History of Global Political Economy and State Formation

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the historical evolution of world systems, state formation, agrarian empires, gender, and the Great Divergence.

13th Century World System

A global trading circuit (1250–1350) described by Janet Abu-Lughod that functioned without a single hegemon, common currency, or shared language, yet successfully facilitated contracts, credit, and trade across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Champagne Fairs

A cycle of six rotating European trade fairs held in 13th- and 14th-century France that spurred long-term advances in banking systems, commercial law, and trade infrastructure.

Pax Mongolica

A period of political and institutional stability established under the Mongol Empire that safeguarded the northern trans-Eurasian overland trade routes.

Malthusian Exit

The pathway in which labor scarcity from the Black Death gave workers outside options, dismantled serfdom, boosted wages and urban manufacturing, and led toward democratization and development in Western Europe.

Elite Reaction

The pathway in which landed elites responded to labor scarcity by repressing wages and reinforcing serfdom, entrenching an agrarian economy and underdevelopment in Eastern Europe.

Black Death Political Development Model (Gingrich & Vogler)

A framework tracing how local mortality shocks from 1347–1351 produced long-term political effects: high mortality broke serfdom and produced participative institutions and strong liberal parties, whereas low mortality preserved serfdom and elite deference, producing strong conservative parties.

Nomothetic Approach

An analytical approach seeking to discover general, universal, and law-like propositions that apply broadly across cases.

Idiographic Approach

An analytical approach centered on explaining particular, distinct, and idiosyncratic historical events or entities.

Modern State (Max Weber)

A human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Modern State (Karl Marx)

An institution whose executive branch functions merely as a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, directly tied to capital rather than autonomous.

Modern State (Charles Tilly)

A centralized, differentiated, autonomous, and territorially bounded organization holding priority in the use of force within contiguous borders.

Four Functions of the Modern State

The primary activities identified by Charles Tilly as driving European state formation: war-making, state-making, protection, and extraction.

Moral Economy

An economic arrangement organized around cultural ethics, communal norms, mutual obligations, and reciprocity rather than pure market transactions.

"Ever-Normal" Granaries

A Qing Empire state-managed storage and redistribution system that provided famine relief and price stabilization during regional crop failures.

Devshirme

An Ottoman administrative practice of recruiting formerly Christian boys to be educated and incorporated into the empire's elite military and civilian bureaucracy.

Orfi Law

Sultanic secular law within the Ottoman legal system that functioned alongside Islamic Sharia and religious community courts.

Siege of Vienna (1683)

A battle resulting in a Christian coalition victory that ended Ottoman territorial expansion in Eastern Europe and initiated the empire's gradual decline.

Mughal "Land Ethic"

An ecological and fiscal strategy that conserved key ecosystems—such as forests in Gondwana for war elephants and pasturelands for transport animals—alongside agricultural cultivation.

Gold Sink

A historical term characterizing early modern China and South Asia because their high agricultural productivity and manufactured goods attracted vast amounts of world bullion and silver.

Jats

A peasant farming caste in Mughal Punjab that gained wealth during the agrarian boom, aligned with emerging Sikh networks, and sustained prolonged rebellions against Mughal authorities.

Primitive Accumulation

The foundational historical process in capitalism of forcibly separating direct producers from their means of production, likened by Marx to original sin in theology.

Enclosure Movement

The historical fencing-off and privatization of common grazing and forest lands in Europe, leaving dispossessed peasants with only their labor power to sell.

Double Freedom

The dual status of wage laborers under capitalism: legally free from feudal bondage, yet simultaneously free (deprived) of any autonomous means of survival.

Social Reproduction

The vital biological, domestic, and emotional labor necessary to sustain and reproduce the working population, emphasized by Silvia Federici as central to capitalist development.

Confessional-Battles Hypothesis

The argument by Leeson and Rusk that witch trials were concentrated in regions experiencing intense religious competition between Catholics and Protestants.

Ideational Diffusion Hypothesis

The theory by Doten-Snitker, Pfaff, and Hsiao that the European witch hunts spread through the geographic transmission and printing of demonological texts.

Querelle des Femmes

A long-running European intellectual debate from the 14th to the 18th centuries concerning the fundamental nature, capacity, and rights of women.

The Great Divergence

The historical process through which Western Europe (principally Britain) pulled ahead of leading Asian economies like China and India in wealth and industrial production.

