The Transformation of the World (132 page)

“Rational” Bureaucracy

Such a conception of the state as a structure outside society developed on several tracks in early modern Europe. It is by no means the case that a uniform absolutism was impelling all European societies, or even all the larger ones, in
the same direction.
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An inevitable part of this early modern state was a bureaucracy that had to tackle three main tasks: (a) to administer large states in a way that ensured their cohesion; (b) to keep the exchequer afloat (especially the war chest, given the importance of war for states in this period); and (c) to organize the administration of justice, in an age before an effective division of powers that gradually emerged in North America and Europe only in the late eighteenth century. Nowhere in Europe before 1800, however, was every level of the justice system in the hands of the state. Royal and imperial courts were never responsible for everything, even in the most centralist systems of absolute rule; there always remained special enclaves for cities, estates, corporations (e.g., the universities), or the landowning aristocracy (the so-called patrimonial courts in Prussia). Churches, monasteries, and other religious establishments often applied laws of their own to their members. In the Islamic world, secular and religious law was not sharply separated and had many overlapping elements. Imperial China in the eighteenth century, with no state-recognized churches and no equivalent of European canon law, was more marked than most parts of Europe by a state monopoly of justice. The lowest-ranking officials, of whom there were only a handful in each district (
xian
) throughout the Sino-Manchurian empire in the late eighteenth century, were generalists responsible for the dispensation of justice in all conceivable cases. Death sentences had to be personally upheld by the emperor. In terms of the degree of state involvement, the pre-1800 Qing justice system was therefore more modern than its European counterparts. It is hard to say whether the rule of law was equally pronounced, but from 1740 on there was a body of secular penal law altogether comparable with European codifications of the time.
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Since Max Weber, historical sociology has been agreed that in modern Europe patrimonial administrations turned into the rational bureaucracies we know today. This transformation took place in the nineteenth century and had its origins in the French Revolution, which paradoxically established a bureaucratic state dwarfing Bourbon absolutism in both scale and efficiency.
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Napoleon spread this model beyond the borders of France, but the pace and degree of change varied from country to country.
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The general political culture, together with infrastructural conditions and the nature of the political system, played a role in the development of state administrations as tightly integrated and smoothly functioning apparatuses of communication. Although the differences were not very great in these respects, no state bureaucracy was the same as another; the Bavarian bureaucracy in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, was plainly less hierarchical and authoritarian than the Prussian version.
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Bourgeois or newly ennobled officials were characteristic of France and many parts of Germany, whereas in the lands of central and eastern Europe, from Austria to Russia, large state administrations offered employment mainly to declassed people from the lower ranks of the nobility. Since, with the limited exception of Hungary, this huge region had no representative institutions
capable of exercising effective control over the executive, the second half of the nineteenth century there was the great age of bureaucratic domination within authoritarian-monarchical systems—more “Asiatic” than “European” in the modern sense.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, a “rational” state bureaucracy was not actually operational everywhere in Europe, but it had at least established itself as the ideal model. According to this, a modern state administration rested on an ethos of public service, and each ruler felt responsible for its adequate provision out of tax revenue. Corruption was neither desirable nor (with adequate salary levels) necessary. Civil servants were supposed to be above parties, bound by existing laws and subject to inspection. Hierarchies within the bureaucracy were transparent. Promotion followed open and familiar career paths, based on either seniority or performance. Officials were employed on the basis of expertise or special diplomas, not through nepotism or “connections.” The buying of offices was ruled out. The work of administration took place by written communication. It stored up archives. It included special disciplinary proceedings where necessary, subject to the laws of the land.
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No rigid criteria can be applied to assess when an efficient state by modern standards was actually achieved. Pragmatically, a state may be considered modern if the following are true:

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 Bands of robbers have ceased to terrorize the population and an effective police force (Max Weber's “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”) is in operation.

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 Judges are appointed and paid by the state, without being subject to dismissal or to outside control by other institutions within the system of government and administration.

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 A treasury department regularly raises revenue through direct and indirect taxation, and the population recognizes the state's fiscal requirements as legitimate in principle (so that taxpayers are not in danger of being pummeled and tax evasion does not exist on a large scale).
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 Officials are appointed only on the basis of proven competence. Corruption in dealings between public and officials is not taken for granted but regarded as an evil deserving punishment.

This kind of state bureaucracy, increasingly copied in large private corporations since the last third of the nineteenth century, was a European invention with especially strong roots in Prussia and Napoleonic France. But this should not obscure the fact that there were imposing bureaucratic traditions outside Europe—for example, in China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire—which should not be too hastily dismissed as “premodern” or “patrimonial.” In the nineteenth century these traditions tended to converge with Western influences, producing highly varied results. Four examples will have to suffice: British India, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan.

Asian Bureaucracies: India and China

Nineteenth-century European colonies usually featured a low degree of bureaucratization in comparison with their mother countries. The colonial state had two aspects. On the one hand, it was often the only institution of any kind that—with the help of centralized powers such as the army, police, or customs and revenue—gave life to a territory as a single governed entity. The colonial state brought laws with it, along with judges who dispensed justice in accordance with those or special colonial laws. It recorded the population statistically, classifying it by ethnicity, religion, and other categories that had not previously been customary but now tended to shape the reality. “Tribes” or religious communities or (in India) whole castes were defined in such a way as to demarcate administrative districts or statistical objects, or to identify indigenous leaders with whom the colonial state wished to cooperate. In large parts of Africa, India, and Central Asia, such things became possible at all only through the establishment of European-style colonial state apparatuses. On the other hand, the colonial state was never an all-powerful monster. The forces it had in the field were so skimpy that it was seldom able to bring the vast colonial territories fully under its wing.

