The Transformation of the World (134 page)

The growth of bureaucracies can be documented only approximately. The state “grows” if and when the number of public-service jobs increases at a faster rate than the population. By this criterion the state was shrinking both in China and in many European colonies. In a thoroughly administered country such as Germany the number of state employees began to soar only after 1871, but the threefold increase between 1875 and 1907 was disproportionately due to higher employment in transportation and the mail service, while jobs in the state administration proper and in public education actually declined.
¹³⁵
The picture was the same in the colonies, especially those belonging to Britain and France. There, apart from the army and police, the largest share of both European and indigenous public employees worked in the railroads, the post office, and the customs service. The state intervened in society at the most diverse points. Its revenue department therefore required a reasonable monetary system, and in parts of Africa, for example, this first had to be created. State building and commercialization were mutually reinforcing.

The speed and scale of financial rationalization should not be exaggerated, however, even in the case of Europe. It took a long time for regular budgets to become the norm, for the state not only to record its income and expenditure but also to look ahead and more or less plan their future levels. In nineteenth-century Europe this was made easier by the fact that few wars needed funding, whereas in the previous century they had been the main burden on state finances—an area in which Britain, with its huge fiscal strength, outstripped all its rivals. Federal systems involved special complexities, since various taxes had to be raised at different levels and the problem of financial equalization also had to be addressed at some point.
¹³⁶
When governments incurred debts in the nineteenth century, they too—like early modern princes—avoided becoming too dependent on individual financiers. Britain was the first country to introduce regular debt management, over and above ad hoc activity relating to particular business. Public borrowing to cover deficits became a normal instrument of financial policy, and one effect of this was to give investors a stake in the well-being of the state. The conflict between taxpayers and creditors who siphoned off revenue in the form of loan interest was not infrequently fought out in the open.

In the nineteenth century, the state was not yet thought of as a redistributive state; revenue was hardly ever used as a strategic instrument for shaping the stratification of society. In the conflict between cheap government and expensive public services, it was not just a liberal taxpaying public that opted for thrift. In the final decades of the century, as politics in Europe and Japan took an increasingly nationalist turn, a new dilemma between economical government and military spending came to the fore. Yet, on the eve of the First World War, state revenues reached 15 percent of GDP scarcely anywhere in Europe, and were well
below 10 percent in the United States.
¹³⁷
The rise to the levels of 50 percent or so that are taken for granted today would take place in the two postwar periods after 1918 and 1945.

One of the main fiscal innovations of the nineteenth century was a straightforwardly proportional tax on income. It operated continually in Britain after 1842 and allowed a cautious skimming of the growing affluence of middle and upper income groups. Between 1864 and 1900 many other European countries introduced such a tax.
¹³⁸
In Britain, however, it was not a measure aimed at social reform and redistribution but was directly linked to the new policy emphasis on free trade. The new taxes offset loss of income due to tariff removal, while free trade promoted growth and increased prosperity.
¹³⁹
Another modern feature of the new fiscal systems, above all in the West and Japan, was that at least in peacetime taxpayers did not have to face sudden or arbitrary impositions. Legislation set the level of taxation—a budget, too, is a kind of law—and clearly defined the region and time span for which it would apply. The tax-raising state and the rule of law went hand in hand.

5 Mobilization and Discipline

Conscription

Napoleon had first shown how a well-organized state could mobilize human as well as financial resources. General conscription of the young male population succeeded in exceptional circumstances, in polities that constituted themselves as belligerent formations and saw war as their principal raison d'être—for instance, the Zulus under King Shaka in the 1820s, or particular groups or tribes of mounted warriors in North America and Central Asia. Four types of military organization were especially common in the early modern period: (1) the mercenary army; (2) the warlord and his freebooting clientele; (3) feudal associations such as the Manchu bannermen of the Qing dynasty or the Rajputs in India; and (4) praetorian guards such as the Ottoman janissaries, active in political affairs especially in the capital city. Of these forms, two remained prominent in the nineteenth century: warlords (above all, in Latin America after independence or in comparable conditions following the breakup of an imperial order, as in China after 1916) and mercenary armies (especially in India's numerous markets for military labor and in parts of Africa).

In India, European rule was actually constructed on a military foundation, and the armed forces enjoyed priority funding. From the late eighteenth century on, the British spoiled their loyal mercenary troops and ensured they were adequately rewarded; the British and Indian military cultures merged into a martial
sepoy
world. Until 1895 there was a decentralized organization, so that different armies kept watch on one another. After the Great Rebellion the British relied more than before on Punjab Sikhs, who made up roughly half of the standing
troop strength. At the end of their active service, they sank roots as army settlers and took on ancillary tasks such as horse breeding. In an age of increasing conscription, the Sikhs were perhaps the most highly decorated professional troops anywhere in the world.
¹⁴⁰

The nineteenth century also saw the peacetime debut of the standing army stationed in barracks.
¹⁴¹
This presupposed that all citizens stood on an equal footing, but at the same time it was an instrument whereby the state established such equality. General conscription, without which a people's army is unthinkable, thus stands in a complex interrelationship with the formation of nations and nation-states. In the revolutionary wars, soldiers on the French side fought as citizens for the fatherland, no longer as subjects for a king. The idea of the nation under arms was born. But it took universal peacetime conscription to bring about a new kind of relationship between state and society. The distinction between war and peace is important here, because the spontaneous selfmobilization of the popular masses under wartime conditions is something different from a routine annual levy of whole groups of young men. A conscript does not necessarily feel himself to be a
soldat-citoyen
. After its Jacobin origins, compulsory military service only gradually established itself in the face of major resistance. At the outbreak of the First World War, Britain was the only major power to rely on volunteers for the manning of its army.

