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On the rational origins of the modern centralized state
EXPLORATIONS
IN ECONOMIC
HISTORY
20, 1-13 (1983)
On the Rational Origins of the Modern Centralized State RONALD
W.
BATCHELDER
AND HERMAN
FREUDENBERGER”
Tulane University
1.INTRODUCTION There is a general agreement among historians that the development of gunpowder weapons was a significant factor in transforming the art of war and in contributing to the consolidation of military and political power in European states during the early modern period. It is our purpose to offer a new explanation as to why the development of gunpowder weapons, especially the cannon, introduced a rational basis for greater bureaucratic centralization within European governments. There were, of course, many factors that contributed to its formation and as Elton (1963) has pointed out it was already an old story at the time. Rulers were interested at all times in extending their power to the limit; this conception suggests a rational approach, namely that rulers knew what their limits were. We will offer an explanation by hypothesizing that rulers possessed a menu of choice variables which they could manipulate to their best advantage. While the introduction of gunpowder was a significant factor in shifting military and political power from the nobility to the crown in European states, the consolidation of power under bureaucratic monarchies occurred with the help of many other factors, including the religious movements of the time. Luther and other religious reformers supported the consolidation of power by princes. Even the Roman Catholic Church preferred strong centralized governments to the danger of private wars instigated by smaller princes and knights. Aristocracies also aided the process by their participation in the Crusades and the English and French civil wars, which contributed to their own decimation, In addition, the bourgeoisie had generally entered into tacit alliances with strong princes and had provided them with officials, especially Roman Law practitioners, to staff the governmental bureaucracies. * The authors benefited from discussions with Gerry Suchanek and Earl Tbompsoa. Helpful comments on earlier drafts were made by David Glasner, Kenneth Harl, Douglass North, Adele Wick, and the editor and referees of this journal. We would like to thank W. H. McNeil1 for permitting us to use his unpublished manuscript. 1 0014-4983/83/010001-13$03.OO/O Copyright Q 1983 by Academic Press, Inc. Ali rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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Undoubtedly, North’s (1981) position that these consolidated states provided greater benefits to the actors in the private sectors of the economy by reducing transaction costs also has much merit. North seems to place major emphasis on the voluntary contracting of people such as merchants to a government to provide services that would make trading among them easier. Besides this contracting state, North also acknowledges the existence of a predatory state, one in which violence is used to extract surpluses from a population. Both he and Bean (1973), who examines the predatory state in detail, find the formation of the modern state of the 16th and 17th centuries to be significantly determined by the extent of its jurisdiction and the increase in its population. In our own tracing of the evolution of the modern hierarchical state, we place major emphasis on the military nexus. We do not wish to go quite as far as Oppenheimer (197.5),who sees the formation of the state as the result of military conquest and who feels that its continued existence is necessitated by the domination of one social class over others. While not as crude in his analysis, Lane (1966) also credits violent conquest with greatly contributing to the creation of the state. According to him, the conqueror realized that his take was enlarged when he became sheriff, enforcing rules he had laid down. Our point of departure has much in common with McNeill’s (1974) statement that the “first and foremost among disruptive novelties [in the 16th century] was the political upheaval that accompanied the spread of the cannon and other gunpowder weapons.” II. A RATIONAL
BASIS FOR FEUDAL GOVERNMENT’
Throughout most of Western Europe, feudal principalities and monarchies preceded the establishment of hierarchically organized, bureaucratic governments. It is our thesis that the feudal organization was an efficient institutional response to the state of military technology and the nature of warfare during the Middle Ages. During the earlier Middle Ages, a defensive strategy that incorporated a system of fortified, fixed positions dominated another defensive strategy relying upon the deployment of mobile infantry units in open combat. The strategic dominance of a system of regional military units attached to relatively small-scale castles and walled cities was the consequence of the tactical dominance of medieval fortifications as a defensive weapon. The medieval castle was a self-contained fortification which gave a ’ The term “feudal government” refers to various social arrangements that existed in the Middle Ages. For our purposes, it was the specific contractual relationship between a prince and his vassals that characterized feudalism, not the manorial land tenure system and the relation of serf to vassal. Whether the textbook construct of feudalism ever actually existed is currently disputed (Brown, 1974).
ORIGINS OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
3
defending army both a tactical and logistical advantage over a much larger attacking force. The development of systems of such fortifications transformed military conflict into a series of time-consuming siege attacks, requiring an aggressor to take one castle at a time.2 Furthermore, by stockpiling food in castles, an invading army could be denied the easy capture of supplies, thus forcing it to rely upon a more costly baseline supply system. In short, a defensive strategy based upon fortified castles garrisoned by relatively small forces made it prohibitively costly in most cases to conquer a feudal state before the introduction of the cannon.3 In our simplified model of the feudal organization, a prince subdivided his state into districts and assigned the responsibilities for defense and the administration of justice in each district to a vassal or a tenant-inchief under a franchise contract. In return for certain contractually specified obligations to the prince, a vassal’s district became his tax base. In effect, a vassal received an ownership interest in his district (both as a private landlord and as a taxing authority) in return for bearing the cost of maintaining his military capability. In brief, our model of feudalism describes an organization of relatively powerful local military leaders who were assigned limited ownership of their districts by a monarch who himself was perhaps no more power&d than each of the leaders individually. The weaker the personal military capability of the monarc relative to his local military leaders, the more closely the feudal state would resemble a confederation. Indeed, it was medieval practice to obey the king only as long as his enforcement capability induced fear (Graus, 1965, p. 36), and at best the king was a sovereign of other sovereigns (Hintze, 1962, p. 477). A defensive strategy that essentially deployed military units from a regional system of medieval strongholds exhibited no significant interdependencies that would have gained substantially from coordination. In particular, there was no overhead logistical system that was shared by individual military units, each of which had its own capital in the form of a medieval castle or stronghold. Thus, by assigning the responsibility for the defense and policing of each district to a local military authority under a franchise contract, the feudal military orga~z~tio~ * The medieval castle could be effectively defended by a small undisciplined force. The development of medieval fortifications made the use of disciplined infantry a relatively more costly defensive strategy. In addition, neither disciplined infantry nor cavalry was effective in attacking medieval fortifications before cannons. In our view, the disappearance of disciplined infantry during the decline of the Roman Empire was not due to the alleged superiority of cavalry on the field of battle, as argued by Oman (lP53), but rather to the development of fortification. 3 See Duffy (1979) for an extensive discussion of how the cannon was instrumental in the destruction of medieval fortifications. McNeil1 (1982) examines the role of gunpotider weapons in the decline of feudal-type organizations throughout the world.
