Chapter 1 introduces evolution theory and evolutionary explanation for studies of East Asian international relations and lays out the design of the whole book

The chapter offers a large-scale historical review of elite strategies toward the empowered inclusion of labor before the dual transition. This macro-historical process of elite response to labor political activism shapes dominant elite strategies and, over the long term, affects labor’s ability to build political legitimacy.

This chapter focuses on the origins of the institutions that would evolve into the European Union. Norman argues that a focus on perceptions of fragility provides a fruitful but underexplored perspective on the creation of the early institutions of European postwar political cooperation. The design of these institutions were informed by perceptions of fragility associated with democratic governance. The conventional functionalist story of the EU, where cooperative institutions were set up to prevent new conflicts between the formerly warring countries, while not inaccurate, obscures how the reconstruction of the European political order was also an answer to the breakdown of European democracy before the war. Notions of democracy’s fragility informed the functionalist perspective on politics as well as the perceived for a ‘militant’ protection of democratic institutions. Apart from shaping the origins of the European political order, the chapter argues that perceptions of fragility have continued to inform the institutional development of the EU and even ongoing efforts to strengthen its democratic aspects.

This chapter lays out some of the key concepts and theories that support the book, as well as a key conceptual typology of colonial governance. It starts with an examination of the literature on civil conflict, highlighting its attributes but explaining its limitations in relation to the types and patterns of both insurgent and social violence in south Asia. It then lays out the framework of political order and institutions that has implicitly driven much of the research on political violence and related outcomes in comparative politics. I argue that some of the assumptions embedded in this framework do not allow for the examination of the historical roots of subnational institutions. I provide an alternative in the analytical tradition of state-building, and suggest how uneven state-building in developing countries can shape state-society relations. The chapter concludes with laying out the key conceptual typology of colonial governance, by interacting two dimensions of direct and indirect rule, which serves as the basis for legible categories of colonial difference.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a substantive discussion of a key puzzle in the comparative politics and political economy literature: Is property security a cause or consequence of political order? Much of the property rights literature views the creation of legal rights as a solution to what ails society, such as underinvestment, both public and private. Investment, in turn, is understood to be likely to result in prosperity and eventually political order. In our conclusion, we argue that it makes more sense to conceptualize political order and political institutions that limit the scope of government as a cause rather than consequence of property security. This conclusion does not deny the possibility of self-governance. But it does mean that the creation of legal rights requires that we think clearly about features of the state. The straightforward implication of our analysis is that the domestic and international policymakers should scale back land titling, relying instead on communities until there is progress in establishing robust, inclusive political institutions at higher levels of government.

The conclusion examines some broader questions raised by the analysis. It first discusses the pattern of the normative/empirical inversion noted throughout the book, whereby conditions associated with some desirable outcomes (e.g. separation of powers) are projected back into an account of origins. This is identified as a major obstacle in effective causal analysis. Second, the chapter examines a fundamental underlying concern of the book, the origins of power. Although no answer can be offered, it explains the implications of the book's argument to our understanding of despotic and infrastructural power, perhaps the most influential formulation in social science, as well as to the distinction between direct and indirect rule, which is shaping discussion of the state in varied literatures. Third, the chapter offers some thoughts about how the medieval account I have provided can be reconciled with the early modern accounts that have proved far more influential in explanations of state- and institution-building. I conclude with some shorter thoughts on the implications of the argument on the use of bargaining theory in modern development theory, on the popular notion of land redistribution, and on Huntington's problem of political order and instability.

This chapter argues that Thomas Hobbes’s imagining of the original events of biblical authorship and transmission in Leviathan play a pivotal role in his radical arguments about sovereignty and its relationship to religion. It contends that Hobbes’s emphasis on the Bible as the product of multiple layers of history is not in itself secularizing. Instead, this chapter focuses on the materialist metaphysical foundations of Hobbes’s account of the Bible’s production, transmission, and reception. The radical ways Hobbes represents the Bible’s origins and the events of its textual history buttress his argument for the sovereign’s total authority over all religious matters pertaining to the public. This is because they have the effect of eradicating any means, other than the sovereign’s wholly secular decision, by which a communal biblical meaning and authority might be actualized, including any means by which “the Bible” can be collectively recognized as such. Hobbes’s subjection of Scripture to the sovereign is thus predicated on metaphysical assumptions inimical to human participation in revelation, assumptions undergirding the untraditional scenes of biblical origin he imagines.

This chapter examines the portrayal of Scripture as miraculously transcendent of history, human activity, and material conditions in Francis Bacon’s utopian narrative New Atlantis. It considers how this imagined Bible founds a mode of social organization oriented towards human mastery over created nature. Drawing on Maurice Blondel’s concept of “extrinsicism,” which describes a stark separation of revelation from its human and historical mediations, this chapter analyzes the significance of this transcendent Bible, including the displacement of human agency, history, and culture from its production and transmission. This chapter argues that the social organization oriented to the acquisition and implementation of natural knowledge imagined by Bacon is enabled by the seemingly secularizing boundaries between revelation and reason, and theology and philosophy, which this miraculous Bible establishes. However, the apparently secularizing consequences of a wholly transcendent Bible are disrupted when considered in the larger frame of Baconian philosophy, which in fundamental ways retains a theological conception of nature and of the social organization needed to harness its power.

An ancient analogy has it that the family simultaneously is a source of inspiration and of legitimization for the political order. With attention to the interactions between family imagery, familial structures, intrafamilial relationships, and premodern Western political imagination, this chapter argues that until modern times, the analogy predominated political theories and understandings, and traditional imagery of family and the political order were largely static. The rise of liberalism caused the collapse of these ideas and demanded new definitions, articulations, and justifications.

This chapter presents the theories used in the empirical chapters. The book uses theories that emphasize that stable polities need consent and collaboration, not just coercion. Power is not only how the strong dominate the weak but also a function of how groups can work together and the institutions that help them integrate. Finally, I discuss how political order is more than just the sovereign state. Political order is a general category of order that does not presuppose a monopoly of violence but capabilities for warfare, a common identity and a way to act as a collective.