Social Development And State-Building And Social Development

Social development and state building are two interrelated concepts which passed through many different stages throughout the history of mankind. When talking about social development, we refer to a process of social change, not merely a set of policies and programs instituted for some specific results. Social change is stimulated by an increasing awareness leading to better organization, which emerges when the society senses new and better opportunities for progress and it develops new forms of organization to exploit these new openings successfully. On the other hand, state-building, as a term used in state theory, describes the construction of a functioning state. The term first entered academic debate in the context of Charles Tilly's

Then they become pastoralists, less mobile than their predecesors but still, as Montesquieu phrased it, “unable to unite”. Finally, they invent agriculture, and this in time transforms them into city dwellers and traders, into modern, civilized, social beings. The final stage (“commercial society”) represented the highest possible human attainment on a trajectory through which all the peoples on the globe were bound to pass. The commercial society was one that had forsaken ancient violence (or so it was hoped) for benevolent, enlightened communication, for the transaction not only of goods but also of beliefs, habits, and ideas. The commercial society was one, or so its proponents believed, that could finally dispense with colonization in favor of harmonious transnational cooperation, one in which the less civilized peoples of the world would welcome the “civilizers”—not as conquerors and despoilers but as intellectual and moral

Many states of the Muslim World were in every respect more advanced than the Western Europeans, as well as China, which was by far more developed. For instance, in the year 1000, Western Europe, without Muslim Iberia, had no more than 2.5 million people or so, while China had some 100 million living in a unified empire under the rule of the Song Dynasty. But what represented an important advantage for Europe were the climate conditions. Here, the climate is quite different than in other regions of the globe. Rainfall is evenly distributed throughout the year and extreme periods of dryness and flooding are rare. Complex irrigation systems did not need to be maintained, so the economy was much less dependent on effective political rule to maintain prosperity. Also, there were no adjacent dry zones with marauding nomads, which meant that major disruptions were far less common than in the other major civilized regions of the world. Once stocks of animals had been built up and agricultural improvements made, this capital was more likely to survive and continue to grow instead of havinf to be replaced periodically. Indeed, from some time in the Middle Ages on, the slow accumulation of capital in Western Europe raised productivity to the highest levels in the world, which resulted in every unit of human labour producing more food than in other regions. Still, in spite of this significat