| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Comparative/World

Martin van Creveld. The Rise and Decline of the State. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 439. Cloth $54.95, paper $19.95.

Eminent military analyst Martin van Creveld takes strong positions on an issue that continues to vex and divide observers of capital markets, multinational corporations, the European Union, nongovernmental organizations, and other transnational institutions. For Creveld, states are rapidly losing the visibly vital power and autonomy they enjoyed until recently. It is therefore time, he reasons, to ask how the state came into being, how it functioned in its heyday, and what impact its decline will have on human life. By "states," Creveld means sovereign organizations exercising control over populations that live within delimited territories and enjoying abstract existence as corporations, legally constituted persons separate from any particular individual or set of individuals; true states sharply distinguish public from private affairs. This definition encourages Creveld to adopt some dubious practices: treatment of all chiefdoms, city-states, and empires as stateless regimes; consequent disposition of all the world's history before 1300 c.e. (deemed essentially stateless) in less than a sixth of his book; location of the state's rise in Western European experience between 1300 and 1648; analysis of world history from 1648 to 1975 as a dual process of diffusion and consolidation of an already defined form of government; and no more than passing discussion of China, Japan, India, or Africa before the twentieth century, with that discussion concentrating on European intervention. . . .

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