Tracing the Origins of the Modern State

The modern state was an institutional innovation that fundamentally changed political, economic, and social dynamics. It originated in medieval or early modern Europe, spread to all parts of the world, and quickly became the dominant form of political organization. Quantitative scholarship on the historical development of the modern state has lacked a measure of historical statehood that taps into the defining feature of the state: the monopoly on the use of physical force within a territory. In this paper, we present an ongoing project to operationalize, measure, and eventually explain the development of the modern state; one that starts from the canonical definition and allows us to trace the origins of the modern state in the period when it actually originated. We propose a new measure of the state based on castle ownership and construction from c. 950-1650 to trace the rise of the modern state when, where, and how it actually occurred. We use original data from a pilot study in Denmark to show how this measure correlates with historical narratives of Danish state formation. We also show that, as the territorial state gradually arose in medieval Europe, castles tend to cluster around early modern European borders.