Appendices

Summary

historical data for france and the Ottoman empire

For the purpose of calibrating the model developed in Chapter 2, we need to estimate which actor controls how much of overall taxation capacity, political decision-making power, public service provision, and military support. We can provide estimates for three of the four resources. The difficulties were insurmountable, however, when trying to determine actors’ control over political decision-making – an overview of the entire political edifice and the amount of power vested in the different offices and positions would be necessary to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimation. The estimations for the other three resources are explained in this appendix, while our assumptions regarding political decision-making are justified in the main text..

The first step is to define which periods correspond to a pre-modern, weakly centralized state and which ones to a centralized, modern territorial state. For France, we propose to look at three points in time. The “pre-modern” situation corresponds to the fourteenth century, i.e. after a state with the capacity for direct taxation and with a standing army had emerged under Charles V. The modern, territorial state in France arises with absolutism: tax rebellions (the “Fronde,” 1648–1653) were successfully subdued, the collection of taxes became centralized (Kiser and Linton 2002), and the military revolution of the mid-sixteenth century institutionalized and strengthened a standing army under the command of the king. The seventeenth-century absolutist state, however, was still based on tax farming, and most offices (including in the army) were up for purchase. We thus take a third snapshot of the resource distribution in the late nineteenth century, i.e. after the Franco-Prussian war. Now tax farming has been abolished and universal conscription introduced. For the Ottoman empire, any data point after the establishment of the standing army in 1360 and before the beginning of the Tanzimat reforms in the early nineteenth century is adequate to represent the pre-modern situation. The late nineteenth century under Abdul Hamid stands as an example of a modern territorial state (with an army based on universal conscription, central taxation without tax farming, etc.).