Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (2:37)

So Charles, thanks so much for coming on the show today and talking about your book. This book was a lot of fun to read. I actually did international relations as a graduate student. Oh God. Over a decade ago. So all of these ideas and all of these debates are things that I had to. To talk through and work through back in my. Back in my brief period as a master's student, international relations. And from that time I know that kind of. The word state is probably the most contested word in IR theory, perhaps after sovereignty. So maybe before we get into what you're trying to do with the idea of statehood, what is the traditional view of what the state is and what does it miss about what the world was actually like during much of its history?

Charles R. Butcher (3:27)

Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much for having me along on the show. So I agree that the concept of the state is somewhat contested in the literature. And I think there's. That's largely because there's a proliferation of adjectives that often go along with it. So a national state or a modern state or a city state or a territorial state. But a traditional view of the state, I think you could derive from work, say from Charles Tilley, where we're really thinking about organizations that stand atop a hierarchy and have a basic infrastructure to do things like take some taxes, administer some areas of jurisprudence and mobilize coercion, mobilize for. For armed conflict. And also you could think of that as internal autonomy. And then also are free to engage in relations with other states. You might think of that as external autonomy. I think where this gets complicated, as I said, is the addition of many different adjectives. So if we want to use the term modern state, then maybe we are thinking quite particularly about states in Europe. But I think if we're wanting to think about states in general, then we need a broader definition. And I should say in the book, conceptually, the definition that we use I don't think is very different from the traditional idea of the state as a coercion wielding organization that sits atop a hierarchy with a relatively sort of stable territory or set of places that it governs. We do add on this bit. That means the entities that we're talking about need to be free, really de facto free to engage in relationships with other states and they have to also have this external autonomy. So conceptually, I don't think that deviates greatly from what's out there in the existing literature. What I think is different that we do in the book is how this is measured. And you could think of a fairly basic question like how many states are in the world Today, and you and I, we could probably agree on what that number is. It might be somewhere between 193 and 196. And we can more or less agree on that number because we have sovereignty attributing organizations like the United Nations. But what if I were to say, well, how many states were there 200 years ago in 1825? Then we might have more difficulty agreeing on that answer. And basically, social scientists and scholars in international relations haven't had a good answer to that question. So the main answer to that question, and one that was in the form of a list of states that went back to the 19th century, was provided by a project called the Correlates of War Project. And so what they did to get around this problem of the fact that there aren't any globe global sovereignty attributing organizations was to say, okay, well, to be a state, you had to have this internal autonomy aspect, but you had to have diplomatic relations at a fairly high level with both Britain and France. And that, as you can imagine, excludes a large number of what we think of as states in places like Africa, Asia and the Middle East. And sometimes that's just because Britain and France just weren't the most relevant actors. So in Indonesia it was, it was the Dutch or it was local, other local states. In West Africa, it was more about the recognition by, or recognition or de facto recognition by indigenous states and so on. So what we wanted to do in the book was not so much change the definition of the state. Conceptually, we pretty much build on existing work there, but really try to change how we measure it and the way that we identify states. And I suppose the major thing we did was just dispense with this notion that Britain and France are the key recognizers and adopt them more regionally sensitive approach to, to identifying or attributing external sovereignty.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (8:11)

So you talk about in your, in your analysis kind of the difference between the, the billiard ball and the, and the bullseye model of the state. And I wonder if you might talk a bit more about kind of what, how these two things are different in terms of, in, in terms of what, how states, what states looked like.

Charles R. Butcher (8:29)