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imposed efficient incentives upon local military leaders by implementing the medieval defense technology without incurring the high overhead cost of bureaucratic monitoring. One might compare the production of defense in the Middle Ages with a firm that produces its overall output in several regional plants and assigns the manager of each plant an exclusive franchise to sell the output in his region. This decentralized organization would be efficient when, for a given set of production technologies and resource costs, a given level of output could be produced and distributed at a lower cost by locating plants in each of several regions, and the plants did not share significant overhead capital. Thus, introducing bureaucratic centralization to organize the production activities of the individual plants would result in higher organization costs to achieve given levels of output. Moreover, to return to the pro’blem, the cost of achieving bureaucratic centralization would have been very high given that each military leader was easily able to resist an attack by a much larger force against his castle. As a result, a prince would have had to maintain a very large personal force to effectively enforce a bureaucratic structure over his military subordinates armed with castles. Whether a feudal state was formed by a powerful military leader assigning portions of his dominion to subordinates under franchise contracts, or whether it was formed by powerful local military leaders cooperating to establish mutual assistance agreements, is irrelevant for our purposes. Our argument is that the feudal organization was an efficient institutional response to the state of defensive military technology that prevailed during the Middle Ages. There seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest that princes preferred greater centralization and that the prescriptions for it were available since Roman times. The princes were frustrated in achieving this goal, however, by the high costs of information and monitoring, which made them unable to impose taxes efficiently or to control the activities of their subordinates. These conditions led monarchs and other princes to accept expedients which were probably not especially welcome. From the 8th to the 13th centuries, for example, it was common to expect all soldiers to furnish their own horses and equipment, and they frequently received grants of land in return for military services (Beeler, 1971). At the same time, however, the proposition of a militia of all able-bodied freemen was kept alive and, more important, mercenaries were used wherever possible. Even though feudalism was based on contractual loyalty between a vassal or knight and his overlord, those who fought for wages were actually more reliable and therefore preferred (Schlight, 1968). Increasingly, the obligation for military service was transformed into revenue taxes with which a monarch could hire mercenaries or pay wages to feudal knights who would answer the call of their lord (Poole, 1946; Powicke, 1962).
ORIGINS
OF
THE
CENTRALIZED
STATE
5
Under the feudal system of military control, it was very costly for a prince to prevent a certain amount of redistributional activity among his vassals. Historical evidence tends to confirm that the inability of a prince to effectively control the redistributional actions of his vassals was a major weakness of the feudal organization (Ganshof, 1952). Preventing such resource losses would be a major source of benefit for a more centralized military system. Ill. THE EVOLUTION ORGANIZATION
OF THE BUREAUCRATIC AND THE CENTRALIZED
MILITARY STATE
Having developed a rational basis for the decentralized, semiautonomous organization of the feudal state, we now identify the changes in circumstances which induced the establishment of bureaucratic monarchies as an efficient institutional response. According to our theory, in order to achieve greater administrative authority over its military eapability, a central authority had to impose greater administrative control in an arena that had previously been the prerogative of local military leaders. Of particular importance in this regard was the separation of certain governmental activities from the direct authority of military leaders, especially the collection and appropriation of taxes, and the creation of a civilian bureaucracy to administer these activities. These changes in the mode of governmental operation were directly, although not exclusively, related to alterations in the technology of military weaponry. The development of gunpowder weapons, especially the siege cannon, proved to be a major innovation in warfare, concomitantly reemphasizing the need for mobile infantry for defensive purposes and significantly increasing the importance of coordination among military subunits. In those areas where castles and city walls had served as virtually impregnable fortresses, permitting relatively few, undisciplined soldiers to defend their territory against invasion by vastly superior armies, the cannon could now be used by the attacking forces to destroy these fortifications. The time and resources required to conduct successful sieges was thus reduced, making medieval fortifications obsolete (McNeill, 1982). In& tially, these new weapons permitted a prince who commanded sufficient resources to increase the strength of his armed retainers (the precursor of the modern army), in order to consolidate military and political authority within his dominion and to reduce the strongholds of his nobility. Elector Frederick I of Brandenburg, for exaqple, used a siege cannon to destroy the castles of defiant nobility, enabting him to establish the Hohenzollern dynasty during the early 15th century (Hintze, 1915, p 73-74).
If we ignore coordination problems, the introduction of salary contracts and bureaucratic control within the military can be explained as a rational response to risk-bearing considerations. Heretofore the vassal had been
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assigned to a local jurisdiction which served as his tax base, and he had borne the risks of success or failure, as happens under the conditions of a lease-franchise. It may be supposed that the medieval prince generally felt that he was entitled to some of the tax base which by force of circumstance he allowed the vassal to control. When the occasion permitted, the princely overlord would tend to redistribute wealth in his favor and to reduce the vassal’s tax base, by the same token reducing his subordinate’s ability to oppose his orders. In this process the local military leaders retained a great deal of risk in military activities while their ability to bear risk was being constantly reduced. It was then but a relatively short step for the central authority to offer the military subordinates a salary contract, which had the effect of reducing their exposure to financial risks while providing the prince or equivalent government authority with an opportunity for a great deal more discipline through a hierarchical monitoring system. In effect this shifted risk-bearing from the vassal to the prince or central authority. The time had now arrived when the central authority had sufficient wealth to accept the risks associated with military activities. Prior to the innovations in gunpowder weaponry and mobile artillery, whatever tendencies toward centralization of military authority during the Middle Ages existed cannot be attributed to gains resulting from greater cooperation among military units for defensive purposes. That is, it would have been of little advantage for a prince to incur the high overhead costs of establishing a more centralized military and governmental organization to achieve greater coordination among military units under a technology based upon castle fortresses. In our view, any centralizing tendencies within Western European militaries during this period would be attributable to either redistributional factors that shifted efficient risk bearing or to the advantages of greater cooperation when undertaking offensive operations. Given the nature of defensive warfare during the Middle Ages, the cost of successful aggression was prohibitive for most military leaders (Duffy, 1979). The development of the mobile siege cannon at the beginning of the 16th century was an important factor in shifting the advantage from defensive to aggressive warfare in Western Europe (McNeill, 1982; Rice, 1970). The shift to aggression introduced greater overhead capital requirements to be shared by military subunits, establishing a rational basis for greater centralized administrative coordination, and, accordingly, for centralization of military authority in Western European principalities. It became profitable for central authorities with sufficient resources to finance the overhead costs of supplying provisions for a large-scale aggressive military operation against principalities that did not command sufficiently large military forces to deter such aggression. As an organizational response, greater bureaucratic cooperation was required to insure efficient coordination in the utilization of overhead factors shared
ORIGINS OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
7
by several military units engagedin aggressive wadare. While each military unit could conceivably provide its own supply system, there were advantages to providing the logistical support for the combined forces. The defensive reaction to the development of mobile siege artillery was the construction of new fortifications capable of withstanding cannon bombardment and a shift to mobile, disciplined infantry. These Renaissance fortifications were much larger and more expensive than systems of medieval castles (Hughes, 1974; Duffy, 1979). The new fortifications were an important part of an overhead logistical system that was necessary to demonstrate the ability to defend a state using mobile infantry. The creation of a logistical systemconstituted a large-scale,overhead investment to be shared by a large number of military units. To effectively communicate a commitment to a defensive strategy that utilizes a state’s entire military capability to punish an aggressor requires an administrative structure that achieves a high degree of coordination among military units. This coordination could best be achieved under a bureaucratic organization which was already being introduced for risk-bearing reasons according to our thesis. In general, the introduction of centralized bureaucratic control over a military capability was achieved by introducing a salary structure over the hierarchy of authority. Basic subunits (companies) were combined into larger units (regiments) for organizational purposes by piacing mili&y subordinates under a pyramidal organization. Each military leader was placed under a salary contract and subject to discipline and control from above. There was a priority of decision-making authority extending from the top military leader down to the lowest level. At the same time the basic unit was reduced from 300-500 men to 100 men while the number of officers remained unchanged.4 In short, the degree of direct supervision increased substantially. In terms of our theory, a central authority imposes’bureaucratic control over its military by communicating its commitment to impose punishments upon its top military leaders if the actions of the military do not maximize the payoff to the central authority. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern times, central authorities made increasingly successful efforts to monitor and control the subordinate officialdom (Newhall, 1940). The culmination of this trend came in France in the 17th century, when the financial activities and condition of the army became subject to the control of a civilian bureaucracy (Howard, 1976; Baxter, 1976). At that point every echelon in the military hierarchy was ‘forced to submit to an exacting discipline, with punishment threats imposed by the immediate superiors. Each link in a long chain of command had to adhere unquestioningly to its superiors (Roberts, 1956, p. 28). Thus, there was a 4 See Delbrtick (1964), p. 187, and Parker (1976). Feld (!975), p. 426, reports a change in standard infm~try units from 2000 to 135 soldiers.
