Since at least 1780, consolidating states have been providing an unusually fertile terrain for the development of social movements. Compared with other states, consolidating states are more contiguous, with better‐defined borders and also more centralized, with an increased monopoly over violence. They are better able to identify their population, to protect it, and to serve it (or exploit it) than other states. But the association between states and social movements was typically more complex. Between 1780 and the present, empires formed the major alternative to consolidating states and while social movements originally developed within consolidating states they spread almost worldwide, to land‐based empires, and to colonial empires. As they spread from consolidated states to empires, the tactics of social movements more or less retained their familiar form but profoundly changed their content. In our discussions of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century social movements, analysts often consider consolidating states as independent entities, but many consolidating states in the modern era were also metropoles, capitals of colonial empires. This entry looks at: (i) social movements in consolidating states, (ii) land‐based empires, and (iii) colonial states and empires.

La pensee ouvrierere pendant la second republique et le second empire, Georges Duveau's classic but largely-forgotten study of French artisanal workers, focuses on changing attitudes toward work and education between 1848 and 1870, years which Duveau himself lauded as exceptionally fertile and creative in French social thought. How to explain such extraordinary fecundity? Partly, it can be explained by intensified police repression after Napoleon III's coup, when the educational institutions of workers were repressed and they had to design new ones under the eyes of a suspicious state. Perhaps a more important factor, one suggested by the recent work of Thomas Piketty, is the ever-growing need to produce workers capable catering to the ever more sophisticated needs of the fabulously wealthy. The highly skilled artisanal production in Paris combined with the growth of factories created the distinctive conditions of French economic growth.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael HanaganMichael Hanagan, Vassar College, is the author of several books on labor history and contentious action. He is currently collaborating on a world history textbook (Cambridge University Press 2015) and, with Miriam Cohen, on a comparative study of the welfare state in England, France and the USA.

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