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JAY COAKLEY

JANET LEVER

STANDARDIZATION

Standardization is a technique used in comparing indicators from two or more populations. The goal of the standardization procedure is to control for compositional differences between these groups that may influence the indicator that is being examined. This method allows a researcher to determine the extent to which differences in the rates of events between populations are due to differences in population characteristics. Often sociologists ask questions, that require comparisons between groups of people: Which city has a

higher crime rate? Which country has lower mortality? Which ethnic group is more likely to coreside with elderly family members? In making these comparisons, one usually calculates a summary measure: crimes per capita, crude death rate, or the proportion of elders living with family members. However, any two groups of people are likely to differ along several dimensions, such as age, educational level, race, and income. These dimensions, or factors, also may be related to the event being explored. As a result, the summary measure to some extent reflects the compositional differences in the groups being studied.

Standardization historically has been a central aspect of demographic methods (Bogue 1969; Hinde 1998; Murdock and Ellis 1991; Shryock and Siegel 1980), but its importance extends beyond that use to a way of thinking about summary or aggregate measures. While offering the advantage of conciseness, aggregate measures mask underlying compositional differences, and the use of standardization represents an acknowledgment that population characteristics influence the rate at which events occur in a population. Summary indicators are very useful; they provide a single number for comparison rather than a whole series of numbers, and they are easily calculated. However, comparisons among population groups or among subgroups in a population should account for the differing compositional makeup of those groups. Demographers have been led to standardization for several reasons. First, there is a natural desire to make comparisons between groups along demographic indicators: crude death rates, crude birthrates, marriage rates, and employment, among others. Standardization allows these comparisons to reflect differences in the underlying processes, rather than being confounded by the effects of composition. Standardization procedures can accommodate the effects of a single factor or many factors, leaving the technique bounded only by the available data. Standardization also allows the estimation of indicators for groups for which data are incomplete or of poor quality.

Many demographic measures are affected by the composition of the population, particularly the age distribution. Age composition is especially critical in considering crude death rates, since mortality rates have a very distinctive age-specific pattern: high at very young and very old ages.

Populations with a large proportion of persons in those age groups experience a large number of deaths, regardless of age-specific rates of mortality. Two populations with identical sets of agespecific rates of mortality but different age distributions will have different crude death rates. The removal of the ‘‘interference’’ of age distribution from the summary measure—the crude death rate—is the goal of the standardization procedure. In the rest of this article, the standardization procedure will be explained using mortality rates, and then several other examples of standardization will be presented.

The first step in a comparison is to calculate a crude rate or proportion. Crude rates or proportions are calculated by the formula

where E refers to the number of events of interest in the population during the time period and P refers to the population during that period. If the population is measured at the middle of the year and the events occur throughout the year, this proportion can be interpreted as a rate. In cases where this proportion is small, for instance, mortality rates, the crude rate commonly is multiplied by 1,000 and reported as the number of events per 1,000 people.

Crude rates or proportions are used to represent a variety of characteristics of a population. These rates have an advantage over a comparison of absolute numbers, since they account for differences in size between two populations. Obviously, in a comparison of the annual number of homicides in Chicago versus that in Seattle, one must account for the fact that the population of Chicago is 2.8 million people compared to about one-half million in Seattle. Similarly, comparing the number of deaths in the United States (over 2 million) to those in Sweden (about 90,000) in 1994 would be unreasonable without knowing that the population of the United States is three times that of Sweden.

Despite the advantage of crude rates over absolute numbers, crude rates are influenced by the composition of the populations being compared. If the event of interest varies by some factor and the two populations have varying levels of that

factor, the crude rates will partly reflect this compositional variation rather than only a difference in the rate at which the event is occurring. If the populations being compared are standardized with respect to the factor, any remaining difference between the crude rates can be attributed to a true difference in rates of occurrence. If the difference in the crude rate disappears, one can conclude that the compositional variation rather than a difference in the underlying rates of occurrence led to a difference in the crude of events.

