CHAPTER 3 THE MODERN STATE€ FRUTED PLAIN (and American t you as a Nigerian recent,toa local ch, or Spanish commu The Kings who wi these new states often had family ties or other interests that took priority over their state. As late as 1714, a German line of kings ‘hose members co\ even speak English for the first gener England. In contrast, during World War I (after Britain and Germany had evolved into modern states), it would prove an embarrassment to the British royal house that ‘was their cousin—so much so that they changed their name from ion came to power Hanover to Even s yeriod as most wars: Bands and vice versa. In the American Revolut a inglish soldiers could be hired by the French king to fight the English, the king of England hired German troops Tt was not unt y tury that we could see the state as we know ita relat oundaries, whose people were bound together by intricate political ties and who thought of themselves distinctively in terms of the state to which they belonged Historians mark the invention of modern states in Europe from 1800 to 1815. In France, he ereated a well-organized, broad pol bureaucracy and army. The resulting state was nearly f ler state had finally emerged. Even ntually overreached himself and was defeated at the Battle of Water fledged i emerged after 1815 tried, ne eagerly and some with more hesitation, to emulate his method of organization. igh the modern state had finally been invented in Europe and North America ry, most other peoples ofthe world still lived under a variety of other arrangements. However, a great surge of Earopean colonial expansion during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had divided the rest of the world into colonies organized somewhat as subsidiary states. When European power waned in the twentieth century as a result of two disastrous world wars, these colonies were able to break away and establish themselves as independent. Then their new leaders, almost all of whom had been educated in Europe and to whom the state seemed a natural way to organize things, adopted the state as their own form of political organization. Even some regions that had never been conquered by Europeans, such as Ethiopia and Thailand, found that they needed to organize as states in order to defend themselves and participate in international ‘commerce. The modern state became the universal form of politcal organization, not u political structures, the state has aimed to impose uniform fe within far-reaching (but sil crcumscribed) st personal tohow one enforce such norms over h Imost everywhere they were made, And, indeed in which this kind of microregulation has been successf cop's yearly earnings a share equivalent ine ofthat > THe ORIGIN OF STATES: POWER OR CHOICE? ‘What was it that le to the invention ofthe state over the last several centuries? Perhaps derstand the nature ofthe state 18 as to why states developed in