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BATCHELDERANDFREUDENBERGER
hierarchy of committed reaction strategies, where persons at each position of the hierarchy controlled the actions of immediate subordinates by promising to impose punishments on them if their actions did not conform to the objectives of the organization. The costs of monitoring activities constituted a significant part of the high overhead costs of achieving efficient incentives within the bureaucratic organization. Alternatively, monitoring costs would realistically be lowered under the decentralized, feudal military organization in the absence of significant interdependencies between the actions of military subunits (the existence of interdependencies would imply additional contracting costs to coordinate the actions of otherwise independent military leaders). For a central authority to be willing to incur the high overhead cost of imposing bureaucratic control, it would have to expect significant surpluses to result from coordination of activities through the imposition of discipline from above. Additional surpluses could be expected from the elimination of conflicts of interest among military leaders. One way to reduce the cost of removing conflicts between military leaders, and thus achieve a high degree of coordination under bureaucratic control, was to remove the spoils as the reward for the military. The tax collecting activity thus became even more clearly a function of a civilian administration. This separation was consistent with the introduction of a bureaucratic incentive system within the military. It allowed military and civilian personnel to concentrate on activities in which they were most skilled, thereby increasing the joint product. Such a division of labor must have been clearly preferable to military commanders who, since they possessed coercive power over a presumably pacific population, could have viewed their incomes through taxation and looting as unlimited. But as Lane has pointed out, they saw the benefit of controlling their violence; the plunderer in effect became the chief of police and thus regularized his “take” (Lane, 1966, p. 414). In short, the military recognized that the division of labor and specialization would result in an increased surplus. Moreover, it is likely that individual soldiers were risk averse, and that they preferred the steady pay, continuous employment, and promise of promotion associated with bureaucracy and standing armies to the windfall profits that might be derived from the loot and booty of the victor in the field. Bureaucratic discipline depended to a large extent upon hiring soldiers under a salary contract. Loyalty was purchasable and mutinies mostly occurred when soldiers’ pay fell considerably in arrears, as the Spanish army commanders in Flanders learned when trying to suppress the Flemish and other Netherlands rebels in the late 16th century. Prince Maurice of Orange, the commander of the Dutch forces, was among the first to see clearly the relationship between bureaucratic discipline and regular wages and to act accordingly. The wealthy Dutch towns, realizing the importance of Maurice’s armies, provided him with resources that enabled
ORIGINS
OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
his forces to defeat an army three times its size (Delbriick, 1962, p* 186 fo The success of Maurice encouraged Sweden, France, England, and the Habsburg Monarchy to emulate him in the 17th century. A particularly important student was Gustavus Adoiphus, King of Sweden, whose mentor Jacob de la Gardie had served as a general under Maurice (Wijn, 1971, p, 217). The French military of the time saw improvements in organization, discipline, and equipment due mainly to the development of a civilian administration within the military. The civilian administration was to a large extent independent of the military, and arose under a succession of great planners and politicians, especially Richelieu, Le Tellier, Louvois, and Vauban.’ Having attributed the development of the civilian administration of the centralized state to its complementarity to the bureaucratic centralization of the military, we turn now to further historical evidence. We need not participate in the controversy over whether it was the Swiss infantry or the more extensive use of personal firearms that served as the catalyst for the introduction of hierarchical discipline in the 15th century. It suffices to say that both phenomena did in fact require increasing discipline and coordination. Those military forces without the new weaponry and disciplined infantry were defeated in battle. As the standing army became more expensive and more sophisticated, the soldiers’ discipline and training became more important. Their increased training may well have initially been a by-product of the standing army, which was apparently introduced as an economy measure. In the 16th century it was still customary to dismiss soldiers after a campaign or at the onset of winter and then to recruit anew in the spring. This process required lump-sum payment of wages before dismissal an.dhanding over recruitment bonuses in the spring. Holding the military in garrisons was therefore a cheaper method of organizing an army (Roberts, 1956, p. 19). To keep them busy, soldiers were drilled on the parade grounds and trained in the use of guns so that they would automatically perform the required movements when deployed in battle. For the gun ‘&was virtually useless, indeed positively dangerous in the hands of untrained men” (Hale, 1961, p. 20). Instruction sheets like those of Henry Hexham (1637), in which the soldier is shown through illustrations how he is to shoot a musket in 16 steps, graphically detailed the doing-bythe-numbers learning process with which every military person in a modern army has become only too familiar. It is quite clear, then, that the standing army and the effective use of the new military technology became closely associated and that in this way it became more ~r~~tab~~ ’ This type of arrangement was already in use to some extent in the English and French armies of the 15th century (Newhall, 1940, p. 15; Guerlac, 1948, p. 27).