To understand the rationale of standardization, it is necessary to recognize that in essence, the crude rate is a weighted average of a set of factorspecific rates, where the weights are the distribution of the factor in the population. Thinking in this manner, one can rewrite the crude rate as

where pa is the population in group a and ea is the number of events occurring in group a. The sum of all ea equals the total number of events, E, and the sum of all pa equals the total population, P. Note that this equation has two components. The first, ea/pa, represents the group-specific rate of events or the group-specific proportion, which sometimes is expressed as ma. The second component of the rate calculation, pa/P, represents the proportion of the population in each of the a groups. These are the two series of elements needed to apply the direct standardization technique. Using this notation, the crude rate can be rewritten as

When the formula for the crude rate is written in this manner, it is easy to see how the composition of the population, that is, its distribution among the a groups, affects the crude rate. If the groupspecific rate ma is high when the proportion of the population in that group, pa/P, is large, more events will be observed in the total population than will be observed if pa/P is small. Similarly, if ma is small when pa/P is small, few events will occur.

A comparison of the crude death rates in Sweden and the United States provides an example of the use of standardization. Sweden has one of the world’s highest life expectancies at birth,

approximately 76 years for men and 81.4 years for women in 1994. The crude death rate of Sweden, however, was about 10.4 deaths per 1,000 in that year. In contrast, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 72.2 years for mens and 78.8 years for women in 1993, and the crude death rate was about 8.6 deaths per 1,000 in that year (United Nations 1997). It seems natural to expect that the country with the longest life expectancy would also have the lowest crude death rate, so what accounts for this discrepancy? To understand the reason for this difference in the crude rates, it is necessary to observe the differing age distributions of the two populations. In the United States about 13 percent of the population is over age of 65; while in Sweden over 17 percent of people are over that age. Since death rates are highest in this age range, the larger proportion of the Swedish population in old age creates more deaths, even with lower age-specific death rates. Standardization demonstrates the extent to which these differences in age distribution account for the difference in the crude death rate.

As was mentioned above, this method of stan- dardization—direct standardization—requires a standard population distribution and a set of fac- tor-specific rates for the populations being studied. Direct standardization uses this standard population to calculate new standardized crude rates for the populations of interest. In this case, the population distribution of the standard population replaces the observed population distribution. Since each population’s crude rate will be calculated with the same distribution, the effect of the compositional differences will be eliminated and each population will have the same composition. To apply direct standardization, the formula

is used, where eja represents the number of events occurring in group a in population j, pja represents the population size of group a in population j, psa represents the number of people in group a in the standard population s, and Ps represents the standard population. Comparing equations (2) and (4) shows the similarities. The second term in equation (2), the compositional distribution of the population of interest, pa/P, has been replaced with the compositional distribution of the stan-

dard population, psa/Ps. The first term in the crude rate calculation remains the factor-specific rate in the population of interest, population j.

Returning to the example of the United States and Sweden, using the age distribution of the United States as the standard distribution and computing a standardized crude death rate for Sweden by applying the age-specific death rates of Sweden yields a standardized crude death rate of 7.6 deaths per 1,000 for Sweden. Instead of being higher than the crude death rate in the United States, Sweden’s crude death rate falls below that of the United States. At least part of the difference in the crude rates therefore is due to Sweden’s older population rather than to a difference in agespecific death rates. In general, populations with a relatively old age distribution tend to have higher crude death rates than do populations with similar age-specific mortality patterns, since death rates are higher at older ages.

