That Before Colonization can be read in several ways is to its favour, but also makes it hard to review. It takes aim at the way international relations (referred to by the field’s formal initials IR) has tended to go about its business; it is also a refreshingly straightforward discussion of, as in the subtitle, “Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century”, which includes clear explanations of theory as well as numerous interesting examples. But, most interestingly perhaps, authors Charles R Butcher and Ryan D Griffiths also treat their data statistically, implying that IR could do with some additional empirical rigor.
Before Colonization’s attempt to count and categorize states is something that in turn requires a definition. Most people would likely have some difficulty coming up with a rigorous definition of a “state” but—to borrow a phrase from once-US Supreme Court Justice Potter—probably know one when they see one. This common-sense feeling, as it turns out, is probably pretty accurate. Yet, write the authors,
as an illustration of the problem, consider this simple question: How many independent states existed in 1820? The question of how many states there are in 2024 is relatively easy to answer because we have globe-spanning, sovereignty-attributing institutions such as the United Nations … There is uncertainty on the margins … but most will agree that there are between 193 and 196 independent states today. However, the existing work in IR has not produced an accurate number for 1820. A commonly cited figure is 23 states, given by the Correlates of War (COW) project. Yet all the states in the COW list were in Europe and the Americas, and vast regions of the globe are elided.
That there were no states in, say, South or Southeast Asia prior to the 20th century would have come as a great surprise to, say, all those from European powers who spent a lot of time and effort fighting, signing treaties and trading with them. So, why?
The main criterion to qualify as a state in the COW register is that a polity needed to have diplomatic representation by both France and Britain at the level of charge d’affaires or higher.
The authors actually discuss this rather than just dismiss it as silly. They note:
The field of IR has a problem… IR scholars have looked back into history to draw general lessons and construct universal theories. Yet for the most part they have examined one state system, the European system, which expanded to become the global system by the early twentieth century.
So when Butcher and Griffiths say that standard IR only identifies 23 states in 1820, it’s rather like shooting fish in a barrel. One doesn’t need to be an IR practitioner to see what’s wrong here. The authors propose a different metric which gives a number of about 219 states in 1820, a measurement which converges with the COW register around the First World War as colonization had reached its zenith.
Butcher and Griffiths divide states up into two categories: “billiard balls” and “bull’s-eyes”.
The authors look at four region in detail: East Asia, South Asia, Maritime South Asia and West Africa. They first divide states up into two categories: “billiard balls” and “bull’s-eyes”, the former being centralised states with clear borders (ie the sort of states we are used to today) and the latter being states where the authority tends to diminish the farther one gets from the center, system in which one state’s authority can overlap with another’s. For many, this will be a familiar division, for it coincides with the “mandala system” being commonly used to describe the latter in Southeast Asia.
The number of states (and they list them!) allows one to see some patterns. States come and go, some quite rapidly. Dagestan lasted from 1834 to 1859; Herat from 1829 to 1863. A great many states, from Fiji to Korea and Cambodia “died” (to use the authors’ emotive term) but were “resurrected” (usually as a result of emerging from colonialism). If this sounds peculiar, it’s worth remembering that the very European Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918, dismembered in 1939, resurrected after World War II and dissolved in 1992.
Butcher and Griffiths’s numbers show a decline in state numbers from their starting point of 1816-20 (colonialism being a key driver) but, at least as South Asia is concerned, had they started a bit earlier, the numbers would have shown a sharp uptick in the 18th century as the Mughal Empire started to pull back.
There’s a great deal of conventional wisdom that it is war that creates states.
All states are “billiard balls” today (or close to it) whereas hardly any were before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; outside of Europe and, interestingly, East Asia, most states in the world took a “bulls-eye” form in the 19th century. Butcher and Griffiths cover
… an old debate by testing whether prominent explanations for state centralization—specifically war, trade, and interaction capacity—can explain the choice between indirect and direct forms of rule in samples that are (mostly) different from those upon which these models were developed. We argue that a unified model can explain these choices across disparate historical regions and that the level of interaction capacity shapes not only the structure of states with respect to indirect and direct rule but also the systems they constituted.
There’s a great deal of conventional wisdom that it is war that creates states. Butcher and Griffiths are skeptical. They also note that while trade can channel money and power to the center, it also provides a means for entities on the periphery to break away.
Trade could empower rulers but also empower rivals and elites as markets changed and new resources were discovered. For example, pepper “defied monopoly” and created dozens of semiautonomous “pepper-rajas” along the coast of northern Sumatra, fragmenting the Sultanate of Aceh…. Pepper revenues also facilitated the independence of sultanates such as Deli, Langkat, and Asahan from Siak in the early nineteenth century.
The authors come down on what they call “interaction capacity”, which they define as “a measure of the organizational potential within a system”. It correlates, however, pretty closely to what we might call transport and communications infrastructure and capacity. Land and water transportation networks, population density, all help in developing and maintaining centralization.
It’s Butcher and Griffiths’s use of (global) data that gives the book its brio.
The authors imply that Before Colonization may prove controversial in IR circles, but the general reader, especially if familiar with the history, is likely to find that most it seems commonsensical (if slightly and unsurprisingly prone to academic terminology). It’s Butcher and Griffiths’s use of (global) data that gives the book its brio.
However, IR is as a discipline much more tied to contemporary policy-making (many would no doubt argue that is its raison-d’être) than is history. So while Butcher and Griffiths demonstrate that there were indeed a great many states ca 1820; they also demonstrate that the past is indeed a foreign country. Those relatively few places where “bulls-eye” states have emerged are generally considered to be “dysfunctional”. Butcher and Griffiths’s data-based approach nevertheless should give one greater pause about the validity of analogy-based approaches such as that in the well-known “Thucydides Trap”.
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