Ancient Polities, Modern States

Ancient Polities, Modern States The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Foa, Roberto. 2016. Ancient Polities, Modern States. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718768 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Ancient Polities, Modern States A dissertation presented by Roberto Stefan Foa to The Committee on Degrees in Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Government Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts January 2016 c 2016 – Roberto Stefan Foa All rights reserved. Thesis advisor Author James A. Robinson Roberto Stefan Foa Ancient Polities, Modern States Abstract Political science is concerned with the study of polities. However, remarkably few scholars are familiar with the polities of the premodern era, such as Vijayanagara, Siam, Abyssinia, the Kingdoms of Kongo or Mutapa, or the Mysore or Maratha empires. This dissertation examines the legacies of precolonial polities in India, during the period from 1707 to 1857. I argue that, contrary to the widespread perception that the Indian subcontinent was a pre-state society, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of rapid defensive modernization across the subcontinent, driven by the requirements of gunpowder weaponry and interstate warfare among South Asian regimes and against European colonial powers. These changes included the broadening and deepening of the tax base, consolidation of territorial control, reorganization of domestic militaries to use infantry and gunpowder weapons, rationalization of the administration through use of ac- counts and printed records, and the professionalization and functional differentiation of the executive branch. I then trace the boundaries of precolonial eighteenth-century South Asian polities, in order to show that districts of India that lie narrowly within the boundary lines of histori- cally centralized states perform significantly better today on a wide variety of district-level indicators of state effectiveness than those narrowly outside these boundaries, despite the fact that these borders largely ceased to exist in the early nineteenth century. These esti- mated effects are robust to a wide variety of controls, placebo tests for border displacement, the exclusion of individual polities, and controls for the boundaries of India’s contemporary federal states. I verify the persistent legacy of precolonial states using a combination of archival research, district-level colonial data on taxation and public goods from 1853 to 1901, and a field test of bureaucratic responsiveness conducted in the state of Karnataka. Using extensive archival research on the fiscal and bureaucratic structure of Indian states in the eighteenth century, I show that following the decline of the Mughal Empire, warfare iii between “challenger states” prompted an accumulation of bureaucratic and fiscal capacity at the local level, and that this capacity has persisted through the colonial era to the present day. In contrast to “bottom-up” theories of state capacity which root institutional strength in societal characteristics such as ethnic homogeneity, social capital, or land equality, it is argued that government effectiveness is cumulatively built through long-term historical investments in state capacity, and that, in India, an important phase of investment occurred during the warring states period of the eighteenth century. Finally, I show that this relationship exists beyond the South Asian context, both in cross-country regressions of the effect of state antiquity on contemporary state capacity, and by conducting a subnational historical analysis within districts of the Former Soviet Union. I conclude that augmenting the state’s power to tax, regulate, or conscript is, in Weber’s phrase, “a long and slow boring of hard boards”, and the resources required in order to attain a functioning state - bureaucratic infrastructure, norms of compliance, and affective loyalty - are accumulated only very gradually. Yet where long-extant political regimes were successful in monitoring, coercing, and mobilizing citizens towards state goals they generate a reservoir of legitimacy and compliance, that is essential for making states work in the world today. iv Figure 0.1: India in the Late Eighteenth Century. Source: Schwartzberg, 1992, Historical Atlas of South Asia. v Figure 0.2: Land Tax per Capita, Districts of India in 1900-1. Entries in the District Gazetteer: India Archives, London. Green indicates higher levels of taxation (4-12 Rs./capita), red lower levels ( <1 Rs./capita). vi Contents Title Page . i Abstract . iii Acknowledgments . viii 1 Why Ancient States Matter 1 2 The Culture of Compliance 38 3 Precolonial States in South Asia 80 4 Testing for Border Discontinuities in Modern India 107 5 Trajectories of State Formation 157 6 The Puzzle of Persistent States Legacies Under Colonial Rule 207 7 The Global Perspective 239 8 State History and State Capacity in Russian Regions 279 9 Conclusion: Ancient Polities, Modern States 305 Bibliography 315 vii Acknowledgments “Thus by the beginning of the fourteenth century, Italy had produced, not one, but two innovative patterns of governance with their associated social and cultural features” - Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 1993 “Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration.” - Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, 1853 This dissertation explores fundamental questions about institutional persistence and state capacity by studying district-level variation in India. It is written primarily for those who care about historical institutions and their effects on contemporary quality of government, but will also, I hope, prove informative and enjoyable for who share my interest in South Asia and its myriad differences in language, culture and religion. The inspiration for this research lies in a place very far from South Asia, however, and also very far from Europe, where much of the historical literature, and my own prior knowl- edge, is based. Working in Central Africa in the year before my graduate studies, I had the opportunity to cross by land from Rwanda, in the African interior, to the North Kivu area of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Crossing the border from Gisenyi to Goma, I was struck by the contrast between the immaculate and orderly nature of the Rwandan side, where the guards are polite and efficacious, the streets, if rudimentary, free of litter, and the roundabouts sport planted gardens, and the Congo, where waste is ubiquitous, poverty conspicuous, and the police predatory. What could explain these sharp differences in public order? Rwanda’s strong “culture of compliance” was commonly-accepted fact among the international development community in Kigali, who reported positive impressions of the country’s government and civil service, and yet, morbid fascination at how so many ordinary citizens had been inducted into the recent genocide. Rwanda’s culture of compliance is rooted in longstanding social and political institutions, as a tradition of collective viii service, for example, termed Umuganda, has existed since precolonial times, by which all residents of a neighborhood are required to engage a day a week in local tasks, such as paving roads, planting trees, and cleaning streets. Moreover, reading the diaries of the first European explorers to visit the kingdom in the late nineteenth century (collected in the Etudes´ Rwandaises), I found similar descriptions and anecdotes of the degree of public order in the realm, and the extent to which the royal court exercised surveillance over individual villages. The long history of Rwanda as a centralized kingdom, seemed linked to the unusual degree of compliance offered to its king and public authorities, which in modern times, despite several changes of regime, have transferred to the country’s civilian leaders. This led me to entertain a more general hypothesis of how stable, long-term state formation leads to the accumulation of state capacity and persistent cultures of compliance in the world today. For a scholar interested in the legacy of precolonial polities upon contemporary social and political institutions, India, in many ways, presents a better grounds for hypothesis testing. The country has lived under the same constitutional order since 1947, but contains an exceptional diversity in precolonial institutions, exhibiting the full range from centralized bureaucratic polities, to patrimonial dynasties, to petty chieftaincies and tribal societies. If variation in historical state formation can explain differences in contemporary governance, we would observe it there. The idea seemed unique, moreover, as South Asia has also been largely invisible to comparative historical analysis: most studies of state formation are fo- cused on the experience of early modern Europe, and it seemed

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