Elements in a Theory of State-Building: An Inquiry into the Structural Preconditions for Successful State-Building in Europe

This article tests the six hypotheses on successful state-building in Western Europe formulated by Charles Tilly (Tilly 1975a, 40). The key to state-building success in European history, with success defined as continuous survival as an autonomous polity throughout the period AD 1500–1900, is found to be the variable "success in war" operationalized as the successful creation of formally institutionalized administrative institutions for the transformation of economic resources into military power, regardless of whether these institutions evolved within the framework of a representative state-building format as in The Netherlands or a bureaucratic-absolutist format as in Prussia.