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Blazing Cane
Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959
Gillian McGillivray
Duke University Press, 2009
Sugar was Cuba’s principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and during that time, the majority of the island’s population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. In Blazing Cane, Gillian McGillivray examines the development of social classes linked to sugar production, and their contribution to the formation and transformation of the state, from the first Cuban Revolution for Independence in 1868 through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. She describes how cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power.

Focusing on sugar communities in eastern and central Cuba, McGillivray recounts how farmers and workers pushed the Cuban government to move from exclusive to inclusive politics and back again. The revolutionary caudillo networks that formed between 1895 and 1898, the farmer alliances that coalesced in the 1920s, and the working-class groups of the 1930s affected both day-to-day local politics and larger state-building efforts. Not limiting her analysis to the island, McGillivray shows that twentieth-century Cuban history reflected broader trends in the Western Hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.

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Civil War and State Formation
The Political Economy of War and Peace in Liberia
Felix Gerdes
Campus Verlag, 2013
The scene of two devastating civil wars since 1989, Liberia had widely been considered a failed state until the international professional Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was democratically elected president in 2005. This book investigates the political economy of civil war and democratic peace, arguing that the civil wars did not represent state decay, but exhibited dynamics characteristic of state formation. In the analysis of post-war developments, which emphasizes the intertwining of corruption and democracy under the new regime, Felix Gerdes details both political progress and persistent structural deficits of the polity.  
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Constructing the Maya
Ethnicity, State Formation, and Material Culture in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, Volume 55
Paul K. Eiss, special issue editor
Duke University Press
This special issue of Ethnohistory is a significant contribution to the history and anthropology of the Maya in both Mexico and Guatemala. Utilizing a comparative analytic framework, these essays explore the ethnic dimensions—indigeneity, indigenismo, mestizaje, racial subjugation—of state formation as well as state practice in indigenous regions. The contributors emphasize how the material aspects of state formation—roads and infrastructure; model villages; restored ruins; portrait photography; highland marketplaces; modern improvements; traditional cultural performances, artifacts, and dress—become theaters for the construction and reconstruction of ethnic and political entities and relationships. Taken as a whole, the collection challenges a tendency toward the segmentation of the discussion of the Maya into distinct disciplines (anthropology and history), national historiographies (Mexican and Guatemalan), and, within Mexico, distinct regional historiographies (Yucatán and Chiapas).

Contributors: David Carey Jr., Paul K. Eiss, Ben Fallaw, Stephen E. Lewis, Walter E. Little, John M. Watanabe

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Dynasties and State Formation in Early Modern Europe
Liesbeth Geevers
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In state formation research, princely houses have been a blind spot. The development of states has been discussed from many perspectives, like interstate competition, internal social conflicts, fiscal-military developments, etc., but at the centre of most European states, there was a princely house. These ruling houses have been overlooked in studies about state formation. What’s more, when discussing such dynasties, the vertical chronological perspective (grandfather-father-son) is all dominating, for instance in the focus on dynastic continuity, dynastic culture and representation, and the like. This collection of essays highlights the horizontal perspective (ruler, all children, siblings, cousins), in asking how the members of a princely family acted as a power network. The quest is to develop an understanding how this family network interplayed with other factors in the state formation process. This volume brings together existing knowledge of the topic with the aim of exchanging insights and furthering knowledge.
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Everyday Forms of State Formation
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds.
Duke University Press, 1994
Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico’s past, these original essays reveal the state’s day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another.
Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of Mexicanists and comparative social theorists, this volume boldly reassesses past analyses of the Mexican revolution and suggests new directions for future study. Showcasing a wealth of original archival and ethnographic research, this collection provides a new and deeper understanding of Mexico’s revolutionary experience. It also speaks more broadly to a problem of extraordinary contemporary relevance: the manner in which local societies and self-proclaimed "revolutionary" states are articulated historically. The result is a unique collection bridging social history, anthropology, historical sociology, and cultural studies in its formulation of new approaches for rethinking the multifaceted relationship between power, culture, and resistance.

Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott

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From Palestine to Israel
A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950
Ariella Azoulay
Pluto Press, 2011

In this carefully curated and beautifully presented photobook, Ariella Azoulay offers a new perspective on four crucial years in the history of Palestine/Israel.

The book reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine became a minority in Israel, while the Jewish minority established a new political entity in which it became a majority ruling a minority Palestinian population. By reading over 200 photographs from that period, most of which were previously confined to Israeli state archives, Azoulay recounts the events and the stories that for years have been ignored or only partially acknowledged in Israel and the West.

Including substantial analytical text, this book will give activists, scholars and journalists a new perspective on the origins of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

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The "Greatest Problem"
Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan
Trent E. Maxey
Harvard University Press, 2014

At its inception in 1868, the modern Japanese state pursued policies and created institutions that lacked a coherent conception of religion. Yet the architects of the modern state pursued an explicit "religious settlement" as they set about designing a constitutional order through the 1880s. As a result, many of the cardinal institutions of the state, particularly the imperial institution, eventually were defined in opposition to religion.

