Friday, September 30, 12-2
Mark Cohen
What Is the State without War?
The Case of the Pax Tokugawa in Japan
Taking the bellicist framework for the analysis of state-formation as a theoretical starting point, this paper develops an account of the origin and dynamics of the political structures of Japan during the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868). The theoretical salience of this period in Japanese history is that whereas before and after it, the state-building cycle of competitive military buildup, fiscal expansion, and administrative consolidation was in full force in Japan, during the Tokugawa era, unlike in Europe during the same time period, the bellicist mechanism jammed up. States stopped making war, and so war could not continue to make states. This is consistent with the bellicist framework insofar as both military conflict and state-building ceased, but that framework lacks the capacity to explain why in this period the state-building cycle ceased operating. In order to do so, this paper revises the bellicist framework with three elements that together represent a theory of the political-economic environment of state formation: 1) the determination of the positions and associated strategies of agents by the structure of social-property relations; 2) the organization-for-conflict and conflict-of- organizations among those positions; and 3) institutional path-dependency produced by the resolution of conflicts.