Imposing states: External intervention and the politics of state formation

This dissertation examines the effects of external intervention on state formation in the global periphery, particularly the establishment of sovereign statehood. I posit that the institutions of governance and political authority that define the organisational form of a polity results from the aggregated pattern of competition amongst foreign powers over that area, conditional on external power perceptions about the opportunity costs of intervention. The project evaluates this claim in the East Asian context, paying special attention to China, the Netherlands Indies/Indonesia, and Siam/Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.;The emergence of sovereign statehood in the polities above resulted from convergent outside power perceptions about the high opportunity costs of intervention. Intensifying systemic competition during the mid-twentieth century forced major powers to safeguard access in China, the East Indies, and Siam indirectly. As such, major powers supported local groups to independently manage a state and deny privileged access to adversaries. In return, these local groups received assistance in challenging domestic rivals for control over the polity. The institutional configurations emanating from such arrangements tended to resemble sovereign statehood.;Divergent expectations about the opportunity costs of intervention prior to the middle of the twentieth century led major powers to seek a range of access denial strategies. Major powers were less constrained toward local collaboration in China and the East Indies, and more so in Siam. To facilitate greater denial of access in the former two cases, foreign powers backed domestic actors willing to accept external control more directly. Accordingly, outside intervention led state organisation to approach the semi-colonial and colonial in China and the East Indies, but approximate the sovereign state in Siam.;The project's findings encourage a reconsideration of the role nationalism played in state formation processes. Nationalism was politically salient in the cases above since the nineteenth century, but transformations in state organisation did not naturally follow. My research too promotes rethinking about the generalisability of state formation accounts drawn from early modern Europe. Studying the relationships between intervention and state formation may prove informative for understanding externally-supported efforts to establish order in fragile polities today.