BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN AND TERRITORY AND POWER IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Writing in 1985, Skocpol suggested that there had been a three-stage process in the study of politics in the USA.Footnote ¹² First, before the 1950s/1960s, political science was dominated by the study of the Constitution, primarily in terms of the political ideas by which it was supposed to work, with only Marxists offering marginalized critiques. The second stage involved the move to study political behaviour as a means of seeing how politics really worked. Politics was studied in terms of voter, interest group or class interests and the state was seen as an arena in which such interests competed or as a black box through which interests were processed. During the third stage, which took off in the 1970s and 1980s, political scientists acknowledged the behaviouralist revolution but at the same time lamented the neglect of the study of the state. Nordlinger suggested that ‘the preferences of the state are at least as important as those of civil society in accounting for what the democratic state does and does not do,’ and is ‘also markedly autonomous in doing so even when its preferences diverge from the demands of the most powerful groups in society’.Footnote ¹³

This intellectual turn towards bringing the state back into the analysis of political development also penetrated UK political science in the late twentieth century, and had a general influence on scholarship in the period in which Territory and Power was written.Footnote ¹⁴ Bringing the state back in has proved to be an enduring engine for research, and one to which Territory and Power should be more clearly related. In doing so, we need to consider a number of key issues of taking a state-centric approach and how these have been addressed by leading scholars. These provide a set of defining elements of a state-centric approach against which we can locate Bulpitt's own approaches on these issues in Territory and Power.

First, all social scientists have contended that in taking a state-centric approach it is essential to address the origins of state autonomy. On some things there is general agreement. The state is seen as a set of institutions at the centre of a geographically bounded territory through which authoritative rule-making for the whole territory is exercised. State officials are those public officials, elected and unelected, who make up the institutions’ personnel, and autonomy may focus on both their capacity for action as well as observable actions free from external constraint.Footnote ¹⁵ Beyond this, though, when one addresses the social origins of state autonomy there has been much dispute. Nordlinger, in the pluralist tradition, gave state actors the same capacity to determine political outcomes as societal actors, and suggested that they were acting autonomously when they were not deliberately giving in to societal demands. Olsen, adopting a rational-choice approach, imbued state actors with purely self-serving interests. Neo-Marxists have seen the state as the objective guarantor of capitalist class interests or simply as a further arena for their pursuit. Finally, elite theorists, assuming the existence of cohesive elite groups within the state with coherent aims as well as assuming societal deference, have proposed a variety of accounts of state elite operations.Footnote ¹⁶ All would be agreed that an account of the social origins of state power is needed, but would disagree on how it should be done.

Second, it has been important to contend that the very territoriality of the state means that its autonomy matters. Mann argued that the state alone had the capacity to structure the relations of civil society in certain socio-spatial ways to reflect its territorial boundaries. Consequently, in bringing the state back in there was a need specifically to conceptualize how the state developed and used territorial power. Mann's own approach was to suggest that while the state has certain despotic powers, its autonomy is principally derived from the ability to develop infrastructural power across the territory of the state. His historical research suggested that the origins and use of both types of power had varied between states as well as over time. Where state actors were able to develop more infrastructural power they consequently had greater capacity to structure the relations of civil society.Footnote ¹⁷

Third, the principal American promoters of the turn towards bringing the state back in – Evans, Rueschemayer and Skocpol – established the importance of studying the relationship between the external and domestic arenas of state responsibilities as a basis for analysing state autonomy. In raising this issue they were keen to argue that the study of state autonomy could be multi-theoretic. They borrowed first from neo-Marxists in assuming the ‘relative autonomy of the state’ to explain how the state, while ultimately bound by capitalist societal forces, may operate against the immediate interests of the capitalist class. They also borrowed from Weber's view that state autonomy derived from its authority, reflecting a militaristic view of the state as the embodiment of physical force in society.Footnote ¹⁸ As Mann has observed, by borrowing equally from Marx and Weber, Evans et al. presented a dual theory of the state that ‘would identify two dimensions: the domestic, economic/ideological aspect of the state and the military, international aspect of states…[and] as states would now be responding to two types of pressure and interest groups, a certain space would be created in which a state elite could manoeuvre, play off classes against war factions and other states, and so stake out an area and degree of power autonomy for itself’.Footnote ¹⁹ Neo-Marxists contended that claims to multi-theoretic innovation were overblown and that this approach was essentially a pluralist one.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, Evans et al. had invested new thinking into how to study state autonomy, suggesting how comparative historical study of the domestic and external operations of state officials would uncover trends and variations in state political development.