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for a central authority to effect the pertinent changes in the organization of its military. The costs of maintaining such an army were, however, substantially greater than those of the feudal militaries, while at the same time the cost per enemy killed seems to have declined. Economies of scale could now be realized by the higher fixed investment increasingly favored by the richer countries and by those states able to marshal their wealth more effectively (Smith, 1937, p. 669). Without a well-developed bureaucracy, the wealth of the country could be exploited for the improvement of the military only with difficulty (Graus, 1965, p. 37). Two decades after the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, and while the Dutch were fighting for their lives, it was still difficult to convince the Dutch estates to provide a secure and increased stream of funds for the military (Delbrtick, 1962, p. 189). Yet the Dutch towns were among the wealthiest of the time. State spending rose dramatically, but the tax-gathering mechanism developed only slowly in response (Parker, 1974, p. 560). Nevertheless, the Dutch Republic was more successful than any other European state in raising money by floating a huge public debt, doubtless because its member municipal governments had been among the first to gain valuable experience in public finance (de Vries, 1976, p. 202). Eventually, however, the municipal source of state finances became a handicap; competition with more centrally organized states like England and France became increasingly difficult. Obviously, the mere provision of financial resources did not make armies victorious, nor did the adoption of firearms and discipline. A logistical revolution was also taking place, especially during the 17th century. With its greater mobility, a standing army could now be employed much more effectively to communicate a commitment to defend a country. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in particular was innovative in this respect, stockpiling war material at strategic points to prepare for a campaign (Roberts, 1956, p. 215). The Swedish king also reduced the weight of hand guns and field pieces, which permitted both faster movements of troops and greater firepower in battle (Wijn, 1971, p. 218). To the greater mobility of troops should be added innovations in fortifications, which made defense more effective. Indeed, one explanation for the increasing size of armies is directly related to the new types of fortification in the 16th century. A successful campaign now required an army twice the size of the traditional force (Parker, 1972, p. 19). In short, under a centralized, bureaucratic military organization a central authority was able to use its entire military capability to communicate a commitment to punish a potential aggressor in any region within the country. The feudal military organization, on the other hand, had permitted a central authority to deploy its military primarily on a regional basis and had not been able to shift its entire military capability effectively to deter aggression against any .designated region under attack. Given
ORIGINS OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
11
a military technology based on the knight on horseback, the rural castle, and the fortified town, it would have been extremeiy costly to deploy a sufficiently strong military capability in each region for this purpose. IV. CONCLUSION
Our purpose has been to explain the organizational changes that characterize the development of the early modern state in Western Europe using a theory of rationally structured contractual arrangements. Clearly there were many sources of gain for central authorities from replacing feudal arrangements with more centralized bureaucratic structures in the organization of governments during the late Middle Ages. Our thesis is that the innovations in gunpowder weapons initiated the move to bureaucratic monarchies during the early modern period, and that there were two stages to this process of centralization. Initially, the siege cannon gave central authorities the ability to consolidate power at the expense of their powerful nobility. Because the development of the siege cannon significantly reduced the cost of punishing local military leaders, central authorities were able to redistribute wealth from their regional military leaders. An efficient response to this redistribution of the returns to government would have been to shift risk-bearing for the payoffs from governmental activities to the central authority. That is, it would have been inefficient to maintain governmental subordinates under franchise contracts while reducing their surplus, since this would have diminishe their ability to bear the risk of an ownership interest in government. Th adoption of salary contracts assigned the ownership interest to the returns from governmental activities, and shifted risk-bearing to the central authority. Consequently, during the initial stage in the consolidation of political power the introduction of bureaucratic structure within governments, especially in the military organization, can be viewed primarily as an efficient organizational response to the redistribution of wealth that occurred when the introduction of siege cannons reduced the cost punishing regional military leaders. The se&ond stage in the bureaucratic centralization of European gdvernments occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries. In the late 15th century, technological innovations in mining and metallurgy reduced the cost and size of cannons, leading to the increased mobility of artillery. In addition, during the early 16th century, the development of tactics based upon the interdependence of pike and musket contributed significantly to the rise of modern infantry. The vulnerability of modified medieval fortifications to siege by mobile artillery, combined with disciplined infantry, resulted both in a new generation of larger and more costly fortifications and in a new emphasis upon mobile infantry for defensive’ purposes. A system of defense based upon mobile, disciplined infantry required an overhead logistical support system, In effect, for a government to defend its jurisdiction, it had to have the ability to
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provide a reliable logistical system. The efficient sharing of an overhead logistical system required bureaucratic coordination within the military, the introduction of which had already begun earlier. However, this new system of defense required, in addition to the military organization, a governmental apparatus to finance and provide a logistical system. It is our argument that the bureaucratic centralization of early modern European governments was an efficient response to this problem of providing a logistical system for a defensive strategy based upon the centralized coordination of mobile infantry. REFERENCES Ames, E., and Rapp, R. T. (1977), “The Birth and Death of Taxes: A Hypothesis.” Journal of Economic History 37, 161-178. Baxter, D. C. (1976), Servants of the Sword: French Intendants of the Army 1630-1670. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. Bean, R. (1973), “War and the Birth of the Nation State.” Journal ofEconomic History 33, 191-221. Beeler, J. (1971), Warfare in Feudal Europe 730-1200. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. Brown, E. A. R. (1974), “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and the Historian of Medieval Europe.” American Historical Review 79, 1063-1088. Contamine, P. (1972), Guerre, .&at, et Societt a la Fin du Moyen Age. Paris: Mouton. Crefeld, M. van (1977), Supplying War. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Delbrtick, H. (1962), Geschichte der Kriegskunst, Vol. IV. Berlin: de Gruyter. Delbriick, H. (1964), Geschichte der Kriegskunst, Vol. II. Berlin: de Gruyter. Dully, C. (1979), Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1492-1660. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Elton, G. R. (1963), Reform&ion Europe 1.517-1559. New York: Harper. Feld, M. D. (197.5), “Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism.” Armed Forces and Society 1,419-442. Feld, M. D. (1977), The Structure of Violence. Beverly Hills: Sage. Ganshof, F. L. (1952),‘Feudalism. London: Longman, Green. Graus, F. (1965), “Die Entstehung der mittelalterischen Staaten in Mitteleuropa.” Historica
10, 5-65. Guerlac, H. (1948), “The Impact of Science on War.” In Mukers of Modern Strategy. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Hale, J. R. (1961), The Art of War in Renaissance England. Charlottesville, Va.: Virginia. Hicks, J. (1969), A Theory of Economic History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Hintze, 0. (1915), Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk. Berlin: Parey. Hintze, 0. (1962), Staat and Verfassung. Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Howard, M. (1976), War in European History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Hughes, Q. (1974), Military Architecture. London: Hugh Evelyn. Lane, F. C. (1966), “Economic Consequences of Organized Violence.” In Venice and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Lopez, R. S. (1956), “The Evolution of Land Transport in the Middle Ages.” Past and Present 9, 17-29. McNeill, W. H. (1974), The Shape of European History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. McNeill, W. H. (1982), The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since 1000 A.D. Manuscript. Newhall, R. A. (1940), Muster and Review. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. North, D. C. (1981), Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton.
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North, D. C., and Thomas, R. P. (1973), The Rise of the Western War/d. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Oman, C. W. C. (1953), The Art of War in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. Oppenheimer, F. (1975), The State. New York: Free Life Editions. Parker, G. (1972), The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1557-1659. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Parker, G. (1974), “The Emergence of Modem Finance in Europe, 1.500-1730.” In The Fontana
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Myth?” Journal of Modern Parker, G. (1976), “The ‘Military Revolution,’ 1560-1660-A History 48, 195-214. Pirenne, H. (1937), Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Poole, A. L. (1946), Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Powicke, M. (1962), Mifitary Obligation in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford Univ. (Clarendon) Press. Rice, E. F., Jr. (1970) The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. New York: Norton. Roberts, M. (1956), The Military Revolution 1560-1660. Belfast: M. Boyd. Schlight, J. (1968), Monarchs and Mercenaries. Bridgeport: Conference on British Studies. Economic Papers Schumpeter, .I. A. (1954) “The Crisis of the Tax State.” laternational 4, S-38. Smith, A. (1937), The Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library. Sombart, W. (1913), Krieg und Kapitalismus. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. de Vries, Jan (1976), The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis 1600-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Wijn, J. W. (1971), “Military Forces and Warfare, 1610-1648.” In New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press.
