Family Power : Kinship, War and Political Orders in Eurasia, 500–2018

Combining political science with history, this book presents a new history and theory of how political order developed in Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, explaining why some empires and states succeed and others fail. Elite families and dynasties are shown to be crucial to state formation.

Since the seventeenth century, scholars have argued that kinship as an organizing principle and political order are antithetical. This book shows that this was simply not the case. Kinship, as a principle of legitimacy and in the shape of dynasties, was fundamental to political order. Throughout the last one and a half millennia of European and Middle Eastern history, elite families and polities evolved in symbiosis. By demonstrating this symbiosis as a basis for successful polities, Peter Haldén unravels long-standing theories of the state and of modernity. Most social scientists focus on coercion as a central facet of the state and indeed of power. Instead, Halden argues that much more attention must be given to collaboration, consent and common identity and institutions as elements of political order. He also demonstrates that democracy and individualism are not necessary features of modernity.