All this was true of the largest colony: India. Here the numerical relationship between European personnel and Indian subjects was especially unfavorable. Nevertheless, one of the full-scale bureaucracies of the era was built in India—the only such case in the colonial world of the nineteenth century. In 1880 India was more highly bureaucratized than the British Isles: not only in quantitative terms but, more decisively, because the bureaucracy did not perform the ancillary services of a purely administrative executive under political direction. Rather, it was the core of a system of rule that may best be described as bureaucratic autocracy. In this respect, the Indian colonial state had greater affinities with Imperial China than with any political system in Europe. Nor do the parallels end there. Both the Chinese state bureaucracy and the Indian Civil Service (ICS) revolved around a fairly small corps of highly qualified top officials who enjoyed great prestige in society. Outside the capital they were present at the lowest level of the hierarchy as district magistrates (
zhixian
) in China or “collectors” in India, the official duties of the two being very similar.
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Specially educated for their posts in a system involving competitive examinations, both the Chinese and the British-Indian district officials were at once heads of local government, revenue collectors, and magistrates. There had been such exams in China for centuries. Europeans who knew of this practice often expressed admiration for it in the eighteenth century, and it would appear that the British had the model in mind when they introduced something similar not only for the Indian and colonial service but also—first proposed by experts in 1854, finally implemented after 1870—for the senior (ministry-level) bureaucracy at home.

The British colonial bureaucracy in India did not turn up one day in a political landscape previously free of the state. But the Mogul Empire and its
successor states had not essentially been bureaucratic structures such as those of China or Vietnam; they had hierarchies of scribes and a developed chancellery but not a strictly or thoroughly organized civil service. The ICS could therefore build to only a limited extent on existing foundations. Its immediate predecessor was the administration of the East India Company, which, though one of the world's most complex formal organizations in the eighteenth century, was in many respects still premodern. The posts it had to fill were largely allocated through patronage, not by objective performance criteria. Such practices had been commonplace in the European state of the early modern period. In France, the Napoleonic rationalization of the state had replaced them early on with the advantages of an open career structure. In Britain, it was still possible until 1871 to purchase an officer's position in the army, and it was only around that time that it became the rule to recruit ministerial officials (with the exception of the strongly aristocratic Foreign Office) by means of aptitude tests. In India that had been the case since 1853, shortly before the East India Company was wound up in the wake of the Great Rebellion of 1857/58.
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The ICS was the second pillar, alongside the army, on which the British based their rule in India. If one judges an organization retrospectively by whether it achieved its own objectives, then the ICS was a very successful apparatus, at least until the First World War. Indian taxes flowed into the colonial coffers, and after the rebellion a high degree of internal peace was attained by means not confined to military force. Thanks to its high salaries and considerable prestige, the ICS became the civilian elite corps of the British Empire. The stresses and strains of life in the tropics were offset by the fact that one could accumulate quite a nest egg in colonial employ and enjoy early retirement back home as a gentleman of means. The Indian bureaucracy, as it still exists today, shows traces of its colonial origins. Since a slow Indianization of the service began after the First World War, the post-1947 Republic of India did not find itself in the position of having to repudiate the ICS as a symbol of colonialism. It therefore kept it going as the Indian Administrative Service.
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Though a European implant, the bureaucracy in India did not directly copy a European model but experimented with various forms under the special conditions existing in the country. China was not colonized. Colonial state apparatuses of a significant size arose only in marginal areas under Japanese rule: after 1895 on Taiwan; after 1905, and on a large scale after 1931, in Manchuria. China's ancient bureaucratic tradition therefore survived without direct colonial intervention until the end of the nineteenth century. Its old institutional forms ended when the Qing government abolished competitive state exams in 1905, but a kind of mental bureaucratism persisted under the new conditions of the republic and, after 1949, under the rule of the Communist Party of China. Still today the nationwide state and party hierarchies are the main braces holding the giant country together. At the modern peak of its efficiency, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the Chinese state bureaucracy was the most rationally
organized in the world, the largest and most experienced, and the one responsible for the greatest number of tasks.
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For a late-nineteenth-century European, China had become the embodiment of a premodern bureaucratism out of tune with the requirements of the age. Observers from Western countries that had left behind the scourge of corruption perhaps only a few decades earlier now spoke contemptuously of the venality of the Chinese mandarinate.
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Its inability to modernize the country economically also fueled doubts about the rationality of the Chinese state. Much in these contemporary judgments is justified. The Chinese bureaucracy did suffer from low pay that made its members dependent on “benefices” from office. It was also stifled by an overwhelmingly literary-philosophical education that, despite many attempted reforms,
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fell far short of the requirements of modern technology. It was further impeded by the purchasing of office (bred by the dire condition of the state finances) that brought many unsuitable people into the apparatus, and from the fact that after the death of the Jiating Emperor in 1820 there was no strong monarch capable of imposing discipline and probity on officeholders. A more general problem, on top of all this, was that the Qing Dynasty failed to reform two central pillars of the state before 1895: the military and the exchequer. The army was just capable of defending the imperial borders in Central Asia, but it was in no position to stand up to the European Great Powers. The revenue system, based on a fixed land tax, was so antiquated that the imperial state was hopelessly impoverished by the time it neared its end.