Killing Ambition

This chapter seeks to account for the nearly complete absence of warfare from medieval Iceland and its sagas. It argues that a single logic dictated both the embrace of feud as a socially constructive idea and the rejection of war as an abomination. Drawing on anthropological examples and analyses, war is defined by contrasting it with feud; the bond between war and state-formation is emphasized. War presupposes political centralization and differentiation, which Icelanders, committed to the reciprocal logic of feuding, resisted. According to the sagas, ideological opposition to war manifested itself in abortive attempts at political consolidation within Iceland, in confusion and substitution in the face of war elsewhere (in Norway, England, and North America), and in failure to contend with burgeoning warlike activity in thirteenth-century Iceland. Tensions between state-centric warfare and state-resistant feuding existed in historical reality, however, not only in saga accounts of this history; and in reality, tensions could not always be resolved. Uchronia provided a tool for creative, retrospective textual resolution of problems that could not be overcome in practice. As demonstrated by the Icelandic law code, Grágás, the past thus became the path-dependent product of the future. Uchronic ideology worked to emend any perceived historical ‘errors’: any symptoms of war that could not be suppressed in reality were, instead, overwritten and repressed in text

The Origins of Colonial Investments in Former British and French Africa

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but there is little systematic evidence of their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, this article shows that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within sixteen British and French African colonies. What led colonial states to invest much more in some districts than others? The author argues that natural harbors and capes led some places to become centers of pre-colonial coastal trade, which in turn increased later colonial investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Furthermore, distance from pre-colonial trading posts helps explain the diffusion of investments within each colony. The author finds limited support for alternative explanations such as natural resources and pre-colonial ethnic characteristics, including pre-colonial political centralization. These two findings suggest an economic origin for the regional and ethnic disparities observed in the colonial and contemporary periods.

Local agency costs of political centralization

We analyze a model of moral hazard in local public services, which could be efficiently managed by officials under local democratic accountability, but not by officials who are appointed by the ruler of a centralized autocracy. The ruler might prefer to retain an official who diverted resources from public services but contributed part to benefit the ruler. The autocratic ruler would value better public services only when residents reduce taxable investments, which become unprofitable without good public services. For local government to benefit local residents, they must have some decentralized power to punish an official who serves them badly even while serving the ruler well.

Population density and size facilitate interactive capacity and the rise of the state

Radiocarbon summed probability distribution (SPD) methods promise to illuminate the role of demography in shaping prehistoric social processes, but theories linking population indices to social organization are still uncommon. Here, we develop Power Theory, a formal model of political centralization that casts population density and size as key variables modulating the interactive capacity of political agents to construct power over others. To evaluate this argument, we generated an SPD from 755 radiocarbon dates for 10 000–1000 BP from Central, North Central and North Coast Peru, a period when Peruvian political form developed from ‘quasi-egalitarianism’ to state levels of political centralization. These data are congruent with theoretical expectations of the model but also point to an artefactual distortion previously unremarked in SPD research. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

Diseased Bodies and the Invaded Social Body in Biblical Depictions of the Census

The question of why biblical literature links census-taking with plague has long puzzled scholars. I propose looking at the problem through the lens of body theory, where one understanding of the body is to see it as a place upon which society and culture are mapped. Several studies anchored in this approach have found that diseased bodies are sometimes understood as symptoms of the “sick” or malfunctioning society. I propose that this representation of the sick body as a consequence of the sick society lends credibility to the interpretation that the biblical census-plague link stemmed from perceived dangers about political centralization under the monarchy. Some factions in ancient Israel viewed the census as an affront to tribal society with an emerging monarchy invading traditional village life. I argue that the diseased bodies of Israelites in these texts articulated concern for the invaded and deteriorating social body of the tribes.