Warfare is not the only driving force of state formation, and the state is not simply a violent machine. As the preceding chapters have shown, state formation in England, China, and Japan was also propelled by safeguarding the public interest. This occurs first along the dimension of domestic welfare, and later extends to diverse and sometimes conflicting aspects of nonmaterial forms of public good. I identify across the three cases similar organic conceptions of public interest, each of which the respective state proclaimed its duty to protect. Consent to state authority was to a large extent based upon the subjects’ evaluation of the state’s performance in safeguarding that interest, as judged by particular projects and policies. Both the concept of public interest and the terms of state legitimacy are shown to be open to negotiation and contestation in specific circumstances.

The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation thus connected state agents in the center and those in localities into one governing apparatus directed and coordinated by the center as the highest political authority. It provided a common basis for the interactions among state actors to attain good governance and thus strengthened state capacity. Meanwhile, it served as a common normative platform for the collaboration between state and social actors in public goods provision vital to domestic welfare. The specific forms varied, but the patterns of state–society collaboration remained the same. Importantly, they complemented the state’s limited fiscal capacity in domestic governance and the locality’s limited ability to provide cross-regional large-scale public goods vital to domestic welfare and hence to governance.

In early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, which exhibited a high degree of fiscal decentralization, the royal government and the shogunate as the highest political authority intervened to mobilize resources to provide large-scale public goods that went beyond the capacity of self-governed local communities, such as major repairs of harbors and buildings and maintenance of cross-regional hydraulic projects. In Qing China, where the state was equipped with a centrally managed yet rigid fiscal institution, the central government encouraged local communities and merchant organizations to participate in public goods provision. For public works that were too big for local communities to shoulder but too small for the Qing state to incorporate into its annual budget, official funds might be lent to social actors, as we see in the “people’s projects.” Neglecting these interactions makes it difficult to understand how domestic governance was maintained with very limited state fiscal capacity in Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840.

These two-directional collaborations between the state and society to provide public goods in domestic governance contributed to the stability of fiscally limited early modern states, even in the face of significant commercialization and social change. This stability was quite remarkable as long as the state was not involved in expensive foreign wars. Tied together by the organic conception of public interest, state and society could have a relationship that was to an important degree collaborative rather than purely confrontational or competitive. Such a conception of public interest was also dynamic, as it could accommodate new types of interests and welfare concerns generated by commercial and industrial development.

State capacity is therefore determined neither by social origin nor by state autonomy alone, but is tied to the interactions between state and society that take place upon the shared normative basis of state legitimacy. Historically, the enhancement of state capacity did not necessarily depend upon the consent of local communities, as suggested in the theories of the social origins of state power. Indeed, the state’s involvement in large-scale public works often needed to overcome the narrower interests of local communities to secure the welfare of a larger region or population. The state justification of the welfare of wider regions or even the whole realm as prevailing over local or segmental interests also prompted local communities or particular social groups to present claims related to their specific welfare concerns as integral components of the public interest. The consent of social actors to state power was thus to a large extent a constructive process of negotiation and sometimes contestation upon the same normative platform shared by all parties.

This process was of course constrained by a serious asymmetry of power and information between state and social actors. The state could disguise abuses of power or policies favorable to certain social classes in the name of serving the public interest of the realm. When the degree of economic and political integration was low, it was difficult for social actors in different regions or different sectors to organize collectively to pursue a common interest. When the interests of a local community and a wider region clashed, the local community was often at a disadvantage in bargaining with a state that possessed more information collected by its agents across the territory and reported to the center. Despite this disparity, we should not underestimate the willingness and ability of social actors to contest the meaning of public interest in the context of specific welfare problems and the contribution of such state–society negotiation and contestation to stability in domestic governance.

