Economists are the near perfect example of the aphorism “a man good with a hammer sees all the world as a nail.” They are convinced that the totality of life on earth can be packed into one of their spreadsheets. The idea that people might not want the most efficient or most cost effective thing is alien to the mind of the economist. Despite mountains of obvious examples in daily life, they insist that people are moist robots, acting out of self-interest. Despite that, this post is worth the read.
Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states. … If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. …
Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. … Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. … Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.
Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. …
The industrial revolution … demanded a different kind of government. … “In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.” … Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.
The author is confusing a lot of things here. There were nation states before anyone thought of inventing passports. The British had a clear sense of national identity by the time of the Thirty Years War and most argue that the 100 Years War was the birth of nationalism. Certainly the French and English saw themselves as nations by the the 17th century. When you look at how people identified with the local polity, the Romans clearly had a firm understanding of citizenship.
That said, the idea of nationalism is a recent development. The English and French caught the fever first and then the Spanish and Italians. The Swedes had a national identity in the Thirty Years War. Central and Eastern Europe, however, were late to the game. Outside of China, India and Japan the rest of the world still struggles with the concept. If not for the West forcing these concepts on the people of Africa and the Middle East, tribalism would still be the natural method of self-organization.
Agrarian societies are not in need of a large public works projects, at least not the simple sort of farming in place for thousands of years. Maybe large scale irrigation would have been helpful, but farming adapted to the land. Road maintenance for getting crops to market would have been useful and the Romans did a lot of it, but the European model worked just as well.
As a result, in purely agrarian societies, there was never an economic need for coordinating loads of people into creating publicly held assets. The pillaging of France by the English in the 100 Years War, did change the economy, creating a demand for talent to build and maintain large estates. That probably sowed the seeds for later economic innovation like road building an irrigation projects.
Industrial societies, on the other hand, need large scale public works and that can happen in two ways. One is with the lash in low trust societies. The other is through coordinated cooperation in higher trust societies. A group of people can come together for mutual economic benefit and hire a bunch of men to do the work that the rich guys need done. There is obvious exploitation here, but it is not slavery.
It is important to note that the Industrial Revolution did not start in Africa or the Fertile Crescent. The elements for industrialization were in place in England, which is why it started there first. The combination of demographics, social structure and limited political institutions built on a national identity allowed large scale economic operations to flourish in England before anywhere else.
As industrialization flowed on to the continent, the countries with “far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialized societies” were the last to industrialize. In the case of Russia, industrialization destroyed the “far-reaching bureaucracies” needed to maintain order. The riots and revolts of the 19th century in central Europe were largely due to the collision of these existing “far-reaching bureaucracies” and the changing economics.
These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around. …
“nation building” … required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. … Nationalist feelings … arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.
The key factor driving this ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker’s native village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work, benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. “It wasn’t until then that they had to establish who a Prussian was,” he says, and they needed bureaucracy to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.
Again, national identity came to France in the 15th century. Early in the war, English armies would be stocked with all sorts, as well as English. Similarly, the armies loyal the French King were stocked with Scots, English and French. By the end of the war this was no longer true. The French fought for France and the English fought for England. French national identity is what drove France’s involvement in the Thirty Years War two centuries later. The idea that nationalism was born in the Industrial Revolution is at odds with history.
It is fair to argue that the Industrial Age allowed for the industrialization of the state. The managerial revolution is why we have a managerial class. I suppose one can argue that this then let nationalism sweep the continent. A better answer is that the barbarism of the Thirty Years War ended Christianity as the organizing force on European elites. Nationalism filled the void, eventually giving the people a new foundation myth and a sense of destiny. Still, the Industrial Age certainly helped accelerate the modern bureaucratic state along with the spread of various Rousseau-ist cults as a organizing philosophies.