Trajectories of State Formation pdf download

Trajectories of State Formation – across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences Edited by Jo Van Steenbergen

TRAJECTORIES OF STATE FORMATION

State Formation in the Fifteenth Century and the Western Eurasian Canvas: Problems and Opportunities

The concept, practice, institution and appearance of ‘the state’ have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship.

Over the past century debates over states and statist systems, and around issues of their emergence and transformation throughout human history, have been substantially moulded by the visions of towering figures such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and many others.

At the same time, they have taken on many different guises along a wide variety of intellectual trajectories. Indeed, research on states and their formation and transformation, already a vast field, continues to expand rapidly.

Approaches and concepts have been legion, bringing in more specific if rarely un-problematic analytical or descriptive forms and types, such as the ‘feudal state’, the ‘patrimonial state’, the ‘dynastic state’, the ‘bureaucratic state’ or the ‘(early) modern state’.

The scholarly bibliography on these forms and types of state in various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities is obviously colossal. Any attempt to reconstruct these debates in the context of the introduction to this volume on state formation in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asian history therefore inevitably risks remaining at the most superficial level.

Nevertheless, at this point, we should probably emphasize two points related to these debates. These issues, outlined in the next paragraphs, offer grounds not just for the relevance of thinking carefully about state formation in any fifteenth-century

research context. As this volume will also argue, these two points also combine to make a strong case for the importance of pursuing more ‘entangled’ and connected historical as well as historiographical trajectories to conduct such inquiries.

First of all, for a variety of reasons—some obvious and some less so—the adoption and elaboration of different visions, concepts and types of states and state formations have arguably been largely dominated by Eurocentrist approaches.

Indeed, certainly in the Enlightenment and Hegelian traditions which are at the origin of all modern debates on the ‘state’, Eurocentrism is not just a small embarrassing problem that new generations of scholars have to correct.

Since the development of the humanities and social sciences from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, Eurocentrist categories of analysis and Eurocentrist empirical research programs have been central to all theories on the origins of the ‘state’—and indeed of ‘modernity itself.

The ‘state’ is doubtless one of the key conceptual pillars of modernity, along with ‘rationality’, ‘capitalism’, ‘freedom’, ‘division of labour’ and other such master signifiers.

Indeed, descriptions of the past, whether the European idea of the ‘past as a foreign country’ or the Orientalist imaginary of the ‘Other’s’ history or lack thereof, have always been a way of talking about the present or about unfulfilled futures. In this respect the ‘state’ and its relationship to ‘society’ have always represented a central stake in the debate.

This presentist or even teleological and Western bias in the classical sociology of modernity has now almost universally been recognized.

In fact, in recent decades there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the development of more specific tools and insights for the study of premodern and non-European polities and for gaining a better understanding of premodern and non-European ‘statist’ practices, institutions and discourses of power, distinction, integration, redistribution and order.

Nevertheless—and this is the second important point for comparative purposes—, understandings of states and state systems tend to move at greatly differing speeds in different fields of historical research, and these fields themselves often employ extremely diver-gent epistemological and heuristic parameters.

As such, our understandings of states and state systems generally continue to lack proper and nuanced aware-ness of recent research achievements and advances in cognate contexts, whether European or non-European. The concept of ‘the state’ is widely used in more or less theoretically informed ways across history.

However, people working in different regional and chronological fields of specialization hardly ever understand the notion in similar ways, and the complex dynamics of this great divergence are often even less appreciated across such different research traditions. Dominant paradigms within these traditions may be influenced by