The data demands for direct standardization, while not overwhelming, can be difficult to meet if there is limited information on factor-specific rates in one of the populations of interest. For example, in many studies of mortality in less developed countries or in a historical perspective, information on age-specific death rates may be missing or unreliable. In these cases, an alternative method referred to as indirect standardization can be used. Indirect standardization requires knowledge only of the composition of the population and the total number of events of interest. Direct standardization involves the application of population-specific sets of rates to a standard population; conversely, indirect standardization involves the application of a standard set of rates to individual population distributions. In indirect standardization, a set of standard rates is applied to the population and the expected number of events is compared to the actual number. This standardizing ratio is estimated by the formula

where Ej is the actual number of events in the population j, msa is the factor-specific rate in the standard population s, and pja is the number of people in population j who are in group a. The denominator of the ratio calculates the number of

events that would be expected in population j if the factor-specific rates of the standard population were applied to the population. When the event of interest is death, this ratio often is referred to as the standardized mortality ratio. To obtain the new indirectly standardized crude rate, this standardizing ratio is multiplied by the crude rate for the standard population:

where CRs is the crude rate in the standard population. These indirectly standardized crude rates then can be compared to each other. Obviously, when the standardizing ratio is greater than 1.0, the ISR will be larger than the crude rate for the standard population, and when the standardizing ratio is less than 1.0, the ISR will be smaller than the standard population’s crude rate.

Indirect standardization does not control for composition as well as the direct standardization method does but should yield similar results in terms of direction and magnitude. Returning to the example of Sweden and the United States, the actual number of recorded deaths in Sweden would be greater than the observed number if U.S. agespecific death rates were applied to the Swedish population’s age distribution. The resulting standardized mortality ratio would be 0.912, and when that was multiplied by the crude rate for the United States, the ISR for Sweden would be 7.8, very similar to the result obtained through direct standardization.

When indirect standardization is employed, there is no choice to be made about the standard population; this method is used when only one population distribution is available. The choice of the standard population for direct standardization should be considered carefully, but within reasonable bounds the choice of standard should not alter the conclusions radically. Researchers generally are interested in the direction and approximate size of differences between the groups, and these values are preserved with the choice of any of a number of reasonable standard populations. There are three general choices for the standard: use one of the populations being studied, use an average of the populations, or use a population outside those being studied. Each of these choices has advantages and disadvantages. Theoretically,

the choice of standard should be made to minimize the effects of that choice on the results.

Using one of the populations being studied eliminates the need to standardize that population and often makes the explication of comparisons easier. For instance, in comparing crime rates across several cities, choosing one city as the basis for comparison may be appropriate. When comparisons are made of a population over time, it is standard procedure to choose a distribution that is representative of the middle of the time period. For instance, in a study of mortality change between 1950 and 1990 in the United States, it would be appropriate to use the 1970 census for the standard age distribution. A drawback to using one of the study populations as the standard, however, can be that the population chosen has an unusual distribution of factors. This unusual distribution may skew the summary measures in a way that is inconsistent or difficult to interpret. Also, choosing one of the populations as a standard can carry implications that this distribution is the ‘‘ideal’’ or ‘‘correct’’ distribution and may place interpretational burdens on the results.

Using an average of the populations eliminates the problem of setting one population as the ideal and ameliorates the problem of unusual distributions. A comparison of racial differences in mortality in the United States, for example, might use the age distribution of the total U.S. population, an unweighted average of the distribution of each racial group, as the standard. This choice eliminates the assumption that any one population has a preferred distribution and allows for meaningful comparisons among groups. The use of an aggregate population as the standard is encountered frequently in comparisons of subgroups within a national population.

A third choice is to pick a population completely exogenous to the study as a standard. This choice most often involves an artificial population that is representative of a standard pattern of factor distributions. Several sources of standard populations exist. In the case of age, Coale and Demeny’s (1983) set of regional model life tables contains sets of age distributions typical of a variety of mortality levels and patterns. The use of an external standard eliminates any value judgments associated with the choice of standard. An exter-

nal standard also can be chosen to minimize or eliminate extreme distributions of factors. The external standard also provides a way of comparing very diverse populations. Again, the choice of standard should match the populations being studied as closely as possible to minimize the effect of that choice on the results.