Yeah. So maybe what I should say first is once we modify how we identify states to be more flexible to practices across different regions, we identify a very large number of states. So I think I'm trying to recall numbers, but these might be slightly off, but I think in 1816, the correlates of war might identify 23 states. And I think in the book we have something like 230. And most of these states were in these pre dense state systems in West Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, but also other parts of Africa and Asia as well. And then so one of the things we wanted to do with the book was, was to ask, okay, well what were these states like? How did they govern? And in the book we use this broad heuristic device. It's not a very scientific device, but it's a, it's a heuristic device to differentiate between two ideal types of international system, or state, if you want to put it like that. And we labeled them the billiard ball and the bullseye system. So the billiard ball system, I think the idea originates from Arnold Wolfers. And it's this idea that states are fully self contained entities. They have hard borders on the outside and they're homogeneous inside. There's no higher authority. And all of the information that we need to know about what's going to happen in this interstate system we can know from the size, trajectory, speed, so on. For the, of the balls themselves, we don't need any extra information about what's inside. So it just captures this idea of really hard boundaries and internally homogeneous states clashing up against one another. And it's, I suppose most commonly invoked in the realist tradition of international relations. So bullseyes. We borrowed this term from Kevin McDonald and his colleague Kamara who study West Africa. And the bullseye model captures the idea that governance can be more decentralized. So instead of hard borders on the outside, sovereignty can be a bit more graded. So if you imagine the center of the bullseye here, control of the state might be quite direct, it might be quite strong. But then as you move further out from the center, sovereignty becomes more and more graded or regions become more and more autonomous to the point when you get out to the outer boundaries of the state in this type of system, it might be really hard to know whether you're inside one state or outside of that state and inside another. So it captures the idea that rule can also be decentralized. Sovereignty isn't necessarily uniform over the territory of a state and that it can kind of fade out as one moves over distance. It really is just. We could have picked, we could have picked a bunch of other metaphors that were used to describe fundamentally the same concept. So we came across metaphors like candle, like a candlelight, so. Or light emanating from a flame. You know, it's, it's stronger where the flame is and then it diminishes. Over space, mandalas, Swiss cheese. Most capture the same basic idea that sovereignty is not uniform and centralized, but graded and decentralized.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (12:44)

Yeah, you know, maybe. Maybe kind of one more conceptual question before we start talking about what the international system during this time was actually like. You know, state centralization is another variable you look at. And I wonder if you might explain kind of what. What you mean by that and what a decentralized state in the 19 in. In this period might. Might have looked like.

Charles R. Butcher (13:07)

Yeah. So the way we are thinking about state centralization is the extent to which a ruler or the center controls things like taxation, the mobilization of Kurds, coercion, lawmaking and jurisprudence, and relations with other states. So are those things controlled by the center, or are those things delegated to other actors with their own institutions who perform those functions on behalf of the state? So you could think of these actors, these delegated actors, as vassals? So does the state control these functions directly itself, or does it delegate them to vassals that do it on its behalf and then transfer some. Some part of that to the center? See, you could take the perspective of a ruler. You could try to imagine yourself as a ruler. I mean, you. You want revenue to fund the. The. The running of your state, the formation of institutions. You want to be able to pay soldiers. You want to be able to pay bureaucrats. But where does that money come from? Do you appoint your own bureaucrats to go and take those taxes directly from the producers themselves? Or do you use someone who already has the institutions to do that, to take those taxes to do that on your behalf, and then transfer some of that back to the center? So other words that might be familiar to describe differences between decentralized and centralized rule might be notions like direct rule or indirect rule. So perhaps some of your listeners are familiar with the concept of indirect rule, which was applied fairly widely across the British Empire. That was the practice of taking away the ability of, let's say, indigenous states in India, taking away their ability to interact with other states in the international system, but leaving aspects of taxation, lawmaking, even, even, to an extent, policing and so on in the hands of local rulers. That's a decentralized way of ruling. Yeah, I think that mostly covers conceptually how we're thinking about it. Maybe I can give you one. So the second part of your question was, what is it to be a decentralized state? So a decentralized state, at least in our thinking, would be a state that controls some of these functions, but actually delegates a lot of these functions to vassals or other substate actors. And if I can give you an example, it's not an example from Asia, but it's one that we use in the book. So there was a state in West Africa called the Oyo Empire, and this was, it's in modern day Nigeria, towards the southwest. And this was a decentralized state. And what we mean by that is the ruler or the king who was titled the Elephant, had a territory that was the territory of the Ohio Empire. And he claimed the right to do some things, but not all things. So he claimed the right to make war and conduct diplomacy with, with other states. He claimed the right to extract some tribute, which we can think of as taxation, to adjudicate on capital crimes. And apart from maintaining a small force in the capital to demand levies, military levies in the case of war, but many other functions remained in the hands of local subordinates with their own institutions. So taxes weren't directly collected. They were collect by local leaders with their own institutions who would then transfer part of that to the, to the center. The Elephant didn't make laws about criminal offenses that weren't capital crimes. They were all managed at the local level. So hopefully that gives a bit of a sense of what the difference between centralized and decentralized rule is.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (17:29)