Conscription did not necessarily imply democracy or fairness of the draft. In France, until 1872, it was nearly always possible for affluent citizens to buy themselves out of the army; there was a market for substitutes, with fluctuating prices. Until 1905, whole occupational groups (teachers, doctors, lawyers, and so on) were being spared. Well into the Third Republic, France had not so much a citizen army as an army of stand-ins. In Prussia, which introduced conscription early on as a matter of “national honor,” the institution aroused less enthusiasm at the thought of service than ingenuity in the search for dodges. Only in the imperial period after 1871 did the army really become an important agency of socialization, a “school of nationhood” for nearly all layers of the population.
¹⁴²
In Russia, conscription was part of a general duty of service to the tsar formalized in the early eighteenth century, and before the Crimean War any nonnoble who became caught up in the military machine had to remain there for twenty long years. Men were drafted from nearly all the peoples of the empire. But at first it was not possible to speak of universal conscription—that was officially introduced only in 1874.
¹⁴³
The Tsarist army, like its Habsburg counterpart, was anything but a
national
army, rather comprising a mosaic of all possible ethnic and linguistic groups. The same was true of the force that Muhammad Ali began to put together in the 1820s in Egypt so that he could conduct his campaigns in Sudan and Arabia. Egypt turned into an aggressive military state, basing itself on the press-ganging of ordinary peasants, the fellahin. The officer corps, on the other hand, consisted not of Egyptians but of Turkish-speaking Turks, Albanians, Kurds, or Chechens, whose French instructors taught them the elements
of modern warfare. Muhammad Ali did not yet think of involving the peasantry as active citizens in his authoritarian-dynastic project of nation building.
¹⁴⁴

Things were only slightly different in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the century. The basis for military modernization was the suppression of the rogue janissaries (1826), a guard of originally non-Muslim (but later converted) groups based in Istanbul, who had degenerated into a self-perpetuating caste barely capable of performing its duties. In the 1840s, in the wake of the Tanzimat reforms, a new policy aimed to unify the status of male subjects and to close the gap between state and people by abolishing a range of intermediate bodies. The gradual introduction of universal military service after 1843 was part of this reorientation—here too a major intervention in society. As in many European countries, exceptions were made for certain groups such as nomads or residents of Istanbul. Non-Muslims were charged a special tax in lieu, becoming liable for conscription only much later, in 1909. Military service, which in practice could be extended far beyond the allotted term, was widely feared and detested, and the actual intake of recruits was comparatively small. After the turn of the century, the Ottoman army continued to rest on the sedentary Muslim farmers of the Anatolian core provinces. By then there was a competent officer corps, soon to prove itself the most active factor in Turkish politics, but a “school of nationhood” the Ottoman army would never become.
¹⁴⁵

Perhaps nowhere other than in Prussia-Germany did conscription acquire as much importance as in Japan. In stark contrast to the ethnic heterogeneity of the great continental armies, the post-1873 Japanese military was organized as a national force on the basis of universal conscription (three years in the field, four in the reserve), but as in France it was possible to buy exemption from service. Conscription had a directly revolutionary significance in Japan that was not present in any other country, since the Meiji military reformer Yamagata Aritomo opposed plans to convert the samurai of old into a neofeudal force of professional soldiers. A conscript army was supposed to avoid the formation of such an autonomous knighthood while providing an opportunity to tie the population to the new regime and to use its energies for national objectives. The prestige of the military grew enormously after the victories of 1895 and 1905. Japan's militarism in the early twentieth century was less a continuation of old martial traditions than the consequence of a new beginning that borrowed from the models of France and Prussia.
¹⁴⁶
Above all, universal conscription made the military visible in civilian life during peacetime.

Police

In the army, mobilization converged with the disciplining of a certain population group. General order and discipline in peacetime was the responsibility of the police and the criminal justice system; the army had a hand only during periods of revolutionary turmoil, or else in rural contexts (as in Russia) where the police were too thin on the ground. The state withdrew earlier in
nineteenth-century Europe than elsewhere from spectacular acts of penal retribution. It no longer used ritual executions to stage its theater of horror. The growing strength of humanitarianism gradually made such practices seem intolerable, and after the middle of the century they disappeared from Western Europe: by 1863 in the German lands and by 1868 in Great Britain.
¹⁴⁷
Something like a global “premodernity” in the penal system ended wherever the state hangman vanished from the public eye as a skilled craftsman and entertainer. The logic of the market also made such displays objectionable, since in many cities the proximity of a place of execution interfered with the rising trend in real estate prices. Nonlethal state violence, of kinds also unthinkable in today's Europe, persisted for rather longer. In 1845 Tsar Nicholas I forbade public floggings, but the practice remained so widespread that it elicited protests until the end of the century from humanitarian activists, as well as from nationalists who feared that it threatened Russia's reputation as a civilized country.
¹⁴⁸

Greater penetration of society by the forces of law and order gave the state less drastic means of exerting its power. The nineteenth century was the pioneering age of the police. France had been the first European country—as early as 1700—to have full-time police agents under central government control.
¹⁴⁹
In Britain a London-centered police
system
began to take shape in 1829, but the control of local authorities remained greater there than on the Continent. It was 1848 before the police in Berlin were provided with uniforms that made them clearly identifiable. Meanwhile, the gendarmerie was responsible for government control in the countryside—a special force that had first acquired importance during the French Revolution, later serving as a model for the whole Napoleonic empire and beyond and figuring as one of France's leading export articles throughout the nineteenth century.
¹⁵⁰
The police and gendarmerie were in many countries the most lasting remnants of Napoleonic rule; the Restoration regimes took over few things so gladly.