Inclusive Institutions

Legal and political structures—such as secure property rights, fair courts, and checks on power—identified by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson as driving sustained economic development.

Republic of Letters

A transnational community of scholars described by Joel Mokyr that fostered open science, competitive debate, and intellectual exchange, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution.

Bourgeois Equality

Deirdre McCloskey's concept that cultural respect and social validation for ordinary commercial innovators and merchants enabled European economic growth.

Capitalism

An economic system in which private individuals, groups, or corporations own and control the means of production to generate profit. It emphasizes free markets, competition, and consumer choice, underpinned by the rule of law and property rights.

Feudalism

A socio-economic system prevalent in medieval Europe characterized by the hierarchical structure of lords, vassals, and serfs, where land ownership and obligations defined social relations.

Collapsed after events like the Black Death - land and labor gradually turned into commodities rather than obligations tied to nobility or serfdom.

Janet Abu-Lughod

Before European Hegemony

• Vibrant, interconnected world

• Economy existed long before the rise of western dominance in the 16th century.

• No hegemonic power.

• 1250-1350: highly sophisticated global trading network existed linking Europe, the Middle East, and Asia

  • powerhouses were in the East, under the Song and Yuan dynasties in China and the Islamic World → central geographic and economic hub

Western Circuit

Genoa, Venice, Bruges, Ghent

• traded wool, textiles, and metals

Middle East Circuit

Cairo/Red Sea, Baghdad, Persian Gulf

• maritime transit between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean

Eastern Circuit

Indian Ocean, Indian subcontinent, Strait of Malacca, and Yuan Dynasty

• Asian cities were the most commercially advanced

Collapse in 14th century

Spread of the Black Death fragmented the Mongol Empire (Pax Mongolica) and ecological/political disruptions severed long-distance trade

• 1346-1353

  • demographic shock supercharged European expansionism, creating a “crews culture” of maritime exploration, colonization, and settlement to export surplus capacity abroad

World System Theory

Immanuel Wallerstein

• macro-sociological framework that analyzes the global economy as a single, interconnected capitalist system, rather than looking at individual nation-states in isolation

James Belich

The Black Death and the Spread of Europe

• Plague Paradox: rather than causing permanent late-medieval dark age, the BD halved the human population while leaving physical infrastructure, land, tools, and capital intact

• Survivors had higher real wages, greater disposable incomes

• Larger portions of society entered the “buying class” → heavy consumer demand for commodities like sugar, spices, silk, furs, bullion, and manufactured goods

  • new wealth accelerated developments in gunpowder, musketry, gunned maritime vessels…

• Argued Europe’s global expansion was less about an inherent, civilizational “rise” - more a demographic “spread” triggered by the Black Death

The State

Centralized political organization that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory.

• driven by warfare and taxation

• Charles Tilly → “war made the state, and the state made the war.”

Capitalism (definition)

Economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, market competition, and continuous accumulation of capital.

• driven by colonial expansion and institutional synthesis of private and public power

• Philip Stern

Nationalism

Ideology asserting that the nation (shared cultural identity) and the state (political unit) should be congruent

• driven by industrialization and state-building. Need for standardized language and loyal citizenry for mass warfare

• Ernest Gellner/Benedict Anderson

Charles Tilly

• “war made the state”

  • state was an accidental byproduct of rulers trying to wage war

• cycle of violence

• taxation and bureaucracy

  • overtime, to keep populations from rebelling over high taxes, rulers had to grant representational rights and services

Philip Stern

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism

• rather than capitalism developing purely through free-market merchants, stern highlights the role of hybrid institutions like the British East India Company

  • weren’t just businesses - they were company-states

  • held monopolies, commanded private armies, governed millions…

• modern capitalism was forged through violent, politically powered monopolies that used state-like power to extract wealth globally and build international trade networks

Genesis of Nationalism

• minaly emerged in the late 18th-19th centuries as states needed to justify their existence and mobilize entire populations for war

• rulers needed people to fight out of loyalty, not just for pay

• states used public education and printing presses to enforce a single national language and history, erasing regional dialects and creating an “imagined community” willing to die for the flag.

