Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences ed. by Jo van Steenbergen (review)
- Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences ed. by Jo van Steenbergen
The fifteenth century in Islamic West-Asia, in the aftermath of the Mongol Empire, was a time of widespread political reorganization. [End Page 640] For van Steenbergen, it forms an ideal moment to examine state formation in the region. The stated goal of this book is to analyze the region's history using political-science theories of state formation. The seven contributors of the evidentiary chapters, however, are mainly historians whose empirical studies are largely disconnected from the more theoretical chapters at the beginning, despite the editor's "multiple attempts to maximize the volume's coherence" (vii). These authors provide five episodes from the histories of the Mamluk Sultanate, one about the Timurid realm, one about the Ottoman Empire, three about young sultans and their attempts to mold their states around themselves, three about states and their provincial elites (intellectual, political, and commercial), and one about the state's relationship with foreign elites. These chapters are all solidly historical; they acknowledge the volume's agenda but do not directly address it. Van Steenbergen has made a valiant effort, but theory and data remain far apart in this work.
Readers of this journal will be most interested in the two introductory chapters, which fill about half of the book. The first presents a generalized history of "the West-Asian state" (actually, states from Nile-to-Oxus) in the fifteenth century. It describes the Middle East in terms applicable to any polity, pulling back from the histories of the individual states to construct a trans-dynastic history of state formation in its essentials. As a result, the description's application to any particular polity is unclear. The chapter frames the features of Turco-Mongol politics as a tug of war between members of the dynastic family and the nomadic military leaders, although it does not explain how this general framework fits the Mamluks, who had neither a dynastic family nor a nomad-based military. The pre-bendal system that funded the military in most of these polities is regarded not as mere "decentralization" or "privatization" of landholding but as a symptom of the political transformation of the fifteenth century, which saw the growth of centripetal institutions, especially a specialized administration that allowed central authority to be exerted over a wider span. In this view, the ruler becomes less of an individual and more of an abstraction, an institution, while outsiders are easily integrated into the elite. The chaotic politics at the top do not normally disturb the lower level. This characterization does not include the role of patronage, the nonviolent aspect of these political relationships. Its purpose seems to be an attempt to draw Middle Eastern politics into comparison with the politics of the European states.
The second chapter, written with Jan Dumolyn, seeks to theorize these politics. It summarizes state-formation theory in the European tradition and then searches West-Asian political history for interpretive frameworks that can be made to parallel or accommodate European theories of state formation, since the West-Asian state does not yet have theoretical grounding. The concepts found useful are the privatization of power (Ira Lapidus), the militarization of the state (Marshall Hodgson), and the state as a product of social processes (Michael Chamberlain, but note that he studies a provincial city, not a political capital of a state). This chapter observes that Islamic West-Asian states claimed a monopoly [End Page 641] of both military and symbolic force. It seeks to understand the extent to which these states actually governed, and why only the Ottoman state continued through the sixteenth century. Generalizing on such a broad scale and trying to uncover a theory in historical works, it makes no direct reference to what could be extrapolated from the examples in the next seven chapters about how rulers and elites interacted and thus constructed the state.
This analysis, moreover, does not distinguish between the...
