Chapter 26. THE ORIGIN OF STRATIFICATION AND
STATES <– find the full text of this article here:
“Every state is a community of some kind, and every
community is established with a view to some good: for
mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think
is good.” (Politics, Book. I, Ch. 1.)
“For that some should rule, and others should be ruled
is a thing not only necessary but expedient: from the hour of
their birth, some are marked for subjection, others for rule.”
(Politics, Book. I, Ch. 5.)
Aristotle
III. Hypotheses for Origins and Stratification of States:
A. Food Plant Production a Prerequisite
No scholar doubts that the development of agriculture was a precondition for states.
Presumably, population densities and per capita production must rise to a certain level before a state elite, or even a tribal chieftain, can be freed from primary production to the de-The Origin of Stratification and States 26-496
gree required for them to have a specialist role. Note how the scale of political organization
was closely related to population size and density in Polynesia. Advanced chiefdoms arose
only on large islands, and on these only when densities became high. It takes a fairly large,
dense population to support a real chief, much less a king. And other occupational specialties are required in order to give them much to organize. As tribal chieftains acquire enough
full time specialized retainers to assist them in government, at some point they can style
themselves kings and a state is born. As we saw earlier, states are supported by either plow
agriculture or advanced horticulture, and the former led more often and sooner to states.
The development of stratification and states is far from perfectly correlated with subsistence technology. On the other hand, this cannot be the whole story. For example, NorthWestern Europe was agricultural for perhaps 5,000 years, but remained at a tribal level of
political organization until quite late; real states began to arise in the medieval period from
petty kingdoms/glorified chiefdoms (areas of Roman conquest aside). In Africa, politically
unorganized societies coexisted for long periods with chiefdoms and small states. In India,
the state was historically a fairly marginal institution, perhaps because caste regulates the
division of labor, elsewhere an important state function.
Furthermore, the scale of political organization has fluctuated substantially over
time in the same place. Small states have collapsed (e.g., in the Mayan area), and great empires have grown and vanished, such as Rome, leaving petty states and even tribal societies
in their wake. Large-scale political organization is clearly somewhat fragile. Renfrew (cited
in Chapter 6) has made quite a point of the instability of states among societies in the lower
ranges of agricultural productivity. Yoffee and Cowgill (1988) give examples of collapses
of ancient states and discussions of some of the reasons for them. The potential for excessive demands of chiefs to lead to revolt, as illustrated in the case of Hawaii, could clearly
limit the scale of integration, and explain how cycles of consolidation and collapse could
occur. The long-run trend to consolidation of large states in some areas but not others is
likely to depend upon a number of factors, including ecology, technical changes in transport, statecraft, and military organization and hardware. The integrative and coercive hypotheses (see Service, 1978, for a convenient summary) give us some clues as to how these
factors might work. We will return to these ideas in the next section.
It is worth noting that tribal (and similar) institutions generally remain important in
states, rather than disappearing. Ancient states attempted to enforce monolithic ideologies
on the entire populace, and modern nationalism is in this tradition. People should have their
main political loyalty to the state. However, this ideal is seldom achieved in practice; states
must reach accommodation tribal institutions of one kind or another. In agrarian states, trib-The Origin of Stratification and States 26-497
al institutions lived in a partly symbiotic, partly competitive relationship with the state. For
example, the Ottoman Empire, which disappeared at the end of World War I, had Orthodox
Greeks, Orthodox Slavs, Orthodox Armenians, Moslem Arabs, and Moslem Kurds among
its citizens, all dominated by Moslem Turks. The tribes were responsible for much of the
on-the-ground maintenance of order and provision of services to the population. Agrarian
states had rather small bureaucracies by modern standards and left much to the tribes out
of necessity. The tribes were themselves very complex, with many variations at the local
level, linked mainly by segmentary principles of loyalty, though in some cases at least a
religious hierarchy maintained a degree of formal organization at the tribal level. Groups
like the Kurds have ancient roots, and have been members of many empires, but have never
had a state of their own nor any other form of formal organization at the whole-tribe level.
The spread of nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries tore apart the Ottoman
and Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic Empires, even as the Soviets were successful in maintaining the Russian Empire.