IN ECONOMIC
HISTORY
20, 1-13 (1983)
On the Rational Origins of the Modern Centralized State RONALD
W.
BATCHELDER
AND HERMAN
FREUDENBERGER”
Tulane University
1.INTRODUCTION There is a general agreement among historians that the development of gunpowder weapons was a significant factor in transforming the art of war and in contributing to the consolidation of military and political power in European states during the early modern period. It is our purpose to offer a new explanation as to why the development of gunpowder weapons, especially the cannon, introduced a rational basis for greater bureaucratic centralization within European governments. There were, of course, many factors that contributed to its formation and as Elton (1963) has pointed out it was already an old story at the time. Rulers were interested at all times in extending their power to the limit; this conception suggests a rational approach, namely that rulers knew what their limits were. We will offer an explanation by hypothesizing that rulers possessed a menu of choice variables which they could manipulate to their best advantage. While the introduction of gunpowder was a significant factor in shifting military and political power from the nobility to the crown in European states, the consolidation of power under bureaucratic monarchies occurred with the help of many other factors, including the religious movements of the time. Luther and other religious reformers supported the consolidation of power by princes. Even the Roman Catholic Church preferred strong centralized governments to the danger of private wars instigated by smaller princes and knights. Aristocracies also aided the process by their participation in the Crusades and the English and French civil wars, which contributed to their own decimation, In addition, the bourgeoisie had generally entered into tacit alliances with strong princes and had provided them with officials, especially Roman Law practitioners, to staff the governmental bureaucracies. * The authors benefited from discussions with Gerry Suchanek and Earl Tbompsoa. Helpful comments on earlier drafts were made by David Glasner, Kenneth Harl, Douglass North, Adele Wick, and the editor and referees of this journal. We would like to thank W. H. McNeil1 for permitting us to use his unpublished manuscript. 1 0014-4983/83/010001-13$03.OO/O Copyright Q 1983 by Academic Press, Inc. Ali rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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Undoubtedly, North’s (1981) position that these consolidated states provided greater benefits to the actors in the private sectors of the economy by reducing transaction costs also has much merit. North seems to place major emphasis on the voluntary contracting of people such as merchants to a government to provide services that would make trading among them easier. Besides this contracting state, North also acknowledges the existence of a predatory state, one in which violence is used to extract surpluses from a population. Both he and Bean (1973), who examines the predatory state in detail, find the formation of the modern state of the 16th and 17th centuries to be significantly determined by the extent of its jurisdiction and the increase in its population. In our own tracing of the evolution of the modern hierarchical state, we place major emphasis on the military nexus. We do not wish to go quite as far as Oppenheimer (197.5),who sees the formation of the state as the result of military conquest and who feels that its continued existence is necessitated by the domination of one social class over others. While not as crude in his analysis, Lane (1966) also credits violent conquest with greatly contributing to the creation of the state. According to him, the conqueror realized that his take was enlarged when he became sheriff, enforcing rules he had laid down. Our point of departure has much in common with McNeill’s (1974) statement that the “first and foremost among disruptive novelties [in the 16th century] was the political upheaval that accompanied the spread of the cannon and other gunpowder weapons.” II. A RATIONAL
BASIS FOR FEUDAL GOVERNMENT’
Throughout most of Western Europe, feudal principalities and monarchies preceded the establishment of hierarchically organized, bureaucratic governments. It is our thesis that the feudal organization was an efficient institutional response to the state of military technology and the nature of warfare during the Middle Ages. During the earlier Middle Ages, a defensive strategy that incorporated a system of fortified, fixed positions dominated another defensive strategy relying upon the deployment of mobile infantry units in open combat. The strategic dominance of a system of regional military units attached to relatively small-scale castles and walled cities was the consequence of the tactical dominance of medieval fortifications as a defensive weapon. The medieval castle was a self-contained fortification which gave a ’ The term “feudal government” refers to various social arrangements that existed in the Middle Ages. For our purposes, it was the specific contractual relationship between a prince and his vassals that characterized feudalism, not the manorial land tenure system and the relation of serf to vassal. Whether the textbook construct of feudalism ever actually existed is currently disputed (Brown, 1974).
ORIGINS OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
3
defending army both a tactical and logistical advantage over a much larger attacking force. The development of systems of such fortifications transformed military conflict into a series of time-consuming siege attacks, requiring an aggressor to take one castle at a time.2 Furthermore, by stockpiling food in castles, an invading army could be denied the easy capture of supplies, thus forcing it to rely upon a more costly baseline supply system. In short, a defensive strategy based upon fortified castles garrisoned by relatively small forces made it prohibitively costly in most cases to conquer a feudal state before the introduction of the cannon.3 In our simplified model of the feudal organization, a prince subdivided his state into districts and assigned the responsibilities for defense and the administration of justice in each district to a vassal or a tenant-inchief under a franchise contract. In return for certain contractually specified obligations to the prince, a vassal’s district became his tax base. In effect, a vassal received an ownership interest in his district (both as a private landlord and as a taxing authority) in return for bearing the cost of maintaining his military capability. In brief, our model of feudalism describes an organization of relatively powerful local military leaders who were assigned limited ownership of their districts by a monarch who himself was perhaps no more power&d than each of the leaders individually. The weaker the personal military capability of the monarc relative to his local military leaders, the more closely the feudal state would resemble a confederation. Indeed, it was medieval practice to obey the king only as long as his enforcement capability induced fear (Graus, 1965, p. 36), and at best the king was a sovereign of other sovereigns (Hintze, 1962, p. 477). A defensive strategy that essentially deployed military units from a regional system of medieval strongholds exhibited no significant interdependencies that would have gained substantially from coordination. In particular, there was no overhead logistical system that was shared by individual military units, each of which had its own capital in the form of a medieval castle or stronghold. Thus, by assigning the responsibility for the defense and policing of each district to a local military authority under a franchise contract, the feudal military orga~z~tio~ * The medieval castle could be effectively defended by a small undisciplined force. The development of medieval fortifications made the use of disciplined infantry a relatively more costly defensive strategy. In addition, neither disciplined infantry nor cavalry was effective in attacking medieval fortifications before cannons. In our view, the disappearance of disciplined infantry during the decline of the Roman Empire was not due to the alleged superiority of cavalry on the field of battle, as argued by Oman (lP53), but rather to the development of fortification. 3 See Duffy (1979) for an extensive discussion of how the cannon was instrumental in the destruction of medieval fortifications. McNeil1 (1982) examines the role of gunpotider weapons in the decline of feudal-type organizations throughout the world.
