Historical contextualization is vital to comparative historical analysis in social science. The meaning of important concepts such as rights, popular sovereignty, and the state differs across diverse historical contexts even within a single case such as England. Neglect of such differences makes state formation appear to occur along a linear trajectory and the state–society relationship seem simply confrontational. A comparative historical analysis based upon deep and solid examination of historical contexts reveals hitherto unobserved similarities in state formation between Western Europe and East Asia. It provides a new account of how domestic governance was attained through state–society collaboration when the state's capacity to directly provide public goods remained quite limited. Moreover, it casts new light on understanding the political “great divergence” in the transition from early modern to modern states, as well as offering a novel explanation of the resilience of contemporary authoritarian regimes that legitimate their power mainly through care for domestic welfare.

This chapter critically reviews the extant scholarship of state formation. It argues that the excessive attention to war and violence produces a confrontational interpretation of state–society relations and neglects the state's role in public goods provision vital to domestic governance. It outlines the main theme of the book, which is to bring state legitimation through public goods provision into the scholarship of state formation. It argues that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation furnished a common normative platform for state and society to collaborate in various issues of domestic governance. This platform allowed state and society to complement each other's weakness in pursuit of good governance. It also provided a limited yet important space for political participation that could be accepted by the state authorities. Although this space was grounded in the conception of "passive rights" rather than "active rights" – that is, rights granted by the state rather than inalienable to the individual – it allowed for a growing degree and scale of political organization and activity and laid the basis for a rethinking of the role of such rights in state formation.

The proclaimed duty of the state to safeguard the public interest provided a space for subordinates to engage with ruling authorities. It entailed the right of the ruled to remind the state to fulfill its obligation in the case of specific welfare grievances of its subjects. Such a right was passive, as it was derived from the state's duty to protect the public interest. The patterns of state response to popular claim-making were similar across Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. The right to petition authorities was granted to individuals; yet the state did not allow crowd petitions, which were universally treated as disrespectful to authority and as a threat to social order. However, the state across these three cases was tolerant of collective petitions caused by cross-regional or cross-sectoral conflicts of interest, and it tried to arbitrate disputes as an impartial guardian of the public interest. The increasing scale of conflicts of interest that arose with population growth and commercialization led to larger-scale and well-organized popular petitions that were still accepted by the state. Such petitioning represented a political space that had great potential to expand with socioeconomic development.

The prologue to Part II synthesizes the major causes of the resilience of early modern states despite their limited capacities. It explores the conditions that led to the collapse of state–society collaboration in pursuit of good governance. Big historical events – the English Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion – forced the state in each case to search for new institutions to safeguard various dimensions of the public interest in the new socioeconomic circumstances and so reestablish its legitimacy.

This chapter examines famine and poverty relief in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Relief in subsistence crisis was the most basic obligation of the state to the public interest. The same platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation led to two different directions in state–society interactions in famine relief. Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan had decentralized fiscal systems, and municipal and rural granaries managed by local authorities and social elites were dominant. Yet when a major subsistence crisis occurred, the royal government and shogunate as the highest political authority in each realm had to intervene to protect the welfare of wider regions or even the entire country. In contrast, the Qing state in China had a centrally managed fiscal system that played a significant role in transferring funds and grain across regions in times of major subsistence crisis. The technical difficulties in managing state granaries across the country, however, led the Qing state to encourage local elites' participation in building and managing nonofficial granaries to benefit local inhabitants and to make up for the inadequacies of the state system.

Public infrastructural facilities such as dikes, highways, bridges, and seawalls were vital to domestic welfare. Financing their building and maintenance required extensive and sustained state–society collaboration, which was grounded in the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. In fiscally decentralized Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan to 1853, self-governed communities were active in building and managing small- and medium-scale public works. But for large-scale infrastructural facilities, the royal government and shogunate had to become involved through ad hoc financing measures to cover the otherwise insupportable costs. The reverse was true in Qing China prior to 1840. The Qing state could reply upon a centrally managed fiscal system to directly fund the building and maintenance of major public works. For small-scale public works that mainly benefited local residents, it encouraged investment and involvement by local communities and gentry. It also advanced official funds to repair important local water control projects and let the benefited communities return the funds to the state over time without interest.

This chapter introduces in detail the comparability of three early modern states: Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840. Each episode examines governance during a period of relative domestic peace after the state had consolidated its power and established an administrative structure. The early modern state as an impersonal governing apparatus over delimited territory is common to these three cases. Likewise, a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation linked to concrete performance in domestic governance is found in all three states, despite their respective differences in territorial scale, political institutions, and international circumstances. Although each state had a different fiscal basis, state fiscal capacity remained highly limited. Given this constraint, state–society collaboration was key to attaining good domestic governance; and the norm of state responsibility for the public interest facilitated such collaboration to the benefit of both state and society. The chapter discusses under what conditions such state–society cooperation failed, showing the limits to the resilience of the early modern state.

The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation continued to serve as a common normative platform for state–society interactions when each state's capacity was greatly enhanced under new socioeconomic circumstances in England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895), and China (1840–1911). The state–society interactions over domestic public goods provision were politically similar to those in the earlier episodes, though the scale and organizational capacity of social actors became much greater. Petitions to the state to redress specific welfare grievances did not escalate into demands for political reforms. In contrast, issues of nonmaterial public good, such as "true Christianity" in England and "national honor" in Japan, as well as the ensuing tension between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest, mobilized large-scale cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievance. These petitions demanded fundamental political reforms in England and Japan. In China before 1895, the lack of conflict between diverse dimensions of the public interest accounts for the absence of such petitions of public grievance. When that changed, China likewise saw petitions for political change prior to the collapse of the Qing in 1911.