Fourth, most state-centric analysis has recognized that, however you conceptualize the origins of state autonomy, there is still a need to conceptualize the complexity of motivations in state officials in shaping political development. In responding to this issue Gurr and King were particularly instructive in developing a two-dimensional view of the interests of public officials. The first dimension addressed ‘some central common interests in the perpetuation of the state's institutions and authority…based simultaneously on officials’ material interest in their status and position…and on their acceptance of the legitimacy of the state's authority’. They will thus involve themselves in ‘the primary interests of the state in maintaining public order and authority’ and ‘in securing public revenues’. Gurr and King suggested, however, that a second dimension of state autonomous power would allow for a great diversity in state officials’ other interests, ‘depending on their personal preferences and ambitions, ideological views and social commitments and their positions within the state apparatus’.Footnote ²¹ This approach is not, of course, universally held, but like Evans et al.'s it provides a stimulating reflection on a widely recognized issue in state-centric analysis.

Finally, there is the over-arching issue of how in practice state-centric approaches have stimulated paradigm changes in applied research. In the USA a state-centric approach has become most strongly associated with innovative neo-pluralist and often historically informed scholarship that has been at odds with rational-choice analysis. In the UK it helped to spawn the dominant paradigm in British political science of the last 20 years: the networks/governance approach. This eschewed a focus on formal institutions of government and brought state agency significantly back into political analysis as part of an approach that assumed the blurring of any clear divide between state and non-state actors in how governing occurred.Footnote ²² There is much in common between these approaches, but the British approach has downgraded more the significance of formal government institutions.

Irrespective, though, of the different emphases in Anglo-American scholarship, state-centred political science and new institutionalism have become firmly established components of comparative political science. Territory and Power has not commonly or systematically been identified with this research agenda but on closer examination a strong case can be made that it should be, and that indeed it made a number of distinct contributions to it. Indeed, Territory and Power begins with a critique of the very approaches that state-centric political science sought to move away from: ‘old’ institutionalist approaches that compared states according to their formal constitutional structures, as well as of behaviouralist approaches, exemplified by public administration studies. Bulpitt then developed a conceptual approach that should be seen as reflecting an engagement with state-centric political science on all five points raised above. Itculminates in a distinctive focus on the government rather than the governance of the state.

First, Bulpitt explicitly addressed what social theory should inform a conception of state actors. He followed the assumptions of elite theorists in asserting the existence of a cohesive elite group within the state with coherent aims. He did not disregard civil society interests, but he did work from the assumption that they had been over-studied to the neglect of the motivations and operations of state actors. More distinctively he then defined the centre court – the monarch or later the prime minister and his/her closest colleagues and advisers – as the focus for analysis of elite power. This provided a distinctive parsimonious approach that might miss out much detail but would plausibly incorporate the key factors shaping political development.Footnote ²³ Bulpitt also analysed the court elite within a realist approach to politics. As Gamble has observed, realist analysts have been ‘concerned with understanding political action within specific institutional contexts, in which the course of politics is determined by the response of political agents to information about the constraints and circumstances they face…Key areas for enquiry become the character of political management and where the real sources of power lie within a political system or institution.’Footnote ²⁴ Following this, Bulpitt believed his approach to bringing the state back in incorporated the strategic management of the political system as a whole.

Second, as the title of the book suggests, Bulpitt also worked from an explicit awareness that the very territoriality of the state mattered; that a central preoccupation of state governors would be, in Mann's terms, how to structure the relations of civil society in certain socio-spatial ways to reflect the territorial boundaries of the state. The perception that Territory and Power was nevertheless about a discrete field of study called territorial politics, relating to the central management of sub-national government and regionalist/nationalist movements, is misleading as both Bulpitt's theory and practice in the study of territorial politics meant that his focus of analysis was much broader. Evidence for this can be seen first in how Bulpitt defined territorial politics. His definition was very broad, including centre governing relations with all ‘interests, communities, political organisations and governmental bodies outside the central institutional complex, but within the accepted boundaries of the state, which possess or are commonly perceived to possess, a significant geographical or local/regional character’.Footnote ²⁵ In studying those relations his methodological focus was also potentially all-embracing in seeking to understand the ‘primary cleavage in society between a “central value system”, its institutions and elite supporters, and subordinate peripheral value systems and their non-elite supporters’.Footnote ²⁶ This subject definition was considerably broader than that adopted by analysts of centre–local government relations or territorial governance which, in the case of Rhodes and his differentiated polity thesis, have underpinned general models of British politics.

In practice, Bulpitt then in any case went beyond the scope of territorial politics as he had defined it to focus on issues of central significance to the broader functioning of the polity: political culture, constitutional rules, the bureaucracy, the party system and the economy. Indeed, the preoccupations of the centre in territorial management as Bulpitt addressed them were actually the core preoccupations of general polity management: notably the economy, public expenditure and foreign policy. Bulpitt included among the key potential peripheral threats to centre management by the early 1980s the politics of race relations and left-wing Bennism in the Labour movement, neither of which had any specific geographical base.Footnote ²⁷ Overall, Bulpitt's framework for the study of territorial politics lent itself to the study of polity management and its challenges in whatever form they occurred. His labelling of his methodological focus as that of territorial politics was principally a means of drawing attention to both the central business of state management – to manage socio-spatial dilemmas – as well as the principal domestic sources of state autonomy; that participants in socio-spatial dilemmas would look to state actors to address their problems. Territory and Power actually focused on political development in a broader sense than has generally been appreciated and consequently represented Bulpitt's initial fundamental account of UK state government as a whole.