Drawing on an assortment of primary sources, including internal government debates, diplomatic negotiations, and the popular press, Trent E. Maxey documents how the novel category of religion came to be seen as the "greatest problem" by the architects of the modern Japanese state. In Meiji Japan, religion designated a cognitive and social pluralism that resisted direct state control. It also provided the modern state with a means to contain, regulate, and neutralize that plurality.

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How the Incas Built Their Heartland
State Formation and the Innovation of Imperial Strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru
R. Alan Covey
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Inca archaeology has traditionally been intimately tied to the study of the Spanish chronicles, but archaeologists are often asked to explain how Inca civilization relates to earlier states and empires in the Andean highlands-a time period with little coinciding documentary record. Until recently, few archaeologists working in and around the Inca heartland conducted archaeological research into the period between AD 1000 and AD 1400, leaving a great divide between pre-Inca archaeology and Inca studies.

In How the Incas Built Their Heartland R. Alan Covey supplements an archaeological approach with the tools of a historian, forming an interdisciplinary study of how the Incas became sufficiently powerful to embark on an unprecedented campaign of territorial expansion and how such developments related to earlier patterns of Andean statecraft. In roughly a hundred years of military campaigns, Inca dominion spread like wildfire across the Andes, a process traditionally thought to have been set in motion by a single charismatic ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. Taking nearly a century of archaeological research in the region around the Inca capital as his point of departure, Covey offers an alternative description of Inca society in the centuries leading up to imperial expansion. To do so, Covey proposes a new reading of the Spanish chronicles, one that focuses on processes, rather than singular events, occurring throughout the region surrounding Cusco, the Inca capital. His focus on long-term regional changes, rather than heroic actions of Inca kings, allows the historical and archaeological evidence to be placed on equal interpretive footing. The result is a narrative of Inca political origins linking Inca statecraft to traditions of Andean power structures, long-term ecological changes, and internal social transformations. By reading the Inca histories in a compatible way, Covey shows that it is possible to construct a unified theory of how the Inca heartland was transformed after AD 1000.


R. Alan Covey is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.



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Kinship to Kingship
Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands
By Christine Ward Gailey
University of Texas Press, 1987

Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women’s subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society.

Using a Marxist-feminist approach, Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women’s status in one society over three hundred years, from a period when kinship relations organized property, work, distribution, consumption, and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands, Tonga, in the South Pacific, the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world.

This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology, political science, sociology, and women’s studies, this work is a major contribution to social history.

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Moral Economies of Corruption
State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria
Steven Pierce
Duke University Press, 2016
Nigeria is famous for "419" e-mails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official interactions, from traffic control to university admissions. In Moral Economies of Corruption Steven Pierce provides a cultural history of the last 150 years of corruption in Nigeria as a case study for considering how corruption plays an important role in the processes of political change in all states. He suggests that corruption is best understood in Nigeria, as well as in all other nations, as a culturally contingent set of political discourses and historically embedded practices. The best solution to combatting Nigerian government corruption, Pierce contends, is not through attempts to prevent officials from diverting public revenue to self-interested ends, but to ask how public ends can be served by accommodating Nigeria's history of patronage as a fundamental political principle.
 
 
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The Political Economy of NGOs
State Formation in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh
Jude L. Fernando
Pluto Press, 2011

Jude L. Fernando explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments.

The book examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance.

This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.

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Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico
The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacan
Jennie Purnell
Duke University Press, 1999
In Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico Jennie Purnell reconsiders peasant partisanship in the cristiada of 1926–29, one episode in the broader Mexican Revolution and the last major popular rebellion in Mexican history. While some scholars have argued that the Mexican Revolution was a people’s rebellion that aimed to destroy the political and economic power of the elites to the benefit of the peasants, others claim that the Revolution was a struggle between elites that left little room for popular participation. Neither approach, however, explains why thousands of peasants sided with the Church against the state and its program of agrarian reform—reform that was presumably in the best interest of the peasants. Nor do they explain why so many peasants who considered themselves devout Catholics took up arms against the Church.
Rather than viewing the cristeros (supporters of the Church) as victims of false consciousness or as religious fanatics, as others have done, Purnell shows that their motivations—as well as the motivations of the agraristas (supporters of the revolutionary state)—stem from local political conflicts that began decades, and sometimes centuries, before the Revolution. Drawing on rich but underutilized correspondence between peasants and state officials written over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Purnell shows how these conflicts shaped the relationships between property rights, religious practice, and political authority in the center-west region of Mexico and provides a nuanced understanding of the stakes and interests involved in subsequent conflicts over Mexican anticlericalism and agrarian reform in the 1920s.
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Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Ben Fallaw
Duke University Press, 2012
The religion question—the place of the Church in a Catholic country after an anticlerical revolution—profoundly shaped the process of state formation in Mexico. From the end of the Cristero War in 1929 until Manuel Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency in late 1940 and declared his faith, Mexico's unresolved religious conflict roiled regional politics, impeded federal schooling, undermined agrarian reform, and flared into sporadic violence, ultimately frustrating the secular vision shared by Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas.