So, I mean, what, what are some of the triggers that might push a state to centralize? And I, and, and this may be jumping ahead to the end of your book where, where you start kind of figuring out what might some of these processes, but, but what might hold a state back from trying to centralize control.

Charles R. Butcher (17:48)

So when we were writing the book and we've, okay, we've modified how we're going to identify states, and then suddenly we have hundreds of states, mostly in Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia, and they've been excluded from most comparative international relations research. I don't want to say all, but most. So our next step was to think, okay, we do see some variations in centralization or decentralization. Most of these states govern in a very decentralized way, which is sort of coming to the end of the book. But there are some variations, especially in East Asia and South Asia. So the next question for us was, well, we have all this existing theory about why states centralized in Europe and then to a lesser extent in the Americas. And an interesting question for us was, well, does this theory travel to other regions that haven't been examined in this way? And there's three approaches that we pick up in the book. One is the idea that it's war that makes states. So it's international competition that drives vassals and rulers to pool their resources to confront outside threats. We focus on trade, which is the idea, which is sort of the idea that trade actually creates new important economic actors, particularly merchants. And pacts between merchants and rulers allow rulers to go around otherwise autonomous vassals and get the resources to take away their autonomy. And then the third one was interaction capacity, which is, in interaction capacity is this notion that there are variations in how costly it is to move people and goods and ideas. And because building an infrastructure to, to directly control a region or take autonomy away from a vassal requires a lot of movement in people and goods and also ideas, the more expensive it is to move those things, the higher the costs of building a centralized administration. So with the expectation that when it's very expensive to do those things, you don't see centralized states forming very much. And when it becomes cheaper to do that, that's when you see, that's when you see centralized states forming. So the approach was to say, I mean, reasonably inductively to say, okay, well, how well do these theories travel outside of Europe, in the Americas? And the general finding is that they don't travel particularly well. We come, we come down on the side that interaction capacity probably has the most explanatory power when it comes to explaining patterns of centralization and decentralization across these cases. But even then it's, I think, where in the book we point out there are many exceptions. But for the, for the war and trade based theories, the findings are very mixed. So there are some examples of where war or increased military competition might have produced state centralization. And Japan is a very, a good example of this. But we also find very many cases where there were either few discernible effects or actually the opposite, where increases in military competition actually caused more as associated with rulers decentralizing their states, so becoming in a sense more fragmented and then the same with trade. So there are, there are some examples where increases or changes in trade patterns did appear to associate with the rise of more centralized states. But then equally, we came across many examples where changes or increases in trade patterns led to the fragmentation of states and international systems. So very mixed. I would say overall, we think that the pattern whereby the vast majority of the states that we examined in the book ruled in a decentralized way. So the best explanation for that widespread, that sort of constancy of decentralized rule across at least the regions we examined the 19th century was just these very high costs to moving people and goods that placed a basic limit on the extent to which centers could could centralize their rule.

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Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (24:52)

Terms apply so after after that kind of long theoretical and conceptual preamble, let's actually start talking about some of the regions you cover in the book. And and maybe let let's start with East Asia, which you note is your book notes is has some of the most modern quote unquote looking states out outside of Europe, between kind of China and Korea and Japan and Vietnam. Why do you think East Asia was so conducive to the creation of these centralized states?

