Introduction

Historians frequently discuss states and the people who live in them. “State” is a broad term, since states may be ruled by kings, religious leaders, or democratically elected officials. They may be tiny city-states or massive empires. Their people may be citizens with many rights, or subjects with few rights.

The focus on states may give us a distorted view of history. Today the world is almost entirely divided into states and almost every person is a citizen of a state. However, in the past many people did not live in states at all.

To explore why states came into existence, we will consider how scholars define a state. We will also look at theories about how the first states came into being.

What is a state?

State is the formal term we use to describe a country. The state is usually defined as an organized community living under a unified political system. States are about government, or an organization of people who make decisions, organize society, and enforce laws. States usually claim to control a defined territory, although there are some examples in history of mobile states that move around. The people running a state claim authority over a group of people. The state makes laws and dispenses justice, often through a military or police force. States also collect resources and re-distribute them.

All of these functions relate to governing a society. Of course, people who don’t have states still have ways of making collective decisions. Usually, the ways they make decisions are less formal and the decisions themselves are less permanent. In fact, some scholars argue that a state is defined by having a formal and complex system of government.

Some anthropologists suggest that we can only call something a state if it has at least four levels of government. These are: the people who run the whole country, people running cities, people running neighborhoods and towns, and people running small villages or extended families.

Some scholars, including historian Yuval Harari, argue that this definition is not enough to describe a state. They say that states are the first communities too big for everyone to know each other. The people in a state need a way to believe in their community’s connectedness, to imagine it even when they can’t see the entire state. People in a state agree to cooperate and share a unified belief. That belief might be that the king has a god-like right to rule, or that the President and Congress have the right to collect taxes. For Harari, the state is not just laws, soldiers, and tax-collectors. It is also the way that people believe that they are part of the same community.

Characteristics of early states

Today, most of us think of states as the reason we can elect and shape our government. Early in human history, however, people believed they belonged to a state where the government had authority over them. Few people believed they had the right to participate in government or to select it. Historians and other scholars have suggested a list of characteristics that most early states shared. They use these to help define when states first emerged in a region.

Here are six characteristics frequently included in these lists:

• Urban – Most early states had cities.
• Agricultural – Almost all states seem to have been built in farming societies.
• Occupational specialization – Within states, there are some people who do not work as farmers. Many people were instead artisans like leather-workers, metal-workers, and cloth-makers.
• Complex economy – States largely seem to emerge when an economy becomes large and complicated.
• Social stratification – In most early states, people were not equal in wealth and social status.
• State authority – In states, the government claims the authority to make and enforce laws.

Why did humans create states?

States are important now, but modern humans existed without them for about 245,000 years. This raises the question of why humans first created states in various times and places. In general, there are two broad explanations for the rise of states. Although these explanations seem to contradict each other, it is possible that both are correct in some ways.

The first explanation is called the “coercive theory.” Historians like James C. Scott and Ibn Khaldun argue that states arise because a group of people wants to control others and force them to do certain things. For example, a small group might want more wealth and less work. To do this, they create laws and recruit an army to force others to farm. The coercers become the government. Coercive theory also argues that different communities compete for resources on a larger scale. One community conquers others in order to gain control of resources.

The second explanation was put forward by philosopher Karl Wittfogel and anthropologist Elman Service, among others. It suggests that people come together voluntarily to create states. This explanation, often called “voluntary theory,” has several versions. In one version, humans found that they needed to do work that required cooperation, like building huge irrigation projects to grow crops. They created the state to get people to work together. Another version suggests that communities found they needed rules. To make sure trading was done fairly, reduce violence, and enforce agreements, people wanted laws and social order. Only a state can effectively provide that.

In order to test these theories, historians look at specific examples of states, especially the earliest states. They try to determine whether the models fit the examples.

Table 1 Early states, regions, and eras

The state has been critically important to human history, so we focus on it. Yet not everyone in history lived in a state. As historians, we have to wonder whether concentrating on the state makes us miss out on the important experiences and contributions of people who did not live in states. We also must consider the problems that states have caused. Are states a step forward, or would we have been better off without them? Despite this question, the state was certainly a key element of human history, and remains so today. Therefore, it is useful to study the history of states.