Problems with the argument FOR:
Teleological - explaining the past in terms of the present:
- Medieval government can be explained on its own terms
- No single word for “state” in the Middle Ages so are we imposing a modern construct onto the past?
- Historians generally critical of teleological arguments because they tend to present the present as the logical end point of anything that happened in the past but that doesn’t account for the flexibility that you need in understanding the past, things might have turned out differently if certain things had gone different ways
Eurocentric - a narrow and restrictive focus on European history:
- Legacy of colonialism – 19th C – European states often imposed straight line boundaries on territories that they had colonised – this has disastrous consequences because these states were made to cut across other kinds of Indigenous political organisation so id we use the idea of the state as a model we are repeating and endorsing these kinds of colonial impositions in which the state is the ‘most civilised’ form of political organisation
- Cities and empires more common - even in Europe
Alternatives to the State:
The Mongol Empire (1150-1300):
- One of the largest territorial empires that ever existed – all the way from the steps of the Aral Sea, going through Siberian forests, the Hindu Kush, the Iranian Plateau, all the way into what is currently Korea
- most famous ruler of this Empire (arguably creator) is Genghis Khan, born into a powerful family in the late 12th century
- Consolidates power over various nomadic tribes across what became his empire
- Genghis Khan died in 1227 and was succeeded by his third son Ogedei Khan who continued a sort of Western expansion, leading his armies into as far as modern-day Poland and Hungary
- Genghis Khan and his successors were nomadic – they moved around and this informed the structure of the empire itself, rather than a single stationary capital or a seat of governance government - highly mobile system/centre of governance
- Links to the conquered territories of the empire – ruler would grant a certain number of conquered peoples (usually nomadic peoples) specific regions of pasture to their followers, units of people and pastures were known as Ulus
- Empire itself was governed by the entire dynasty - various branches of the Imperial family continued expeditions expansions so this is not a unitary state with a single ruler
- Little differentiation between military and civil authority – local governors known as Buskirk and Aragon were essentially the heads of army units, but they were also responsible for levying taxes and for economic activities, economic functions – so military organisation and civil organisation go hand in hand
- They drew on the sophisticated pre-existing bureaucratic apparatuses from the people they had conquered: the Persians, the Chinese, the Tibetan scribes – used them to create documents and communication but they were part of the military and absorbed into this Mongolian bureaucracy
Aztec Mexico (1300-1500 CE):
- Nomadic people - spoke the Nhuatl language, who lived in the deserts of what is now northern Mexico – beginning 1100 CE, various clans moved into the valley of Mexico and began to settle lands around the city-states of the earlier Toltec civilisation
- Through a complex series of alliances and wars in late 14th/15th C, in 1428 a ‘Triple Alliance’ emerged, combining the forces of Tenochtitlan with the cities of Texcoco, and Tlacopan who had a temporary coalition against the king of Tepanec but made it a permanent coalition after defeating him
- Basic unit of Aztec political organisation was the city or kingdom (Altepetl) to which most people gave their allegiance to
- Each altepetl was ruled by a king (known as a tlatoani) and at its centre there was a royal palace, which served as his residence and the centre of administrative activity
- Tlatoani was a military leader who raised armies and collected tribute - also understood as a kind of deity
- An altepetl was composed of all of the people who owed allegiance to its tlatoani
- This allegiance was manifested in military combat - all males required to fight for the altepetl when required
- Similar to feudal military system that operated in medieval Europe but whereas European rulers often sought to gain territory through warfare, in Aztec Mexico armies were used merely to establish dominance in the form of taxation and tribute