Ask any old hand in a social science department to list the 10 most influential contributions within the discipline, and the late American sociologist Charles Tilly’s laconic quip that “war made the state, and the state made war” is bound to make the cut. Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg’s edited volume Does War Make States? therefore takes on one of the “big questions” of social science. The aim of the volume is “to provide an assessment that brings Tilly’s agenda forward” (p. 1). To that end, Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg have enlisted some of the biggest names in the field. In their Introduction, cowritten with Benno Teschke, they nicely situate Tilly’s work in a broader literature on state formation and summarize his claims about war making and state formation, which they single out “as Tilly’s most influential and enduring legacy” (p. 14).

The volume is divided into four parts. In the first – on Lineages – Teschke argues that Tilly lacks an explanation of warfare, and that this makes his argument about war making and state making circular. Thomas Ertman next presents the Prussian historian Otto Hintze’s “late” explanation of European state formation, which he sees as offering more nuance than Hintze’s “early” summary of the German notion of Das Primat der Aussenpolitik that so inspired Tilly.

The second part, Challenges, also contains two chapters. Hendrik Spruyt takes the Tillyan or bellicist literature to task for having neglected the unique European environment that produced the modern state. To understand the effects of warfare, we need to understand how outside pressure was mediated by these “preexisting social and institutional arrangements” (p. 90). Philip Gorski and Swaroop Sharma present a different challenge to what they term Tilly’s neo-Darwinist model. They argue that it was the introduction of primogeniture—rather than military conquest—that fostered state consolidation in Europe from the High Middle Ages onward.

In the third part of the book, Omissions, Strandsbjerg argues that the territorialization of state power was aided by important shifts in cartographic practices in the Renaissance, which altered the reality of space. Peter Haldén uses the Holy Roman Empire to illustrate that many European polities were not unitary states but composite realms, and that these realms had a surprising staying power, lasting well into modern times. Sharma, in a solo chapter, challenges the traditional Darwinian view of warfare in Europe from 1000 to 1800. European wars were normally limited, dynastic wars that created not unitary but composite states.

The last part of the book, Vistas, also contains three chapters. Dietrich Jung argues that in recent centuries, bellicist dynamics in the Middle East have been suppressed by external influences. Robert H. Holden stresses that it is not a lack of warfare but a general crisis of legitimacy, dating all the way back to independence in 1808, that has aborted effective state building in much of Latin America. In the final chapter, Victoria Tin-Bor Hui proposes that Tilly’s dynamics can be generalized to China, where periods of geopolitical competition occasioned state building and the civilization of power, whereas periods characterized by the absence of such competition produced the opposite.

These brief summaries obviously cannot do justice to the very rich contributions to this edited volume. Indeed, what strikes one on the first reading is the heterogeneity of the chapters. The contributors focus on different parts of Tilly’s theory (which receive different names, including bellicist, bellocentric, neo-Darwinian, and Tillyan); the outcomes range from state capacity to territorial consolidation to constitutionalism, the notions of causality differ in striking but not well-explained ways, and some of the arguments are outright contradictory. For instance, whereas Spruyt posits that sovereign, territorial states hail from the High Middle Ages, Gorski and Sharma, in the very next chapter, argue that even after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, we do not find sovereign, territorial states (a point also made by Haldén).

The volume is also uneven in other respects. Several of the chapters principally consist of critical literature reviews. This works well in some cases, for instance in Ertman’s lucid presentation of how a deeper acquaintance with Hintze’s work can enrich our understanding of European state formation. But some of the other chapters contain unnecessarily long-winding (and sometimes convoluted) reviews and theoretical asides.

What I liked most were the chapters that presented a clear-cut corrective to Tilly’s story about European state formation, based on solid empirical foundations. Sharma’s two chapters here deserve special praise. They convincingly show that military conquest did not play a key role in European state making, and that much prior work on European state formation is informed by a superficial knowledge of the European milieu prior to the French Revolution. To do so, Sharma demonstrates something that is puzzlingly absent from many of the other chapters, namely, a deeper acquaintance with the work of medieval and early modern historians.

Another striking absence is one or more large-n statistical appraisals of Tilly’s relationship and/or mechanisms. This even comes out in the Introduction, which almost completely slights the new large-n literature on the subject. While these Omissions are surprising, they make it natural to ask what scholars who set out to assess war and state making statistically can take away from this book.

The first and most obvious point, noted by virtually all chapters, is that Tilly was very hesitant to generalize the war-making and state-making relationship and mechanisms beyond Europe. It follows that a genuine statistical test of his argument must be based on historical data from medieval and early modern Europe, not from other parts of the world. Second, the edited volume shows that a deeper acquaintance with contextual features of the European experience is necessary in order to understand European dynamics of war making and state making.

One of the factors that repeatedly crops up is the importance of the Catholic Church in the first place and the later religious conflicts sparked by the failure of the papacy to reform in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Spruyt (and to Otto Hintze, as Ertman relates in his chapter), it was the eleventh- and twelfth-century conflict between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor that created the European multistate system—and, as a downstream effect, generalized geopolitical competition. Gorski and Sharma point out that the Catholic Church was instrumental in introducing primogeniture. The Catholic Church was also—as Gorski and Sharma mention in passing—the locale in which early bureaucratic institutions were developed and (something not mentioned in this volume) the place where notions of political representation and consent were first established. With respect to later religious conflicts, Ertman relates Hintze’s argument that Calvinism was important for subsequent Prussian state making, and a broader version of this claim is made by Gorski and Sharma. Finally, one might add that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion in Europe were not only important for state making (as Sharma points out) but also saw the formulation and spread of constitutionalist theories and doctrines among Catholics, Calvinists, and Protestants.

The European experience therefore cannot be understood shorn of religious institutions, religious teachings, and religious conflicts. This was an issue that Tilly neglected in his work on war making and state making. As this volume makes clear, it is high time to bring the church back into the study of European state formation.