Nor was the development of state capacity simply a result of competition between an assertive civil society and the state. Instead, there is a complementary effect between state intervention and societal participation in public goods provision. The general welfare of the realm served as a normative basis for the state to encourage local notables, gentry, or private merchants to participate in particular aspects of domestic governance. The increasing ability of society to maintain large communal granaries or invest in public works of flood control, for example, reduced the burden on the state. Moreover, even a resourceful and assertive civil society still had to seek help from the state in large-scale public goods provision and conflict mediation. This complementary relationship was a learning process: Both state and social actors had to figure out how to resolve new clashes of interest that emerged in economic development. Neither a society-centered nor a state-centered approach can capture this complex interactional relationship between state and society.

More importantly, the norms of state legitimacy cast new light on understanding the relationship between state and society in both state formation and state transformation. In all these three cases, the organic conception of public interest permitted the expression of specific welfare interests of particular segments or communities: The health of the “body politic” was inseparable from the wellbeing of its components. Upon that common normative basis, state and social actors interacted constantly over how to provide public goods to safeguard the general interest of the realm. Claim-making to the authorities – through peaceful petitions, riots, or protests – represented an important opportunity for political participation for subordinates in the hierarchical societies of early modern England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China.

Nonetheless, the terms by which ordinary subjects could negotiate with the ruling authority were strictly defined by the state. In each case it was hostile to crowd petitions; these were perceived as threats to social order and organizers were punished severely. All three states, however, tolerated organized collective petitions concerning cross-regional or cross-segmental clashes of interest. Both sides in such disputes requested impartial arbitration from the state as the guardian of the public interest. While such impartiality might not always be forthcoming, that too could be contested by social actors. Moreover, the relative tolerance of the state for this type of collective petition meant that this political space could expand as economic and industrial development generated more conflicts of interest across regions and social segments.

The cases studies presented here have documented the complex and multifaceted interactions that took place between state and society upon the common platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. This normative basis provided a limited yet significant space for political participation when formal political representation remained highly restricted or did not exist. Importantly, the active participation of social actors in public goods provision in these three early modern states was not perceived as a potential threat by the state. Instead, the state authorities encouraged the development of the organizational and financial abilities of social actors in such provision. Bargaining, negotiation, and even contestation between social and state actors over how to safeguard the public interest in specific, concrete circumstances were thus permitted. Political participation by social elites in public goods provision and through commoners’ collective petitions or protests thus by no means implied a rejection or defiance of state authority. Furthermore, even if such demands increased dramatically in number and scale, they were still over specific welfare grievances and did not necessarily escalate into demands for fundamental political changes.

Therefore, increasing participation in and of itself does not necessarily imply a gradual accumulation of social forces that will ultimately undermine or overthrow the state. Instead, the collapse of these state–society interactions in domestic governance and subsequent serious threats to state legitimacy were mainly due to the state’s own failure to fulfill its basic duty in protecting the public interest. We see this occur with the early modern English state during the severe religious strife of the early 1640s that challenged the Church of England as the public good; with the shogunate in a hyperinflationary economy after 1858; and with the Qing state in a situation of chronic domestic deflation between the 1830s and 1850s. The recovery and enhancement of state capacity are therefore necessary conditions for the resumption of state–society interactions over public goods provision. Nevertheless, these states with enhancing capacities remained hostile to crowd protests or petitions that were perceived as challenging the state authority or threatening the hierarchical social order: the 1715 Riot Act; the Meiji penal laws; and the continuance of the Statutes against Rogues in Qing China until 1911.

However, when the state improved its fiscal capacity and society underwent significant commercial and industrial development, we observe two kinds of expansion in political participation. Both were justified by the state’s duty to protect the public interest, yet their political nature differed greatly. One represented strong continuity from the early modern state. Economic and social elites continued to participate in public goods provision, collaborating with the state over infrastructural facilities and securing the food supply in times of food crisis; their organizational and financial capacities increased significantly, as shown by the enormous amount of resources that gentry merchants in the Lower Yangzi Delta mobilized for North China famine relief in the late 1870s. Meanwhile, the subjects continued to demand that the state safeguard the public interest by redressing their specific welfare grievances and by impartially arbitrating interregional or intersegmental disputes that came to involve ever larger populations.

