Bureaucracies in Historical Political Economy

Abstract

Modern public bureaucracies are essential to the task of governing complex social systems. Thus, when industrialization significantly increased socioeconomic complexity, bureaucracies became an indispensable aspect of most polities. The institutional design of these administrative organizations not only shapes the prospects for economic growth, but it is also influenced by a variety of socioeconomic and political factors. Moreover, modern bureaucracies were central to global imperialism in the nineteenth century and industrialized interstate warfare in the twentieth century. All of these factors make bureaucracies a fundamentally important object of interest to the field of historical political economy. Therefore, in this chapter, I provide an overview of the historical development of modern bureaucracies and their impact on socioeconomic structures. After introducing these systems' key features, I discuss several prominent classification schemes that allow for further conceptual differentiation. Then, I examine the historical context in which modern bureaucracies emerged and the factors that influenced their organizational structures. Furthermore, I consider the effects that public administrative systems had on their environment throughout history, emphasizing their impact on economies, but also discussing society and politics as additional dimensions.

Keywords: bureaucracy, bureaucratization, public administration, public institutions, state capacity, state–society interactions

JEL Classification: H10, H11, H20, H41, H83, N40, N41, N42, N43, N44, N45, N46, N47