Mukerji On Power and Logistics

The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics,
Logistics, and Impersonal Rule∗
CHANDRA MUKERJI
University of California
The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social
theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused
with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural
world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-
century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics,
was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial
networks, disempowering the nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal
rule: the modern, territorial state.
The strategic exercise of will for domination—often associated with the use or threat
of legitimate violence—is routinely assumed in social theory to define power, but
there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed
as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect.
Strategic power works because people respond to favors and threats (and by extension
surveillance), aligning their behaviors to regimes (Adams 2007; Anderson 1974; Beik
1985; Brewer et al. 1996; Foucault 1979; Lynn 1997; Mousnier 1979; Sargent 1968).
Logistical activity shapes social life differently, affecting the environment (context,
situation, location) in which human action and cognition take place (Carroll 2006;
Joyce 2003, 2009; Mann 1986; Parker 1983; Scott 1998; Zukin 1991). Both forms
of power take advantage of human responsiveness to outside influence to shape
aggregate patterns of action. But strategics and logistics are different forms of power
in that they do this in distinct ways. 1
The concept of logistics used here, defined as power derived from controlling and
shaping the natural world, owes a debt to Marx and the idea that social orders are
grounded in material relations (Marx 1963). Neo-Marxists and post-Marxists have
continued to find ways to analyze the relationship of material conditions, economic
systems, and regimes (Beik 1985; Mann 1986; Parker 1983; Tilly 1975). But they
usually assume that material and social orders are aligned or synthesized through
dialectical processes, so even if logistical power acts as a distinct historical force, its
effects can be seen in patterns of strategic power and so require no separate analysis.
∗ Address correspondence to: Chandra Mukerji, Department of Communication 0503, University of

California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503. E-mail: cmukerji@ucsd.edu. Thanks
to CASBS for supporting this work.
1 Sociologists tend to distinguish between institutional and constructivist approaches to social life. Often,
constructivist studies focus on logistics (how social life proceeds on the ground), and institutional studies
focus on strategics (social domination). What logistical analysis can do for constructivist analysis is to
provide a means for thinking about the material aspects of activity and the physical character of the
social settings of interaction (Mead and Strauss 1956). So, even though this article addresses historical
matters around state formation, the theory of strategics and logistics presented here is not meant to be
limited to the large-scale institutional level. In fact, figured world theory, which is at the center of this
analysis, comes from social psychology (Holland et al. 1998).
Sociological Theory 28:4 December 2010

C 2010 American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
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THE TERRITORIAL STATE AS A FIGURED WORLD OF POWER 403
In fact, Marx explicitly cautions against attending to the mere physical existence
of things as part of a material order. It is the human labor in the object and the
objectification of the human that fascinates Marx, not the independent powers of the
material world on human communities: “mindless objectivity is annulled by the fact
that private property is incorporated in man himself, and man himself is recognized
as its essence . . . [M]an himself . . . has now become the act of objectification, of
alienation” (Marx 1963:98). Similarly, Foucault, who famously writes about archi-
tectures of power, does not concern himself with logistics, such as the materials and
labor that go into buildings. Traditions of wall design do not enter into discussions
of the panopticon, and the same is true for the skills of masons (Foucault 1979).
Equally absent from his description of biopower are the logistics of training bodies,
including the military music whose rhythms have been used for centuries to train
soldiers for war (Cowart 2008; Foucault 1978). The body may be material and the
walls may be importantly physical, but they are both strategic power materialized
for Foucault, not elements of logistical power acting at a different level on human
groups.
Scott (1998), Joyce (1994, 2003, 2009), and Carroll (2006) are exceptional in their
efforts to describe the workings of logistical power in modern governance. Scott
(1998) follows techne as a political tool used by states from the seventeenth century
to create social order through large-scale, imposed, material projects—a strategy
that he suggests usually failed (compare to Latour 1992). Carroll (2006) argues, on
the contrary, that materiality was quite effective for the English in Ireland where
colonizers experimented with urban reforms, estate management projects, and in-
frastructural engineering to stabilize British rule, developing along the way both new
natural knowledge (episteme, not just techne) and tools of measurement—with the in-
frastructure of experimental science becoming an object of political interest precisely
because of its logistical significance. Joyce (2003, 2009) makes another argument
for the effectiveness of material regimes, pointing to their importance to identity
and self-management. He argues that material infrastructures can be powerful in
part because they disappear from consciousness when they are accepted and taken
for granted, creating an illusion of freedom and patterns of governmentality that
seem quite the opposite of overt political regulation. Material orders thus engender
less opposition in populations even as they define social worlds. (For the material
formation of social worlds, see Becker [1982].)
In this article, I synthesize these ideas to create a broad theory of logistical
power, demonstrating its effectiveness in installing, stabilizing, and defining polit-
ical regimes. I develop the theory around an empirical case and important his-
torical moment in Western state formation: the period of the so-called absolutism
of Louis XIV, when the French state began to have more purchase over French
life.
STRATEGICS AND LOGISTICS

Before I turn to the political interplay of strategics and logistics in French state for-
mation, I need to pay closer theoretical attention to the difference between strategics
and logistics as forms of power. This can be done by comparing them across six
dimensions: (1) the form of control exercised, (2) the basis for legitimacy, (3) the
mode of political calculation, (4) the form of order sought or achieved, (5) the media
used in the exercise of power, and (6) political outcomes. These are summarized in
Table 1.
404 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
Table 1. Forms of Power2

Strategics Logistics
Form of control Political domination Material regime

Legitimacy Moral authority by rank Dominion/restoration
Calculation Strategic advantage Natural knowledge
Form of order Social hierarchy Built environment
Medium of control Threats/favors Impersonal rule
Political expression Relations of domination Figured world of power
Reading the left column of Table 1 from the bottom up, one can see that strategic
power is a practice of social domination, using favors or intimidation to control
social outcomes in order to gain or maintain rank in a social hierarchy. Participants
in the system use strategic calculation of advantages over others to win contests
of power. The authority of ruling elites is legitimated by defining them as morally
and/or intellectually superior. And the result of these activities is a regime of political
domination.