With economic and industrial development, these petitions grew significantly in number and scale. Many were responses to new welfare problems such as working conditions in factories, industrial unemployment, and pollution. However, increases in the scale and organizational capacity of such petitions or contentious collective actions do not necessarily constitute a political threat. Because they continued to center on concrete welfare grievances, the state could, as before, redress welfare grievances and mitigate hardship though making new social policies. The state could thus still tolerate such collective petitions; examples of acceptable petitions include those lodged by English workers in the late eighteenth century or by victims of industrial pollution in Meiji Japan. The political nature of state–society interactions over domestic welfare remained essentially the same as in the early modern era.

In contrast, the rise of collective petitions of public grievance in both England and Japan represented a qualitatively different form of political participation. Such petitions centered on nonmaterial issues of public interest, such as “true Christianity” in England or “national honor” in Japan, mobilized a large number of people across each country, and went further than their predecessors to call for fundamental reforms in the state. They did not, however, reject the state authority; their demands were still justified by the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. Such collective petitions of public grievance arose in special historical contexts in each country. Nonetheless, these nonmaterial issues concerning the public interest engendered serious conflicts between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest, which is of general significance and could apply to cases other than England and Japan.

As centralization of public finance greatly enhanced the capacity of both the English and the Meiji states, the connection between public finance and the welfare concerns of society became clearly recognizable to a wide range of social actors. Ordinary people in both England and Japan knew that their heavy tax burden was caused by highly regressive indirect consumption taxes, which formed the major pillar of public finance. In eighteenth-century England, state actors could hardly use the protection of the public interest to justify rampant corruption in government and military spending and a regressive tax structure that taxed property and capital lightly but ordinary consumers heavily. The state could not simply dismiss the criticism that such public finance was unfair and detrimental to the general welfare. In Japan in the 1880s, serious underinvestment by the government in domestic welfare had negative impacts across the country, a fact that was widely recognized at the time. This underinvestment contrasted sharply with the steadily increasing military spending from 1882 onward. Although each state justified massive government spending on foreign wars or on military expansion as protecting the international dimension of public interest, social actors could point to the domestic dimension to demand tax reduction, elimination of corruption, and increased expenditure on domestic welfare. The primary means to achieve these goals would be through fundamental political changes and reforms: to make Parliament more representative in England by reforming parliamentary elections, or to establish an elected parliament in Japan to incorporate “public opinion” into policymaking and to make public finance more accountable to domestic needs at a time when Japan was not threatened by foreign invasion.

Such contentious claim-making over general issues of public interest did not resist state authority, but was justified by the state’s duty to protect the public interest in new circumstances. However, it greatly stimulated the development of cross-regional and cross-segmental associations, the organizational capacities of petitioners, and the broader development of the public sphere as newspapers and printed pamphlets took up these issues. In this negotiation and contestation, we observe the expansion of two different kinds of public sphere. In one kind, state and social actors negotiated over how to better redress specific welfare grievances in concrete circumstances; in the other, social actors contested fundamental political reforms to better safeguard the public interest.

Despite still being justified by the terms of state legitimacy, the rise of large-scale petitions of public grievance represented a great political divergence in the transition from early modern to modern state. This divergence occurred at a time when radical demands for political change based in a notion of active individual rights either were not yet influential among ordinary people or were suppressed by the state, as seen by the English government’s deep hostility to active rights-based political demands linked with the French Revolution. The dynamic described here sheds new light on the expansion of political participation at a time when theories of active individual rights and a democratic understanding of popular sovereignty did not yet have widespread social influence. The historical contexts of England between 1640 and 1780 and Japan between 1853 and 1895 are indeed unique. However, there is no hint of “exceptionalism.” Instead, I would argue, their shared pattern attests to the general implications of the conflict between domestic and international dimensions to the expansion of political participation and state transformation.