Charles R. Butcher (25:24)

Well, East Asia seems to follow follow the theoretical patterns that we might expect. So this was, we argue in the book, this was the region with the highest interaction capacity. So China, but also Vietnam and Japan and Korea have historically high population densities. Some of these are concentrated around the large river basins with also high yield agricultural production possible there. And so the idea is that this lowers the marginal costs of rulers building a more centralized administration. It's important to remember China and Korea in the book are centralized states long before we engage with them, long before the 19th century. So they take a little bit of a backseat in the book. And we take a closer look at, at Vietnam and in Japan. And these cases are interesting because they enter the 19th century reasonably decentralized. So in Japan you have the Tokugawa Shogunate and it has some, I suppose, national institutions, but is quite a decentralized government where the daimyo have a high level of autonomy. So the, the central government largely controls interactions with other states of foreign affairs. But, but taxation, justice and even military mobilization are a very, a very localized affair. And then also Vietnam enters the. We're now talking about the late 1700s, but it's divided between two states, one in the north, one in the south. There's a really huge civil war called the Tay Son Rebellion, which eventually results in the victory of a group from the south who then unifies Japan and Japan, sorry, Vietnam, in 1802. And then from about the 1830s, you really see a rapid centralization of the administration in Japan. So, sorry, Japan, Vietnam. So the broad argument is that this region sort of fits the bill, theoretically. It was a high, high interaction capacity region that saw increases in, in trade that rulers at the time were able to monopolize on. So for example, in Vietnam, they were able to use an increased access to European weapons as a way of overcoming internal rivals and monopolizing their rule. And then in Japan, the classic external shock in terms of military competition is the 1953 Matthew Perry incident, which is, at least in the sources that we wrote we read, sort of wakes Japan up to this idea that it can't remain isolationist anymore. And to survive in this increasingly competitive world, what it needs to do is centralize and be rid of this very decentralized sort of system that it has in the lead up and that results in the meiji Restoration in 1868 and then a quite centralized Japanese regime.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (29:08)

Yeah, and then what about Southeast Asia, which you note is marked by a lot of smaller states, a lot of complicated kind of vassal relationships. States constantly seem to rise and fall. There's a lot of state death, Southeast Asia during this time. And you suggest that maybe there is something about it being a mostly maritime region that affected kind of how these states rose and fall. And how these states centralized and decentralized.

Charles R. Butcher (29:42)

Yeah. So what we know in the book is that Southeast Asia, and here we're talking about what is modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, to an extent the southern Philippines was very interconnected by the sea. So it was quite easy to move people and goods and so on across the ocean, but it was still very difficult to do that across land, on the islands themselves. And to very quickly summarize, what I think we find in that case is that maritime nature of Southeast Asia enabled it to be very connected in terms of trade. But this is one of the cases where we see trade having very mixed effects on state centralization. It's clear that rulers wanted to use trade to centralize their administration, so to displace their local vassals, but they were very often unable to do that. And the reason is that trade has the potential to provide new resources, whether they be economic resources or resources in terms of access to new weapons or technology. And those resources may enable them to buy off elites that they want to replace. It may enable them to conquer them with access to new, new weapons. But at the same time, because this trade was very diffuse, it also might empower the vessels to become stronger and more easily able to throw off the rule of ascender. So we sort of see this happening with a case like Aceh, which was never a very centralized state, but there were centralization attempts to, made, I think we're talking way back in the 17th century now, that were unsuccessful. But the rise of the pepper trade, particularly in the late 18th and early 19th century, led ACE to become at least partly, even more fragmented and decentralized than it was before. And part of the reason for this was so on the one hand that the pepper trade could, it did provide Aceh with, with revenues, but it also provided a bunch of other ports along the Sumatran coast with, with revenues as well. And, and enough such that they were able to eventually throw off the hegemony or the, or the rule, however you want to call it, of Aceh. So it was a region where we saw these really mixed effects of trade on state centralization. And I think because it's in some ways for rulers, it's a bit of a double edged sword. I should also say, coming back to the example of Japan, the Japanese leadership in the Tokugawa Shogun were very aware of this. And one of the reasons why they were so closed off to the world was that they were deeply suspicious of the impacts that trade with the west in particular would have on their administration and that it might actually Cause a fragmentation of the state rather than a centralization. Yeah.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (33:01)

And then finally, let's. Let's talk about South Asia. And I know we've covered the rise and fall of the many princely states of India on the show, and most of that's a 20th century story, but I do know that there were all of these different princely states throughout the region. So what's happening in South Asia?