Following this in Territory and Power Bulpitt also promoted an innovative language for analysing how state actors would manage socio-spatial dilemmas. Bulpitt itemized a set of five ideal governing code types defined by whether the centre seeks simple central penetration, indirect rule through local elite assimilation, direct central control, significant intervention to mobilize centre organization in the periphery, or direct citizen mobilization. In that order they represented approaches with an increasing focus on central intervention. Bulpitt then defined four possible models of resulting centre–periphery relations. First, he suggested a central autonomy model, which resulted from successful peripheralization to local collaborators of what the centre considered to be low politics to allow it to concentrate on what it considered to be high politics. Second, he conceived a model of capital city bargaining in which centre governing had to accept that peripheral interests were stronger and had penetrated the centre, resulting in the need for constant negotiation. Third, he suggested the central authority model in which the centre has achieved considerable voluntary acquiescence. Finally, he proposed a coercive power model, in which the centre can only govern through continuous intervention and threats.Footnote ²⁸

This taxonomy of centre governing codes and structures of territorial politics was at the heart of Bulpitt's original comparative approach as a state-centric analyst. It provided a framework for analysing the territorial management of any groups or interests provoking social-spatial dilemmas for the state. In this context, Territory and Power provided an analysis of the UK as a case of the centre shaping political development by applying a local elite assimilation code to achieve centre autonomy. In addition, though, the book also provided a framework for the analysis of political development in other states. It does not take much imagination to observe that Bulpitt viewed France, the country with which he invokes most frequent comparison, as a state best studied in terms of the centre's attempts to assert central authority. Italy, the initial subject of his postgraduate research, was a country that in private he viewed as a good exemplar of a state based on the need to structure politics around capital city bargaining. Beyond the pale lay the totalitarian regimes of fascist and communist states, best studied as malign versions of local organization and citizen mobilization and resulting political structures best characterized by the need for coercive power.

Third, Bulpitt also echoed Evans et al.'s emphasis on the fact that state actors alone are concerned with the relationship between domestic and external politics, and that this provided a key space for state autonomy. Bulpitt asserted that the link between domestic politics and external relations was integral to any state actor approach to domestic political development, and to conceptualize this he introduced the idea that the centre would always seek to organize an external support system to the conduct of its domestic activities.Footnote ²⁹ This would ‘attempt to minimise the impact of external forces on domestic politics, or ensure that these forces are favourable to the maintenance of domestic tranquillity’.Footnote ³⁰ This was not, however, an easy task. Bulpitt started from the assumption that external relations were potentially a problem as well as a solution for internal state management. The centre would have some autonomy in making choices about external relationships, but they invariably carried with them challenges, and often they became the major preoccupations of centre government. Overall, Bulpitt made the management of the interrelationship between domestic and external politics a fundamental issue for research.

Fourth, Bulpitt was concerned with how to study the different dimensions of interests pursued by state actors. Territory and Power was significant for developing an approach to Gurr and King's first dimension of state officials’ interests: envisaging their basic concern to be the perpetuation of the state's institutions and authority, the maintenance of public order and the securing of public revenues. Bulpitt was also distinctive in conceptualizing the pursuit of such fundamental concerns as an integrated exercise, led by a central elite and not irredeemably fragmented by departmentalism. Territory and Power was not much concerned with the second dimension of state officials’ interests. Nevertheless, in hindsight we can see that while Territory and Power was concerned with analysing the first dimension of state actors’ preferences, concerned with maintaining state stability and its authority, Bulpitt's later work on ‘The Thatcher Statecraft’ conceptualized the second dimension of state autonomous power, where state officials’ other interests could be asserted. ‘The Thatcher Statecraft’ focused on the key elected politicians in the centre and conceptualized their personal preferences as focusing on demonstrating party unity, gaining hegemony in political argument, establishing governing competence and developing a winning electoral strategy, all in the name of getting and staying elected.Footnote ³¹ If one were to integrate the two works one would simply build these actor preferences on top of the fundamental governing priorities articulated in Territory and Power. A weakness in doing this is that the party statecraft approach was an ethnocentrically developed approach, relevant largely only to the UK. Nevertheless, an integration of the two works provides the potential for a fuller and richer basis upon which to develop a comparative approach to analysing the complexity of state actor preferences in political development.

Finally, Bulpitt was also concerned in Territory and Power with how a state-centric approach may contribute to paradigm shifts in how we study politics. His own approach appears to have been to attempt to cash fully the potential of a state-centric approach. Behaviouralist, pluralist and emerging governance approaches had failed to predict Thatcherism in the UK or Reaganism in the USA. There was a need for an approach that recognized the importance of government to change and shape the course of politics. He was concerned to move the analysis of political development not simply from a focus on the study of the constitutional state to that of changing modes of governance, but to focus on the government of the state as a key autonomous variable shaping and leading all others.

