In beginning with Teschke, the core of his argument is that while the shift from a concentration of power in a decentralized nobility to a centralized absolutist state is typically associated with international modernity, this was in reality a continua-tion of mediaeval feudalism.67 Here the rise of absolutism in Western Europe, with France as the key exemplar, created a class of administrators personally connected to monarchs with class interests aligned against those the old feudal nobility.68 In furtherance of these interests, this administrator class aligned with the peasantry through centralized tax regimes that replaced the feudal tributary system and granted peasants a reliable means of subsistence.69 Within this particular social property configuration, relationships between dynastic monarchs centred upon a land-/heredity-based system of geopolitical accumulation where contested claims of territorial inheritance triggered perpetual military competition via wars of suc-cession.70 Furthermore, this system had a highly detrimental effect on the territorial authority of the old feudal nobility whose lands were susceptible to partition by allied dynastic monarchies when they refused to consent to projects of absolutist
67 Teschke 2003, 151-152.
68 Ibid. 171-172.
69 Ibid. 172.
70 See Ibid. 225-227.
centralisation.71 Moreover, the rights and obligations incurred in the wake of these territorial reconfigurations were accounted for through an elaborate practice of dy-nastic peace agreements of which the Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck, together constituting the ‘Peace of Westphalia,’ exemplified rather than ruptured.72
However, a competitor to this system emerged through England’s seventeenth cen-tury transition to capitalism that resulted in it becoming the first ‘modern state’ with an administrative apparatus stripped of personalised authority. According to this theory, the transition occurred through a new formation of class alliances between feudal lords and the monarchy-linked administrator class against the peasantry.73 This alliance between the two ruling classes resulted in the assertion of direct pro-ductive ownership over land (the infamous enclosures) which eliminated peasants’
traditional subsistence practices and forced them to reproduce themselves by selling their labour in the market as wage-earners.74 This social transformation precipitated a move to modernity whereby the division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres of activity characterized a constitutional-parliamentary state. What operated this state was a rational bureaucracy with administrators pledged to an abstracted gov-ernmental entity rather than bound to an absolute monarch or feudal lord through personal loyalty and debt.75 Freed of such burdens and instabilities, this state could guarantee public debts through a central banking system that was absent in absolut-ist systems where debts were held by monarchs in their personal capacity.76 More-over, this allowed for the public financing of a unified professional military instead
71 This was the fate of the Kingdom of Poland, see Ibid. 236-238.
72 Ibid. 239-242.
73 Ibid. 251-252.
74 Ibid. 253.
75 Ibid. 254-255.
76 Ibid. 258.
of one held together though precarious bonds of personal loyalty.77 Taken together, Britain’s novel achievement of modern statehood produced an unparalleled geopo-litical competitiveness that other actors either imitated or were conquered by. 78 What ultimately resulted was a world of legally equal entities more or less approx-imating this modern state form.
In explaining the American Revolution within this frame, we must first engage sub-stantial critiques of this ‘Myth of 1648’ theory of international modernity. First and foremost, the above raised issue of Eurocentrism is certainly applicable to the Bren-ner hypothesis informing Teschke’s theory in that it imagines the development of capitalism as purely internal to rural England.79 In addressing this issue, through a deliberately anti-Eurocentric account of the origins of Western dominance Anievas and Nisancioglu’s How the West Came to Rule confronts much that The Myth of 1648 leaves out.80 In contrast to Teschke, Anievas and Nisancioglu theorize the or-igins of capitalist modernity by linking numerous developmental strands inside and outside Europe that imposed pressures to adapt but also transmitted opportunities for innovation.81 From this view, the specific configuration of class conflict and social property relations in seventeenth-century England emphasized by Bren-ner/Teschke is only one developmental strand amongst many that contributed to the transition to capitalist modernity.
77 Ibid.
78 See Ibid. 256-262.
79 See Brenner 1985.
80 In making this critique, Anievas and Nicancioglu confront the ‘Political Marxism’ of Robert Bren-ner that places overwhelming emphasis on internal class struggle as the core source of socio-political agency and transformation. When developing a theory of ‘the international’, for Anievas and Nican-cioglu the problem with this approach is that ‘Brenner neglects the determinations and conditions that arose from the social interactions between societies, since ‘political communities’, in his con-ception, is subordinated to ‘class’, while classes themselves are conceptualized within the spatial limits of the political community in question.’ Anievas and Nicancioglu 2015, 25 (emphasis in orig-inal).
81 On this critique of Teschke’s Political Marxism, see Ibid. 30-32.
However, a notable gap in Anievas and Nisancioglu’s account is the American Rev-olution. This must be rectified for the significance of this event is difficult to over-state when theorizing the origins of modern sovereignty in the systemic context of inter-sovereign relations. As the ‘first new nation’, the US provided a template for modern state creation made in deliberate rejection of the old regime of dynastic rights and customs that governed territorial authority amongst its European fore-bears.82 It is this very ideal of popular will-based international legal standing that allows modern actors to raise sovereign equality, nonintervention, and territorial integrity as a means of resisting the impositions that defined medieval forms of territorial authority. Thus, explaining the transition to the modern international sys-tem of formally equal sovereign states necessitates an understanding of what stand-ards are applicable when determining membership within this system. Relatedly, this requires attention to the fact that the advent of the American Revolution was precipitated by a long process of defining identity/ideology in relations between the British metropole and its privileged settler colonial subjects. This raises the ques-tions as to how England’s transition to ‘modern statehood’ can be attributed to its process of overseas expansion and, consequently, how the American case for sov-ereign independence was an outgrowth of this process.