At this moment the Russian Empire is apparently dissolving. It is striking how strong
tribal loyalties remained after 70 years of relentless propaganda and repression by the Soviets, and how rapidly tribal organizations could arise to seek independence. The Caucasus
region is an especially interesting laboratory, because historically many small tribal groups
of agrarian mountaineers asserted their independence against all comers, until the Russian
conquest in the 19th Century. As the Soviet Empire has weakened they’ve seized the
chance to aggressively declare their independence. States are always the result of a dynamic
equilibrium between larger and smaller scale institutions, and the organizations based on
the larger can collapse quite suddenly if the smaller scale ones win out in the ongoing competition.
B. A Role for Non-adaptive Variation
The Pacific case suggests that non-adaptive variation, specifically the evolution of
the hereditary chief ideology, may be important. Sahlins (1963) wrote a classic paper contrasting the Polynesians and the Melanesians. Despite many ecological and subsistence
similarities, Polynesians developed elaborate chiefdoms and states on large islands, as we
have seen, whereas the Melanesians classically lack ranked lineage systems and chiefs,
even on the largest islands they inhabit, such as New Guinea and the Bismarcks. Sahlins
attributed the difference to the traditional hereditary lineage-ascribed status ideology of the
Polynesians. Even on small islands like Tikopia, and on large islands during the colonization phase while population was small, the ranked lineage/mana/tabu system was maintained. Thus the germ of a social framework for state formation in appropriateThe Origin of Stratification and States 26-498
circumstances was always present in Polynesian but not Melanesian societies. There does
not seem to be anything special about the environment of ancestral Western Polynesia that
stimulated the development of ranked lineages. Thus, historical happenstance may well
play a big role in this and other cases of state formation.
There seem to be no externalist hypotheses to explain state formation beyond the requirement for a reasonably productive farming system. Everyone invokes internal hypotheses. States are one of the ultimate consequence of cultivation, even though they took
varying periods of time to arise.
C. Integrative (Functional, Voluntaristic) Theories
The basic argument for the origin of states because of its functions to society as a
whole is: (1) there are gains to be made from organized human cooperation and coordination; (2) advanced societies are organized to exploit these opportunities; and (3) these opportunities are the reason why states evolved.
Thomas Hobbes advanced an early, hardheaded, argument of this sort. For him a
state, the Leviathan, was necessary to ensure public peace, otherwise there would exist a
state of “war of all against all”. People would voluntarily give over their freedoms even to
the most dictatorial government because anarchy was worse. (Hobbes was politically active
during the period of the English Revolution (1640s) and knew his anarchy first hand.) This
is not too farfetched. As we have seen, some simple societies approximate this state. It is
said that many New Guinea highlanders welcomed the White Australians, because they
brought police who suppressed warfare. Much as Hobbes and the deterrence theory would
lead us to expect, people often have to fight when they would rather not, and states can “secure domestic tranquility;”as the United States Constitution says.
Advanced chiefdoms and states do suppress internal violence, although formal legal
codes tend to arise fairly late. Chiefs seem reluctant to risk their authority by taking too
much responsibility for administering justice. Rather, they seem to offer a sort of mediation
service, with self-help violence remaining the ultimate recourse in disputes.
8
States typically have some sort of court system, but often it is far short of a comprehensive legal/penal
system as we know it. Chiefdoms and states do regularly provide for defense against foreign enemies and major internal revolt. Chiefs and kings obviously are interested in these
activities, but the interest of governor and governed perhaps largely coincide here. At least,
8. This contrasts with contemporary Western legal systems where those behaviors that are most deleterious to society are identified as crimes. When a criminal act is committed, it is by law a crime
against the state rather than against an individual victim. In this fashion, the state interposes itself
between disputants so as to nip cycles of vendetta in the bud.The Origin of Stratification and States 26-499
population densities seem to rise as states suppress small-scale violence and prevent constant predatory raiding. Recall the tendency of the population of China to fall in times of
political trouble; this seems to be a common pattern. The same territory can support a considerably higher population, perhaps twice or more as high, if states suppress local violence.
Of course, states themselves are responsible for much large-scale violence. International anarchy still prevails, and states have fought wars between themselves with a fair frequency. There is undoubtedly an arms race built into the evolution of states that can run as
fast as technical and institutional innovations permitting the increase in scale of political
organization can occur. Presumably, the last 5,000 years have been spent on this escalatory
spiral. Perhaps the best times in this regard were the periods of unchallenged hegemony by
large empires, such as the Chinese, Roman, and British. In such cases, international and domestic peace prevailed over large areas for significant periods of time. Unfortunately,
statesmen have not discovered how to make such structures popular, stable, and competent
in the long run. The former Yugoslavia’s recent troubles are dramatic but not so exceptional, as we saw in Chapter 18.