Overall, state-centric political science remains a potent research agenda. Hindess, in a recent retrospective on Stephen Lukes's Power, A Radical View, commented that it had been seminal in many ways. Nevertheless, we can see now that the book, published in 1974, had been deficient as a study of power in the US polity specifically because it lacked a conceptualization of the political power of the state, the government of the state or of the states system in determining domestic state power. All of these points have subsequently been addressed in the bringing the state back in literature. Bulpitt's Territory and Power addresses all of these issues too and in its own distinctive ways. To highlight its distinctiveness, though, we should note Hindess's other more critical reflection that efforts to bring the state back in have become dominated by governance approaches and, following Foucault, approaches concerned to study governmentality. Hindess reminds us that for Aristotle the government of the state meant ‘the supreme authority in states’, which implied ‘that government should be seen as emanating from a single centre of control, albeit one which may itself be divided between executive, legislature and judiciary, or between federal, state and local levels’.Footnote ³² It is possible that when political scientists have analysed governance they have failed to interrogate sufficiently state power and its strategic use. In this context one may assess Territory and Power as providing a distinctive state-centric framework for analysis overall because it focused on the government rather than the governance of the state. To this day it remains under-explored.

TEMPORAL ANALYSIS AND TERRITORY AND POWER IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Writing in 2004, Pierson suggested that there have been three common uses of history in political analysis: first; the study of historical episodes in their own right; second, the study of historical episodes for their capacity to illustrate social science models; and third, the study of history as a temporal process in which one seeks to show how historical episodes are related over time and ultimately to the present.Footnote ³³ This third approach has become the dominant historical approach among political scientists. It has focused on the study of historical institutions and their role in shaping political and social outcomes. Thelen and Skocpol's early review of historical institutionalism suggested that it had the capacity to look beyond short-term factors to key institutional mechanisms that have shaped political development. While it covered a diverse range of scholarship, historical institutionalism was ‘a theoretical project aimed at the middle range that confronts issues of both historical contingency and “path dependency” that other theoretical perspectives obscure’.Footnote ³⁴ Pierson's approach followed Elster in also insisting that ‘the basic concept inthe social sciences should be that of the mechanism rather than of a theory…we should concentrate on specifying small and medium-sized mechanisms for human action and interaction.’ He raised the importance of conceptualizing the temporal mechanisms that have determined political development, and how they might be applied to comparative state analysis.Footnote ³⁵

This intellectual turn towards the temporal analysis of political development has penetrated the study of politics in the UK much less than in the USA, but its research potential is no less potent. It is a research agenda to which again Territory and Power should be more clearly related. In doing so, we need to consider a number of key dimensions of temporal analysis and how these have been addressed by leading scholars in more depth, before exploring Bulpitt's approaches on these issues also in Territory and Power.

First, a key concern is how temporal mechanisms cause variation in paths of political development between states. Temporal analysts have identified the need to study long-term processes of historical development, and within them the significance of timing and sequencing to explain differential development. Second, and closely associated with this, temporal analysts have then sought to explain how distinct patterns of political development are perpetuated. Scholars have developed path dependency as the core concept to explain this phenomenon. For Pierson, path dependency captures the importance of ‘self-reinforcing or positive feedback processes in a political system…such processes can produce more than one outcome. Once a particular path gets established, however, self-reinforcing processes make reversal very difficult.’Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, the timing and sequencing of positive feedback can also be crucial to the nature of path-dependent processes.Footnote ³⁷

Third, there is also the issue of how to conceptualize the causes of change. Historical institutionalists have developed the concept of the critical juncture, which suggests that external events, such as war or economic crisis, act as a shock that can change the path of institutional development. But Pierson has also invoked the significance of incrementalism, time-lag effects, causal chains and structural causal factors to explain slow long-term change.Footnote ³⁸ Where there has been sudden change after slow long-run developments one approach has been to focus on the significance of threshold effects where, as Pierson puts it, ‘some social processes may have little significance until they attain a critical mass, which may then trigger change.’Footnote ³⁹ Historical institutionalists have also developed the analytical device of the conjuncture as a mechanism that emphasizes the combined effects of factors internal and external to institutional development to explain development. For example, it may matter deeply whether a left or a right-centre party is in power when an economic crisis occurs.

Fourth, the ambitions of temporal analysis have also extended to exploring how it can help us to periodize political development more rigorously. A key recent intervention has been made by Pierson and Skocpol in The Transformation of American Politics. They argue that ‘by taking a long-term perspective, we make visible large scale transformations that too often disappear in narrower short-term studies of American politics.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Consequently, they are sceptical of successive attempts to organize the study of contemporary politics around the themes of how the USA responded to the Vietnam War, the advent of Reagonomics in the 1980s, or indeed around the notion that ‘everything changed in domestic politics following September 11, 2001.’ Instead they emphasize that, seen in long-term perspective, ‘the greatest change of the contemporary era’ has instead been the advent of ‘a persistent “era of big government”[which] commenced in the 1960s’.Footnote ⁴¹ This has been characterized by the predominance of activist government, the rights revolution and the rise of conservatism.Footnote ⁴² Pierson and Skocpol's work is a prime example of how an explicitly temporal political science can reshape our understanding of the contemporary period in which we situate and try and understand political phenomena.

