Christoffer Cappelen defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Political Science

PHD defence

Candidate

Christoffer Cappelen

Title

"On the Origins of the Modern State. State Formation in Medieval and Early Modern Europe".

The thesis

The thesis will be published as an e-book which can be bought at Academic Books. Furthermore, the thesis can also be loaned from the Royal Danish Library.

Time and venue

Friday 14 October 2022 from 14:00-17:00 at Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., room 1.1.02. Kindly note that the defence will start precisely at 14:00.

The defence will also be available on Zoom.

Assessment committee

  • Professor Asmus Leth Olsen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen (chair)
     
  • Associate Professor Mark Dincecco, University of Michigan
     
  • Associate Professor Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg

Abstract

The sovereign, territorial state is a relatively recent phenomenon, considering the thousands of years in which humans were organized into tribes, chiefdoms, city-states, and empires. Yet, it has come to almost completely replace those alternative forms of political organization. This dissertation seeks to trace the origins of the modern state in political developments of medieval and early modern Europe: from a system of weak, decentralized political authority emerged eventually the states whose rulers subjugated the population and wrested territorial control from powerful magnates.

Using castles and castle ownership to measure the gradual monopolization of violence – a defining characteristic of modern states – the article-based dissertation study how monarchs’ concentration the coercive means was facilitated by specific historical events that shifted the distribution of power in society. For instance, the drastic population decline following the Black Death promoted more direct forms of rule by weakening the bargaining power of landed elites. And the Protestant Reformation presented a powerful blow to the Catholic Church, another powerful actor in the struggle for centralized authority, and thus promoted further concentration of coercive power in the hands of secular rulers. The dissertation thus demonstrates how successful state-building depends on the relative bargaining powers of powerful societal actors and on historical events that may alter these bargaining powers.