Patrimonialism

Is a form of political governance in which the state is treated as the personal property or extended household of the ruler

• Max Weber

Welfare State

System of government where the state plays a central role in protecting and promoting the economic and social well-being of its citizens

• Qing Empire

Karl Marx

• Communist Manifesto 1848

  • “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoise”

• political state does not exist above or outside society, rather it’s a superstructure determined by the underlying economic ode of protection (capitalism)

  • “withering away”

    • state is an organ of class oppression

    • post-capitalist communist society: class distinctions would vanish and the state would “wither away”

    • replaced by a free association of producers rather than a coercive governing apparatus

Max Weber

• defined modern state sociologically not by its goals, but by its means

  • “state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”

• part of a broader cultural and historical process of rationalization

• operates through impersonal legal codes, professionalized civil services, and rigid, efficient bureaucracy

• “iron cage”

  • hyper-rationalized control that traps modern individuals regardless of whether capitalism or state socialism is in charge

• power doesn’t mean purely economic strength

  • power, status, and class are distinct dimensions

Charles Tilly

The Long Run of European State Formation

• “war made the states, and states made the war’

• intense pressure of military competition forced rulers to extract resources, build administrative machinery, and ultimately converge on the modern national state

  • centralized, differentiated, autonomous

  • use of force

  • contiguous, territorially-bounded

• war as a driver

• modern European states emerged not from a conscious social contract, but as unintended byproducts of rulers competing violently for territory and extraction resources

Tilly’s “protection racket analogy”

rulers offer protection against dangers in exchange for taxes and compliance

Tilly’s framework

1. coercion - instruments of violence and force concentrated in rural, agrarian lands

2. capital - tangible, mobile resources, money, and commercial networks concentrated in cities and trade hubs

• combined deep financial backing of commercial centers with large manpower and administrative control of centralized states

• other models adopted/weeded-out, forcing all European states to eventually converge on a variation of the centralized national state

4 Functions of the State

1. war-making

2. state-making

3. protection

4. extraction

Missing from Tilly

• the church, religion, ideology, nationalism, and non-state actors

• transfers poorly to the global south

• states aren’t single coherent actors

Sultan Mehmed II

• 1451-1481

• conquered Constantinople 1453

• rivalry with Venice in the Mediterranean

Fall of Constantinople

• 1453

• captured by Ottomans

• ended 1,100 year-old Byzantine Empire

• became the new capital of the empire (Istanbul)

• Cathedral Hagia Sophia was converted into an imperial mosque

• start of early modern era

Sultan Bayezid II

• 1481-1512

• rescued and welcomed thousands of Sephardi Jews and Muslims fleeing the Spanish inquisition 1492

• son of Mehmed → focused on stabilizing and consolidating the vast territories inherited from his father

Sultan Selim I

• 1512-1520

• rapid expansion of the empire

• defeated Sultanate 1517

  • Ottoman forces entered and captured Cairo, absorbed Egypt into the empire

Sultan Suleiman I

• 1520-1566

• Suleiman the Magnificent

• peak of the empire’s military, political, and cultural power

• expanded empire from Hungary-Vienna, Middle East, North Africa, and dominated the Mediterranean and Red Sea

• Siege of Vienna 1529

  • Habsburg victory, Suleiman forced to abandon siege and retreat

Mehmed IV

• 1648-1687

• 2nd Siege of Vienna 1683

  • defeat by the Great Holy League, triggered the Great Turkish War

Battle of Lepanto

• 1571

• coalition of the Catholic maritime states (The Holy League) organized by the Pope

• defeated fleet of the Ottomans

3rd Siege of Vienna

• 1683

• marked the end of the Ottoman expansion into Central Europe

• start of long-term decline

• Christian victory

Organization of the Ottomans

Elite civilian and military bureaucracy staffed by formally Christian boys (devsirme system)

Devsirm System

Young Christian boys converted to Islam

• royal slaves

• could move up to high military/political offices

Imperial Harem

• private residence within the imperial palace

• Sultan lived alongside family, female relatives, servants

Ottoman economy

• agriculture

• no private property

• all lands belong to Sultan

• trade and manufacture regulated and supervised

Ottoman society

• multi-ethnic - Turkic, Arab, Kurds, Greek, Armenians

• multi-religious - Sunni Islam, Christian and Jewish minority

Islamic legal structure

Sharia courts, centrally appointed judges, highest ranking officials

• Ofri law

Leslie Peirce

• Beyond Harem Walls

• challenged myth of the Harem as a passive, scheduled place of leisure

  • instead: structured, hierarchical, political and domestic institution

• Sultanate of Women: 16-17th century

  • women (high-training, royal) wielded direct political power

  • constructed and managed domestic political factions

  • engaed in correspondence and negotiated with foreign ambassadors

  • acted as official regents for young/inexperienced sons who ascended the throne

  • patronized major architectural, charitable, and economic foundations that anchored public presence in Ottoman society

