Origin of State Societies

Theories of origin

Elman Service and Morton Fried staged bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. A chiefdom still rests on kinship rank; a state has offices that outlast a lineage. V. Gordon Childe linked the state to the urban revolution: surplus, writing, specialists and monumental centres. Karl Wittfogel over-stressed irrigation (“hydraulic”) despotism; Indian monsoon agriculture does not require that single cause. Robert Carneiro argued that circumscription and warfare concentrate power. Maurice Godelier and Marxist anthropologists treated the state as control of surplus and ideology together.

Henri Claessen and Peter Skalník described the early state as a transitional type: sacral kingship, tribute, and incomplete bureaucracy. Pierre Clastres warned that some Amazonian societies actively prevented the state; the origin is not an inevitable climb.

Indian illustrations

Harappan cities — Rakhigarhi, Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira — show urban planning, craft specialisation and long-distance trade without a palatial text that names a king. That is a state-level organisation whose political form is still argued. Later mahajanapadas, Magadha and the Mauryan empire fit Fried’s state more clearly: tax, army, and dharma as public ideology.

Tribal India supplies the other end. Nuer segmentary opposition (Evans-Pritchard) and many Indian hill polities remained acephalous or chiefly. S. C. Roy on the Mundas and Verrier Elwin on NEFA described headmanship and khuntkatti without a territorial bureaucracy. Colonial ethnography then made a state by mapping tribes onto districts.

Caution

No single cause — irrigation, trade, conquest or religion — explains every origin. Indian evidence favours multiple pathways: Bronze Age urbanism in the north-west, iron-age territorial kingdoms in the Ganga plain, and delayed or resisted state formation in forest and hill tracts.