War, Politics, and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Origins of State Building

Abstract

A large literature has examined the “rise of the state” in early modern Europe, focusing
on the increase in the capacity of states due to war. However, at the same time
they were increasing in size, state institutions were also increasing in quality, through
the creation of “modern” or “Weberian” bureaucracies. Our project examines the state
in early modern Britain, often cited as the ideal type of a bureaucratic transformation.
To do so, we are building a dataset of every central government employee in
Britain between 1660 and 1870, capturing not just their numbers but five measures of
bureaucratic rationalization: structured career progression, functional specialization,
renumeration through salaries rather than user fees, centralized control over salaries,
and recruitment from middle class backgrounds. Consistent with the existing literature,
we find that increases in the number of bureaucrats occur during war. However,
increases in bureaucratic quality are negatively related to war, and appear positively
associated with periods of political change. The results suggest that there may be short-term tradeoffs between the quantity and quality of state institutions.

Authors

• Matteo Bertoli

• Alexander Lee, University of Rochester