogun and daimyo often used the term kokka (guojia in Chinese), or “state,” to characterize the impersonal institutional nature of the governing apparatuses upon which they relied to rule their respective territories. Major daimyo, particularly the “outside” (tozama) daimyo, were autonomous in legislation and could even mete out the death penalty to their subjects without the sanction of the shogunate.Footnote 83 Nonetheless, the use of kokka by daimyo and their retainer-officials should not be taken to mean “sovereign state”; they were well aware that they were subject to the shogunate as the higher political authority in many important aspects such as mintage of currency, foreign relations, map-making, and national defense.Footnote 84
To characterize the Tokugawa political system as a “composite state” or even a conglomeration of independent states ruled respectively by the shogunate and various daimyo recognizes the autonomy of daimyo in their own territories, particularly before the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 85 By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the growth in the shogunate’s authority over daimyo, not only in national defense but also in safeguarding the wider domestic welfare across the boundaries of domains, changed the political nature of their relationship. Indeed, the delegation theory of shogunal power developed by the late eighteenth century highlighted that the normative basis of the shogunal authority over daimyo rested upon the duty of the shogunate to protect the public interest of Japan on behalf of the emperor.Footnote 86 This later Tokugawa state was very similar to a quasi-federal state in which the shogunate served as the higher political authority over daimyo.Footnote 87
In China, the state as an impersonal apparatus of governance appeared earlier than it did in Tudor England or Tokugawa Japan. The meaning of the term guojia in China underwent similar changes to the word “state” in English: From originally referring to the status and condition of the emperor, it came to refer to a set of impersonal governing institutions. Before the middle of the Tang dynasty (618–907), guojia was often used to refer to the emperor himself or the emperor’s household.Footnote 88 By the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), it alluded to the governing institution as an impersonal entity that separated the emperorship as a public figure from the emperor as a private person.Footnote 89
The institutionalization and centralization of the state formed one important political outcome of the process known as the ‘Tang–Song transition’ (eighth through tenth centuries).Footnote 90 As the historian Miyazaki Ichisada has emphasized, the absolute authority of the emperor did not imply a personal autocracy. Rather, it signified the highest political authority of the central government in the use of political power in localities and civilian control of the armed forces, which depended upon fiscal resources allocated by the central government.Footnote 91 Scholar-officials in the Northern Song thus could publicly proclaim that they and the emperor “jointly governed the realm” (gongzhi tianxia) as officials with a public duty rather than as personal servants of the emperor.Footnote 92 In particular, policy-making was based upon huge amounts of information in the form of written memorials submitted from regional governments and of official archives held by the central government. The sheer size of this documentation constituted a formidable information constraint on the arbitrary use of personal power by the emperor, no matter how intelligent and hard-working he was.Footnote 93
The emergence of the early modern state after the Tang–Song transition thence marked a watershed in state formation in China. The degree of institutionalization in governance and the importance of domestic welfare to state legitimacy made the state thereafter qualitatively different from that found in previous dynasties.Footnote 94 However, these normative and institutional constraints on the personal power of the emperor are neglected by many social scientists who view the emperor as having a high degree of despotic power: He “owned the whole of China and could do as he wished with any individual or group within his domain.”Footnote 95 Such an early modern state as an impersonal governing apparatus that justified its power by protecting domestic welfare was in general sustained into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).Footnote 96
In Qing China, large-scale military campaigns came to an end after the suppression of the Three Feudatories Rebellion and the conquest of Taiwan in the early 1680s. Between 1684 and 1840, the period considered here, there were no major civil wars within China proper.Footnote 97 The Qing government did launch military campaigns on its frontiers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but these wars did not present significant fiscal difficulty.Footnote 98 Likewise, it had adequate fiscal capacity and military power to suppress domestic rebellions, including the White Lotus Rebellion between 1795 and 1805.Footnote 99 Its performance in providing public goods for domestic governance was thence the key to the legitimacy of the Qing state.