An exogenous standard also might be employed as a way to simulate the effects of a variety of changes in population composition on the crude rate. This use of the standardization technique highlights the underlying logic of the procedure by using the method to investigate the extent to which compositional chances influence aggregate comparisons. Here the technique is used as a methodological device to explore the effects of changes. For instance, a researcher might be interested in the effects on average wages of changing occupational structures among men and women. A testable hypothesis could be that as women approach men in terms of occupational distribution, the gender gap in wages will disappear. If a variety of simulated occupational structures are applied to a set of genderand occupation-specific wage rates, the effect of occupational structure on the wage gap can be examined.

Since standardization developed in the field of demography, most applications involve the study of demographic phenomena. The example of the United States and Sweden involved comparisons of mortality rates. However, standardization is used widely in other areas as well. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau routinely reports the distribution of the American population aged 15 and older among marital states, and historical comparisons of this distribution are used to examine changes in marital behavior over time. However, the age composition of the population can greatly influence the distribution among marital states, particularly when the proportion of the population in the age range of 15 to 25 years is very large. In 1960, 65.6 percent of women aged 15 and older were married compared to 60.4 percent of similarly aged women in 1975 (United States Bureau of the Census 1976). At first glance, these comparisons seem to signal a retreat from marriage: A smaller proportion of women was married in 1975 than in 1960. However, when the age distribution of the population is standardized to the 1960 population, the proportion married in 1975 in-

creases to 63.5. While this is still a decline compared to 1960, the magnitude of the change is much less. The difference in the proportion married is due largely to a difference between 1960 and 1975 in the proportion of women just over the age of 15, the baby boomers, who were young teenage women who had not yet married.

Standardization can be used to control for characteristics other than age. Suppose, for instance, one is comparing the health status of two different groups: elderly white Americans and elderly African-Americans. If we compare the proportion of each group in poor health, we find that 34 percent of elderly whites and 50 percent of elderly African-Americans report their health as fair or poor. However, we know that health status varies by education and that the educational distributions of these two groups differ. Among elderly whites, about 12 percent have fewer than eight years of school, compared to 39 percent of elderly African-Americans. Clearly, since lower levels of education are associated with poorer health and elderly African-Americans have lower levels of educational attainment, some of the difference in observed health status between the groups can be expected to result from the different educational compositions.

It is desirable to compare these two groups without the influence of education. Using the educational distribution of the elderly white population as a standard and applying the observed education-specific rates of poor health among elderly African-Americans, one obtains an overall proportion of 42 percent in poor health, compared to the unstandardized proportion of 50 percent. Thus, if the African-American older population had an educational distribution similar to that of the more highly educated white elderly population, the expected health status of older African-Americans would improve.

Lichter and Eggebeen (1994) used standardization techniques to examine the effects of parental employment on rates of child poverty. In their work these researchers use direct standardization techniques in two different ways. In the first, they simulate the effects of a variety of assumptions about parental employment patterns on children’s poverty rates. This is an illustration of using an ‘‘exogenous’’ or artificial population

distribution as a standard population. By changing the employment distribution of the parents of children in poverty, they determine that only modest declines in child poverty would result from increasing those levels of employment. Their second application of standardization compares the poverty rates of black children obtained by using the employment distribution of white parents as the standard to the rates directly observed. In this case, they have chosen one of the study populations as the standard and are interested in the extent to which differences in child poverty between blacks and whites are determined by factors other than parental employment distributions. They find in fact that parental employment differences among female-headed families account for a substantial portion of the observed differences in child poverty.

Standardization can control for more than one factor at a time and can be applied to more than two groups. Himes et al. (1996) standardize for age, sex, and marital status in an examination of the living arrangements of minority elderly in the United States. Living arrangements are known to be different for men and women, for married and unmarried, and for younger and older elderly. These factors—age, sex, and marital status—also are known to vary across racial and ethnic subgroups. Therefore, the observed differences in living arrangements are likely to be due in part to these underlying characteristics rather than being a reflection of differences in attitudes or beliefs. Standardization allows a comparison among groups without the influence of these compositional differences. In this research, the compositional distribution of the entire United States with respect to age, sex, and marital status was chosen as the standard. In this analysis, the standardization procedure had the greatest effect on comparisons of the African-American population and much smaller effects on the white, non-Hispanic, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American populations.