Finally, there is also interest in whether taking a temporal approach means that a predictive political science history is also possible. Most researchers are sceptical. Nevertheless, Pierson takes the view that ‘it is easy to underestimate the extent to which theoretical discussions underpin, if only implicitly and by way of diffusion, all empirical research.’ Quoting Fritz Scharpf, Pierson suggests that the search for historical explanation must be disciplined by ‘strong prior expectations’ that are confirmed or revised by historical analysis.Footnote ⁴³ He concludes that ‘clarifying how various temporally grounded mechanisms operate and suggesting where we should expect such processes to be at work can provide strong theoretical underpinnings for the analyses of even those seeking to explain a single case.’ This suggests that we should theorize the operation of temporal mechanisms in contemporary politics where they have occurred in similar circumstances in the past.

Overall, temporal analysis has become a well-established component of comparative political science but there remains much scope for innovation, consolidation and application. It has been suggested before that Territory and Power pursued a historical institutionalist approach, which would locate it as an example of Pierson's third type of history. But this does not appear to have closed the matter. For instance, Bevir criticizes Bulpitt for employing an ahistorical methodology akin to Pierson's second approach, raiding UK history to provide evidence of a theorized ideal-type approach to governing.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is unfair, but patently we need to clarify how Bulpitt sought to show that history mattered, and indeed did so in a distinct and original manner.

In general terms Bulpitt was explicit in employing a framework of analysis which anticipated the ambitions of a temporal approach. He sought in relation to territorial governing to ‘identify the various regimes (structures persisting over time) which have existed in the past, examine the outcome in territorial terms, of certain “critical junctures” or “option points” in the past and isolate any factors which are associated with periods of political instability’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bulpitt then developed and applied in Territory and Power a conceptual approach that should be seen as engaging with all five of the dimensions of temporal analysis raised above. It culminates in a distinctive focus on the study of political development as the study of governing regimes and the dilemmas that governments face.

First, in Territory and Power Bulpitt acknowledged the need to analyse political development in a long-term context. He demonstrated the importance of the initial complex origins of an integrated English polity to later UK state political development. In the process he stressed the significance of the timing and sequencing of particular developments, specifically with regard to how early polity building was resolved in England.Footnote ⁴⁶ As early as the sixteenth century the pros and cons of governing England had been resolved in such a way as to mean that ‘the development of territorial politics in England can be represented as a highly successful exercise in state and nation building.’ However, he stressed that the monarchy – partly as a result of early success – then also responded poorly to the great changes of the early modern period: the rise of the printing press, the commercial significance of the City of London and the importance of law. ‘It failed to develop strong and autonomous bureaucratic, financial and military resources. The process of state building continued but without a state machine. The result was to politicise the periphery without the means of controlling it,’ with dissent from local communities being voiced through Parliament.Footnote ⁴⁷ The outcome was revolution and civil war.

The weaknesses of the English revolution allowed ultimately for the restoration of the monarchy in 1688, but the absence of a state machine meant that during this era the court had to identify satisficing ways of sustaining the state if it was to avoid similar problems again. Bulpitt argues that it was in this context that there emerged a very particular approach to governing. This focused on, first, the primary aim of simply seeking the ‘peace, order and tranquillity of the realm’; second, seeking local elites as the local collaborators to the monarchy in a system of indirect rule; third, using Parliament primarily as a place for the settlement for local concerns away from the court, and finally seeking an operational distinction that allowed the court to focus on whatever it saw as high politics – generally defence, foreign affairs and taxation – and leave low politics issues to Parliament and local collaborators. This was seen as a durable approach for minimally sustaining effective government. However, it was very unusual. In other states where the integration of the polity and establishment of central authority came much later and was coterminous with developments of literacy, military capacity and/or industrialization; the development of a state machine based on bureaucracy and coercive power was much more prevalent. The result, Bulpitt argued, was that ‘in comparative perspective the development of the early English state was highly idiosyncratic. In no other comparable West European polity did the Centre achieve so much power and authority so early and lose so much after the mid-sixteenth century.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Second, Territory and Power then invoked ideas of path dependency and positive feedback processes in charting how this approach, originally fashioned for governing England in the pre-modern period, was applied to the challenge of governing the expanding territorial state. The indirect rule methods of governing England were first more widely applied to governing Wales, Scotland and Ireland as an informal empire.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bulpitt then characterized England as a reluctant formal imperialist in bringing these nations into a UK state. He suggested that ‘the post-Union political settlements are best seen as a series of reconstructions of as much of the old indirect management of the Celtic periphery as could be achieved in the changed circumstances. Each Union settlement took the form of a contract between the Centre and relevant Celtic elites.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Equally, as the pressures on government grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from industrial society, parliamentary reform and international competition, Bulpitt observed that the centre continued to govern the UK as much as possible via indirect rule through local elite leaders, whether they were the Scottish governing class or county and borough social elites.