Reading the right column of Table 1 from the top down, one can see that logis-
tical power (in contrast) is the use of material world for political effect, physically
reworking land to shape the conditions of possibility for collective life. A material
regime cultivated this way favors some groups over others, but governs imperson-
ally through an order of things. In the Western tradition, managing the earth and
its creatures is legitimated by Judeo-Christian conceptions of stewardship or human
dominion over Creation, but land administration can also be condoned with other
ideals of moral and material restoration (Drayton 2000; Lansing 1991). The exercise
of logistical power depends on natural knowledge (techne and/or episteme), either
practical experience in working with materials, or formal knowledge useful for re-
shaping the environment. This knowledge is employed for making built environments
or material contexts for social life, conditioning action both practically and through
symbolism embedded in the form of things. The effectiveness of the resulting mate-
rial regime lies in its mute presence as a form of impersonal rule. Without words,
the built environment often seems to lie outside of political dispute, and thus can
seem as inevitable as the natural order. And without people enforcing order, a sys-
tem of impersonal rule provides little opportunity for resistance. So, the outcome
of exercising logistical power is an inarticulate but deeply effective material regime
inflected with cultural ideals and conveying a reality that seems inevitable, natural,
or true: a figured world of power.
The term logistics has already been used in social theory by Michael Mann, who
considers logistics in explaining the power of empires (Mann 1986). Mann points
to the role of natural places, forces, and resources in the formation of systems of
power. Empires emerged, he argues, from the particularities of people, places, and
governments. The physical characteristics of places matter, and governments rule
both people and places alike. Still, for Mann, logistical activity, while historically
important to the dialectics that shape social power, is not a matter of extended,
independent theoretical interest.
2 This table is a variant of one I used at the conclusion of my book (Mukerji 2009a). I have tried here
to make the categories more broadly useful for analyses of practices and regimes of power.
Logistical power, although not named, is more significant in critical geography

and landscape studies where places are understood as sites of political structuring.
Zukin (1991, 1995), Cronon (1991), and Joyce (2003), for example, write theoretically
sophisticated analyses of the power of cities as sites of governmentality and market
relations with their stores, streets, libraries, and grain elevators. These built environ-
ments not only bear signs of the marketplace but also make economic calculations
formative for all parts of the urban environment. This is logistical power in the
metropolitan context.
The term logistical power, as I use it, also bears a close relationship to what
Scott (1985) calls weapons of the weak or what de Certeau (1988) calls tactics—
oppositional stances that prevent ruling elites from governing with impunity. Many
of Scott’s weapons of the weak are logistical; they are acts of sabotage, employing
peasant knowledge of natural processes for political effect. The success of strategic
power is limited by the tactics of those resisting this power, but tactics can, in
principle, be forms of strategic action—resistance to superordinates themselves, not
the order of things. In this sense, logistical power can be a weapon of the weak, but
tactics and logistics are not the same thing.
Scholars in science studies are (on the whole) the social analysts most interested in
the independent powers of material orders, and provide most of the analytic prece-
dents for my thinking about logistics. Becker and Clark (2001), Bowker and Star
(1999), Galison (2003), Knorr-Cetina (1999), Latour (1993), Roberts et al. (2007),
Smith (1994, 2004), and Smith and Findlen (2002), among many others, have all
studied the power of infrastructures, pointing to the silent, unrecognized, and rou-
tine ways they can define reality. They explain how keys, trains, lab instruments,
specimens, windmills, ship models, paperwork, and databases—ubiquitous and un-
contested material objects—construct the order of things. They also point to the
silent power of these artifacts in shaping human behavior.
The concept of logistics I use here is derived from this tradition, but more directly
from Serres (1983), whose ideas have been formative for science studies. In his
analysis of the Roman Empire, Serres (1983) argues that this ancient political order
was built on two foundations: one, the struggle for dominance illustrated by the
story of Romulus and Remus, the brothers of myth who fought to the death to find
Rome, and the second, the material engineering of the empire that Serres equates
with the collective behavior of social animals like African termites. Military Rome
carried the cultural heritage of Romulus and Remus, using human will and violence
to form the empire. Engineered Rome was a product of many human hands, using
logistical tools to create a form of collective life.
The concept of power presented by Serres as fratricide (or murder used to es-
tablish legitimate political authority) is a version of strategic power, resembling
Weber’s definition of power as legitimate violence (Weber 1947), and pointing to
the importance of intimidation to domination. The second form of power described
by Serres is a process of shaping the natural world. This is what I call logistical
power.
Rome does not speculate, does not speak, never converses about the latest
refinement. Rome fights, Rome prays; it is pious, it humbly accepts the dark
sense of a repeated gesture. It builds, extends itself, preserves. It is not the
negative—the destructive work that seems to advance things . . . It gives flesh to
the word; it builds. Rome incarnates itself; it is construction. (Serres 1983)
The power of construction stands for mute, anonymous work—the power of im-
personal social coordination and material action. 3 The great cities and aqueducts of
Rome were collective accomplishments, products of labor aligning people and things
(Callon 1986; Callon and Latour 1992). One person would seal cracks in a wall, oth-
ers would fix the floor, and the result would be a more long-standing structure that
would carry a heritage of problem solving from older material regimes. Pragmatic
acts of construction would yield a built environment, both serving and characteriz-
ing the successive regimes inhabiting the space (Mukerji 2008a; Rosental and Lahire
2008).
Talking of logistics as a distinct form of power may seem counterintuitive on
philosophical grounds. Political agency is normally associated with acts of conscious-
ness or will, not the power of objects to shape social life. 4 Understanding logistical
power requires accepting that natural objects can have a kind of social agency with-
out intentionality (Callon and Latour 1992; Callon 1986; Kirsch and Neff 2008;
Knorr-Cetina 1997). Plagues are historical agents; droughts or floods are, too (Muk-
erji 2007b); and so is climate change. Large-scale physical assaults on social orders
may seem exceptional because they are rare, but they are nonetheless extreme cases
of normal relations, revealing taken-for-granted human dependencies on the natural
world. Disaster brings into relief the flow of rivers, the heat of the sun, the formation
of ice that have routine and often relatively benign agential powers in human life.