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imposed efficient incentives upon local military leaders by implementing the medieval defense technology without incurring the high overhead cost of bureaucratic monitoring. One might compare the production of defense in the Middle Ages with a firm that produces its overall output in several regional plants and assigns the manager of each plant an exclusive franchise to sell the output in his region. This decentralized organization would be efficient when, for a given set of production technologies and resource costs, a given level of output could be produced and distributed at a lower cost by locating plants in each of several regions, and the plants did not share significant overhead capital. Thus, introducing bureaucratic centralization to organize the production activities of the individual plants would result in higher organization costs to achieve given levels of output. Moreover, to return to the pro’blem, the cost of achieving bureaucratic centralization would have been very high given that each military leader was easily able to resist an attack by a much larger force against his castle. As a result, a prince would have had to maintain a very large personal force to effectively enforce a bureaucratic structure over his military subordinates armed with castles. Whether a feudal state was formed by a powerful military leader assigning portions of his dominion to subordinates under franchise contracts, or whether it was formed by powerful local military leaders cooperating to establish mutual assistance agreements, is irrelevant for our purposes. Our argument is that the feudal organization was an efficient institutional response to the state of defensive military technology that prevailed during the Middle Ages. There seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest that princes preferred greater centralization and that the prescriptions for it were available since Roman times. The princes were frustrated in achieving this goal, however, by the high costs of information and monitoring, which made them unable to impose taxes efficiently or to control the activities of their subordinates. These conditions led monarchs and other princes to accept expedients which were probably not especially welcome. From the 8th to the 13th centuries, for example, it was common to expect all soldiers to furnish their own horses and equipment, and they frequently received grants of land in return for military services (Beeler, 1971). At the same time, however, the proposition of a militia of all able-bodied freemen was kept alive and, more important, mercenaries were used wherever possible. Even though feudalism was based on contractual loyalty between a vassal or knight and his overlord, those who fought for wages were actually more reliable and therefore preferred (Schlight, 1968). Increasingly, the obligation for military service was transformed into revenue taxes with which a monarch could hire mercenaries or pay wages to feudal knights who would answer the call of their lord (Poole, 1946; Powicke, 1962).
ORIGINS
OF
THE
CENTRALIZED
STATE
5
Under the feudal system of military control, it was very costly for a prince to prevent a certain amount of redistributional activity among his vassals. Historical evidence tends to confirm that the inability of a prince to effectively control the redistributional actions of his vassals was a major weakness of the feudal organization (Ganshof, 1952). Preventing such resource losses would be a major source of benefit for a more centralized military system. Ill. THE EVOLUTION ORGANIZATION
OF THE BUREAUCRATIC AND THE CENTRALIZED
MILITARY STATE
Having developed a rational basis for the decentralized, semiautonomous organization of the feudal state, we now identify the changes in circumstances which induced the establishment of bureaucratic monarchies as an efficient institutional response. According to our theory, in order to achieve greater administrative authority over its military eapability, a central authority had to impose greater administrative control in an arena that had previously been the prerogative of local military leaders. Of particular importance in this regard was the separation of certain governmental activities from the direct authority of military leaders, especially the collection and appropriation of taxes, and the creation of a civilian bureaucracy to administer these activities. These changes in the mode of governmental operation were directly, although not exclusively, related to alterations in the technology of military weaponry. The development of gunpowder weapons, especially the siege cannon, proved to be a major innovation in warfare, concomitantly reemphasizing the need for mobile infantry for defensive purposes and significantly increasing the importance of coordination among military subunits. In those areas where castles and city walls had served as virtually impregnable fortresses, permitting relatively few, undisciplined soldiers to defend their territory against invasion by vastly superior armies, the cannon could now be used by the attacking forces to destroy these fortifications. The time and resources required to conduct successful sieges was thus reduced, making medieval fortifications obsolete (McNeill, 1982). In& tially, these new weapons permitted a prince who commanded sufficient resources to increase the strength of his armed retainers (the precursor of the modern army), in order to consolidate military and political authority within his dominion and to reduce the strongholds of his nobility. Elector Frederick I of Brandenburg, for exaqple, used a siege cannon to destroy the castles of defiant nobility, enabting him to establish the Hohenzollern dynasty during the early 15th century (Hintze, 1915, p 73-74).
If we ignore coordination problems, the introduction of salary contracts and bureaucratic control within the military can be explained as a rational response to risk-bearing considerations. Heretofore the vassal had been
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assigned to a local jurisdiction which served as his tax base, and he had borne the risks of success or failure, as happens under the conditions of a lease-franchise. It may be supposed that the medieval prince generally felt that he was entitled to some of the tax base which by force of circumstance he allowed the vassal to control. When the occasion permitted, the princely overlord would tend to redistribute wealth in his favor and to reduce the vassal’s tax base, by the same token reducing his subordinate’s ability to oppose his orders. In this process the local military leaders retained a great deal of risk in military activities while their ability to bear risk was being constantly reduced. It was then but a relatively short step for the central authority to offer the military subordinates a salary contract, which had the effect of reducing their exposure to financial risks while providing the prince or equivalent government authority with an opportunity for a great deal more discipline through a hierarchical monitoring system. In effect this shifted risk-bearing from the vassal to the prince or central authority. The time had now arrived when the central authority had sufficient wealth to accept the risks associated with military activities. Prior to the innovations in gunpowder weaponry and mobile artillery, whatever tendencies toward centralization of military authority during the Middle Ages existed cannot be attributed to gains resulting from greater cooperation among military units for defensive purposes. That is, it would have been of little advantage for a prince to incur the high overhead costs of establishing a more centralized military and governmental organization to achieve greater coordination among military units under a technology based upon castle fortresses. In our view, any centralizing tendencies within Western European militaries during this period would be attributable to either redistributional factors that shifted efficient risk bearing or to the advantages of greater cooperation when undertaking offensive operations. Given the nature of defensive warfare during the Middle Ages, the cost of successful aggression was prohibitive for most military leaders (Duffy, 1979). The development of the mobile siege cannon at the beginning of the 16th century was an important factor in shifting the advantage from defensive to aggressive warfare in Western Europe (McNeill, 1982; Rice, 1970). The shift to aggression introduced greater overhead capital requirements to be shared by military subunits, establishing a rational basis for greater centralized administrative coordination, and, accordingly, for centralization of military authority in Western European principalities. It became profitable for central authorities with sufficient resources to finance the overhead costs of supplying provisions for a large-scale aggressive military operation against principalities that did not command sufficiently large military forces to deter such aggression. As an organizational response, greater bureaucratic cooperation was required to insure efficient coordination in the utilization of overhead factors shared
ORIGINS OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
7
by several military units engagedin aggressive wadare. While each military unit could conceivably provide its own supply system, there were advantages to providing the logistical support for the combined forces. The defensive reaction to the development of mobile siege artillery was the construction of new fortifications capable of withstanding cannon bombardment and a shift to mobile, disciplined infantry. These Renaissance fortifications were much larger and more expensive than systems of medieval castles (Hughes, 1974; Duffy, 1979). The new fortifications were an important part of an overhead logistical system that was necessary to demonstrate the ability to defend a state using mobile infantry. The creation of a logistical systemconstituted a large-scale,overhead investment to be shared by a large number of military units. To effectively communicate a commitment to a defensive strategy that utilizes a state’s entire military capability to punish an aggressor requires an administrative structure that achieves a high degree of coordination among military units. This coordination could best be achieved under a bureaucratic organization which was already being introduced for risk-bearing reasons according to our thesis. In general, the introduction of centralized bureaucratic control over a military capability was achieved by introducing a salary structure over the hierarchy of authority. Basic subunits (companies) were combined into larger units (regiments) for organizational purposes by piacing mili&y subordinates under a pyramidal organization. Each military leader was placed under a salary contract and subject to discipline and control from above. There was a priority of decision-making authority extending from the top military leader down to the lowest level. At the same time the basic unit was reduced from 300-500 men to 100 men while the number of officers remained unchanged.4 In short, the degree of direct supervision increased substantially. In terms of our theory, a central authority imposes’bureaucratic control over its military by communicating its commitment to impose punishments upon its top military leaders if the actions of the military do not maximize the payoff to the central authority. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern times, central authorities made increasingly successful efforts to monitor and control the subordinate officialdom (Newhall, 1940). The culmination of this trend came in France in the 17th century, when the financial activities and condition of the army became subject to the control of a civilian bureaucracy (Howard, 1976; Baxter, 1976). At that point every echelon in the military hierarchy was ‘forced to submit to an exacting discipline, with punishment threats imposed by the immediate superiors. Each link in a long chain of command had to adhere unquestioningly to its superiors (Roberts, 1956, p. 28). Thus, there was a 4 See Delbrtick (1964), p. 187, and Parker (1976). Feld (!975), p. 426, reports a change in standard infm~try units from 2000 to 135 soldiers.