In China in the late nineteenth century, by contrast, there was neither a nonmaterial issue of public interest nor a pressing tension between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest to mobilize cross-regional and cross-segmental mass petitions of public grievances. Political participation by gentry merchants, local literati elites, and common subjects did show an increasing degree of organizational capacity and resources, but it remained tied to specific issues of welfare and for the most part complemented state efforts in public goods provision. Prior to the imposition of enormous indemnities in 1895 and again in 1900, the Qing state showed the remarkable resilience of an early modern state that legitimated its power primarily through protecting domestic welfare.

The relative underdevelopment of civil society or of a public sphere is thus not the reason for the absence of fundamental political reform in China before 1895. On the contrary, it was the absence of serious conflict among diverse dimensions of the public interest that the state was obligated to protect. Such a conflict constitutes the necessary condition for mobilizing cross-regional and cross-sectoral actors to engage with the state over general issues of public interest through associations and mass media, and thence the great expansion of the public sphere. The rise of cross-regional collective petitions of public grievances that demanded the establishment of an elected parliament between 1907 and 1910 shows that China is not a case of “exceptionalism.”

The contextualized comparative historical analysis presented here thus demonstrates both continuity and discontinuity in the transformation from early modern to modern state. The nature of political participation in the early modern era was not parochial or local, but had general implications. Popular petitions over specific welfare grievances, even where they showed the increase in scale emphasized by Charles Tilly, did not represent a qualitatively different form of popular contention. Discontinuity in popular contentious politics is reflected rather in the rise of collective petitions of public grievance, whose growing scale and organizational capacity greatly stimulated the development of a public sphere as well as associational activities and public assemblies. Such discontinuity is not a linear result of the accumulation of political participation over time in the forms of contentious collective actions and petitioning for redress of specific welfare grievances.

Contextualization is therefore a crucial component in comparative historical analysis in social science. State formation, the example at hand, is inherently a temporal process, spanning decades or even centuries. The nature of the state varies greatly in the different historical contexts that constitute this process; for example, proto-state, early modern state, and modern state. In the first, the ruler’s use of political power could be quite personal and the degree of institutionalization of government remains low. In the early modern state, the ruler was constrained by relatively well-developed political institutions, as well as by a large volume of written documents and archives that were indispensable to the making of government policies, and which went beyond the ability of any individual ruler to handle. As a result of the increasing institutionalization of government, the ruler as a public figure (the rulership) became separate from the ruler as a private person, and the public duty of an administrative office came to be held as distinct from the private interest of officeholders, at least in principle if not always in practice.

The political nature of the state as an impersonal governing apparatus over a delimited territory in the early modern state persisted into the modern state, which possesses centralized institutions of public finance and a full-grown bureaucracy. The modern state thence has a much greater fiscal capacity and the institutional ability to regulate the economy and provide a wider range of social welfare to its citizens than did its predecessors. Meanwhile, the boundary between public duty and private interest of officials becomes more clearly drawn. Still, considering the fundamental differences in the political nature and institutional features of state across proto-, early modern, and modern states, we should not assume a linear or teleological trajectory leading from one stage to another. Each is like a different paradigm in the sense described by Thomas Kuhn for scientific revolutions.

Although Western European historical experiences have shaped much of our understanding of this process of state formation, the process is of course not unique to that part of the world. From a comparative standpoint, for example, the early modern state exemplified by England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be found in China after the tenth century and Japan after the late seventeenth century, and perhaps in other places as well. This raises the question of why and how the modern state first emerged in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, and not elsewhere. Guided by the conventional comparative methodology, scholars not unreasonably look for causal factors that exist only in Western Europe to explain the rise of the modern state. Candidates include individualism; a conception of individual rights upon which the contractual relationship between the individual and the state is developed; representative institutions such as a parliament that effectively defend private property rights against the encroachment of the state; or contentious social movements that demand general citizen rights.