People manage natural forces and resources to live (Carroll 2006; Joyce 2003; Marx
1963; Serres 1983), building towns or cities, and using fauna and flora for food or
medicine. The result is a “second nature” that is the foundation of collective life
(Cronon 1983, 1991; Serres and Latour 1995), and a political culture embedded in
things: a “figured world” of power (Holland et al. 1998).
A “figured world,” as described by Holland et al. (1998), is a politically infused
culture that shapes cognition as well as action. The culture consists not only of a
constellation of ideas, but also physical forms systematically infused with meaning.
3 Because of its constructivist leanings and cooperative focus, Serres’s view of material power is inter-
estingly quite unlike Foucault’s notion of embodied power that focuses on strategic uses of the material
world for domination, or in Serres’s terms, impersonal means of fratricide (Foucault 1973, 1978, 1979).
Foucault, of course, is as concerned as Serres with the physical aspects of regime power, but in seeing
buildings and bodies as tools of hierarchical domination, he never considers who built the wall systems
for prisons and mental hospitals, or how these construction techniques developed. The forms of life
that make materialized power possible are easier to recognize in Serres than Foucault. What makes Ser-
res’s argument distinctive (and sometimes problematic) is its posthumanist stance—taking human beings
as part of nature rather than distinguished by the human mind (and language). Serres focuses on the
unpremeditative forms of tacit knowledge that allowed those inhabiting the Roman Empire to extend
it through construction. They engineered a Rome, but without sustained premeditation—extending the
empire to different sites and in different times. Creating a built environment is, for Serres, an expression
of human nature, not essentially a means of domination, although it can be used to that end (Hénaff
and Feenberg 1997). People can use water in war as the Dutch did when they flooded the countryside
to defeat the Spanish and later the French (Belidor 1753), but generally people design water supplies
for more peaceful purposes such as making their towns more habitable. Like other social animals such
as bees and termites, people make worlds together, forms of collective life that are powerful organizing
systems. The construction described by Serres in many ways resembles Cronon’s “second nature” (1983),
an environment reworked over time by many people in the course of its development. In finding solutions
to the problems of living in the world, they define goals for life and reasons to build or “improve”
things. Precisely because a built environment is accreted over time, it is not a product of an individual
imagination, or even imposed by one political regime. Compare to Howard Becker’s art worlds (Becker
1982; Mukerji 1997b).
4 I would like to acknowledge the help of my colleagues in the Objects and Agency Group at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for their help in developing this part of my argument,
particularly Marian Feldman, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Gina Neff, Glenn Adams, Ann Taves, Linda Jack,
and Seth Landefeld.
It is a physical arrangement of the material environment that intentionally ratifies

cultural conceptions of reality. A figured world functions like a habitus (Bourdieu
1984), shaping the beliefs, tastes, identities, and habits of people, but it is not just a
set of social relations and ideas; it is a material order, too (Becker 1982; Beik 1985;
Joyce 2003; Wagner-Pacifici 2005).
Adams et al. (2010) have demonstrated how deeply people’s political conscious-
ness can be shaped by figured worlds—even apparently neutral elements of their
environments. They studied bulletin boards set up in classrooms during Black His-
tory Month, asking about their effects on racial attitudes. The ones from black and
white classrooms were quite different. The bulletin boards in majority white schools
emphasized individual achievements, and test subjects—both black and white—who
viewed them in laboratory studies displayed more racist attitudes, according to stan-
dard measures. The ones from majority black schools focused on the collective
history of African Americans in the United States, and in laboratory studies reduced
negative attitudes about race. Given that everyday understandings of race can affect
students’ abilities to perform cognitive tasks (Steele and Aronson 1995), such figured
worlds can clearly be political in their effects on thought. They are rhetorical agents
of even more significance because they seem in their silence to lie outside of acts of
persuasion.
To flesh this out and illustrate these ideas, I turn to logistical power and its
use in France for state formation in the late seventeenth century, focusing on the
most ambitious and technically difficult infrastructural project of the administra-
tion: construction of the Canal du Midi. I begin by describing the contest set up
between strategics and logistics by administrative policies of infrastructural devel-
opment. Then, I show how logistical work on the Canal du Midi transformed the
province where the canal was built. I do this by analyzing the six aspects of logistical
power listed in Table 1. I not only show how Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of the
Treasury, King’s Households, and the Marine, built his administrative power on a
material regime, but also demonstrate how logistical power was legitimated, intellec-
tually developed, and used for the canal. I illustrate ways that the physical presence
of the canal changed life and politics in Languedoc, too, and analyze Colbert’s pro-
paganda campaign that enrolled the Canal du Midi in imagery of the New Rome. I
end with the most telling evidence of the incommensurability of strategics and logis-
tics as forms of power: the king’s break with the three great architects of the French
state who worked on the Canal du Midi. The power that these men wielded over
France started to threaten Louis XIV as territorial projects and stewardship ideas
seemed more and more important to French life. To reverse this trend, the king
used his will to destroy their careers, reasserting his absolutism with patrimonial
power.
STRATEGICS, LOGISTICS, AND FRENCH STATE FORMATION

To begin, I must first review the basic characteristics of the canal project. The Canal
du Midi was built between 1663 and 1684 across the province of Languedoc in
southwestern France just north of the Pyrenees, linking the Mediterranean Sea to the
Atlantic Ocean through the Garonne River (Bergasse 1982; Maistre 1968; Rolt 1973).
It was roughly 150 miles long, and crossed the continental divide, linking parts of the
province previously remote from each other, and cutting across fields and roads that
had integrated local life. The work was contracted out by the king (officially) and
Colbert (administratively) to an entrepreneur and salt tax farmer from Languedoc,
Pierre-Paul Riquet, a financier with a large fortune but questionable social standing.
He was no engineer, but successfully assembled people from Languedoc with the tacit
knowledge to do the work, cutting a broad waterway across southwestern France
and making it seem more like ancient Gaul (Mukerji 2009a).
