Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War. By Mila Dragojević. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. 224p. $45.00 cloth.

Abstract

period or place to say anything definitive. As already mentioned, the ultimate expression of this thoughtful mindset is the way Stasavage has jettisoned his prior belief that there is anything particular about political consent in medieval Europe. However, there is one point where he seems to me to have changed his mindmore than the admittedly scarce source material can bear. In his 2011 book, States of Credit, Stasavage emphasized the importance of the ninthand tenth-century Carolingian state collapse for the development of European institutions of self-government. In his new book, we hear virtually nothing about this collapse. Au contraire, the book implies that state power was permanently low in Europe. Even the Romans, according to Stasavage, had little in the way of genuine bureaucracy, at least not compared with Chinese emperors. And whatever Roman state apparatus existed then broke down after the Germanic invasions. Stasavage here rides roughshod over a widespread consensus among medieval historians: that early medieval Germanic/barbarian rulers inherited a relatively vigorous notion and exercise of public power from the Roman Empire. From the fifth century to the late ninth century, according to medieval historians working on Western Europe, there was a clear distinction between the private and public aspects of power, and monarchs generally overawed all other political players in their realms. To be sure, public power was not at the same level as in the Byzantine Empire, Imperial China, or the early Abbasid Caliphate. But it was nonetheless robust for centuries after the fall of Rome. Only after the Carolingian state collapse did this exercise of public power by Western European kings hollow out “from inside in a much more fragmented world, and local lordship became more important” (Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe: From the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation, p. 78, 2016). In other words, Stasavage’s interpretation of early medieval kingdoms seems to be colored by this later breakdown of royal power, which marked an end to the ex-Roman tradition of public authority, but about which we hear almost nothing. One indication of this is that he places the Byzantine concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and the state bureaucracy late, under the ninthand tenth-century Macedonian emperors, to show that this was a novel development that broke with the Roman past. On this point, Stasavage’s use of source material is for once very weak, resting on a single reference (p. 105, fn. 17) to an old work by George Ostrogorsky (History of the Byzantine State, 1969). Stasavage thereby ends up ignoring a significant rupture in medieval Europe. This speaks to a broader point, which is slighted in the book, even though it is in many ways a mirror image of Stasavage’s insight that the advance of civilization has tended to sound the death knell for political consent. Civilization and state power have often proved remarkably brittle, and throughout history, the collapse of old power structures has repeatedly paved the way for a reestablishment of political equality (James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017). To more fully understand the European political inventiveness in the high middle ages—and hence the roots of modern representative democracy—the Carolingian state collapse surely needs to be factored in. However, this point only reinforces one of the main conclusions of Stasavage’s book: that where a strong state exists, democratization is unlikely, regardless of whether a society modernizes in socioeconomic terms. The book deserves to be read and discussed, because its global history perspective allows Stasavage to formulate this, as well as a number of other thought-provoking ideas that remain hidden to those only studying democracy and democratization in the contemporary era.