Standardization is widely used in a variety of sociological inquiries. While it originated in demographic analyses, it can be applied to a variety of questions in which a researcher wants to determine the extent to which compositional differences in population groups account for observed differences in summary measures. Standardization is also useful as a simulation technique, allow-

ing researchers to explore the effects of a variety of compositional changes on a summary indicator. Researchers should bear in mind, however, that the results of standardization are merely artificially constructed indicators; they do not represent a real population or circumstance.

REFERENCES

Bogue, Donald J. 1969 Principles of Demography. New

York: Wiley.

Coale, Ansely J., and Paul Demeny 1983 Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations, 2nd ed. New York: Academic Press.

Himes, Christine L., Dennis P. Hogan, and David J. Eggebeen 1996 ‘‘Living Arrangements of Minority Elders.’’ Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences

51B:S42–S48.

Hinde, Andrew 1998 Demographic Methods. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Lichter, Daniel T., and David J. Eggebeen 1994 ‘‘The Effect of Parental Employment on Child Poverty.’’

Journal of Marriage and the Family 56:633–645.

Murdock, Steve H., and David R. Ellis 1991 Applied Demography: An Introduction to Basic Concepts, Methods, and Data. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Shryock, Henry S., and Jacob S. Siegel 1980. The Methods and Materials of Demography, 4th printing (rev.). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

United Nations 1997 Demographic Yearbook 1995. New

York: United Nations.

United States Bureau of the Census 1976 Social Indicators 1976. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

CHRISTINE L. HIMES

STATE, THE

The term ‘‘state’’ denotes the complex of organizations, personnel, regulations, and practices through which political power is exercised in a territory. In simple societies organized as bands of families, as tribes, or as chiefdoms, political power is not separated from power relationships rooted in kinship structures or religion. Those societies also lack organizations and specialized personnel (beyond the chief) for exercising political authority

and therefore have no real states. The state emerged only with the development of more complex societies, either cities or tribal confederations, which formed the bases for city-states, monarchies, and empires. Monarchies and empires in turn have given way to liberal states, modernizing dictatorships, and one-party states as the most widespread current forms of states.

The ‘‘state’’ is a rather abstract term. Over time and space, the concrete organizational forms, the kinds of personnel, the specific laws and regulations, and the practices of states have varied greatly with the historical development of societies and across different cultures and regions. The modern nation-state is a very particular kind of state that developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and currently is spreading across the world (Poggi 1990). However, like other forms of the state, this organizational form is likely to have its day and then fade; already various kinds of supranational and international bodies have begun to take over some of the political power formerly monopolized by nation-states.

The basis of the state is political power. This article examines the roots of that power and then explores the various forms taken by states from their beginnings to the present day.

POLITICAL POWER

All forms of power involve the ability of powerholders to coerce others into giving up their property, their free choice of action, and even their lives. Political power, as opposed to economic power (based on money or other forms of wealth), religious power (based on relationships to transcendent forces), family power (based on sex, seniority, and kin relationships), and pure coercion (based on brute force), is rooted in the recognition of the rightful authority of the ruler (Weber 1968). That authority stems from the demands within a society for specialists with the ability to mediate and coordinate.

Any group of human beings in regular interaction among themselves is prone to conflict over possessions, decisions regarding group actions (to hunt or not, to camp here or there, to fight or flee from a threat), and individual actions that give offense (insults, injury, infidelity). In small groups,

such conflicts usually can be settled through the arbitration of respected family members or elders, but in larger groups or groups in which much interaction occurs among nonkin, those conflicts produce demands for justice that require a more broadly recognized form of mediation. Individuals who are particularly skilled at mediating such conflicts, who gain a reputation for wisdom and justice, can acquire the role of a specialist in settling conflicts. In addition, every group of human beings faces external threats from wild animals, the weather, and other human groups. Individuals who are particularly skilled at coordinating actions within a group for the purposes of attack, hunting, and defense can gain a reputation that translates into a calling as a specialist in coordinating group actions to meet threats.