This work was important. The modern French state, as I will show here, was
not the product of bureaucratic rationalization or more effective management of
nobles at court, as many theorists have argued (Elias 1983; Tilly 1975), but rather a
product of state territoriality and the use of logistical power to silently undermine
traditional elites and to assert and exercise new forms of impersonal power (Mukerji
1997a, 2009a). By my account, the reign of Louis XIV was not really a period of
state absolutism (Beik 1985; Parker 1983) in which the king’s will was augmented
by a more effective state apparatus. The turn to logistics had more complicated
effects, disrupting a patrimonial order that had impeded the king, but on which
his personal authority was founded. The result was supposed to be an absolutist
government, but was instead something more complex: an unintended state built
on political territoriality that indeed empowered the administration, but did it by
using patterns of impersonal rule at odds with absolutism. The result was a new
political order in which the pursuit of power assumed new forms, but whose radical
implications were for the moment masked by Louis XIV’s ostentatious use of his
personal will (Mukerji 2010).
Colbert first developed programs of territorial politics to contend with the strategic
powers of the nobility that he saw as impeding the ambitions of the young Louis
XIV. Machiavelli (1996) explains well the problems of patrimonial relations in France
that made the shift to political territoriality so consequential. He argues that French
monarchs had never gained full control of great noble families:
The king of France is surrounded by a large number of lords of ancient lineage

who are recognized and loved by their subjects. They have their degrees of pre-
eminence, which their king cannot deprive them of without danger to himself
. . . You can [conquer such a kingdom] with ease by winning over one of the
barons of the kingdom, since malcontents and others who desire a change can
always be found. For the reasons stated, such persons can open the way for you
and facilitate your victory. But in preserving it afterward infinite difficulties will
arise in regard to both those who have helped you and those whom you have
oppressed . . . Unable either to please them or to annihilate them, you will lose
the state at the first likely opportunity. (Machiavelli 1996:26–27)
In the patrimonial system, nobles were nominally bound to the king with ongoing
acts of respect, favoritism, and generosity: the tools of patronage politics. But these
strategic powers had their limits. Giving nobles favors often meant assigning them
offices with attendant powers that served the autonomy of appointees, diminishing
the king’s control over them (Kettering 1988; Mousnier 1971). In contrast, nobles
gained no immediately recognizable advantage from new state infrastructure built
across their land, since nobles were nominally restricted from trade and, in any case,
did not want state facilities taking land from their estates. Accustomed to seeking
autonomy more than money, even high-ranking families that did eventually profit
from increased rents from state infrastructure were nonetheless more concerned about
the political rather than economic implications of the installations (compare to Beik
1985; see Bergasse 1982; Mukerji 2009a; Rolt 1973; Salamange 1986).
Ruling elites across France more frequently tried to stop rather than embrace
infrastructural projects like the Canal du Midi 5 (Konvitz 1978; Mukerji 2007c; Sala-
mange 1986). So, it is no wonder that when Riquet sought a contract for the
enterprise, elites in Languedoc immediately and vigorously opposed it, using all
the strategic powers at their disposal to try to prevent this intervention into their
province. Their techniques of social domination were pitted against Colbert’s invest-
ments in logistics, producing in this tension a modernizing form of social change.
The result of the contest was not just a grand canal and engineering emblem of the
New Rome, but also a new political regime: a disempowered local nobility and an
administration with greater geographical reach and authority.
In arguing that strategics and logistics were in contest at the Canal du Midi, I take
issue with Beik (1985), who contends that a partnership developed between nobles
and the king around the canal during its construction, serving as a (strategic) basis
of absolutism. Local elites, Beik (1985) suggests, started to act like a class in this
early period of French capitalism as they began to see their common interests served
by the state rather than furthered by struggles against it. These elites, in his eyes,
abandoned traditional powers for more modern ones they could only realize through
closer ties with the king. The result was state absolutism—a triumph of centralized
patrimonialism—and a new strategic order in Languedoc.
Although well aware of the material relations of power in this region and period,
Beik (1985) sees ruling elites pursuing a strategic alliance with Louis XIV by free
choice. But it was a forced choice made in the face of logistical power that they
could not control. The États du Languedoc, the body representing the ruling elite,
had originally turned to the king when Riquet first proposed the canal, expecting
his protection and vigorously protesting the project. But Louis XIV did not support
them, and instead signed a contract for the canal, specifying that the États had to
help pay for it (Conseil d’Etat 1666). They haggled over the price for indemnified
land mainly to stall work so the canal would not be completed within the period
of the contract (Mukerji 2007a). It was precisely because the king was not a good
ally that members of the ruling elite used their powers over the bourse and indem-
nifications to try to deprive Riquet of both money and land to build the Canal du
Midi (Etats du Languedoc 1680). The États were forced to play logistical politics,
and ended up losing. It is true that in the following century after traffic on the
canal began to mount, nobles in Languedoc did become more capitalistic, profiting
from higher rents they could charge for land near the new waterway. But throughout
construction of the Canal du Midi, the contest between strategics and logistics con-
tinued unabated in Languedoc, and the administration triumphed politically because
logistical power prevailed.
MATERIAL REGIME
Engineering for political effect in itself was not new to seventeenth-century France;
it was common in Italy and used in the competition among city-states (Long 2001;
Masters 1998). Even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian engineers were
developing new principles and practices of fortress engineering while also cultivating
5 Importantly, the Canal du Midi was built in Languedoc, one of the most dissident regions of France
where even the nobility had a tradition of evading control by the northern monarchy (Beik 1985). Rather
than vainly demanding their obedience, Colbert simply took their land for administrative projects (de
Froidour 1672).
other forms of technological innovation useful to the military. They used engineer-
ing in contests of power between city-states. In contrast, the territorial engineering
nurtured by Colbert was politically more radical because it shifted the balance of
powers within the kingdom, having unexpected effectiveness in disempowering the
nobility.
The most famous infrastructural work from the period of Louis XIV was the
string of fortresses constructed along French borders by the great engineer of the
period, Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, working under the minister of the army,
Louvois. This enterprise was a direct outgrowth both technically and tactically of
forms of Italian military engineering that had been brought to France in the sixteenth
century. During the wars of religion, the king of France brought Italian engineers
to the kingdom to modernize the battlements of border cities, using French laborers
to do the construction. The result of the policy was not only more defensible cities
in vulnerable border regions, but also more sophisticated French knowledge and
practices of military engineering (Blanchard 1996; Holt 2005).