Mughal Empire

• 1526-1857

• land-based empire, established by Turco-Mongol Timurids

• powerful early modern Islamic empire that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent

• inclusive, multi-religious, wealthy

• connected to global trade, argrarian economy

• collapsed due to imperial overreach in South India (Deccan) 1720s

Akbar the Great

• 1556-1605

• Mughal Empire - established stable governance institutions, tax system based on actual crop yield, and cash schedules rather than arbitrary demands

Mughal Empire 2.0

• kept reinventing itself with each new region

• global connections but local networks + connections with local society and ecology crucial to understanding its power

• women → crucial links within/across elites

evolved:

• not just an agrarian empire

• reliant on pastoral nomadic regions

  • trade, access to markets

  • provisioning of Mughal armies

  • breeding of key transport animals (elephants)

Mughal Economic Developments

• South Asia and China dominated global economy due to agricultural productivity and highly developed markets in artisanal products

  • “gold sinks”

• commodities:

  • textiles, bullion, horses, spices, food crops, metals

Khyber Pass

historic mountain corridor connecting Pakistan and Afghanistan

• Bakarwal: nomadic pastoralist community native to the Western Himalayas (Jammu and Kashmir)

Punjab

• agriculture booms spreads access to wealth and land among non-elite and elite groups

• experienced prosperity under Akbar

  • mercantile movements provides opportunities to pastoral tribes

  • growing legal services of the state → help conserve wealth within family units

Bengal

• economy was the wealthiest province of the Mughal Empire

• exported high-value goods like cotton textiles, silks, and rice

• revenue rights and tax concessions for newely-settled land auctioned

• complex Hindu patronage of cultural Islamization of tribes

Zafar Khan

• Mughal Empire

• general of the Delhi sultanate

• adapted to Kashmiri norms

  • rice as currency for taxes and wages

• cultivation of export trade goods

• development of internal infrastucture and grain reserves

  • corrupt governors who violate rules were punished quickly

Mughal “Land Ethic”

• ecologies were valued for sustenance of human life, artisanal production, market goods, and transport technologies had to be preserved

• impact on animals and particular flora

• state had to adapt to local ecologies and local practices

• trajectories of development is not straight forward, tangled and messy - learning curve

• viewed land revenue as a tax on the produce of crop not a rent on the soil itself

Silvia Federici

• Marxist, feminist, scholar, activist

• The Great Witch-Hunt in Europe

  • calculated, state-driven counter-revolution designed to destroy peasant resistance and modern capitalism

  • rejects view that witch-hunts were a remnant of medieval superstition - frames them as central, violent mechanism of primitive accumulation used to subjugate the work force and form a new proletariat

  • as feudalism collapsed and common lands were privatized, displaced peasants resisted wage labor.

    • shattered communal solidarity, transforming neighbors into informants and breaking collective defiance

Federici’s Witch Hunts

• accused and executed were poor, older peasant women

  • state and church criminalized birth control, abortion, and the traditional authority of female healers and midwives

  • turned the female body and reproductive capacity into a resource controlled by the state and rising economic order

• by stripping women of autonomy and social power, the persecutions helped establish a new sexual division of labor that regulated women to devalued, unpaid domestic and reproductive work

Federici criticisms

• historical, panoramic, narrative argument based on secondary sources

• takes the category of women as a stable fact

  • biological sex and gender have been configued differently at different times

• totalizing theory - unfalsifiable?

• other explanations:

  • not orchestrated from above, but motivated by real religious belief, social contagion from below, diffusion of ideas

  • religious conflict

Royal Women

• “Sultanate of Women”

  • Suleiman and Roxelana

    • chief consort and legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history

  • 1530s-1700s

Age of Queens

• 16th century

• unprecedented explosion of female rulers, regents, and highly influential women dominated the politics and courts of Renaissance Europe

• Spain, France, Scotland, England, Austria, and Netherlands

Response to women in 1500s

1) are women capable of governing? (natural law)

2) are women meant to govern (divine law)

3) problems of marriage and autonomy

Conservative response to Witch Hunts:

• John Knox:

  • 1558

  • to promote women to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city is:

    • repugnant to nature

    • contumely to God

    • subversion of good order, of all equity and justice

Karl Marx Witch Hunts

• focused attention on production, insufficient attention on social reproduction

• Capital Vol. 1:

  • “the primitive accumulation" plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.”