The functions of mediation to produce internal justice and of coordination to deal with external threats are distinct; indeed Native American tribes sometimes had a ‘‘peace chief’’ and a ‘‘war chief’’ who specialized in those functions. Modern societies have legal-judicial systems and executivemilitary systems that show a similar division of functions. However, these functions tended to merge because in both cases it was necessary to have mechanisms to compel compliance with the arbitration decisions of the mediator or the action directives of the coordinator. Once a society develops regular means to compel compliance with those decisions and directives (generally armed warriors closely attached to or under the direct supervision of the mediator or coordinator), that society is on its way to developing a state. Political power is thus the authority given to a recognized leader (whether judge or general) to compel compliance with his or her decisions.

Political power, however, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the power of the leader must be sufficient to ensure that arbitration is enforced and that the coordination of military, hunting, or building activities is effective. The larger a society is, the more complex its economy is, the stronger its enemies are, and the more threatening and varied its environment is, the greater are the tasks facing the state. Thus, for a society to avoid turmoil and defend itself, it must grow in organizational size, complexity, and power along with the society of which it is a part. On the other hand, as the leaders acquire control of larger and richer

organizations and larger and more powerful coercive forces, there is a danger that that organizational and coercive force will be used to enrich and serve the desires of the ruler, not to meet the demands for justice and protection of the population (Mann 1986).

The history of the state is thus a history of balancing acts and often of overreaching. State rulers frequently use their organization and authority to expand their power and wealth. Some rulers invest heavily in conquest, acquiring power over new regions and peoples by brute force and then setting up organizations and laws to acquire and enforce political authority. Other rulers have sought to distinguish themselves primarily as lawgivers or (e.g., King Solomon) paragons of justice. Still others have simply taken their power as given and abused it. Sometimes they gain mightily from such abuse, but at other times—under very particular conditions—they may become the object of elite revolts or popular revolutions.

For sociologists, the key to understanding the state is knowledge about the shifting relationships between state rulers, their organizations and resources, and their societies. Much of the history of the development of state forms comes from the competition between rulers seeking to extend their control of political organizations and coercive force and elite and popular groups seeking to limit or channel political authority into socially acceptable goals and actions.

CITY-STATES, EMPIRES, AND FEUDALISM

Although cities and states initially may have developed independently, with both gradually moving forward between 8000 and 3000 B.C., by the third millennium B.C., the conjunction between urbanization and state making was firmly established in the Middle East. Elsewhere—in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia (especially Java and Cam- bodia)—states and even empires developed without true cities; those states operated through dense clusters of villages that often centered on great temple complexes. By contrast, in the Middle East and the New World, large cities grew up around the temple complexes that served as the headquarters and ceremonial centers of the new states. Several of those city-states had great success in

expansion and became the nucleus of larger empires, such as Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and the empire of the Aztecs.

City-states continued to emerge throughout history, especially in periods of early settlement of new lands (such as the Greek city-states that spread throughout the Mediterranean in the second millennium B.C.) or after the breakup of large empires (as occurred in Italy and along the Rhine in Germany after the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth century A.D.). The legacy of these citystates is that they experimented with a wide array of state forms. At various times, the Greek and Roman city-states of the eighth through fourth centuries B.C.—including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and Rome—were ruled by a single monarch, pairs of kings (or consuls), oligarchies of the wealthy or well-born aristocrats, and popular assemblies. The modern forms of democracy and monarchy can be traced back to the Greek and Roman city-states of that period. However, citystates generally did not survive in any area for more than a few centuries before being swallowed up by large territorial empires.