Louis XIV reinvigorated fortress construction in France again during his reign. He
wanted to defend recently acquired land in Roussillon (Sahlins 1989), and went to
war to expand French territory to the north and east. French attacks in the Spanish
Netherlands were successful enough to frighten the Dutch who allied with the En-
glish and Swedes, forming the Triple Alliance. They stopped the northern territorial
expansion of the French state, but Louis XIV nonetheless retained some territory
(Sonnino 1988), so new fortifications were again required. Vauban, a political vi-
sionary as well as engineer, wanted to do more. He hoped to unify France as well
as defend it with a string of border fortresses. He spoke of the kingdom as a pré
carré, a singular military territory, defined as a unity by its geometrical form and
expressing its military power (Mukerji 1997a, 2002).
Although Vauban and his pré carré were certainly important to the history of
French engineering and territorial politics under Louis XIV, they have overshadowed
Colbert’s early work on military infrastructure that was politically more transforma-
tive. As the head of the king’s households, Colbert was in charge of royal lands,
and these included some sites of military significance. He started repairing fortresses,
improving ports, and razing old military infrastructure. As minister of the navy, Col-
bert also wanted new well-fortified ports, particularly in the Mediterranean with its
pirates. He wanted ports and ship-building facilities, too, on the Atlantic to stimulate
and serve colonial trade. As minister of the treasury, he wanted to expand trade in
the Atlantic, but he understood that the merchant marine was ineffective without a
navy to protect ships, so even in pursuit of his economic goals, Colbert wanted to
empower the navy (Konvitz 1978; Mukerji 2009a).
All these practices of territorial politics were consequential, but only some started
to address internal relations of power. Razing fortresses inside the kingdom was
an example. It helped to destroy material infrastructure that had been or could
be used for regional dissent. New ports were meant to shift power in France, too.
Colbert’s projects at Brest, Lorient, Rochefort, and Sète were explicitly designed
to rival Marseilles on the Mediterranean and La Rochelle on the Atlantic—not
because trade was too great to be served by these ports, but rather because these
great commercial cities were only tenuously loyal to the crown (Degage 1985, 1987;
Konvitz 1978). Colbert wanted safe harbors for French naval vessels, and places
where he could control trade by the merchant fleet, so he sent the military engineer,
the Chevalier de Clerville, to find them. The minister explicitly sought to displace
(at least in part) the great port cities that already existed in France, significantly
shifting the balance of power inside the kingdom toward the king (Konvitz 1978;
Vérin 1993).
Pierre-Paul Riquet’s canal across Languedoc, although often treated simply as
economic infrastructure, was originally meant to serve the navy (Mousnier 1985;
Mukerji 2009a; Rolt 1973). The entrepreneur argued that it could be made large
enough to accommodate naval vessels, allowing French ships to reach the Atlantic
from the Mediterranean without passing Gibraltar. This goal was abandoned during
construction because it was technically too difficult to achieve, but it was certainly
a central reason that Riquet was given a contract for the Canal du Midi (Mukerji
2009a).
Colbert had other interests in building a canal through Languedoc, however. The
province was famous for its dissidents, and difficult to administer. In his early efforts
at forest reform, Colbert had naively asked those in charge of royal forests to tell him
about their condition, expecting that they would take their official responsibilities
seriously and be honest to the king’s minister. But he found local elites resisting him
and lying about the trees they had timbered for their own purposes (Corvol 1999;
Mukerji 2007c, 2009a). Running a large canal through the heart of Languedoc was
an act of power meant to shift authority away from local nobles and to the king,
reducing the autonomy of elites that might be dangerous to the crown.
The result of all these logistical programs by Louvois and Colbert was a new ma-
terial regime for France that physically made the kingdom a singular unit of power:
a territory marked along its boundaries with military installations and restructured
in the interior to undercut local resistance to the state.
STEWARDSHIP AND RESTORATION

While the divine right of kings as articulated by Bodin (1967) 6 formally established
the primacy of the king among nobles, it did not provide legitimacy for royal rule
among his many detractors. In the region of Languedoc, for example, Huguenot no-
bles questioned their duty of allegiance to the northern monarchy, rejecting Church
authority on this or any issue (Holt 2005). In this context, Christian acts of stew-
ardship became particularly legitimating, pointing to a moral authority based on
spiritual qualities of person rather than Church law. This was particularly true in
the southwest of France, where Huguenots were politically powerful, and ideas of
material virtue had local roots.
Olivier de Serres, a man of southern France himself who developed ideas about
estate management based on classical writings, was particularly effective in defining
stewardship practices (or the intelligent and productive management of God’s Cre-
ation). Moreover, he successfully wove them into political doctrine (Mukerji 2005,
2009a). His ideas were first adopted as administrative policy by Henri IV, the king of
Navarre who ruled France at the turn of the seventeenth century. If man was respon-
sible for restoring nature to its perfect form (like the Garden of Eden), using his God-
given intelligence to produce a more abundant and peaceful world, then rulers should
take stewardship of their lands as their highest duty. Henri IV was a Huguenot
when he ascended the throne, and had to define a new legitimacy for his monar-
chical authority. He and his minister, Sully, initiated programs of infrastructural
6 Bodin’s articulation of the relationship between Church law and Roman law underscored divine right
as the foundation of royal power, relegating Roman law to local legal issues (Mousnier 1979).
improvement, citing the need for administrative stewardship of the kingdom

(Pinsseau 1944). The infrastructural program was not fully realized, but the promise
of stewardship politics was there to see.
Colbert was impressed by Sully’s territorial practices, and used stewardship princi-
ples in his administration, too (Mukerji 2007c). He also used ideas routinely evoked
in this period by Europeans who were seizing and “improving” lands in colonial ar-
eas that they claimed were not being well tended and exploited by local populations
(Drayton 2000; Mukerji 2005). If noble officials were stripping the kingdom of its
natural resources, their poor stewardship warranted its return to the control of the
state.
Colbert cleansed his territorial politics of some of its Huguenot associations by
defining France as a New Rome. The heritage of Gaul provided a rationale for
making infrastructural improvements a route to power (Apostolidès 1981; Goldstein
2008). France would be restored not only to the good order designed and desired
by God, but also to its ancient glory. The two programs of restoration provided the
moral and cultural foundation for French public administration (compare to Burke
1992; Mukerji 2005, 2009b).