However, the danger in such efforts is anachronism: One may project concepts back into history to explain political changes that occurred at times in which these concepts were not yet available to historical actors. As this book has tried to show, “rights” in the early modern period were mostly understood in passive terms; that is, as derived from the obligation of the state to protect the public interest. Active conceptions of rights as inalienable to individuals independent of the state are quite different. The “people” as the passive beneficiary of the state’s protection had no right to command the sovereign to make changes, nor to change the sovereign. This contrasts sharply with the more assertive “people” as an assembly of individuals with inalienable rights that possess the power to set the terms of the state in modern liberal democracies.

The stress on the role of popular sovereignty in contentious politics by Charles Tilly or the use of general citizen rights by Margaret Somers are highly illuminating to understand the relationship between contention and democracy from the late nineteenth century on. Their work has stimulated much further research (including my own). However, to apply the modern conception of rights and popular sovereignty to understand the rise of modern politics and liberal democracy implicitly assumes that the transformation of the state results from the resistance or defiance of society. Accordingly, the driving force of state transformation is identified in society: class in Marxian theory; the development of a public sphere and increasing scale of contentious collective actions in the scholarship of contentious politics; or the taming of the state by propertied elites in neoclassical political economy. However, these diverse strands of theory share the view of a fundamentally confrontational relationship between state and society in the predemocratic past, as well as in contemporary nondemocratic countries. They tend to overlook how key concepts such as rights might be differently used in early modern states. Inadequate attention to the heterogeneous historical contexts intrinsic to even a single temporal process of state formation in one country such as pre-nineteenth-century England can be a major source of bias in comparative historical analysis.

How to balance the deep investigation of specific historical contexts and building general theory in social science is always a big challenge. Comparative studies paying inadequate attention to complexity in historical context often take two forms. The first derives a theoretical insight by studying a case with which the researcher is relatively familiar. It then either explicitly or implicitly determines the direction of investigation of other cases of which the same researcher possesses relatively less contextualized knowledge. Instead of putting the cases in dialogue with each other, historical materials from the less familiar cases are often selected to fit the theory derived from the first, most familiar case. This imbalance leads to a biased conclusion. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is a classic (and still influential) example. Barrington Moore was obviously much more familiar with English history, and his case study of Japan depended on the limited English-language scholarship available to him at the time. While highlighting the contribution of commercialized agriculture to the rise of democracy in England, he failed to recognize the great development of commercialization in agriculture in Japan from the late eighteenth century onward. The imbalance of contextual knowledge of the cases being compared thus leads to a lack of further investigation that could be more fruitful to theory-building.

The second form is often seen in quantitatively oriented comparative studies. Once a dataset coded from various countries has been prepared, it becomes the empirical basis of theoretical exploration. Too little attention is paid to reexamining the historical context that generated the raw materials from which the data is being coded, particularly in light of new historical scholarship. For example, quantitative comparative studies of state capacity rely heavily upon annual taxation and expenditures recorded by the central government. Such data, however, should be viewed against the institutional contexts of tax extraction and allocation of state spending. The amounts recorded by the central government may not properly reflect the true quantity of fiscal resources being mobilized by the state in practice. As we saw in our examination of famine relief and public works, a large portion of the resources that these early modern states mobilized from society for public goods provision were not recorded at the central level. Neglect of such resources leads to serious underestimation of state capacity in concrete historical contexts.

In order to understand the underlying causal mechanism of a given instance of state formation, we need to carefully examine different meanings of key concepts as they were understood by contemporaneous historical actors. Context becomes even more important when our analysis involves multiple historical cases in different times and places. From the perspective of theory-building, a more deeply contextualized examination of the cases can provide a more solid empirical basis not only to test theoretical hypotheses, but also to question well-established paradigms in social science. To do so, historical studies and social scientific research should keep up with the advancing scholarship on both sides of the disciplinary divide.

