If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

For over half a century, discussion of the relationship between military finance, organisation, and state development has been dominated by the contested concept of a ‘military revolution’; the belief that there were one or a few periods of fundamental change that transformed both war and wider European history. More recently, this has been supplemented by the idea of smaller, but more frequent ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMAs) as individual military organisations respond to, or anticipate, changes made by their likely opponents. Technology is generally considered to drive both forms of ‘revolution’, as innovative weaponry and institutional practice transform war, rendering older models ineffective and obsolete. Change flows through a series of chain reactions, as states adapt to new conditions, modifying their structures to sustain and direct altered armed forces, and revising their forms of interaction with society both to extract the necessary resources and to legitimate their use in war-making.

This chapter asks: how did notions and practices of individual equality arise out of state centralisation?

The law of the virtual Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, combined with customary law, like Salic law, or Saxon Law. Roman law was rediscovered and studied in the first universities in Western Europa. Legal scholars of the day made comments and thus developed so-called canon law: a mix of roman, medieval and religious law. At the same, as a result of feudal relations, quid pro quo documents, like the magna Charta and Joyous entries, emerged, granting different classes different privileges and rights in turn for assistance, tax and loyalty to a ruler. This marked the beginning of conditional power and the rule of law.

No account of the ‘rise of the modern British state’ would be complete without an appreciation of the ways in which local institutions, constitutional principles and precedents, laws – and ultimately governance – evolved. Prior to the twentieth century, locality defined the overwhelming majority of British subjects’ lived constitutional experience: the shire rule of Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, medieval corporations and county corporates, fourteenth-century Quarter Sessions, the empowered Elizabethan parish, and then the explosion of ‘ratepayer democracy’ in the nineteenth century featuring municipal corporations and county councils, Poor Law unions, and ad hoc statutory bodies (including school boards, public health authorities, and improvement committees) of all kinds.

Traditional principles studied in this chapter – mission command (decentralisation) and partnership between a commander and his chief of staff – are seen as a special characteristic of German command. Part of the mechanism for handling the first command task, co-ordinating a mass army. Why mission command’s implementation was limited in Western Front conditions, and how granting autonomy of action could go badly wrong. Lack of trust in subordinates, risk aversion, the growing complexity of battle, shortages of manpower and matériel and good communications led to increased micro-management.

Mission command linked to the partnership between a commander and his chief staff officer, the command team. Composition, strengths and weaknesses of the commander and general staff officer cadres. Great efforts to create effective command teams: reasonably successful in terms of their duration, less so in the vital combined arms balance required by modern battle. General staff officers increasingly influential, but commanders remained important.

The chapter focuses on how IIAs have impacted relations in public administrations through institutional rearrangements. First, we analyse how the intervention of IIAs influenced relations between different state agencies at the central level. Here, we look mainly at central state agencies’ struggles over the IIA portfolio and the attendant budgetary repercussions. Second, we look at how the IIAs impact the relations between the central agencies and their counterparts at the levels of individual states, provinces, and municipalities. This part deals with the management of the support for foreign investment projects and issues connected with ISDS management and defence. We highlight the related budgetary politics as well. Regardless of the variations, one element arises from all of the studied states: the gradual side-lining of the traditional actors tasked with international diplomacy in favour of more sectoral expert actors that base their expertise on the considerations of trade, commerce, finance, and the economy. It also became evident that the practices of centralisation, executive rule, and discourses that put a premium on the economic considerations of efficiency and competition have been preferred by the centre to rein in provinces.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is legally designated the country’s independent central statistical authority with formal responsibility for all official statistics. Despite formal emphasis on statistical centralisation in Australia, there has been significant growth in official statistical production outside the ABS in recent decades. I argue that this is partly a product of a perceived tension between maintaining depoliticisation and meeting the needs of policymakers for new information, a tension managed by restricting ABS responsibilities to core statistical programs and creating new statistical agencies and programs to meet policymaker needs. ABS statisticians have exacerbated this trend by insisting on their absolute impartiality and sacrificing their claim to policy usefulness. ABS has a strong bias towards the production of economic indicators, reflecting the institutional settings it has operated in, including its formal location within the Department of the Treasury. The latter has relied on the ABS to bolster its own credibility in economic policy and has actively hindered the ABS from expanding into other statistical subject areas.

