War drove rulers to build fiscal and administrative capacity, so states made war and war made states.
Tilly's 1990 formulation. Rulers needed money for war, extracting money required bureaucracy and bargaining with taxpayers, and representative institutions grew out of that bargaining.
In practice
- A ruler who needs an army needs a tax office, and the tax office needs records, and the records outlast the war.
- A charity that needs to fundraise builds a database, and within a decade the database determines what the charity does.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works