Kirkpatrick Sale on the Growth of the State

"Small is Bountfil: The Secession Solution" was published in the October 2010 issue of Chronicles.

There have been four major periods of great state consolidation and enlargement in the last thousand years. The first (1150 to 1300) came with the establishment of royal dynasties, which replaced medieval baronies and city-states in England, Aquitaine, Sicily, Aragon, and Castile. This resulted in rampant inflation of nearly 400 percent and almost incessant wars, with increasing battle casualties from a few hundred to more than a million.


The second (1525 to 1650) involved the consolidation of national power through standing armies, royal taxation, central banks, civilian bureaucracies, and established state religions. Inflation rose to more than 700 percent in just 125 years. There was also an unprecedented expansion of wars, a war intensity seven times greater than anything Europe had seen before, with casualties increasing to as many as eight million, perhaps five million in the Thirty Years War alone.


Third, from 1775 to 1815, the period of modern state government in most of Europe, including national police forces, conscripted armies, and centralized power a la the Napoleonic Code, inflation rose over 250 percent in just 40 years, and war casualties amounted to 15 million (perhaps 5 million during the Napoleonic Wars).


Finally, from 1910 to 1970, all European states consolidated and expanded power, resulting in the worst depression in history and inflation of 1,400 percent, not to mention the two most ruinous wars in all human history, which contributed to casualties, mostly deaths, of 100 million or more.

It appears that his focus is primarily on Western European. How do the Byzantine Empire and non-Christian empires that did not survive the modern Western powers fit into this historical analysis? To what degree did they become centralized in their later years?

You can find a version of the article at LRC.