Primary State Formation: How States Actually Emerge

For most of human history, there were no states. Then, in a handful of places around the world, states appeared. Mesopotamia. Egypt. The Indus Valley. China. Mesoamerica. The Andes. Independently, in each of these regions, the apparatus we recognize as "the state" emerged.

How? Why? And why so rarely?

These are among the most debated questions in archaeology and political anthropology. The answers matter because they shape how we think about states today—are they natural outgrowths of human development, or contingent inventions that might not have happened?

What Is a State?

Before asking how states form, we need to define what we're talking about. Political scientists offer various definitions, but most include:

Territorial control. A state claims authority over a bounded geographic area—not just over a group of people, but over a place.

Centralized government. Decisions affecting the whole territory are made by specialized institutions—bureaucracies, courts, armies—rather than by diffuse local authority.

Monopoly on legitimate violence. Max Weber's famous criterion. The state claims the exclusive right to use force within its territory. Others who use violence are criminals; the state's violence is "legitimate."

Extraction and redistribution. States tax—they take resources from the population and redirect them to state purposes. This requires record-keeping, enforcement, and administration.

Specialized institutions. Priests who don't farm. Soldiers who don't produce. Bureaucrats who track and regulate. Full-time specialists supported by the surplus extracted from producers.

Stratification. States create and maintain inequalities. Rulers and ruled. Citizens and slaves. Literate administrators and illiterate laborers. The hierarchy isn't incidental; it's constitutive.

Early states didn't have all these features in full form. But the trajectory was toward this bundle of characteristics. The state, in this sense, is a package—a cluster of institutional innovations that tend to appear together.

The Primary States

Primary states emerged independently—not in response to neighboring states, but from non-state societies. There are only a handful of clear cases:

Mesopotamia (~3500-3000 BCE). The city-states of Sumer are the oldest documented states. Uruk, Ur, Lagash—cities with temples, palaces, bureaucracies, writing.

Egypt (~3100 BCE). The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt created one of the most durable states in history. Centralized kingship, monumental architecture, administrative apparatus.

Indus Valley (~2600 BCE). Harappa and Mohenjo-daro show urban planning, standardized weights and measures, apparent state organization—though with puzzlingly little evidence of kings or temples.

China (~1600-1046 BCE). The Shang and Zhou dynasties emerge from earlier Bronze Age cultures. Writing, bureaucracy, territorial administration.

Mesoamerica (~200 BCE-250 CE). The Zapotec at Monte Albán, then Teotihuacan, then the Maya city-states. Pyramids, writing systems, complex administration.

Andes (~200-600 CE). The Moche and then the Tiwanaku and Wari states. Monumental architecture, specialized production, territorial control.

Each emerged independently—no state served as a model. Each solved similar problems (coordination, extraction, control) in locally specific ways.

The independence matters. It means the state form wasn't diffused from a single invention; it was invented multiple times. This suggests something about the state as a response to certain problems—though it leaves open whether those problems were inevitable or themselves contingent.

Note what's not on this list: sub-Saharan Africa (before later diffusion), Australia, most of the Pacific, most of North America. States emerged in specific environments under specific conditions. They weren't a universal human development.

Theories of State Formation

Why did states emerge when and where they did?

The hydraulic hypothesis. Karl Wittfogel argued that irrigation-dependent agriculture required centralized coordination. Managing canals, allocating water, resolving disputes—these created the need for bureaucracy. Hence "hydraulic civilizations" in river valleys.

The evidence is mixed. Some early states were indeed irrigation-dependent. But others weren't. And many irrigation systems were managed by local communities without states. The hypothesis explains some cases but not all.

Population pressure. Robert Carneiro proposed that states form when populations grow in "circumscribed" environments—fertile valleys surrounded by desert or mountains. Population pressure leads to conflict; conflict leads to conquest; conquest leads to states.

Again, partial truth. Some early states did emerge in circumscribed environments. But others emerged in open terrain. And population pressure sometimes leads to dispersal rather than conquest.

Trade and exchange. States might emerge to control trade routes, extract tolls, and monopolize valuable resources. Early Mesopotamian states were involved in long-distance trade. Control of lapis lazuli, copper, and tin might have driven state formation.

Plausible for some cases, less so for others. Trade existed long before states. Why did it lead to state formation in some places and not others?

Warfare. Charles Tilly famously argued that "war made the state, and the state made war." Organized violence requires resources. Extracting resources requires administration. Administration creates bureaucracy. This creates a ratchet toward state formation.

Compelling—but warfare existed long before states too. Something about the specific context must have tipped warfare toward state formation rather than other outcomes.

Elite manipulation. Marxist and neo-Marxist theories emphasize that states serve elite interests. Emerging elites—perhaps religious specialists, successful warriors, or wealthy traders—created state apparatus to secure and extend their power.

The question then becomes: why did elites succeed in creating states at these specific times and places? What changed that allowed them to institutionalize their power?

No single theory works. Each captures part of the picture. State formation was probably overdetermined—multiple factors converging in specific places. The question isn't which theory is "right" but how different factors combined in particular cases.

What's clear is that state formation wasn't a simple, linear process. It involved conflict, negotiation, resistance, and contingency. States could emerge and collapse. They could expand and contract. The trajectory wasn't always upward.

