rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_31f6262e-967f-541e-93e1-0f466bad5eb2">19 Henk Rijkeboer, “History of the Dutch East India Company—The Asian Part,” European Heritage, 2011, http://european-heritage.org/netherlands/alkmaar/history-dutch-east-india-company-asian-part.
20 R.A. Guisepi, ed., “Africa and the Africans in the Age of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” History World International, history-world.org (accessed January 7, 2016).
21 Ibid.
22 Eleonora L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues, 291.
23 L. Irwin, “Cherokee Healing: Myth, Dreams, and Medicine,” American Indian Quarterly 16, No. 2 (1992).
24 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 87–90, 110.
25 Ibid., 91–92.
26 Information on the maroon rebellions in Suriname, Jamaica, and Haiti can be found in Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Random House, 1963); and Wim S.M. Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990). Readers whose interest is in overthrowing states, not jut studying them, will also find the following source interesting: Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” 2010, https://russellmaroonshoats.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/the-dragon-and/.
27 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961).
II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology
In the year 983, the Slavic inhabitants of that forested plain south of the Baltic sea, where the river Spree winds past a series of placid lakes, the spot where a city known as Berlin now stands, rose up against their masters. The Slavs, known as Wends, were ruled by a Germanic elite who imposed on their subjects Christianity, military discipline, feudal obligations such as forced labor and the tithe, and a culture of reverence for divine and secular authority. The Wendish rebellion was successful, as were many rebellions against early states. The population killed off or drove out all the German nobles and priests, and for the next century and a half, lived as pagans, stateless and free.
It required a much larger apparatus of state formation than the elite German warrior brotherhoods to subdue them. No less than the Catholic Church, the most potent agent of state formation in the entire European subcontinent28 (and subsequently in the South American continent as well), declared a Holy Crusade against the Wends in 1147, organizing the various states, state fragments, and politogens29 of Central Europe to conquer and colonize them.
Other Slavic peoples who lived farther to the east, some of them inhabiting lands vacated by Germanic tribes moving into the collapsing Roman Empire, did not develop states until significantly later. In what is now Ukraine, the Rus—forebears of the Russians—settled on the Dniepr River and began what would eventually become a powerful state. But the Rus were a brotherhood of Norse warriors who colonized the Slavic locals, just as happened with the Wends.
At Wielkopolska, over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Polanie tribe formed the first endogenous state in Central Europe. Unlike the colony states on the Spree and the Dniepr formed by invading politogens, Wielkopolska provides a clear example of another model of state formation: the imitative state. Local elites within the preexisting autochthonous hierarchies were impressed by the greater power amassed by elites in neighboring societies, and sought to copy them. Having a model close at hand conferred two great advantages for state formation.
Firstly, it decreased the risk entailed by seizing the power necessary for state formation. Unlike original states, imitative states had an example they could follow, and proof that increasing their level of stratification and hierarchy was possible. As in early states, power was by no means stable in non-state societies. Tribes and chiefdoms also faced rebellion and fracturing that toppled the leadership, and unlike their homologues in state societies, the leadership of non-state societies was largely subordinate to the population and did not enjoy coercive capacities. They had to protect themselves with status and charisma alone. Being seen as power-hungry and tyrannical was a proven way to undermine those qualities and end up deposed, exiled, or assassinated.30
Secondly, having states as neighbors changed the political situation faced by a society and made the option of militarization more attractive. States are highly dangerous to their citizens and to the externalized barbarians alike. They obligate neighboring societies to consider the question of self-defense. This question does not have an inevitable answer in state formation, as some historians have wished to assert. Many societies, from the Mapuche and the Lakota of the Americas to the Wa of Zomia, were able to organize for effective defensive warfare against far more powerful state neighbors without an increase in social hierarchy (in fact their collective self-defense sometimes even led to an accentuation of their anti-authoritarian characteristics, as a way to mobilize enthusiasm for defensive warfare and differentiate themselves from the statist neighbors).
More precisely, the need to organize for warfare offers up a trajectory of state formation for those societies where an elite already exists and is prepared to seize the situation and sell a solution to their lower-ranking kin. This is especially the case when self-defense can be sold, by the local elite to their subordinate kin, as a kind of national independence rather than the rebuffing of any kind of domination, whether endogenous or exogenous. This same tension was evident in the state-formation processes of post-colonial countries, where national liberation movements tended towards nationalism (liberation as cultural and political independence attained through interclass unity).
In the case of what is now Poland, increasing populations and belligerent pressure from neighboring states did not make state formation inevitable. The rest of the region faced the same conditions, and also experienced a growth in the construction of fortified settlements, but only at Wielkopolska did a state emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries. It seems that their pathway was to use the increase in construction and military measures (both of which can be accomplished with relatively egalitarian means) as an opportunity for political unification, first perhaps in the form of a strong confederation of tribal leaders enacting an ambitious plan to administer the closely related concerns of trade and warfare, and then to support a monarchy.
Poland’s unique position as an endogenous state surrounded by states of Germanic origin indicates the first strands of an interesting pattern. Elsewhere, the Visigoths, another Germanic tribe, poured into the Iberian Peninsula and founded a rudimentary kingdom in the vacuum left by the Roman collapse, over three hundred years creating an increasingly effective, centralized authority when Tariq ibn-Ziyad swept across from northern Africa and established an emirate at Córdoba. The Muslim state spread quickly, soon reaching as far as the Pyrenees. Formation of a Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula was aided by the apathy of the local population who scarcely raised their hands to defend their burdensome Visigoth lords,31 preferring the lenient Moorish rulers. This is another mechanism for stable state-formation: the progressive state, a lesser of two evils that takes advantage of the popular rejection of a more onerous form of state. This category could include those democratic states that restored governing institutions after popular revolt made it impossible for dictatorships to rule with any kind of stability (the early
