ABSTRACT
The now famous dictum that ‘war makes states’ has received renewed interest in recent years with the experience of state-collapse and state-failure in many parts of the Third World (Tilly, 1985, p. 170). Historical studies have shown that the activity of war-making was an essential ingredient of the process of stateformation in early modern Europe (Tilly, 1975; Ertman, 1997). These studies claim that the ability of getting ready for war and then actually waging war requires power holders to get involved in actions that are very frequently also conducive to state-formation. This includes the effective extraction of resources for the purpose of war-making. Extraction activity presupposes state control, which in turn requires an efficient bureaucracy (Hintze, 1975). In cases where there was nothing or little to extract from society, war-making also required the promotion of capital accumulation which in turn made war-making possible. This activity also required the growing strength of a centralized bureaucracy (Tilly, 1990).