Charles R. Butcher (33:26)

So in the book, when we catch or when we engage with south asia, it's between two empires. So by about 1750, the Mughal Empire has collapsed. And what it leaves behind is this is the rise of new regional states. So states like the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad, Bengal in the east, Awad in Central. In central India. And so it transitions from Mughal rule into this very intense and competitive interstate system. And so when we catch it, it's undergoing this transition. Now, South Asia was a very interesting case for us because it also looked like it should have many of the ingredients that would drive state centralization. So there are parts of India that in the 19th century were very population dense, particularly Bengal. There were parts that had reasonably high interaction capacity on account of river deltas or the Ganges corridor. And it also has this rise in trade that comes with the EIC to the East. And then also this intense competition, which, according to existing theory, should have generated state centralization. And to an extent, that sort of does happen. It happens in the early 18th century with the Marauder Confederacy. And there's some really interesting work by a scholar called Stuart Gordon, who tracks the increasing sophistication of administration from Pune, particularly in a region called Melwa. But then by the time of the Battle of Panapa in 1861, this competition gets more intense regionally after that. But what we actually see is states like the Maratha Confederacy becoming more decentralized. And the reason we think for that is because the increased competition made rulers more dependent upon these regional warlords to prosecute their wars. And if we imagine this game of centralization between vassals and rulers as being vassals really wanting to hold onto their autonomy and rulers really wanting to take it away will increase dependence from the center on these vassals. That doesn't make it more likely that vassals are just going to give up their autonomy. Quite the opposite. They're going to demand more autonomy with return. And so I think this is what we see. Competition had this sort of decentralizing effect as we move further into the, well, the early 19th century in South Asia. But we do also see the rise of some centralized states like Mysore, in the south, which honestly in the book comes out as a real kind of anomaly. It's not in the most dense population, the densest population, or the parts of India with the densest population. It was certainly exposed to competition, but it's hard to say whether that was more or less than other states in the region. It was really kind of isolated from trade as well. So South Asia was really a very interesting case in those terms.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (37:02)

So your book is called kind of Before Colonization. And so I want to ask kind of how does. Does colonization imperialism come into play here? You know, from, from. From European countries and others? I mean, clearly getting conquered is a form of. Is a cost of state death. But were there other ways that, that. That foreign powers, external powers ended up affecting these. In these regional international systems, you know, between the process, like state creation, state death, state centralization. Like, how did, how did kind of European and other Western powers affect the development of these systems?

Charles R. Butcher (37:41)

Yeah, so that the first. You've mentioned it, so I'll only briefly, briefly recall it. But one of the first. I think an important aspects of the book is that we quantify just how vast this event of mass state extinction was with the coming of colonialism. So if there were 230 odd states in 1816 that had declined precipitously by 1900, I'd have to go back to the book for the exact numbers. But just documenting that, I think is an important contribution. But yes, the coming of European colonization had many other effects. I'm being more speculative here because it's not necessarily necessarily the focus of the book, but these effects sometimes provoke centralization and other cases were very fragmentary. So one of the interesting ways in which European colonialism, before any formal colonization, one of the interesting effects in terms of fragmentation was, was European states sometimes provided an exit option for vassals. One of the things we talk about at the end of the book is whether or not things like trade or war cause centralization depends a bit on the exit option that vassals have. So if it's very easy to change sides in a conflict, or very easy to switch allegiance, or very easy to form your own independent state, for that matter, then increasing competition, just like if you have a really good job offer, increases your bargaining power in. In the market, I suppose in the market for sovereignty, if your exit options are good, if your exit options are bad, well, then that increase in competition might actually empower the center and cause you to throw your lot in with the center. So the coming of, say, the British into West Africa cause it Seems in some ways, well, there are cases that suggest that as they became more entrenched on the coast, some of the subordinate vassals in say, the Asante Empire found it easier to defect to the British because they offered an alternative sovereign alternative suzerain to join. And this, this had the effect of breaking down some states that looked reasonably centralized there. We can go even further back. So, so clearly Europeans had very profound effects on the structure of state systems through processes like the slave trade. And there is some interesting new work by that that explores both the centralizing and decentralizing aspects of this, this very brutal period of history. And then on the other hand, so trade with Europeans did often provide rulers with, with, with weapons or with resources that were useful for, or enhanced, enhanced state building projects. And I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm currently watching the Apple TV show called Chief of War, which is about the rise and centralization of the, of the Kingdom of Hawaii and.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (41:14)

Oh, that's a Momoa's in that show.