NATURAL KNOWLEDGE
Building a New Rome was easier to imagine in principle than to realize in practice
on the ground. Creating a grand infrastructure required knowledge that was not
obviously at hand. So there were risks in turning to logistics, and the Canal du Midi
made this clear. Although short canal projects were successful in flatter regions of
Italy, the Netherlands, and northern France, no one knew precisely how to engineer
a canal to span over half of a continent (la Feuille 1678; Masters 1998). The project
for a canal across Languedoc was technically too complex for the formal knowledge
of the time, so no one person could bring the necessary expertise to direct it. The
work required collaboration, and was a product of “natural knowledge” harbored
by peasants as well as military engineers (Mukerji 2009a).
Colbert did not realize the problem at first, and tried to assemble experts that
could clearly say what to do to build the Canal du Midi. He asked the Chevalier de
Clerville to head up a commission of notables and experts to evaluate the project
and draw up specifications for it. The members of the commission, including Hector
Boutheroue de Bourgneuf, heir to the Canal de Briare near Paris, contributed what
they could, but many of the design features were novel, underspecified in the plans,
and had to be invented on the ground (Malavialle 1891). During the course of
construction, Colbert sent additional formally trained and experienced engineers to
help with the problems—some even from the Netherlands (Colbert 1979 5:84). But
they were limited in what they could suggest, too. Hydraulics at the time was mainly
focused on pumps and mining, and could not solve problems of currents, water
supplies, lock design, and silting that became central to taking a canal through
topographically complex and dry land. The people who knew about these problems
worked the land: peasants, artisans, and other laborers—many of them women. They
built irrigation systems for estates, and developed water supplies for mills and towns.
Their tacit knowledge of hydraulics, materials, forces, and the techniques for using
them—added to the formal knowledge of military and civil engineers who knew
something about buildings structures—produced the collaborative intelligence that
made the canal possible (Mukerji 1997a, 2008b).
The cognitive capacity for logistical work was the opposite of the personal strategic
abilities of elites (Clark 1995), creating a divide between what nobles could do polit-
ically and what could be done by the administration. Technical knowledge became a
political asset that was hard for elites to counter or control. They were confronted
with new forms of intelligence embedded in infrastructures they could not imitate
or counter: anonymous works of material governance that stood for France and
embodied a collective cognitive ability forged through administration.
Over the next century, the Canal du Midi was recognized as a textbook case
of hydraulic engineering. It was studied as a model of good practice in the Ecole
des Ponts et Chaussées, when that great engineering school opened in the eighteenth
century. The hydraulics learned while building the canal became a signatory attribute
of French technological ability, and continued to be used to make France more
Roman—all the way through the French Revolution (Mukerji 2009b). 7
BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Infrastructural “improvements” were politically effective not only because nobles
had so few ways to oppose them, but also because material management had lasting
consequences. A canal once filled with water was hard to erase from the landscape.
It became something that locals had to accommodate, and in the accommodation,
they changed their lives in irreversible ways.
The new-built environment disrupted traditional, everyday social practices dra-
matically along the Canal du Midi, first, as 20 years of construction disrupted old
patterns of life, and later, as people took advantage of the new waterway. In the be-
ginning, the ditch for the canal cut roads and fields, inhibiting movement of people,
goods, services, and the mail. Once the canal was built, it became the main route
for trade and much travel in the region, taking over mail delivery, too (Rolt 1973).
Daily life changed for local women as some started doing laundry in the canal,
finding it a source of water close to home that reliably flowed from the mountains
through most of the summer, even in the dry eastern end of Languedoc. Public
laundries developed near towns and bridges along the canal, providing social centers
for women’s work, and commercial opportunities for laundresses. 8
Textile manufacture also gained momentum because weavers were able to get their
products more rapidly to the textile finishers near Toulouse. As the textile trade grew,
so did the taxes on textiles. They helped to refill the coffers of the treasury that had
been partly depleted by canal expenses, but also affected local commerce (Conseil
d’Etat 1668). Enterprising locals also began to develop facilities for the canal itself.
Some made barges; others raised horses to pull them; and some developed facilities
for their repair. There were coopers making barrels for the new Minervois and
Corbières wineries, and merchants building warehouses in Bézier, too, for the goods
stored and awaiting ships from the Mediterranean or barges from the canal (Jaroniak
1999; Konvitz 1978; Rolt 1973).
7 One example of a famous logistical system with obvious organizing power is the traditional water
system in Bali. It integrated many communities into a common system of irrigation and farming and was
managed by monks rather than any given town because of a need to control a whole watershed. This
was similar to what developed in the Pyrenean valleys (Lansing 1991; Mukerji 2008b).
8 There are historical postcards of the Canal du Midi that document its importance for laundry, and
there remains today evidence of the laundries built over the centuries along the canal, mainly near
Castelnaudery and toward Beziers.
Mills on noble lands far from the canal were also replaced by new mills powered
by the Canal du Midi. It was easier to bring grain and take away flour by boat or
bring old rags and take away paper. The value of land parcels along the canal also
changed as they became used for vineyards, yielding new rents for landholders along
the canal (uncatalogued maps, Chateau de Paraza). Hierarchies within the ruling
elite were affected (Jaroniak 1999; Price 1981). The Riquet family gained power in
the province, for example, demonstrating the benefits of working with rather than
against the state, and helping finally to lure ruling elites into capitalist alliances with
the crown (Beik 1985; Rolt 1973). In other words, new activity (commercial and not)
changed life in central Languedoc as the new built environment opened up and shut
down possibilities for social existence.
IMPERSONAL RULE
The Canal du Midi became an effective medium of political transformation in part
because it exercised a form of impersonal rule. The new material regime brought the
power of the state down to the local level. It became like a mountain or river in
France—a physical part of the landscape that locals had to take into account. It was
not like a political policy or argument that notables could contest. Opponents of the
Canal du Midi could poke holes in the embankments of the canal as a “tactic” of
protest, but if they did, they would only flood a neighbor’s land or their own village.
The power of the state would not be breached opponents would confront the power
of water, not the administration.