The basic theoretical models of state formation are derived from creative interpretation of historical materials. For example, Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol fruitfully explored how fighting foreign wars would have divergent impacts on the development of state capacity, ranging from building a strong state to the collapse of the state under the pressure of foreign threat. The historical studies upon which this exploration was based, however, were those studies available to them at the time. But historical scholarship, like history itself, does not stop. A lack of continuous engagement with that evolving historical scholarship risks turning dynamic theories into fixed doctrines.

One effective way to avoid the ontological fallacy caused by limited knowledge of cases is not to detach empirical materials from their original historical contexts, but to actively engage with the advancing historical scholarship. This means not only a thorough and careful reading of the secondary historical scholarship, but also an examination of primary historical materials when necessary. A deep historical exploration is therefore important to theory-building in comparative historical analysis. Instead of applying ideas that were not available to actors in these specific times and places, we should examine carefully each political process to construct state legitimacy in those respective historical contexts and understand the behavior of historical actors in the terms they themselves used.

Where do we go after this long journey of comparative historical analysis of early modern England, Japan, and China? First, we can look for other states that legitimate their power by safeguarding the public interest of the realm. Are similar patterns of state–society collaboration in public goods provision in domestic governance found in those cases? Have other specific nonmaterial issues of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral political participation to demand fundamental political reforms? To test the external validity of the causal account developed in this book requires deep contextualized comparative analysis of further cases.

Second, what is the relationship between the kinds of expansion of informal political participation described here and the development of formal representation? This study has argued that any such relationship is not linear, but it leaves open the question of what form it might take. Did political participation justified by passively conceived rights influence political movements that appeal to actively conceived rights? What are the connections, if any, between that older tradition and a politics grounded in inalienable individual rights or human rights that not only demands changes in the basic political system, but also reconceptualizes state legitimacy and popular sovereignty? These questions await future research.

Finally, both performance-based legitimacy and organic conceptions of public interest are found in many contemporary authoritarian regimes. Such states legitimate their power not by fair and competitive democratic elections, but by public goods delivery in domestic governance. They in principle reject actively conceived citizen rights or human rights that are held to exist independent of the state. Nonetheless, the discourse of state legitimation in these authoritarian regimes still entails the passively conceived rights of subordinates to use collective action to remind the state to make good on its proclaimed duty.

It is not surprising, then, that authoritarian states can allow and even encourage the participation of social actors in specific forms of public goods provision – even to the point of accepting well-organized and well-funded civil organizations – as long as these organizations focus only on delivering public goods necessary for domestic welfare. Examples include Francoist Spain and contemporary China. Such states can respond to petitions regarding specific welfare grievances, even though leaders of these sorts of organized petitions would be singled out for punishment (if not for death), as shown in the literature on contentious politics in contemporary China. An authoritarian state may try to portray itself as an impartial protector of the public interest when arbitrating between different regions or different social segments over specific welfare disputes. It may promote an ideology of social harmony in which local communities or groups willingly subsume their interests for the wider welfare or the general interest of the country. Such ideologies may even find a certain degree of acceptance among the populace.

One prediction that may be derived from this book is that as long as there is no serious tension among diverse aspects of public interest, an authoritarian state that legitimates its power primarily through domestic public goods provision can be quite stable. Such a state may have a reasonably good performance in public goods provision, yet not tolerate any challenge to its authority made upon the basis of actively conceived human rights. In this situation, the development of political participation, civil associations, and a public sphere over specific welfare grievances would be unlikely to go beyond the boundaries set by the terms of the public interest-based discourse by which the authoritarian state legitimates itself. We should therefore not assume that increasing participation in a well-governed authoritarian regime would necessarily lead to political transformation of that state. There is no teleological or unilinear trajectory from participation over specific welfare concerns to popular demands for fundamental political reforms. The patterns of state–society interactions grounded in a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation examined here can thus be further applied to study the resilience and limits of contemporary authoritarian regimes.