The result of these choices was that by the late nineteenth century a UK territorial governing style had become prevalent, which Bulpitt defined as close to the ideal type of the central autonomy model of centre–periphery relations. This ‘postulates a centre seeking and gaining autonomy from peripheral forces to concentrate on what it regards as “high politics” ’.Footnote ⁵¹ This assumed an ability to leave much to peripheral collaborators without damaging state authority. Meanwhile, the centre focused on external support complexes such as empire, which sustained the ambition for the UK to punch above its weight and remain globally significant, and which in turn could also sustain state prestige domestically. Overall Bulpitt argued that in the absence of a strong state capacity it appeared to politicians and officials at the centre that only the adoption of such an approach to governing made stable domestic governance possible.

Third, Bulpitt also engaged with a number of issues relating to critical junctures. Initially, it should be noted that he was innovative in how he understood their causes. He proposed that in any given context there were three key triggers. The first was the emergence of territorial, or socio-spatial, challenges from the periphery that threatened stability. The second was when the centre suffered problems in its external support complex, undermining also the domestic capacity for successful governing, leading to a general crisis of confidence. The final trigger was when, driven by anxieties about the stability of centre–periphery relations, the centre adopted positive action, which in turn had implications for centre–periphery relations. In these circumstances there was the prospect of a decisive change in centre approaches to governing and the structure of territorial politics.

Bulpitt applied this framework to analysis in defining the period of modernization challenges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of potential critical juncture. He argued that during this period the centre faced international economic competition, urbanization, social change and mass party mobilization. In its external support complex the centre faced a huge strain from empire. These pressures produced particular territorial crises on two occasions: first in the 1880s over the specific issue of Irish Home Rule; and then more extensively between 1906 and 1926 over political representation, state intervention, industrial conflict and peripheral nationalism as well as the external crises that led to the First World War.Footnote ⁵² Bulpitt argued that in response the centre developed anxieties that led the pre-war Liberal governments to embrace the positive state ideology of new liberalism, constitutional reform and support for Irish Home Rule.Footnote ⁵³ These combined factors produced the ingredients for potentially transformative political change.

In analysing in more depth how governments respond to periods of potential critical juncture, Bulpitt's approach is also interesting for implicitly leaning on two mechanisms familiar in temporal analysis. He applied these to the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century period. First, he built in the significance of threshold effects. In both the 1880s and between 1919 and 1926 governments tried something new only when the combined pressures of domestic dissent, external failure and declining centre confidence became very pressing. Second, in helping to analyse why the period did not ultimately have transformative outcomes, he also employed the conjuncture mechanism. Over the whole period 1870–1926 the effects of social change proved in practice to be generally conservative. The key issue for Bulpitt was that it mattered that no major party of government departed intrinsically from the traditional priorities of domestic and external policy. The Liberal governments enacted some significant social reforms but they were conditioned still by assumptions of the limited state. While the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party, it was still moderate and poorly organized. The Conservatives survived to become the dominant party of government again in the 1920s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Bulpitt's analysis of the conjuncture of a conservative-minded centre elite with modernization challenges was central to his conclusion that ‘by the middle of the 1920s the challenges to the traditional territorial order had either been defeated, emasculated or swept under the carpet. Territorial modernization was a very conservative process.’Footnote ⁵⁵

In addition, though, it should also be noted that Bulpitt was again innovative in considering how countries emerge out of periods of potential critical junctures. In the case of early twentieth-century Britain Bulpitt was realistic about the underlying pressures for change. That they had had relatively little impact by the 1920s did not dampen their potential long-term significance. Bulpitt termed the management of challenges in this period as leading to a ‘suspended revolution’.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, Bulpitt's study also theorized the conservative instincts in governors to reassert long-term approaches after periods of potential critical juncture. In the case of the UK the centre was very mindful of its limited resources and therefore reluctant to pursue positive action policies for very long as well as keen to manage problems in its external support complex. After periods in which it did carry out policies of positive action, Bulpitt assumed that the centre would seek a return to moderate politics as quickly as possible. This established a temporal mechanism that state agents have powerful incentives to reassert long-run approaches to government and settle down the conditions in which they operate once external challenges appear to recede.

It is in this context that we should locate the significance of the piece of historical interpretation for which Territory and Power is best known, namely the dual polity thesis. Bulpitt argued that what followed the period of arrested positive action policies after the First World War was a search by the centre for a return to moderate politics, to resettle political relations within the state. This resulted in a dual polity lasting until the early 1960s, during which – despite growth in the scale of government and administrative contacts between central and regional/local government – there was a relatively low political interpenetration between centre and periphery.Footnote ⁵⁷ The centre focused on foreign affairs, defence and the management of sterling as high politics. Meanwhile, ‘for nearly forty years, the periphery mounted no serious challenge to the Centre's authority,’Footnote ⁵⁸ with even government in Northern Ireland docile under the Stormont Parliament. The political importance of peripheral dissidents was constrained and overshadowed by peripheral elites who maintained control over low politics issues in an implicit collaboration with the centre.