Charles R. Butcher (41:18)

Yeah. And European weapons play, I, I, I, I believe it is, is based upon, or at least lines up with the, with what I know of the case. But the import of European weapons plays a really important role in that story, and you can see that story playing out elsewhere as well. So really, really different and mixed effects, some fragmentary, some pushing this process of centralization.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (41:50)

So now that you've kind of gone through this analysis and you've gone through this process, you focus on the 19th century. But do you think this kind of, this expanded way of thinking about states, the international system, state centralization, might that be useful for people looking backwards throughout history, you know, at earlier centuries or even perhaps kind of coming forward to our, to our current system of sovereign nation states? I mean, do you think this expanded conceptual view can be useful if you, if you look in kind of either direction historically?

Charles R. Butcher (42:25)

Yeah, I think I'll take the question about looking forward because it's more familiar to me. So in terms of the boundaries of these states in the 19th century that we document, they don't really appear on modern maps anymore. But that doesn't mean that these states entirely disappeared, and it doesn't mean that they don't continue to actually have quite profound impacts on the modern world. Many of these states were incorporated into colonial governance structures through processes like indirect rule. We've talked about India, so several of the princely states that you've mentioned were pre colonial states that were then incorporated into the British Empire through indirect rule. And so their institutions survive over time. And this also is something that occurred in parts of Africa and also in South Asia. So it's not like the dynasty. Of course, many of these dynasties did disappear, but they didn't all disappear. So the dynasties can survive, the institutions can survive right up to independence in some cases. And those institutions still. There's some good research, I think, coming out now suggesting that these institutions still play an important role in helping us to understand peace and conflict within and between states, why some states are democracies and not others, and even aspects like why some regions within states are more economically developed than others. This is an emerging literature, I would say. But it does suggest that this clash or this intersection of the 19th and the 20th century didn't just eradicate any legacies of the 19th century. In fact, I think those legacies, so the sort of impact of the 20th century was mediated often through institutions that were present in the 19th century. There are many other ways, I think I could describe that these states in the 19th century still remain relevant to explaining really important questions around institutions and dissent today. But I'll leave it as that, as a kind of a teaser. So I do think it actually helps us seeing this broader picture of the international system in the 19th century helps us to better understand really important questions today.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (45:13)

So I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Charles Butcher, one of the authors of Before Colonization, Non Western States and systems in the 19th century. Charles, before I let you go, I actually have two final questions, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?

Charles R. Butcher (45:35)

So people can find my work on my website, which is with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. So if you just Google my name, it should be the first website that comes up. And in terms of next steps, actually, I'm working on what I just described. So I was very fortunate to obtain funding from the European Research Project, that European Research Council, a few years ago. And what's that? What that has enabled us to do is to. Is to expand this data set of states that we have back to 1750, and start to include some spatial information on these states. And I think with a. With a really neat method, that means we can get approximations of the boundaries of some of these historical states, even though boundaries were often very, very fuzzy or even indeterminate, as I described before. And then what we want to do is use those data to understand what are the legacies of different configurations of historical statehood for things like democracy and whether states experience secessionist conflicts or civil wars or or even different forms of protest and violent and non violent forms of dissent. So that's where we're going next, looking further back in time, but also really starting to use these data now to understand processes and important outcomes today.

Nicholas Gordon (Interviewer) (47:11)

So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter Ick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookReviewsAsia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more author interviews at the New Books network and new booksnetwork.com we're on author podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Redis recommend us, share us with your friends. Support interviewing those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news news coming up on the show. But before that, Charles, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Charles R. Butcher (47:41)

Yeah, thank you very, very much for having me. I really appreciate it.