The canal stood for the state and yet seemed outside politics, gaining power from
its massive presence but also having more effect because of its quasi-invisibility as
power. As long as political authority lay in the interpersonal struggles among the
king and ruling elites, material arrangements seemed apolitical (Joyce 2003; Mukerji
2006, 2008b). And so structures like the Canal du Midi, even as they clearly shaped
social relations and stood for the state, nonetheless were hard to understand and
counter as political agents.
Local ruling elites could not build canals of their own to compete with it, either,
or design an alternative infrastructure to better serve their needs. It was too costly
and difficult to realize such projects without state support. Even the shifts in the
local economy that resulted from commerce on the canal were results of impersonal
forces that people—including the administration—could not completely control.
Yet, while the Canal du Midi was a palpable instrument of public administration,
changing the local order in irreversible ways, it was never completely within state
control. It posed risks as it imposed new order. As a configuration of natural materi-
als and forces, the Canal du Midi was an impersonal instrument of governance that
did not always obey the will of the king. The canal had no personal obligation to
the monarch or to its neighbors. It could flood, and whole portions of towns would
wash away, and administrators could do nothing to stop it. Walls would crumble
and silt would build up over time, and make the canal too shallow for navigation. It
called for continued repair work (Henke 2008). The government that had expanded
its powers using stewardship principles—promises of a more orderly and abundant
natural world—suddenly faced problems of risk management in the exercise of im-
personal rule. The limits of natural knowledge became a political problem as natural
knowledge itself became a significant technique of power (Mukerji 2009a).
Even the people who managed the locks, policed the waterway, and controlled
traffic on the Canal du Midi were configured as impersonal agents of the state in
the seventeenth century. These office holders were early technocrats who stood for
the administration, repaired its assets, and did its work. Although acting in person,
they were not like the nobles and high-standing members of the clergy who held
offices of the state—or even their clients who served them personally. Officials of the
Canal du Midi stood for a distant authority that was abstract in its absence, and
distant from the patrimonial networks of local elites.
The formation of offices for the canal began as a politically contentious activity,
a site of strategic maneuvering. Once the first leg of the Canal du Midi was opened
for navigation and used actively for the textile trade, there was need for some admin-
istrative personnel to police the waterway, work the locks, and regulate trade near
Toulouse. So, Riquet went to the États du Languedoc to ask for permission to make
the appointments. But they refused, ostensibly because the canal was not finished
(and they did not want it to be). Offices in the province were normally allocated by
the États as part of local patrimonial practice, but Riquet needed immediate help, so
he asked Colbert to intervene. The king pressured the États, giving the entrepreneur
his permission to make the appointments. The result was that office holders for the
Canal du Midi were set outside the social world of the États, and became a cadre
of officers, serving the canal, trade, and the king more than local notables (Mukerji
2009a; Rolt 1973). They, too, became instruments of impersonal rule: modern office
holders.
A FIGURED WORLD
On its completion, the Canal du Midi was hailed as a wonder of the world, and
was framed as such through active efforts by Colbert. Why and how this hap-
pened is easier to understand by following the events that unfolded when the en-
trepreneur Riquet fell ill and died. The story illustrates the continued opposition
of elites to the canal that Colbert countered by representing it as part of the New
Rome.
Throughout Riquet’s lifetime, Colbert was wary of local nobles and their op-
position to the project. But he mistrusted Riquet even more because he was not
noble; as a financier, the entrepreneur was by definition not necessarily a man of
his word. In spite of Riquet’s pleas that he was honest and a loyal servant of the
king, Colbert saw him as a self-promoter, ambitious upstart, and devious money
manager. But the minister needed the canal to succeed, so he had to keep Riquet’s
local opponents at bay. That is why he was horrified when the entrepreneur fell
ill and months later died before the canal was complete. The minister suddenly re-
alized that those whose land had been confiscated for the canal could demand it
back.
The character of Colbert’s concern became clear in his letters to the intendant,
d’Aguesseau, during this period (Colbert 1979 4:372–74, 388–94). The minister wor-
ried that Riquet had engaged in graft, and this would finally be revealed in his estate.
Local nobles could argue in any case that the contract with the state had not been
fulfilled because of Riquet’s death, but worse, they could argue that the contract
should be considered void if there was evidence of graft (Colbert 1979 4:393–94).
There was reason to be concerned. Opponents to the Canal de Briare, near Paris,
had killed that project and successfully taken back their land earlier in the century
(Pinsseau 1944). So, Colbert wanted to act quickly on Riquet’s death. The minister
asked d’Aguesseau to claim immediately any tax money in Riquet’s hands when he
died, so the family could not steal it. In fact, Riquet had not taken money from the
Figure 1.
treasury, and left his family mostly debts. But that did not solve all the problems.
The canal was still not complete.
So, Colbert rushed to the aid of Riquet’s son, publicly announcing his right and
duty to complete the contract for the Canal du Midi. The minister pushed, too, to
have the waterway filled and ready for use before the opposition gathered force. He
studied the books and what needed to be done, and helped the younger Riquet get
financing for the project (Colbert 1979 4:388–90). Then he turned to propaganda,
asking d’Aguesseau to think about preparing something about the wonders of the
canal to publish—perhaps in the journal that covered court affairs: the Mercure
(Mukerji 2009a).
The point was to place the canal in a figured world of French grandeur, linking it
with Rome. Colbert wanted to make the canal too important on the public stage for
locals to destroy it. A map of the Canal du Midi, drawn by an engineer who had
worked on the project named Francois Andréossy (Figure 1), illustrated the symbolic
work done to “save” the canal. Andreossy depicted Louis XIV as Apollo in the heav-
ens over Languedoc with an entourage of muses and angels. The monarch pointed
toward the Canal du Midi with his finger, indicating that it was his handiwork. The
Canal du Midi was an expression of monarchical will, a material instantiation of his
(otherworldly) powers.
The picture of the Canal du Midi in Andreossy’s map and others of the period
show it as part of Louis XIV’s New Rome, a figured world connecting propaganda
to state infrastructure. This imagery was convincing because it seemed ratified by
the canal itself: a work of heroic proportions using sophisticated hydraulics worthy
of the Romans.
