Bureaucracies in Historical Political Economy

Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy, edited by Jeffery A. Jenkins and Jared Rubin (expected 2023)

30 Pages Posted: 11 May 2022 Last revised: 23 Jan 2023

Date Written: January 22, 2023

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

Suggested Citation

Vogler, Jan P., Bureaucracies in Historical Political Economy (January 22, 2023). Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy, edited by Jeffery A. Jenkins and Jared Rubin (expected 2023), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4105786

Jan P. Vogler (Contact Author)

Aarhus University ( email )

Department of Political Science
Aarhus University
DK-8000 Aarhus C, 8000
Denmark

HOME PAGE: http://www.janvogler.net

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