The Clash of Civilizations: War-making and State Formation in Europe

"Building on a tradition of analysis that goes back to Toynbee, Burke distinguishes above the macro level of social organization a supermacro level of interstate conflict, and above that a universal level of struggle among civilizations, clashing not only economically and militarily but in their cultural identities. He coordinates this analysis with the state-centered tendency in contemporary scholarship, which sees war-making capabilities as shaping the structure of modern states. Burke sets himself the question: how did 8th century tribal societies on the far western edge of more powerfully organized states on the Eurasian landmass, expand by the 17th century to the threshold of world domination? His most interesting hypothesis is that the failure of the eastward Crusades, and the westward expansion of Mongol and Ottoman civilizations, set off a legitimation crisis for the Papacy. The Protestant Reformation could not be put down because the Ottoman threat tied the hands of Catholic traditionalists, setting free the dynamics of bourgeois capitalism. And since expansion to the east was blocked, Europe was forced to turn westward, into an overseas empire that created the modern world system." Professor Randall Collins, University of California Riverside

"With unquenchable enthusiasm, commendable brevity, and admirable clarity, Victor Burke has fashioned a theoretically informed synthesis of European political history from the Roman Empire onward." Charles Tilly, Columbia University