Roads to State Bureaucracy

Administering justice and collecting taxes are two basic state functions. In the medieval period, they were neither professionalized nor fully controlled by rulers,  but instead in the hands of amateur individuals who conducted them for private gain. State administrations were patrimonial. Controlling these basic state functions was a source of income for officeholders, but more importantly, a source of political power because it made their assent necessary for the implementation of royal policy.

In the early modern period (c. 1500-1800), the development of new military technology significantly increased the cost of warfare. States across Western Europe responded to the new challenges by pursuing administrative reforms to replace patrimonial officeholders with salaried, professional, and hierarchically organized bureaucracies that could be more easily controlled. The success of these projects of administrative reform hinged mainly on rulers' ability to overcome resistance from entrenched officeholders who defended their privileges, and secondarily, on their capacity to recruit educated employees into the nascent bureaucracies.  

I argue that these permissive conditions depended on whether states experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The book traces two distinct political development paths --Catholic and Protestant-- across three centuries of West European history. It unveils a path dependent process of state-building that entrenched patrimonialism in Catholic states. While recent books have shown that the Catholic Church contributed to state formation in the medieval period, my book demonstrates that it became a hindrance to political development in the early modern period, absorbing excessive human capital and exempting substantial wealth from taxation. Dismantling the Catholic Church was a crucial stepping stone for administrative modernization.

The Catholic Road to Bureaucracy

In Catholic states, such as France and Spain, the crown responded to the heightened international competition of the early modern period by selling offices (e.g., the right to collect taxes, and magistracies). This financial instrument allowed rulers to rapidly raise funds during emergencies, but at the same time created a large stock of officeholders with a vested interest in the survival of patrimonial rule. As Catholic states were absolutist, proprietary officeholders valued their prerogatives because they represented a rudimentary form of executive constraint. Previous studies have linked military threats to bureaucratization, but wars had two offsetting effects. On one hand, they made bureaucracy more desirable for rulers, as they sought to boost tax collection; on the other, they increased the bargaining power of officeholders, who were both in charge of collecting taxes and a source of inside credit. All administrative reforms were fiercely resisted by officeholders (who could openly rebel, cause government shutdowns, and withhold credit). The result was a "patrimonial trap." States could only overcome this trap after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars wiped away venal officeholders. As a result, the transition into bureaucracy in Catholic states was rapid, violent, and took place relatively late —in the nineteenth century.

The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy

Protestant states, such as England, Denmark, and Prussia had a more gradual path towards bureaucracy. The Protestant Reformation allowed monarchs to seize the assets of the Catholic Church, which was one of the most important landowners. The windfall from confiscations let rulers finance international competition without selling offices in the sixteenth century. At the same time, ecclesiastical confiscations reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, incentivizing a reallocation of human capital from religious to secular skills (like law). In the seventeenth century, therefore, Protestant states had a smaller stock of proprietary officeholders to defeat or compensate during administrative reforms, and had access to a larger pool of educated elites to recruit into their nascent bureaucracies. These distinctive characteristics allowed Protestant rulers to replace patrimonial officeholders gradually and peacefully with salaried bureaucrats; and to do so relatively early.