Clearly, everyone can be better off if large-scale public works like irrigation facilities can be organized, and if specialization and trade among specialists are possible under
the protection of a political authority (recall the protection rents argument from Chapter
21). Other integrative suggestions are Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis that the earliest states were based upon the organization of irrigation schemes, and Elman Service’s idea
that political authority arose to supervise trade and redistribution. Given the strong religious ideology in states, even temples can be interpreted as a kind of public works for collective benefit. Both chiefs and commoners apparently believe that intercession with the
gods is absolutely necessary for society to function. As we saw in the Hawaiian case, chiefs
were interested in public works and the management of redistribution. A strong chiefdom
was a rich and happy one, so one might argue that chiefs were motivated to keep at least
one eye on the common welfare.
D. Coercive Theories
The governing elite of a state society often arises by conquest. Carniero (1970) developed a classic argument that coercion is basic to state formation, and gives an account
of its long history. Military victory of one society over another is common. If the winner of
a military conflict can permanently control the defeated, they can set themselves up as an
hereditary, exploitative elite. Carneiro imagines that no independent community would
willingly place itself under an overlord, especially one that claimed an right to rule by su-The Origin of Stratification and States 26-500
periority of birth. Even when defeated in war, people will ordinarily seek to escape their
conquerors by movement to new lands. Indeed history is full of population movements motivated by an effort to escape more powerful groups. Most of the present European ethnic
groups were once refugees from the pastoral warfare of Central Eurasia, for example. Carneiro thinks that these efforts will fail when agricultural or horticultural populations are
“circumscribed”, when they cannot escape conquest for one reason or another. His examples include irrigation farmers, who, once densities were more than moderate, face starvation if they tried to escape into the desert after loss of a war. The farmers of a Peruvian
Coastal Valley, for example, cannot realistically hope to flee into the rainless waste to escape conquest. However, forest horticulturalists in Amazonia could easily flee to new, similar, relatively empty territory if defeated. Similarly, the buildup of population density can
hem people in with other people. In the circumscribed cases, the vanquished have to submit
to whatever their conquerors desire to impose. What the conquerors desire is to live as kings
and lords at the expense of the defeated.
History and archaeology give ample evidence that this process has been important.
For example, the early Mesopotamian city-states based apparently on a religious elite rather
soon gave way to ones dominated by military aristocrats, although, of course, the religious
center of power remained, as it does to this day. Cities became fortified, and strong cities
began to attempt multi-city empires. Very commonly, barbarian warlords either created
states of their own or inserted themselves as the elite of existing ones, especially after the
rise of pastoral societies. Saddam Hussein draws on a deep, if rather dark, tradition of statecraft, whose development began in his own Mesopotamia, modern Iraq.
Another coercive theory of Marxist inspiration imagines that states grow up to protect class interests. Essentially, the idea is that some people tend to become more prosperous than others because of economics, ecology, or chance. The lucky ones then develop
state institutions, including a mystifying state religion in order to protect and enlarge the
economic or prestige advantages of their class. The rise of the nomenklatura (members of
the Communist Party recruited as government bureaucrats) in the former USSR to the status of aristocrats during this century might be considered an example of this—although
probably not the example most marxists would prefer to use!
E. Hypotheses Not Mutually Exclusive
The Polynesian case illustrates phenomena explicable by both variants of conflict
hypotheses. Chiefdoms certainly did not enlarge until population grew to the point that
some groups could not escape conquest by migration. Moreover, chiefly conquests were an
important means of increasing the scale of political organization. Further, the exaltation ofThe Origin of Stratification and States 26-501
chiefly lineages, and the subdivision of Hawaiian society into two class-like strata does
have a marxist flavor. Those lineages endowed with higher status by the ancestral Polynesian ideology certainly did manage to greatly exalt that status in the course of political evolution on the larger islands. On the integrative side, chiefs did organize great collective
enterprises, use their resources to help everyone in times of disaster, and suppress local feud
and murder. The coercive and integrative hypotheses are usually debated as if we must
choose one or the other. It would seem, however, that we can mix or match them.