Late-Twentieth-Century State Forms

Late-twentieth-century state forms names Tilly’s attempt to compare the European war-made-state path with contemporary states, especially military and postcolonial regimes. The chapter warns against assuming that Europe’s sequence will simply repeat elsewhere.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Coercion, Capital, and European States asks what the European experience implies for soldiers and states around 1992. Tilly treats military rule, postwar legacies, postcolonial states, military buildup, and the political role of soldiers as problems that do not map cleanly onto early-modern Europe.

The chapter matters because it limits the simple formula that war makes states. In many late-twentieth-century settings, military organizations can dominate politics without producing the same bargaining, civilianization, or durable national-state trajectory that Europe experienced.

Place in This Wiki

This is useful for the parasite thesis because it keeps Tilly’s evidence bounded. The European path explains much about coercion and extraction, but it is not a universal state-development law. Late military states can be predatory, weak, externally supported, or internally coercive in ways that differ from the European sequence.

See Also

• Coercion, Capital, and European States - primary source, especially Chapter 7
• Charles Tilly - author reference
• Nationalism and State Formation - related late-century nationalism thread
• War and State Formation - broader Tilly concept
• Evolution of the State - historical state-development context
• The State as Parasite: A Thesis - thesis whose Tilly gap this concept helps close

Sources

• Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 - expanded raw aggregate including Chapter 7, “Soldiers and States in 1992”