Those large territorial empires became the dominant form of the state in much of the world for the next 5,000 years, from roughly 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1900 (Eisenstadt 1963). In the Middle East, the major empires included of Sumer, Akkad, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia and the Hellenistic empires founded by the generals of Alexander the Great. These empires were followed by the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic empires founded by the followers of Mohammed. These empires were followed by the vast empires of the Mongols and the Turks, the last of which was the Ottoman Empire, which ruled large portions of north Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe and lasted until 1923. In Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire there followed the empires of Charlemagne and his sons. That empire left as a legacy the Holy Roman Empire, which eventually evolved into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which survived until 1918. After roughly A.D. 1500, much of eastern Europe and central Asia was under the control of the Russian Empire, which lasted until 1917. In China and India, large empires emerged in the third and fourth centuries B.C. In China, the Qin and Han dynasties initiated a pattern of imperial rule that lasted until the birth

of the Chinese Republic in 1911; in India, the Maurya and Gupta dynasties briefly unified the subcontinent and were followed by the Mughal Empire, which lasted until India came under British domination in the eighteenth century.

In Africa, there also were large Empires, including the Aksum Empire in Ethiopia which was (founded around 300 B.C. and whose successor empires and dynasties lasted until 1974), the Ghana Empire and Mali Empire in west Africa, Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa in southern Africa, and the Zulu Empire, which ruled over much of southeastern Africa until it was defeated by the British in the late nineteenth century. In the Americas, three major indigenous empires developed: the Maya and the Aztecs in what is today Mexico and the Incas centered in modern-day Peru. After defeating the Aztecs and Incas in the sixteenth century, Spain established an empire in the Americas extending from Chile to California that it ruled for nearly 300 years.

The vast majority of these empires were conquest empires in which strong imperial centers acquired territory, troops, and resources to build ever-larger empires and thus conquer ever more territory. However, many imperial rulers also were famous lawgivers renowned for establishing justice and order in their empires; they included Hammurabi of Babylonia, Justinian of Rome, and Suleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire. Their lawcodes were established not to give ‘‘rights’’ to subjects but to produce order by making a clear list of crimes and the penalties that would be imposed.

Though powerful, these empires were not immune to decay and disintegration. Even the longest-lived empires, such as those of Egypt and China, had periods of civil war and broke up into multiple states. Population growth that created pressure on the capacity of the land to yield taxes, military defeat by powerful neighbors, and conflicts among elite factions could all produce disorganization and decay of the imperial state administration. In times of decay, a locally based form of rule known as feudalism often arose.

Feudalism in the strict sense is a pattern of allegiance by oath taking in which a lord gives control of land (a ‘‘fief’’) to a vassal in return for a promise of service. This pattern may have one dominant lord controlling many vassals, or there

may be many lords and many vassals, with some vassals dispensing fiefs and thus becoming lords themselves. In this sense, feudalism is not a state, for no centralized administration has full control of the territory. However, if a single lord manages to emerge as dominant over all the other lords and vassals in a territory and is able to expand his own household and personal administration to exert his will throughout the territory, one can then speak of a state, which usually is described as a kingdom or monarchy. Kingdoms were known throughout the world and generally appear in periods in which large empires have broken down or before they are established. In most of the world, empires continued to reestablish themselves, often building on the strongest kingdom in a region. However, in western and central Europe, no empire ever reestablished lasting control over the area that had been controlled by the Romans. Instead, the period of feudalism in Europe (roughly A.D. 600 through 1300) was followed by many centuries in which a number of competing kingdoms controlled major portions of the European continent.

ABSOLUTISM AND BUREAUCRATIC-

AUTHORITARIAN STATES

The early empires and kingdoms all had rudimentary administrations and relatively undifferentiated elites. That is, the officers of the state were mainly family members of the ruler or personal favorites appointed at the ruler’s pleasure; many were also high-ranking officials in the church. They gained much of their income from the control of personal properties or privileges granted by the ruler. The mingling of state and church was based on a strong connection between religious and state power; there was usually an official state religion that supported the state and was in turn supported by the ruler.

