are easier to control, and hierarchies cannot defend themselves from more powerful hierarchies. Officials from a state cannot easily communicate with members of a society in which decisions are made in open assemblies, or societies with chaotic rather than unitary decision-making.
As an important aside, I would challenge the reader to accept chaotic organization as a superior form, even though we are usually only presented with a pejorative vision of chaos. In unitary decision-making, an entire polity must abide by a single decision, or there must be a clear hierarchy to govern and rank the decisions made at different levels, whether in a bureaucratic or federalistic system. All governments, from fascist dictatorships to direct formal democracies, share the principle of unitary decision-making and disseminate the assumptions on which such decision-making is based. Chaotic decision-making fosters the recognition that society can function spontaneously as a decentralized network, permits conflict as a healthy force in our lives, encourages a multiplicity of decision-making spaces pervading all moments of life, well beyond the formal, masculine sphere of the congress or the dictat, and allows different, even conflicting, decisions to be made at different points in the human network, while encouraging a collective consciousness so all decision-makers can maximize their intelligence and accordingly harmonize. Humans have an evolutionarily tested ability to utilize chaotic decision-making at a macro scale, and the only people who dispute this are those who wish to permanently infantilize their compatriots so as to control them by monopolizing decision-making in unitary structures.17
In fact, these two logics of communication, chaotic and unitary, are mutually exclusive. When a state communicates with another society, it is interested in transmitting orders or legislating agreements, not in contributing its perspective to the multitude. Furthermore, the population of a hierarchical society is already organized, in some form or another, in order to be ruled, whereas an egalitarian society is in fact organized, to varying extents, specifically so as not to be ruled. The forms of organization are not at all—contrary to conventional anthropology—orders of complexity on an evolutionary scale; rather they are qualitatively different and mutually exclusive. They represent either the strategies of the rulers, or the strategies of those who refuse to be ruled.
There is, however, a scale of intensity as regards the ability of a state to foist hierarchies on a traditionally stateless people. When an encroaching state has less direct power in a region it wishes to conquer, or the society it wishes to conquer has fewer institutional, authoritarian “handles” to make use of, the process is distinct, as is the resistance to this process. The British tried to appoint chiefs among the horizontal Chin of Southeast Asia, and to increase their prestige and authority, the chiefs, subsidized by their powerful allies, threw lavish feasts, in accordance with the feasting culture prevalent in their society. In response, a new cult arose among the Chin that “repudiated community feasts while continuing the tradition of individual feasts that served to increase personal, not chiefly, status.”18
In the end it is a matter of common sense. A society needs to be accustomed to having leaders for a foreign power to effectively be able to appoint puppet rulers. Those societies that already have traditional forms of hierarchy, though these might not be enough to qualify them for statehood, are more easily forced into a statist logic. If a stateless people has no local, traditional forms of hierarchy that can be exploited by a colonizing state, or if the local leadership—the potential chiefs—cleave to the popular values of anti-authoritarianism and autonomy, a colonizing state has very few possibilities to expand its control. It can either attempt a policy of genocide through extermination or resettlement, or accept the autonomy of the stateless society, at most demanding tribute, a sort of blackmail by which the stateless people produces trade goods to buy reprieve from punitive military actions.
The Roman Empire contented itself with tribute from the Germanic tribes it could not conquer. French colonization in North America largely failed to induce the decidedly anti-authoritarian Algonquian tribes to develop state structures. Instead they sought tribute in the form of the fur trade, and opted for slower, less dramatic forms of genocide—like kidnapping native youth and forcing them into abusive Jesuit schools where they would have to adopt the language and culture of the colonizer. The modern Botswana state uses forced resettlement against the horizontal San hunter-gatherers. Examples of colonizing states using total extermination against resolutely anti-authoritarian peoples abound, such as the Dutch extermination of the natives of the Banda islands, the British genocide in Tasmania, or the repeated massacres of California natives by US settlers.
Portuguese and Dutch colonization of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) provides a good example. In the sixteenth century, the island was inhabited by a patchwork of chiefdoms and kingdoms—stateless areas and weak state powers—that were generally not unified in a single polity. The kingdoms of Kotte, Jaffna, Raigama, Sitawaka, and Kandy contested for dominance or at least tribute in the well-known cycle of empire building and collapse, with the shifting centers of power and autonomy that characterize early state-building processes. The stateless, feudal areas of the Vanni chiefdoms in the north of the island paid tribute to now one, now another of the neighboring states in the south. Occasionally a monarch would conquer multiple kingdoms or even unite the whole island, but in general power was not institutionalized and was not easily passed on from one ruler to the next, so that the empire rarely outlived the emperor.
Neither the Portuguese Crown nor the Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie (VOC)—the Dutch East India Company—could project the military force needed to conquer the island. In fact, guerrilla resistance on the island decimated more than one European army. Faced with this situation, the Portuguese and then the Dutch tried to play different native kingdoms off against one another, appointing client rulers whenever they could. With their naval power and their ability to control trade, the Portuguese were quickly able to gain control over the Kotte kingdom with the use of client and puppet rulers. But state-building is rarely a straightforward process. Kotte dependency caused a backlash, allowing the Sitawaka kingdom to take over its territories and control most of the island. This political centralization caused another backlash, and the newly conquered territories rebelled, allowing the Portuguese to step in and reassert their control. The turning of the tables gave an advantage to the Kandy kingdom, strategically located in the interior of the country, where it enjoyed military superiority. Subsequently, the Dutch allied with Kandy to sweep out the Portuguese, but no sooner had they won than they turned on their erstwhile partners.
Readers can imagine the impact this process of continual warfare and trade had. Local elites, unless they were willing to give up their privileges to take part in the total leveling of society that an effective guerrilla resistance would require, had to develop more effective war-making hierarchies, invent more effective mechanisms of diplomacy and legitimation, and engage in more intensive forms of trade and production in order to acquire the bargaining power and the imported military hardware that would allow them to stay in power. Even though the Portuguese and the Dutch failed to occupy the island and impose direct control, their commercial empires profited and their state-building mission succeeded. As political and economic organization along the coast developed on Western lines, in 1815 the British were able to capture Ceylon’s previously indomitable guerrilla interior without a fight. The Kandyan aristocrats signed a treaty and consented to a British protectorate.
In the East Indies, the VOC established “factories” (representatives of English trading companies were known as “factors”) throughout the areas where they tried to monopolize trade. These factories were fortified port settlements with warehouses, barracks, administrative centers, courthouses, prisons, and other buildings that fulfilled the joint functions of commerce and state-building. At times, the colonial factories also served as points of production for the assembly or refinement of trade goods.
Starting from these factories the VOC obtained spheres of influence or even occupied territories. In this way the VOC, which was in the Netherlands only a trade company, had real sovereignty rights in these territories of the “East.” So, the VOC had the right of declaring war and concluding a peace treaty.
All this is dominated by trade, namely to obtain spices for the lowest possible price.