Britain has a partly decentralised arrangement where most official statistics are produced in government departments at the direction of ministers. A parallel set of centralised statistical institutions and organisations has grown up over time, culminating in the 2007 legislative reforms instituting a formally independent central statistical authority. Chapter 6 traces the different credibility imperatives bearing on UK official statistics and shows how these produced demands for centralisation, legislation, and independencewith attention to the political fallout from the Thatcher Government’s defunding of and interference in official statistics, along with subsequent efforts to find arrangements enhancing statistical independence while preserving the decentralised model. The chapter illustrates impacts of UK government statisticians’ behaviours, highlighting problems in the management of the central statistical agency, and conflicts between statisticians over reform. It shows that the distribution of statistical authority in the UK reflects efforts to reconcile post-Thatcher depoliticisation with a decentralised arrangement and Westminster conventions of ministerial prerogative.

This chapter measures the varied levels of hierarchy, as they developed over time, focused on South Etruria. These trends show an increase and then fluctuations in centralisation.A broader comparison is made with North Etruria and Umbria where quantification of these trends is more difficult to assess. The chapter ends with a more qualitative analysis of the levels of hierarchy more typically represented by South Etruria, covering primate centres, marginal centres, coastal emporia, internal emporium, politically dependent tertiary centres, boundary temples, villages, rural settlement

This chapter broadens the scope of the Java-centric politics of archaeology and heritage towards Sumatra. The first archaeological activities on Sumatra, performed in the context of the colonial state, dated from the start of the nineteenth century. But it was during the second half of the nineteenth century that the now ‘archaeological’ sites of South Sumatra were more systematically inventoried and appropriated in the context of historical and ethnographic descriptions, geographical expeditions, military conquest, and the establishment of governmental structures. This chapter examines how South Sumatra, in particular Palembang, the Pasemah area, and Jambi, became gradually incorporated in the colonial archaeological infrastructure, as it was developed in Batavia, the administrative centre of the expanding colony. It focuses on interactions between state-supported ‘modern’ heritage concepts, local and regional appropriations of certain archaeological sites and objects, and the development of nationalist history writing by Sumatra-born Indonesians who also included the early past of Sumatra.

This chapter, situated in the twentieth century, returns to Majapahit and analyses how and why it became a proto-national site, despite the lack of evidence of its greatness, and despite criticism from philological, Islamic, and communist voices. Both local and centralising colonial state-supported and Indonesian nationalist site interventions played a role in the makings of this site. At the site, Javanese nobleman and administrator Kromodjojo Adinegoro, who was born and raised in the region, and the Indies-born architect and self-taught archaeologist Henri Maclaine Pont stimulated long-term local engagement with the site. Meanwhile, for Indonesian nationalists active in Batavia, Majapahit shifted from a Greater Javanese site into a Java-centred proto-Indonesian one. Yet, this development does not mean that the interests of the different parties engaging with the site stopped, nor that alternative engagements (of religious or spiritual character) faded away.

Chapter 3 focuses on the negotiations concerning the decolonisation of land. It analyses how the reshaping of land transfer institutions impacted both the decolonisation process and Kenyatta’s ascension to power. The setting-up of the Central Land Board in 1961 and the peaceful decolonisation of land was central to the independence conferences. The chapter argues that land negotiations prepared the way for a centralized government, even before the debate over federalism versus centralization was settled among the Kenyan political elite. It shows that the British fear of a security breakdown not only led to the creation of centralized institutions for land transfer, but also played a significant role in their favouring Kenyatta as a leader. By doing so, the British authorities abandoned both the European settler’ and the minority ethnic groups, who were arguing for majimboism (regionalism). At independence, Kenyatta would not only be considered the guardian of political order, he would also inherit an advantageously designed institutional framework to control the most valuable political and economic resource in Kenya: land.