To safeguard public interest in domestic welfare was by no means a simple task for these states, as all experienced significant socioeconomic changes during the respective periods examined here: integration of the domestic market, commercialization of agriculture, urban expansion, and population mobility, not to mention an increasing literacy rate that fostered a rising political consciousness among the populace. Although the degree of development of the market economy varied, each state had to face serious social problems caused by fluctuations in the markets and the growth of interregional trade, such as the vulnerability of urban populations to high food prices. Increasing interregional and intergroup conflicts of interest threatened social order. R. Bin Wong contends that the state’s commitments to domestic governance and social welfare were unique to state formation in China, whereas European states were committed to extracting resources for fighting wars and left the maintenance of social order and welfare provision to social elites and the church.Footnote 100 But the imperative to maintain “good governance” in a commercially dynamic society was common to all three states.
Each earlier episode ends with events that heralded a period of great challenge that threatened the state’s ability to meet its basic obligations to the public interest and thus its legitimacy. The terminal year for England (1640) is set prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War (1642–1651), which marked the beginning of great changes both in public finance and in the political system. The terminal years for Japan (1853) and China (1840) are set at the times of their respective forced “openings” by Western powers. This framing thus highlights the indigenous sources of the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation in the two non-Western cases.
Following these challenges, each state undertook reform of its institutions so as to enhance its fiscal capacity under new socioeconomic conditions; we see this to different degrees in England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911. Despite great historical events, such as the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion, the state’s proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest continued to serve as a common normative platform across these three cases. State–society interactions centered on provision of public goods in the earlier episodes therefore provide crucial background to identify both continuity and discontinuity in such interactions in the later episodes under the new circumstances of enhancing state capacity, industrialization, and urban development. The terminal years for the later episodes are set by a juncture of “great divergence” in state development. In England and Japan, large-scale collective petitions that appealed to the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest began to demand fundamental political reforms; in so doing, they ushered in the transition to a modern state. In China, such petitions of public grievance did not appear until 1907, and were quickly followed by the final collapse of the imperial state in 1911. The comparative methodology used here is to explain divergent outcomes in state–society interactions in the new circumstances that emerged from a common basis: the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation.
In these later episodes, despite important changes, the continuity in the pattern of state–society interaction around domestic welfare was remarkable, and occurred regardless of whether there were changes to sovereignty. The challenge for the state to safeguard domestic welfare was particularly serious in England due to rapid economic integration and industrial development after 1640, and especially after 1700. In Meiji Japan, the traditional ideology of benevolent rule remained influential in spite of great efforts to learn from the West and the implementation of programs of modernization. The Qing state also met new challenges in providing public goods for domestic governance under changed socioeconomic circumstances with its decentralized fiscal operation. In all these three cases, the degree of organization of social actors and the resources deployed by them to participate in public goods provision increased dramatically; moreover, both were permitted and even encouraged by the state. State–society interactions over public goods provision related to domestic welfare continued as before, even though the capacity of social actors in public goods provision increased significantly.
Where discontinuity in such participation occurred, it was mainly caused by tension among different dimensions of the public interest; that is, when dimensions other than domestic welfare became prominent. A passive conception of rights derived from the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation could greatly expand political participation when state–society interactions were compounded by diverse dimensions of the public interest. In England and Japan, new types of claims and demands emerged in the form of collective petitions of public grievances that were not about specific material concerns; they were made, however, upon the same basis of state responsibility for the public interest. In England between 1640 and 1642 and again in 1679–1680, the issue of “true Christianity” was held by many – including both elites and common people – as a “public good” that the sovereign had the duty to protect. In Japan, the unequal treaties with Western powers signed by the shogunate and inherited by the Meiji government were widely considered by contemporary Japanese as a “national dishonor” or “national shame” that was contrary to the public interest of Japan.
