Historical Development of States
How do rulers organize the people and institutions through which states exercise power?
Foundational theories identify the pressures that lead rulers to build states—war, territorial competition, elite bargaining, and economic change—and the institutions that emerge in response. Yet they often leave the internal organization of the state as a black box.
Rulers cannot establish political order alone. They must recruit agents, decide which forms of competence and loyalty matter, and distribute officials across territories that pose different governing problems. Personnel choices are therefore not merely administrative outcomes. They are mechanisms through which rulers assemble coercive, extractive, and ideational capacities while incorporating elites into a political order.
War and State Consolidation. Military victory does not by itself produce durable authority. My work treats postwar state-building as an organizational problem: rulers must reconstruct administration, mobilize different governing capacities, and decide who should govern territories emerging from violence. Governing Empire develops this argument across the Qing dynasty; From Conquest to Rule identifies personnel allocation as a mechanism of consolidation after rebellion; and Ruling after Revolution extends the problem to civilian control after revolutionary war.
Meritocracy and Ideational Capacity. State power is not only coercive, extractive, or administrative. States also shape the categories and political ideas through which people understand authority. Meritocracy Reimagined shows how the civil service examinations created a shared political language among geographically dispersed elites, while The Power of Ideas develops a comparative measure of states' capacity to make their narratives materially and socially present.
Elite Coalitions and Bureaucratic Reform. Bureaucratic reforms redistribute political access and therefore depend on the coalitions that make them possible. Meritocracy or Democracy? examines how British leaders sequenced competitive civil-service recruitment around aristocratic resistance, while State-Making as Class-Making shows how social ties between landed and industrial elites facilitated cooperation during Britain's political and economic transformation.
War and State Consolidation
Governing Empire: Bureaucracy and State Power in Imperial China. Under contract with Cambridge University Press.
“From Conquest to Rule: Rebellion and Elite Appointment in Imperial China.” Conditionally accepted at International Organization.
“Ruling after Revolution.” (with Junyan Jiang)
Meritocracy and Ideational Capacity
“Meritocracy Reimagined: Ideational Foundations of State-Building in Imperial China.” 2025. Journal of Historical Political Economy 4(4): 439–469. Winner of the 2025 Lee J. Alston Prize.
“The Power of Ideas: Measuring the Ideational Capacity of Modern States.” (with Charles Chang)
Elite Coalitions and Bureaucratic Reform
“Meritocracy or Democracy? Civil Service and State-Building in Great Britain.” (with Didac Queralt)
“State-Making as Class-Making.” (with Pablo Beramendi and Adriane Fresh)