NASTAC - Work Package 1

In the area of state formation in early modern Europe, we have prioritized the external dimension of state formation in terms of territorial expansion and border change and its interaction with. Inspired by Abramson (2017) and drawing on his data, we have been able to evaluate Tilly’s theory by identifying territorial changes between pairs of states through extensive spatial computation, while checking whether these border changes happened in conjunction with wars as defined by Brecke. Thanks to the temporal structure of the data, we are also able to compute the cumulative gains and losses of territory, which offer a direct indication of whether Tilly’s dictum “war made states, and state made war” really applies. Finally, this paper uses peace agreements to check whether Tilly’s postulated mechanisms were actually operating. The resulting paper, “War did make states: Revisiting the bellicist paradigm”, co-authored by Cederman, Galano, Girardin and Schvitz, was presented several times.