More importantly, issues of nonmaterial public good in both England and Japan generated great conflict between two dimensions of the public interest: general domestic welfare and international power struggles. Should the state use its greatly enhanced fiscal capacity more for improving domestic welfare or for military spending for imperial wars? This conflict constitutes a vital backdrop if we are to understand how the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation instigated massive but lawful cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievances that demanded fundamental political reforms: the parliamentary reform in England between the 1760s and 1780s, and the demand to establish the Diet as the institution of representation in Japan between the 1870s and 1880s. In both cases, the cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions of public grievances greatly stimulated the development of associational activities and the public deliberation of general issues of public interest in mass media such as newspapers and printed pamphlets. People involved in these heated debates over general political issues, however, agreed on the state’s duty to protect that public interest. The development of a public sphere is therefore intimately connected to severe conflicts among different dimensions of the public interest. Great expansion of the public sphere took place within the framework of state legitimacy, and did not necessarily reject state authority. The terminal years for England and Japan are thus set at 1780 and 1895, respectively.
Qing China presents a sharp contrast. The Qing state after suppressing the Taiping, Nian, and Muslim rebellions also enhanced its fiscal capacity. This allowed it to resume its role in collaborating with social actors to deliver public goods to maintain domestic governance in the new circumstances of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, state legitimacy, unlike that in England or Japan, continued to be tied primarily to the public interest understood in terms of domestic welfare. Before the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), neither issues of nonmaterial public good nor a conflict between the international and domestic dimensions of the public interest emerged to generate collective petitions of public grievance. Qing China in the late nineteenth century thence demonstrates the strong resilience of an early modern state that legitimated its power by taking care of general domestic welfare; this resilience was crushed only by international pressure after 1895. The terminal year for China is the fall of the Qing state in 1911.
In order to further strengthen the causal argument that tensions between the domestic and international dimensions of the public interest are the necessary condition for instigating cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions for fundamental political changes still justified by the terms of state legitimacy, I adopt a natural experiment approach. I take the astronomical indemnities imposed on China due to a series of events between the Qing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Incident (1899–1900) as a proxy for the international dimension of the public interest. The conflict between domestic welfare and payment of indemnities did in fact give rise to cross-regional collective petitions of public grievance that demanded the establishment of an elected parliament between 1907 and 1910. These collective petitions of public grievance across the country were organized by reformers and gentry-merchants who remained loyal to the Qing dynasty. Needless to say, this natural experiment is only for the purpose of testing causal inferences in counterfactual situations.Footnote 101 In actuality, the payment of indemnities had already made the Qing state unable to fulfill its basic functions in providing public goods for domestic governance; nor could it protect the national interest in international politics. Thus its refusal to immediately establish an elected parliament in 1910 contributed significantly to its collapse in the Republican Revolution (Xinhai geming) of 1911.
The rest of the book is divided into two parts. Part I, which constitutes the bulk of the study, focuses on the earlier episodes. It describes the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation for each case and explores how it operated as a basis for collaboration and contention in different aspects of early modern governance. In Chapter 1, I detail the nature of the early modern state in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China, and emphasize the discrepancy between the state’s limited fiscal capacity and its proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest in domestic welfare. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examine the collaboration between state and society upon a shared normative platform of state legitimation to combat the subsistence crisis and finance infrastructural facilities. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate similar patterns in the state’s response to popular petitions justified by passive rights that demanded the state fulfill its duty to redress welfare grievances.
Part II takes up the later episodes. I briefly outline the causes of state crises in England in the 1640s, in Japan between 1853 and 1868, and in China in the 1840s and 1850s. This provides a backdrop against which to explore the process of how each state endeavored to reestablish its legitimacy. Chapter 5 then explores both continuity and discontinuity in state–society interactions upon the shared normative platform of state legitimation in periods when each state had greatly enhanced its fiscal capacity while society confronted new socioeconomic and international circumstances. I demonstrate how the conflicts among diverse dimensions of the public interest instigated cross-regional collective petitions of public grievances that demanded fundamental political reforms, but were still justified by the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest. Such petitions of public grievance occurred in England and Japan, but not in China. In the Conclusion, I review how the findings of this research change our view of state formation and popular contention, and elaborate upon the importance of contextualization to comparative historical analysis and social science research in general.
