Authority means the ability to affect others’ behavior without applying direct force. Its traces, noted among chimpanzees, develop among the “talking apes.” Human tribes may develop shamans even earlier than full-time chiefs. The advent of agriculture increased population density, enabling ambitious chiefs to have more sway over villagers than they could over sparse hunters: Land tillers are easy to locate and cannot abandon their fields even when hard pressed. A population density of five persons per square kilometer may be the threshold for state formation. Formation of the first states witnessed ferociousness rare in the present humans – or chimpanzees. Tool making shifted gatherers to hunting, and hunting skills may have selected for the most ferocious genes. Agriculture might have started an opposite process of self-taming that still continues, but meanwhile tribal freewheeling turned into utter regimentation, as if the state were the ruler’s household (oikos) and other people his slaves. This human self-domestication reached its fullest extent when the advent of money allowed humans to be sold and bought.

From the early second millennium AD more hierarchically organised societies marked by the rise of southern Africa’s first states developed in the north of southern Africa, culminating in Great Zimbabwe and its successors. This chapter outlines the processes involved, including the roles played by hunter-gatherer communities (for example at K2 and Mapungubwe) and the histories of farming societies on their periphery (notably those of Zimbabwe’s Nyanga Highlands). Much of this research is new and the past two decades have also seen challenges emerge to the importance previously accorded Indian Ocean trade in accounting for the emergence of social complexity, to the historical relationships between major centres (K2, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami), and to understandings of the internal organisation, chronology, size, and functioning of those sites. Discussing these debates – particularly those relating to the settlement organisation of Great Zimbabwe and other stone-walled sites and the social implications of this – involves considering how far political action should be understood in terms of Indigenous, rather than Western, concepts.

The chapter introduces the book by presenting the puzzle it seeks to explain. During the decolonization process, colonial and regional powers frequently pursued the policy of amalgamation to avoid creating micro-states, which resulted in numerous cases of merger. However, some rejected merger projects and became independent separately. What, then, accounts for their separate existence? More generally, why did some colonial areas achieve independence separately from neighboring regions when facing pressure for amalgamation or annexation, while others became part of a larger state? This chapter then elaborates the main line of argument and the theoretical framework that underpins it. It argues that oil and a specific type of colonial administration carved out producing areas to create a state that would otherwise not exist. The introduction ends by briefly discussing methods and explaining the structure of the book.

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book, discusses their academic, policy, and normative implications, and proposes areas for future research. It briefly explains the political situation after separate independence, pointing out the contrast between the economic and diplomatic success of the three states and their persisting authoritarianism, which is a result of separate independence. It also makes suggestions for topics for future research, including the resource curse and colonial entities that never became independent.

Chapter 6 traverses the aftermath of Mughal rule as members of the Maratha confederacy, led by the Gaekwads, and officials of the early colonial state in the form of the British East India Company sought to capture Ahmedabad and strategic routes connected to the city. It was in this context that the sons of Khushalchand, Nathushah (1720–1793) and Vakhatchand (1740–1814), became entrenched in financing new forms of political organization by guaranteeing loans to groups seeking the purchase of revenue farms from emerging stately authorities. I call this phase of political-business relations competitive coparcenary. By becoming speculators in land revenue farms and advancing capital to those seeking to establish state power, the Jhaveris tactfully adapted their expertise to new political circumstances. This was a major departure from the high tide of Mughal rule in the seventeenth century when power manifest through warfare. Now, principles of the market and revenue sharing diplomacy became the hallmark of political organization, and the later Jhaveris were central to such emerging diplomacy.

By the late eighteenth century, Mughal power gave way to more pluralistic geopolitics led by the Marathas and representatives of British East India Company authority in India. Chapter 7, a postlude, focuses on how the Gaekwads of Baroda consolidated power in the wake of Mughal dissolution in Gujarat. The political landscape was held together largely by debt relations and novel forms of financial diplomacy. This chapter explores how the Jhaveris, and the analogous Haribhakti family of bankers, became central to post-Mughal political power in Gujarat. The chapter demonstrates how, by the late eighteenth century, the Gaekwads were able to establish and grow their stately influence by relying on a group of elite financiers led by family banking firms. Over time, this led to the accumulation of enormous debt. Such a decisive shift to debt-based sovereignty both enhanced and challenged those in the business of bankrolling the state, and ultimately provided the British East India Company an opportunity to coopt native state formation as a strategy of establishing their colonial hegemony.

Chapter 1 theorises the state as a set of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems which are central to racial capitalism. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, this chapter charts how the state arose as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that swept through Europe in the late medieval period. This revolution from above saw the emergence of whiteness as politics came to be associated with domestication, mastery, and rulership. State-building was thus from the beginning a racial-colonial project, entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. Since then, politics as we know it has revolved around governance, domestication, and mastery.

A short conclusion ties major findings of Bankrolling Empire to wider understandings of early modern political economy in India, and to the comparative history of such transitions world-wide in that crucial period. Scholars such as Braudel, Wallerstein, Mann, and Goldstone have done major work on this period, and the story of the Mughal Empire, the Jhaveri family, and new political upstarts offered in this book helps to fill important gaps on the world scene. By focusing on how four generations of a single business family interacted with sources of political authority in South Asia, we learn how a major imperial formation atrophied, and the mechanisms by which various smaller successor states relied on finance to emerge in its wake. This work suggests that business leaders like the Jhaveris were not complacent, but maintained a keen eye towards political developments of the day. When opportunities arose, they relied on their expertise and wealth to shape political power. In the twenty-first century, as relationships between private capital and political authority continue to be intertwined, this work reminds us that while politics certainly impacts business, commercial actors often possess greater resources that can reorient the very contours of state power and its capacity to govern.