The rationale for pursuing this approach rested on the continued relative weakness of the UK central political administrative elite. The centre did have certain advantages. It was small, well insulated from the influence of Parliament and exploited a series of consensus situations that ‘covered the Baldwin consensus of the late 1920s and 1930s, the Attlee consensus in the 1940s and the consensus of the 1950s summed up by the term Butskellism’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Still, though, it did not have a strong state machine; there was no positive unionist culture, no strong territorial department of the centre, no extensive system of central field administration and there was a weak system of control over local government. As Bulpitt put it, ‘in this period the centre accepted a system of territorial management handed to it on a plate by history,’ actively led by the Conservative Party and acquiesced in by the Labour Party when in power. Overall, the dual polity thesis represents defining evidence for Bulpitt's observed temporal mechanism of state agents out of necessity seeking to reassert long-run approaches to government and settle down the conditions in which they operate once external challenges appear to recede.

Fourth, Territory and Power also engaged with the concern in temporal political science to periodize modern and contemporary history better. Bulpitt's specific focus was the periodization of twentieth-century UK political history. His approach is stimulating for rejecting conventional historiography that has attached prominence to what in the short-term have been seen as key political watersheds, in particular the Second World War and Margaret Thatcher's premiership. A periodization of distinct patterns of politics and public policy associated with the inter-war years, the post-war consensus, Thatcherism and the post-Thatcherite period has entered conventional understanding.Footnote ⁶⁰ There has been the potential for a different approach. A number of studies have indicated continuities between pre- and post-Second World War government, and have emphasized the late 1950s and early 1960s as a period of ‘great reappraisal’.Footnote ⁶¹ Marquand argued how not until the 1960s was a concerted effort made to establish a developmental state based on the ideas of Keynesianism social democracy.Footnote ⁶² However, the influence of conventional periodization has persisted.

In this context Territory and Power is significant for providing a rigorous basis for promoting a revisionist periodization. The Second World War was important in myriad ways but the dual polity thesis points to the existence of a deeper governing consensus that spanned the inter-war and post-war periods. In the latter part of Territory and Power Bulpitt then argues that, judged in long-term perspective, the late 1950s/early 1960s appears as a much more important political watershed than either the Second World War or Margaret Thatcher's premiership. It was at this point that pressures emerged to suggest again the potential for a critical juncture in UK politics. Bulpitt once more stressed that the main triggers came from a crisis in the UK centre's external support complex, new peripheral challenges and renewed anxieties at the centre that led to distinctive positive action projects. Critical components in providing an external shock were the Suez Crisis, imperial decline and problems in relative economic performance. A politicized notion of the UK being in relative decline encouraged new critiques of the state, not least from Scottish and Welsh nationalists. The very authority of the state, internationally as well as domestically, was in question. Bulpitt subsequently viewed the politics of the UK between the late 1950s and 1980s as dominated by a series of modernization projects, of which Thatcherism was but one, to address these problems.Footnote ⁶³

Much water has passed under the bridge since Territory and Power was published. But Bulpitt's framing of the contemporary period of UK politics as one defined by the dilemmas of positive action government to combat perceived relative decline appears very relevant even today. While there have been many differences from US experience, Territory and Power helps to frame the contemporary period in the UK also as one understood as a long period of activist government stretching forward from the 1960s. Against this backdrop it might become possible to understand many political issues afresh and with greater awareness of their historical context.

Finally, Territory and Power also engages with the more tendentious predictive ambitions of temporal political science. A general Bulpittian proposition is that based on past experience one should expect that the centre is mindful of its relative lack of resources. Hence, it seeks to avoid central intervention and after periods of intervention necessitated by critical junctures it bears its heavy costs poorly. The centre has a strong desire to fashion a return to moderate politics, to resettle politics after a period of activism, and reassert the long-term approach to governing based on relative centre autonomy. This is a proposition that Bulpitt applied in the final part of Territory and Power. He suggested that Thatcherism was a composite code that combined short-term central intervention to achieve modernization with long-term aims for centre autonomy. It provided a way of seeking to make the UK at least tolerably governable and to return the UK to moderate resettled politics once hard times had passed. The first Thatcher government's local government reform policy was characterized in this dual light: initially focused on increased central control to reform local government, but to be followed by central retreat to leave a revived and reliable local government based on consumerist control by the local electorate.Footnote ⁶⁴ In concluding Territory and Power Bulpitt articulated a number of possible pressures that could undermine the Thatcher composite code, but he was cautiously predictive of success.Footnote ⁶⁵

This was Bulpitt's own proposition for studying contemporary UK political development but Territory and Power did offer alternatives. If one considered that the effects of the late twentieth-century critical juncture in UK politics have been more profound, the prospect remains of exploring whether any of the other options in Bulpitt's taxonomy of governing codes and structures of territorial politics now better informs interpretation of UK political development. On the one hand this might focus on the proposition that the UK centre has actually made a decisive shift to a central authority model, marked by the development after several decades of intervention of a stronger state machine. On the other hand, this might focus on exploring the notion that the combined effects of European integration, devolution and a civil rights culture have made for a strengthened periphery and an invasive external support complex to such an extent that centre governing has become marked by the politics of capital city bargaining. If either provides a plausible basis for capturing the contemporary state of UK politics then the result of the late twentieth-century critical juncture would be for the suspended revolution to be suspended no more.