• separation of producers from means of production

• “Enclosure Movement” - hedging of land, loss of commons = loss of grazing/forest land

• former peasants, farmers, pastoralists/nomads have only their labor to sell

• “Double Freedom”

  • free of feudal obligations, feudalities, feudal “moral economies”

  • free of any means of survival/subsistence

Leeson + Rusk’s Witch Trials

• witchcraft accusations are found more commonly in places with more confessional-battles between Catholics and Protestants

Doten-Snitker, Pfaff, Hisao’s Witch Trials

• “ideational diffusion and the great witch hunt in Central Europe”

• witch trials correspond to spread of demonological texts

Querelle des Femmes

• 13th-18th c. disupte of women/woman question

• Christine de Pizan: advocate of women’s equality

• John Knox: advocate of women’s subordination

• pamphlet craze followed spread of printing press, rise of popular print cultures across European cities

World System Theory

• Immanuel Wallerstein

• “by the end of the 15th century, the entire world was bound together in a ‘world-system’”

  • nation-state comparison meaningless

• core countries, periphery countries, semi-peripheral countries

• system experiences cyclical economic expansions and contractions, during which dominant hegemonic powers rise and fall

Inclusive institutions

Encourage broad participation by the majority of the population in both the economy and politics

• secure private property rights, guarantee the rule of law, foster open markets, and reward innovation and education

• features pluralistic governance, a broad distribution of political power, and effective checks and balances to hold leaders accountable

• modern democratic market economies such as the United States, Western European nations, and South Korea

• drives long-term economic growth, technological progress, and societal prosperity

Extractive institutions

Concentrate power, wealth, and decision-making into the hands of a small, narrow elite

• designed to extract resources, labor, and wealth from the many to benefit the few. They restrict entrepreneurship, limit property rights for average citizens, and suppress innovation that threatens elite control

• characterized by authoritarianism, weak or nonexistent rule of law, and elite-dominated systems that lack public accountability

• historical colonial plantation economies, absolute monarchies, and centrally planned or kleptocratic states like North Korea

• may generate short-term growth or localized spikes (such as the early Soviet Union or colonial islands), but ultimately lead to stagnation, poverty, and institutional instability

Kenneth Pomeranz

• The Great Divergence

  • why sustained industrail growth and the Industrial Revolution began in Northwest Europe rather than East Asia

  • 1750s: core regions like England and the Yangtze Delta possessed remarkably similar levels of economic development

    • life expectancy, consumption patterns, market structures, and household strategies were comparable

The Great Divergence breakthrough

• Europe’s breaththrough was not due to inherent cultural, institutional, or scientific superiority, rather due to two major windfalls:

  • Coal - Britain had vast, easily accessible coal deposits located near major population and manufacutring centers ← massive energy substitute for wood and timber

  • New World - exploited overseas periphery in the Americas and Africa. Trade provided land-intensive primary products and silver, giving Europe millions of acres of “ghost acreage” that releived its domestic ecological pressures

Teleology

• a philosophical approach to explaining things by their final purpose, goal, or function rather than just their immediate physical causes

• the view that historical events and human progress move toward a predetermined goal, purpose, or grand design

TGD Asian Trajectory

• post-1750 peripheral regions in Asia retained vital resources rather than exporting them to the core, East Asian economies like the Yangtze Delta were forced down a more labor-intensive, resource-saving path with diminishing return

• divergence was late, sudden, and driven by geographical luck and global trade networks rather than a pre-ordainend European “miracle”

Pomeranz’s criticisms

• overstates the parity of pre-industrial Chinese data

• understates European institutional/legal developments

• places too much weight on ecological factors over market/tech structures

Explanations for The Great Divergence

• World System Theory

• institutions

• ideas

• empire

World System Theory

• Immanuel Wallerstein

• “by the end of the 15th c. the entire world was bound together in a ‘world-system’”

  • nation-state comparison meaningless

    • only sensible analysis is the entire system