By around the sixteenth century A.D., however, most of the kingdoms and empires of Europe and Asia had begun to develop into more impersonal and bureaucratic states. State offices were fixed in a ‘‘table of ranks,’’ and officers were expected to undergo rigorous academic training to qualify for their positions. The number of state offices multiplied greatly, and while favorites still were chosen for key positions, an increasing number were chosen and promoted for their merit and

services. States also began to diversify their sources of income. Most early empires relied on various forms of tribute collection or taxes paid ‘‘in kind,’’ such as set amounts of grain, cloth, or labor services. In contrast, by the sixteenth century, most states had begun to specify and collect taxes in cash, with which they paid regular salaries to state officials. In those states, subjects still had few rights and no participation in politics; rulers remained absolute in authority. However, those states became ‘‘bureaucratic-authoritarian’’ in the sense that authority increasingly was exercised through uniform rules enforced by bureaucratic officials rather than through local and customary practices enforced by fairly autonomous local notables.

Dependence on cash meant that many states also placed a greater emphasis on trade and on taxes on commerce as an alternative to taxes on land. For some states (e.g., the Netherlands and Great Britain), taxes on trade and industry soon exceeded revenues from traditional land taxes (Tilly 1990). In the period 1500–1900, the promotion of trade and commerce led to a vast expansion of long-distance trade, both ocean-borne and landbased, across the globe. European kingdoms, stymied in creating empires in Europe, created them overseas. Seeking natural resources and new markets, European states (and later Japan) invested in colonies and overseas companies and administrations to control them in the Americas, Africa, India, southeastern Asia, Korea, and along the Chinese coast.

While this period remained one of kingdoms and empires, bureaucratic-authoritarian states faced two extensive periods of challenge. From the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century and again from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, all of Eurasia experienced several trends that reshaped states. First, in those two periods the population grew dramatically, doubling or more, while in other periods the population declined or was stable. These periods of population growth were also periods of rising prices as a result of more extensive commerce and a rising demand for basic goods. Pay to laborers and available land for peasants, however, declined as the population grew faster than did the agricultural economy. Population growth also led to factional conflicts among elite groups competing for control of state offices and to greater demands on state administrations. However, states were run-

ning into financial trouble, for population growth was reducing the surplus available for taxation and the rapid growth of commerce was shifting more resources into areas where traditional tax collection was weak, leaving more resources in the hands of merchants, local landowners, and urban and regional elites. Toward the end of those two periods—roughly 1580–1660 and 1770– 1860—conflicts between state rulers and elites over the rulers’ prerogatives and resources triggered worldwide waves of revolutions and rebellions in kingdoms and empires; these included the English, American, and French revolutions, the anti-Habsburg revolts, and the revolutions of 1848 in Europe; the collapse of the Ming Empire and the Taiping rebellion in China; and thejanissary, Balkan, and Egyptian revolts in the Ottoman Empire (Goldstone 1991).

REVOLUTIONS, NATIONALISM, AND

NATION-STATES

Those revolutions and rebellions all involved popular uprisings and elite rebellions against the ruler and loyal elements of the state but had different outcomes in different areas. In most societies, the elites were deeply frightened by popular uprisings and sought to reestablish state power more firmly by tightening the reins of state power and enforcing allegiance to the state-sponsored religion. This was the case in Catholic Spain, Italy, and Austria under the Counter-Reformation; in Confucian China under the Qing dynasty; and in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. However, in England 1689, America in 1776, and France in 1789, the elites were more concerned that excessive state power would damage their positions and fuel future revolutions. Reviving ideas and institutions from the days of democratic Greece and republican Rome, they attempted to place limits on state power and reserve specific rights to elites and even to ordinary workers and peasants. Those limits and rights were codified in a variety of documents, including ‘‘declarations of rights’’, and especially in constitutions that became the basis for state power. Those constitutions marked a distinctively modern turn in the history of state. Previously, state authority