Overall, Territory and Power can be viewed as contributing to the ambitions of temporal analysis to inform theoretically both historical and contemporary analysis. Bulpitt focused on the analysis of governing over the long term and the importance of timing and sequencing in early polity development; the identification of path dependency and positive feedback processes to explain continuities in political development; and the analysis of change through a consideration of critical junctures, long-term structural causes, threshold effects and conjunctures. Most distinctively, he explored the analysis of political development after potential critical junctures through a consideration of the powerful imperatives for long-term approaches to government to be reasserted. Territory and Power also offered a rigorous basis for periodizing the contemporary era in the UK, and offered predictions of the temporal mechanisms that one might expect to see at work in contemporary political development, as well as potential alternatives. Territory and Power should be viewed as a significant contribution to comparative temporal political science, which is ultimately distinctive in bringing both the state and history back in for suggesting a focus on regimes of governing. Understood in these terms too Bulpitt's Territory and Power remains to this day under-explored.

CONCLUSIONS

This article has attempted to demonstrate how and why Territory and Power in the United Kingdom should be embraced within the broader literature on state political development. First, Territory and Power should be understood as a contribution to the efforts to bring the state back into the study of political development during the 1980s. It echoed many of the methodological preoccupations of the American contributors to this approach and provided a distinct contribution by rigorously developing an approach to conceptualizing the government rather than the governance of the state. Second, Territory and Power should be understood also as a work that contributed to the efforts to develop a temporal political science – by anticipating many of the analytical tools that we later came to associate with historical institutionalism. It made a distinct contribution most in conceptualizing how approaches to governing seek to reassert themselves after periods of critical juncture. Bulpitt also provided the intellectual underpinning for a revisionist periodization of contemporary UK politics that parallels recent revisionist US work. In the process it offered provocative predictive capabilities for interpreting contemporary political development.

These innovations are open to challenge on both theoretical and historical grounds. Bulpitt's approach can face challenges common to general critiques of modernist political science, as well as challenges specifically to the ‘bringing the state back in’ literature. His approach can be criticized for its specific centre elite focus and for leaving out much that is of importance from the bottom-up in the study of politics. Bulpitt's interpretation is also challengeable on the evidence. A response to theoretical critiques, however, is to assert a basic defence of the intellectual rigour of his approach.Footnote ⁶⁶ Assessed fundamentally, Territory and Power is based on a foundational ontology; that there is a social reality that exists separately from those who observe it. The book is subtitled ‘An Interpretation’, reflecting a long-held recognition of the role of interpretation in foundational political analysis. Bulpitt's subject is the central executive, a famously hidden world of politics, in which there is a long tradition of analysing it both through empirical inquiry and interpretation in terms of its outcomes. The way in which Bulpitt sought to study the centre could be judged over-parsimonious, but intuitively we know that centre governing elites will seek to take a strategic view of how to govern, and that in certain ways what they decide will have a bearing on political outcomes. Not to interpret the centre is to seek to perpetuate an implausible study of politics.

For the many political scientists who accept these basic parameters for political research the Bulpittian approach can be explored as a whole with profit for understanding the view from the bridge, how centre governors strategically seek to direct the ship of state. Equally, the Bulpittian approach can be taken into account for the parts of its sum: that even if one does not wish to adopt the whole conceptual approach one could embrace conceptual insights from Territory and Power within an approach that encourages multi-theoretic inquiry. Above all, Bulpitt's approach is stimulating for offering an approach to studying the central executive in terms of its outcomes, which takes an explicitly long-run perspective. It provides a pithy concise rendering, based nevertheless on a huge scholarship of how to sort the wood from the trees in seeking to understand the main elements of how centre governing has shaped political development.

Historically, we know also that much research is all too frequently too concerned with the short timeframe and micro-level topics. Bulpitt's historical approach shows the gains of studying historical development over the long term. His admission that historical reassessment will render the specifics of the interpretation in Territory and Power open to challenge does not undermine the potential utility of using his overall interpretation as a point of departure in applied analysis – a view to be revised and potentially overturned, but not one that should be ignored. In similar ways his approach also offers a point of departure for applied contemporary analysis. Overall, the pros outweigh the cons in considering Territory and Power as a work that should be brought fully into the intellectual conversation regarding how generally to interpret political development in the UK as well as on a comparative basis.