Ben Fallaw argues that previous scholarship has not appreciated the pervasive influence of Catholics and Catholicism on postrevolutionary state formation. By delving into the history of four understudied Mexican states, he is able to show that religion swayed regional politics not just in states such as Guanajuato, in Mexico's central-west "Rosary Belt," but even in those considered much less observant, including Campeche, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico reshapes our understanding of agrarian reform, federal schooling, revolutionary anticlericalism, elections, the Segunda (a second Cristero War in the 1930s), and indigenism, the Revolution's valorization of the Mesoamerican past as the font of national identity.

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State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900
Fernando López-Alves
Duke University Press, 2000
Despite a shared colonial past, South American nations experienced different patterns of conflict in the nineteenth century. These differences led to the creation of a variety of states and regimes, from authoritarian military oligarchies to popular democracies. Using a rigorous logic of comparison, Fernando López-Alves explores the roots of state building in five countries and explains why the political systems of these early postindependent societies were prone to militarism, corporatism, or liberal democracy.
Breaking with the traditional economic analysis of South American development, López-Alves argues that civil-military relations lay at the core of state building. By comparing three countries in particular—Uruguay, Colombia, and Argentina—during an intense phase of state and regime formation, he shows how war and the collective action of the rural poor contributed to the construction of central armies, the rise of new social classes, and the emergence of civilian organizations. He also examines characteristics unique to each country’s war-formed culture and discusses how coalitions were built during this period. Examples from Paraguay and Venezuela and references to state formation in Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East add to the complexity and richness of the study’s comparative analysis.
Drawing on a vast bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, López-Alves goes beyond providing insights into the particular development of Latin American countries and introduces a comprehensive theory of state formation applicable to other regions. This book will interest Latin Americanists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists studying state formation.
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State Formation
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad
Pluto Press, 2005
What is the 'state' and how can we best study it? This book investigates new ways of analysing the state.



The contributors argue that the state is not a fixed and definite object. Our perceptions of it are constantly changing, and differ from person to person. What is your idea of the state if you are a refugee? Or if you are living in post-aparteid South Africa? Our perceptions are formed and sustained by evolving discourses and techniques---these come from institutions such as government, but are also made by communities and individuals.



The contributors examine how state structures are viewed from the inside, by official state bodies, composed of bureaucrats and politicians; and how these state manifestations are supported, reproduced or transformed at a local level. An outline of theoretical approaches is followed by nine case studies ranging from South Africa to Peru to Norway.



With a good range of contributors including Cris Shore, Clifton Crais, Ana Alonso and Bruce Kapferer, this is a comprehensive critical analysis of anthropological approaches to the study of state formation.

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State Formation in the Liberal Era
Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru
Edited by Ben Fallaw and David Nugent
University of Arizona Press, 2020
State Formation in the Liberal Era offers a nuanced exploration of the uneven nature of nation making and economic development in Peru and Mexico. Zeroing in on the period from 1850 to 1950, the book compares and contrasts the radically different paths of development pursued by these two countries.

Mexico and Peru are widely regarded as two great centers of Latin American civilization. In State Formation in the Liberal Era, a diverse group of historians and anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America compare how the two countries advanced claims of statehood from the dawning of the age of global liberal capitalism to the onset of the Cold War. Chapters cover themes ranging from foreign banks to road building and labor relations. The introductions serve as an original interpretation of Peru’s and Mexico’s modern histories from a comparative perspective.

Focusing on the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship, the volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries. It reveals how the presence (or absence) of U.S. influence shaped Latin American history and also challenges notions of Mexico’s revolutionary exceptionality. The book offers a new template for ethnographically informed comparative history of nation building in Latin America.
 
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The Two Houses of Israel
State Formation and the Origins of Pan-Israelite Identity
Omer Sergi
SBL Press, 2023

The Two Houses of Israel: State Formation and the Origins of Pan-Israelite Identity bridges the gap between the biblical narrative of the great united monarchy ruled by David and Solomon and archaeological and historical reconstructions of a gradual, independent formation of Israel and Judah. Based on a thorough examination of the material remains and settlement patterns in the southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age and on a review of the relevant historical sources, this book provides a detailed reconstruction of the ways in which Israel and Judah were formed as territorial polities and specifically how the house of David rose to power in Jerusalem and Judah. Omer Sergi further situates the stories of Saul and David in their accurate social and historical context in order to illuminate the historical conception of the united monarchy and the pan-Israelite ideology out of which it grew. Sergi provides a new history of the early Israelite monarchies, their formation, and the ways in which these social and political developments were commemorated in the cultural memory of generations to come.

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The Unruly Dead
Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste
Lia Kent
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
“What might it mean to take the dead seriously?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them. 

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself. 
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