Building a State One Step at a Time: Evidence from France justicenewsflash.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from justicenewsflash.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Effective states can raise taxes and armies, enforce laws, and produce public goods, but how these functions are built over time is not well understood. This column studies the administrative reform initiated by the French Revolution, one of history’s most ambitious state-building experiments, to shed light on the sequence of steps needed to build effective states. Cities