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hierarchy of committed reaction strategies, where persons at each position of the hierarchy controlled the actions of immediate subordinates by promising to impose punishments on them if their actions did not conform to the objectives of the organization. The costs of monitoring activities constituted a significant part of the high overhead costs of achieving efficient incentives within the bureaucratic organization. Alternatively, monitoring costs would realistically be lowered under the decentralized, feudal military organization in the absence of significant interdependencies between the actions of military subunits (the existence of interdependencies would imply additional contracting costs to coordinate the actions of otherwise independent military leaders). For a central authority to be willing to incur the high overhead cost of imposing bureaucratic control, it would have to expect significant surpluses to result from coordination of activities through the imposition of discipline from above. Additional surpluses could be expected from the elimination of conflicts of interest among military leaders. One way to reduce the cost of removing conflicts between military leaders, and thus achieve a high degree of coordination under bureaucratic control, was to remove the spoils as the reward for the military. The tax collecting activity thus became even more clearly a function of a civilian administration. This separation was consistent with the introduction of a bureaucratic incentive system within the military. It allowed military and civilian personnel to concentrate on activities in which they were most skilled, thereby increasing the joint product. Such a division of labor must have been clearly preferable to military commanders who, since they possessed coercive power over a presumably pacific population, could have viewed their incomes through taxation and looting as unlimited. But as Lane has pointed out, they saw the benefit of controlling their violence; the plunderer in effect became the chief of police and thus regularized his “take” (Lane, 1966, p. 414). In short, the military recognized that the division of labor and specialization would result in an increased surplus. Moreover, it is likely that individual soldiers were risk averse, and that they preferred the steady pay, continuous employment, and promise of promotion associated with bureaucracy and standing armies to the windfall profits that might be derived from the loot and booty of the victor in the field. Bureaucratic discipline depended to a large extent upon hiring soldiers under a salary contract. Loyalty was purchasable and mutinies mostly occurred when soldiers’ pay fell considerably in arrears, as the Spanish army commanders in Flanders learned when trying to suppress the Flemish and other Netherlands rebels in the late 16th century. Prince Maurice of Orange, the commander of the Dutch forces, was among the first to see clearly the relationship between bureaucratic discipline and regular wages and to act accordingly. The wealthy Dutch towns, realizing the importance of Maurice’s armies, provided him with resources that enabled
ORIGINS
OF THE CENTRALIZED
STATE
his forces to defeat an army three times its size (Delbriick, 1962, p* 186 fo The success of Maurice encouraged Sweden, France, England, and the Habsburg Monarchy to emulate him in the 17th century. A particularly important student was Gustavus Adoiphus, King of Sweden, whose mentor Jacob de la Gardie had served as a general under Maurice (Wijn, 1971, p, 217). The French military of the time saw improvements in organization, discipline, and equipment due mainly to the development of a civilian administration within the military. The civilian administration was to a large extent independent of the military, and arose under a succession of great planners and politicians, especially Richelieu, Le Tellier, Louvois, and Vauban.’ Having attributed the development of the civilian administration of the centralized state to its complementarity to the bureaucratic centralization of the military, we turn now to further historical evidence. We need not participate in the controversy over whether it was the Swiss infantry or the more extensive use of personal firearms that served as the catalyst for the introduction of hierarchical discipline in the 15th century. It suffices to say that both phenomena did in fact require increasing discipline and coordination. Those military forces without the new weaponry and disciplined infantry were defeated in battle. As the standing army became more expensive and more sophisticated, the soldiers’ discipline and training became more important. Their increased training may well have initially been a by-product of the standing army, which was apparently introduced as an economy measure. In the 16th century it was still customary to dismiss soldiers after a campaign or at the onset of winter and then to recruit anew in the spring. This process required lump-sum payment of wages before dismissal an.dhanding over recruitment bonuses in the spring. Holding the military in garrisons was therefore a cheaper method of organizing an army (Roberts, 1956, p. 19). To keep them busy, soldiers were drilled on the parade grounds and trained in the use of guns so that they would automatically perform the required movements when deployed in battle. For the gun ‘&was virtually useless, indeed positively dangerous in the hands of untrained men” (Hale, 1961, p. 20). Instruction sheets like those of Henry Hexham (1637), in which the soldier is shown through illustrations how he is to shoot a musket in 16 steps, graphically detailed the doing-bythe-numbers learning process with which every military person in a modern army has become only too familiar. It is quite clear, then, that the standing army and the effective use of the new military technology became closely associated and that in this way it became more ~r~~tab~~ ’ This type of arrangement was already in use to some extent in the English and French armies of the 15th century (Newhall, 1940, p. 15; Guerlac, 1948, p. 27).