This Conclusion resituates the book’s reconstruction of the early Tudor Court of Requests within the broader scope of late medieval and early modern history. Royal justice was a constant, and constantly controversial, element of English government across these periods. Social demand for more flexible and authoritative dispute resolution, combined with the political expediency of displaying good governance in turbulent times, led successive regimes to further routinise the existing practices of justice-giving in the royal household. Here the rise of the new royal justice system is taken to its conclusion, with the dissolution of this jurisdiction on the eve of Civil War, in 1641. This episode epitomises the complex relationship between principles and practices that has been charted across this book. Returning to the three themes raised in the Introduction, the book concludes with some reflections on the value of interweaving political, social, and legal histories together: for strengthening both institutional and socio-legal studies, and for qualifying existing narratives about litigation as a pillar of state-formation.

Historical contextualization is vital to comparative historical analysis in social science. The meaning of important concepts such as rights, popular sovereignty, and the state differs across diverse historical contexts even within a single case such as England. Neglect of such differences makes state formation appear to occur along a linear trajectory and the state–society relationship seem simply confrontational. A comparative historical analysis based upon deep and solid examination of historical contexts reveals hitherto unobserved similarities in state formation between Western Europe and East Asia. It provides a new account of how domestic governance was attained through state–society collaboration when the state's capacity to directly provide public goods remained quite limited. Moreover, it casts new light on understanding the political “great divergence” in the transition from early modern to modern states, as well as offering a novel explanation of the resilience of contemporary authoritarian regimes that legitimate their power mainly through care for domestic welfare.

This chapter critically reviews the extant scholarship of state formation. It argues that the excessive attention to war and violence produces a confrontational interpretation of state–society relations and neglects the state's role in public goods provision vital to domestic governance. It outlines the main theme of the book, which is to bring state legitimation through public goods provision into the scholarship of state formation. It argues that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation furnished a common normative platform for state and society to collaborate in various issues of domestic governance. This platform allowed state and society to complement each other's weakness in pursuit of good governance. It also provided a limited yet important space for political participation that could be accepted by the state authorities. Although this space was grounded in the conception of "passive rights" rather than "active rights" – that is, rights granted by the state rather than inalienable to the individual – it allowed for a growing degree and scale of political organization and activity and laid the basis for a rethinking of the role of such rights in state formation.

Chapter 3 examines the formation of the Ethiopian state and the revolution of the 1970s. This analysis makes two contributions to understanding the EPRDF and its project of state-led development. The first is to show that long-run state formation and the revolution forged many features of the state that subsequently enabled the EPRDF’s development project, even if these state structures were not initially utilised for developmental purposes under the Derg. More problematically, however, state formation also resulted in a linguistically and culturally diverse population, which was increasingly politicised along ethnic lines. Second, the chapter emphasises the EPRDF’s revolutionary origins. The Emperor’s overthrow in 1974 resulted in competition between multiple revolutionary movements, including one that was overtaken by the military in urban areas and rural-based ethno-nationalist insurgencies that sought to fight their way to the centre. These revolutionary origins shaped the EPRDF’s strategy for gaining and maintaining power, and the structure of the party itself, as it transitioned from an ethno-nationalist movement to a national government.

Chapter 2 sets out the book’s theoretical approach. The first half argues that state-led development requires the formation of states with the capacity and autonomy required for effective intervention. However, it is only where state-led development aligns with elite threat perceptions that leaders make politically difficult choices to promote structural transformation. For many authoritarian regimes, it is when ruling elites face mass distributive pressures alongside resource constraints that they pursue development to expand the resources available to secure mass acquiescence. The second half of the chapter examines the specific challenges facing ‘late-late’ developing authoritarian regimes. First, the changing global economy, which is fragmented into global value chains with manufacturing driven by foreign investment, rather than domestic capitalists. Second, the delayed demographic transition that gives rise to large-scale population growth and urbanisation, enhancing mass distributive pressures. As such, regimes face severe distributive pressures at the same time as the state’s ability to address these is constrained by the global economy.

This chapter explores the transition from a medieval picture of manorial courts as being focused on seignorial concerns to an early modern picture of being focused on community concerns. Through categorising presentments, it demonstrates that the role of manorial officials went through two transitions between c.1300 and c.1650. Firstly, there was a shift away from seignorial and royal business to a community-focused ‘little commonwealth’ where courts worked to maintain local infrastructure and common lands. In a second transition, in the seventeenth century some courts began to be purely focused on land registration and transfers. However, these changes occurred in the context of local variation and a wider East Anglian versus western/south-western divide. These findings support two conclusions. Firstly, they challenge a narrative of the decline of manorial structures, showing how the adaptability of courts allowed them to be put to a wide range of uses by communities. Secondly, they highlight that manorial institutions were not imposed by lords in a top-down process, but were shaped by local officials, who recognised the utility of these institutions for their own purposes.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

The introduction starts by showing how the Swallowfield Articles, the famous record of the early modern ‘politics of the parish’, reveal the persistent importance of the ‘medieval’ manorial court leet to local governance. It then provides an overview of both the medieval and early modern historiography, showing how a newer set of contributions has emphasised continuity between these eras by revealing the importance of manor courts after 1500, a long-run connection between state and locality stretching back into the Middle Ages, and the existence of a medieval local elite. It shows that a flaw in the literature remains the lack of cross-period studies which this book tackles by exploring the functions of manorial offices, who filled these offices, and the ways in which officeholding systems changed in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation using a long-run time frame stretching from 1300 to 1650. Next, the key features of the case-study manors (Horstead, Cratfield, Little Downham, Worfield and Fordington) are discussed. The final section provides a plan of the book.