The Ecological Explanation

James C. Scott's Against the Grain offers a synthesis focused on grain agriculture.

States require legible, taxable surplus. Not all agriculture produces this. Root crops, which can be left in the ground and harvested gradually, are hard to tax. Grain, which must be harvested all at once and stored visibly, is easy to tax.

The "grain thesis": States emerged specifically where and when grain agriculture became dominant. Not because grain is nutritionally superior (it isn't), but because grain is administratively convenient.

Scott notes that early states were actually bad for most people. Nutrition declined. Labor increased. Disease spread in dense populations. Freedom contracted. Why would anyone submit to state control?

Because they had to. States captured populations—often through force—and held them. Early states were built on unfree labor: slaves, serfs, debt bondsmen. Walls weren't just for defense against external enemies; they kept populations from fleeing.

State formation, in this view, wasn't a step forward in human progress. It was an imposition—successful in specific ecological and geographic circumstances, and resisted wherever possible.

The archaeological evidence supports this. Early state populations were less healthy than their foraging neighbors. Skeletal remains show nutritional stress, disease, and shorter lifespans. The "benefits of civilization" took millennia to materialize—if they ever did for most people. The early state was a machine for extraction, and most people were the extracted.

This reframes the question. It's not "why would people form states?" but "why would people submit to states?" The answer, often, is that they didn't have a choice. States captured them.

The Resistance Factor

One puzzle: if states offered advantages (security, public goods, coordination), why did so many people avoid them?

For millennia, non-state peoples lived alongside early states—and often rejected incorporation. They fled to mountains, swamps, and forests. They adopted mobile lifestyles that made state control difficult. They developed political structures specifically designed to prevent the emergence of permanent hierarchy.

Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed studies the hill peoples of Southeast Asia—the "Zomia" region—who avoided state incorporation for centuries. They didn't lack the capacity for state formation. They actively chose non-state organization. Their social structures—egalitarian, mobile, fragmented—were adaptations to avoid capture.

Similar patterns appear worldwide. The "barbarians" surrounding early states weren't primitive relics. They were often refugees from state control—or societies that had consciously organized to remain stateless. The Germanic tribes Rome fought weren't earlier stages of Roman development. They were alternatives to Rome—and some had emerged precisely in response to Roman expansion.

This suggests that state formation wasn't inevitable or natural. It was a specific development that many people actively avoided. The question isn't just "how did states form?" but "why didn't states form in more places?"

The answer, in part, is that people prevented it. Where exit was possible—where you could flee to the hills—state formation was difficult. States succeeded where populations were captured and held.

The Contingency Problem

Primary state formation was rare. Only six to eight independent cases in all of human history. And it happened late—the earliest states emerged only about 5,500 years ago, after modern humans had existed for 300,000 years.

This rarity suggests that state formation wasn't a natural outgrowth of human development. It required specific conditions—conditions that didn't obtain in most times and places.

What were those conditions? Some combination of:

Concentrated grain agriculture. Dense, visible, taxable surplus.

Circumscription. Populations that couldn't easily leave—whether due to geography or the presence of other hostile groups.

Elite capacity. Leaders able to institutionalize and transmit their power.

Ideological legitimation. Religious or cosmological frameworks that justified state authority.

Military advantage. Weapons, tactics, or organization that enabled conquest and control.

Where all these converged, states could form. Where they didn't, people lived in non-state societies—which was the vast majority of human existence.

What This Means

The rarity of primary state formation has several implications:

States aren't natural. They're inventions—specific configurations of power that emerged in particular circumstances. The assumption that human societies naturally evolve toward statehood is wrong.

States were often resisted. The spread of states wasn't just a story of progress; it was also a story of conquest, capture, and coercion. People fled states when they could.

Alternatives existed. For most of human history, people lived in non-state societies. Many of these societies were complex, sophisticated, and successful on their own terms. The state form is one option among many.

Contemporary states rest on this foundation. Modern states emerged from earlier state forms, which emerged from primary states. The coercive, extractive origins are still embedded in how states operate—even democratic ones.

The state monopoly is historically recent. Even after states emerged, non-state peoples persisted for millennia alongside them. It's only in the last few centuries that states have claimed essentially all inhabited territory. The idea that every person belongs to a state is a modern assumption—not a timeless fact.

State capacity varies. Even today, many states have limited capacity outside major cities. The "failed state" problem—states that can't effectively govern their territory—reflects the difficulty of the state project itself. Making states work requires continuous effort. It's not a natural equilibrium.

The Takeaway

States emerged independently in only a handful of places, only about 5,500 years ago, and only where specific conditions obtained—grain agriculture, circumscribed populations, elite capacity, ideological legitimation.

State formation wasn't inevitable or natural. It was contingent and often resisted. The people who avoided states weren't primitive; they were often consciously organizing to remain free.

Understanding how states actually formed changes how we think about states today. They're not the natural endpoint of human development. They're a specific institutional configuration that succeeded in specific circumstances—and that might be replaced by other configurations in other circumstances.

Further Reading

- Scott, J. C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press. - Carneiro, R. L. (1970). "A Theory of the Origin of the State." Science. - Flannery, K., & Marcus, J. (2012). The Creation of Inequality. Harvard University Press.

This is Part 7 of the Anthropology of Institutions series. Next: "Institutional Creativity"