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for a central authority to effect the pertinent changes in the organization of its military. The costs of maintaining such an army were, however, substantially greater than those of the feudal militaries, while at the same time the cost per enemy killed seems to have declined. Economies of scale could now be realized by the higher fixed investment increasingly favored by the richer countries and by those states able to marshal their wealth more effectively (Smith, 1937, p. 669). Without a well-developed bureaucracy, the wealth of the country could be exploited for the improvement of the military only with difficulty (Graus, 1965, p. 37). Two decades after the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, and while the Dutch were fighting for their lives, it was still difficult to convince the Dutch estates to provide a secure and increased stream of funds for the military (Delbrtick, 1962, p. 189). Yet the Dutch towns were among the wealthiest of the time. State spending rose dramatically, but the tax-gathering mechanism developed only slowly in response (Parker, 1974, p. 560). Nevertheless, the Dutch Republic was more successful than any other European state in raising money by floating a huge public debt, doubtless because its member municipal governments had been among the first to gain valuable experience in public finance (de Vries, 1976, p. 202). Eventually, however, the municipal source of state finances became a handicap; competition with more centrally organized states like England and France became increasingly difficult. Obviously, the mere provision of financial resources did not make armies victorious, nor did the adoption of firearms and discipline. A logistical revolution was also taking place, especially during the 17th century. With its greater mobility, a standing army could now be employed much more effectively to communicate a commitment to defend a country. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in particular was innovative in this respect, stockpiling war material at strategic points to prepare for a campaign (Roberts, 1956, p. 215). The Swedish king also reduced the weight of hand guns and field pieces, which permitted both faster movements of troops and greater firepower in battle (Wijn, 1971, p. 218). To the greater mobility of troops should be added innovations in fortifications, which made defense more effective. Indeed, one explanation for the increasing size of armies is directly related to the new types of fortification in the 16th century. A successful campaign now required an army twice the size of the traditional force (Parker, 1972, p. 19). In short, under a centralized, bureaucratic military organization a central authority was able to use its entire military capability to communicate a commitment to punish a potential aggressor in any region within the country. The feudal military organization, on the other hand, had permitted a central authority to deploy its military primarily on a regional basis and had not been able to shift its entire military capability effectively to deter aggression against any .designated region under attack. Given
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11
a military technology based on the knight on horseback, the rural castle, and the fortified town, it would have been extremeiy costly to deploy a sufficiently strong military capability in each region for this purpose. IV. CONCLUSION
Our purpose has been to explain the organizational changes that characterize the development of the early modern state in Western Europe using a theory of rationally structured contractual arrangements. Clearly there were many sources of gain for central authorities from replacing feudal arrangements with more centralized bureaucratic structures in the organization of governments during the late Middle Ages. Our thesis is that the innovations in gunpowder weapons initiated the move to bureaucratic monarchies during the early modern period, and that there were two stages to this process of centralization. Initially, the siege cannon gave central authorities the ability to consolidate power at the expense of their powerful nobility. Because the development of the siege cannon significantly reduced the cost of punishing local military leaders, central authorities were able to redistribute wealth from their regional military leaders. An efficient response to this redistribution of the returns to government would have been to shift risk-bearing for the payoffs from governmental activities to the central authority. That is, it would have been inefficient to maintain governmental subordinates under franchise contracts while reducing their surplus, since this would have diminishe their ability to bear the risk of an ownership interest in government. Th adoption of salary contracts assigned the ownership interest to the returns from governmental activities, and shifted risk-bearing to the central authority. Consequently, during the initial stage in the consolidation of political power the introduction of bureaucratic structure within governments, especially in the military organization, can be viewed primarily as an efficient organizational response to the redistribution of wealth that occurred when the introduction of siege cannons reduced the cost punishing regional military leaders. The se&ond stage in the bureaucratic centralization of European gdvernments occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries. In the late 15th century, technological innovations in mining and metallurgy reduced the cost and size of cannons, leading to the increased mobility of artillery. In addition, during the early 16th century, the development of tactics based upon the interdependence of pike and musket contributed significantly to the rise of modern infantry. The vulnerability of modified medieval fortifications to siege by mobile artillery, combined with disciplined infantry, resulted both in a new generation of larger and more costly fortifications and in a new emphasis upon mobile infantry for defensive’ purposes. A system of defense based upon mobile, disciplined infantry required an overhead logistical support system, In effect, for a government to defend its jurisdiction, it had to have the ability to
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provide a reliable logistical system. The efficient sharing of an overhead logistical system required bureaucratic coordination within the military, the introduction of which had already begun earlier. However, this new system of defense required, in addition to the military organization, a governmental apparatus to finance and provide a logistical system. It is our argument that the bureaucratic centralization of early modern European governments was an efficient response to this problem of providing a logistical system for a defensive strategy based upon the centralized coordination of mobile infantry. REFERENCES Ames, E., and Rapp, R. T. (1977), “The Birth and Death of Taxes: A Hypothesis.” Journal of Economic History 37, 161-178. Baxter, D. C. (1976), Servants of the Sword: French Intendants of the Army 1630-1670. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. Bean, R. (1973), “War and the Birth of the Nation State.” Journal ofEconomic History 33, 191-221. Beeler, J. (1971), Warfare in Feudal Europe 730-1200. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. Brown, E. A. R. (1974), “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and the Historian of Medieval Europe.” American Historical Review 79, 1063-1088. Contamine, P. (1972), Guerre, .&at, et Societt a la Fin du Moyen Age. Paris: Mouton. Crefeld, M. van (1977), Supplying War. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Delbrtick, H. (1962), Geschichte der Kriegskunst, Vol. IV. Berlin: de Gruyter. Delbriick, H. (1964), Geschichte der Kriegskunst, Vol. II. Berlin: de Gruyter. Dully, C. (1979), Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1492-1660. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Elton, G. R. (1963), Reform&ion Europe 1.517-1559. New York: Harper. Feld, M. D. (197.5), “Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism.” Armed Forces and Society 1,419-442. Feld, M. D. (1977), The Structure of Violence. Beverly Hills: Sage. Ganshof, F. L. (1952),‘Feudalism. London: Longman, Green. Graus, F. (1965), “Die Entstehung der mittelalterischen Staaten in Mitteleuropa.” Historica
10, 5-65. Guerlac, H. (1948), “The Impact of Science on War.” In Mukers of Modern Strategy. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Hale, J. R. (1961), The Art of War in Renaissance England. Charlottesville, Va.: Virginia. Hicks, J. (1969), A Theory of Economic History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Hintze, 0. (1915), Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk. Berlin: Parey. Hintze, 0. (1962), Staat and Verfassung. Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Howard, M. (1976), War in European History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Hughes, Q. (1974), Military Architecture. London: Hugh Evelyn. Lane, F. C. (1966), “Economic Consequences of Organized Violence.” In Venice and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Lopez, R. S. (1956), “The Evolution of Land Transport in the Middle Ages.” Past and Present 9, 17-29. McNeill, W. H. (1974), The Shape of European History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. McNeill, W. H. (1982), The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since 1000 A.D. Manuscript. Newhall, R. A. (1940), Muster and Review. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. North, D. C. (1981), Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton.
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North, D. C., and Thomas, R. P. (1973), The Rise of the Western War/d. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Oman, C. W. C. (1953), The Art of War in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. Oppenheimer, F. (1975), The State. New York: Free Life Editions. Parker, G. (1972), The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1557-1659. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Parker, G. (1974), “The Emergence of Modem Finance in Europe, 1.500-1730.” In The Fontana
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Myth?” Journal of Modern Parker, G. (1976), “The ‘Military Revolution,’ 1560-1660-A History 48, 195-214. Pirenne, H. (1937), Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Poole, A. L. (1946), Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Powicke, M. (1962), Mifitary Obligation in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford Univ. (Clarendon) Press. Rice, E. F., Jr. (1970) The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. New York: Norton. Roberts, M. (1956), The Military Revolution 1560-1660. Belfast: M. Boyd. Schlight, J. (1968), Monarchs and Mercenaries. Bridgeport: Conference on British Studies. Economic Papers Schumpeter, .I. A. (1954) “The Crisis of the Tax State.” laternational 4, S-38. Smith, A. (1937), The Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library. Sombart, W. (1913), Krieg und Kapitalismus. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. de Vries, Jan (1976), The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis 1600-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Wijn, J. W. (1971), “Military Forces and Warfare, 1610-1648.” In New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press.