STRATEGICS AND LOGISTICS IN TENSION IN THE STATE

Seen as a strategic asset at its inception, the Canal du Midi was expected to increase
monarchical authority seamlessly. It was meant to increase the king’s personal hold
over his kingdom, not set up a system of impersonal rule. But the depersonaliza-
tion of governance was so effective in countering patrimonialism that it started to
threaten the king. Colbert did not want to undermine patrimonial politics in France,
just weaken the power of local elites and expand the powers of the state to help
realize the king’s dream of a French empire in the image of Rome. But when Louis
XIV’s military ambitions were frustrated (Sonnino 1988), France could not become
a great empire, and state infrastructure took on more domestic significance. Col-
bert’s projects of territorial improvement empowered the administration more than
the king, bringing French lands under greater political control but not under the
personal control of Louis XIV.
In this context, those who exercised logistical power started to become threats to
the king. Their powers were important to the state, but separable from monarchical
strategic power. The monarch’s personal rule was not supposed to depend on their
impersonal powers, but it did. In the face of this reversal of influence, the king
suddenly turned against all three major architects of the French state: Pierre-Paul
Riquet, the Chevalier de Clerville, and Sébastian le Prestre de Vauban. Their logisti-
cal powers lay hauntingly beyond the patrimonial powers of the king. So, Louis XIV
asserted his will by acting willfully, ruining the careers or reputations of all three
men (Mukerji 2010).
Although after Riquet’s death Colbert gave support to his son, before his passing
Riquet was disgraced by Colbert and the king’s representative and appointee in
Languedoc, the intendant d’Aguesseau. The intendant initiated the process, voicing
concerns in a letter to Colbert about Riquet’s character. The minister, already sure
that the entrepreneur was dishonest and worried that he was also a fool, wrote back
suggesting Riquet was delusional:
I must say [your report] very much disturbed me . . . You have penetrated more
deeply [into] the conduct of M. Riquet and the source of his views on the matter
of the vast range that he has given his imagination. Although it might be best
to treat him as ill, we must, nevertheless, apply ourselves with care in order
that the course and strength of his imaginings does not bring on us a final and
grievous end of all his works . . .. This man does as do great liars do who, after
telling a story three or four times, persuade themselves it is true . . . It has been
said to him so many times, even in my own presence, that he is the inventor of
this great work that in the end he has believed he is in fact the absolute author.
(Rolt 1973:91)
The intendant circulated this letter, taking it to the entrepreneur himself to humil-
iate him and put him in his place. Instead of being a hero of the regime, Riquet was
made a laughing stock, and his claims of political importance were made ridiculous
(Mukerji 2009a, 2010).
In a sense, Riquet was crazy to brag about his logistical abilities when he was
politically ill-advised to do so. He was unwise to believe, too, that his work in
Languedoc necessarily served the king’s will. He failed to recognize his debt to Louis
XIV for the contract for the canal, thinking it was the child of his imagination. And
so he was publicly embarrassed by d’Aguesseau and Colbert, who used strategic
practices of patron-client gossip and public humiliation to ruin his reputation and
undermine his independent powers. Patrimonialism was made triumphant (Mukerji

2009a, 2010).
Clerville was disgraced for similar reasons—to constrain his logistical authority
and stewardship reasoning. He was working for Colbert on repairs for the Alsatian
fortresses at Philipsbourg and Brisach. He assumed that executing this work well was
his first duty to the king, but it was not. His duty was obedience to the sovereign
and his patron. So, he got in trouble for improving the design for a fortress without
authorization from the king. Worse, he demanded oversight of the finances for the
project from the intendant, a man appointed directly by Louis XIV. So, he was
reprimanded, and fell out of the king’s favor, leaving Vauban the leading military
engineer in France. Clerville’s career as an esteemed client of Louis XIV effectively
came to an end. Like Riquet, he continued to work for Colbert, but his credibility
even on matters of engineering was diminished (Mukerji 2010).
Vauban made the most stunning political mistake by assuming that good steward-
ship was more important to the king than his patrimonial powers. The great military
engineer had always worried about the well-being of the land and its people, “im-
proving” the kingdom with his carefully designed cities and devising tactics for sieges
that better protected the soldiers. The success of his pré carré probably emboldened
him to think of more ways to act as a good steward of France, using the tools of his
previous successes: reason and attention to material relations. Whatever the genesis
of his proposal for tax reform, the Dı̂me Royale, Vauban (1707) proposed the new
system to be less of a burden for the poor and still provide money for the treasury
by taxing nobles as well as everyone else. Vauban reasoned that all the people of
France were equally indebted to the king and all were beneficiaries of the state.
But as Machiavelli (1996) made clear and Louis XIV understood well, the people in
France were not all the same. The exemption from taxes for nobles was an important
part of what kept the nobility loyal to the king, and its great families at the top
of the social order. The king’s patrimonial powers depended on the tax system that
Vauban proposed to change. So, Vauban was exiled from court and was never able
to speak again to a king who had previously been devoted to him (Mukerji 2010).
All three architects of the French state were disgraced in this period for approach-
ing power in new and dangerous ways—in terms of logistics more than strategics,
stewardship more than patrimonialism. They became the precursors of modern func-
tionaries, and began to think about how to run the state more effectively as though
the kingdom was theirs to manage. They mistook their logistical abilities for un-
mitigated political assets, and soon learned this was not the case (Colbert 1979;
Langins 2004; Mukerji 2007b; Rolt 1973). Louis XIV turned against these men to
demonstrate the final authority of monarchical will.
The fall from political grace of the great architects of the French state was tes-
timony to the political importance of logistics to this regime that made those with
logistical abilities and stewardship tendencies so threatening (Mukerji 2010). Monar-
chical singularity triumphed for the moment, but of course ironically, the canal
outlived Louis XIV and even the system of personal rule he defended. In the French
Revolution, the demand for good stewardship in government was raised in a new
way and the disjuncture between logistical power and monarchical rule became both
more evident and more violent.
CONCLUSIONS
The state that emerged in seventeenth-century France was importantly a product
of logistical activity. Politics at court remained mainly strategic: forging patrimonial
networks and enforcing the will of the king. But public administration increasingly
was logistical activity that served the state’s institutional independence from the
nobility. Colbert used propaganda to reconcile the two political registers to make
logistics seem consistent with the king’s will. But political territoriality organized
state power around something new and dangerous: natural knowledge and risk. And
using logistical power for administrative purposes engaged peasants, artisans, mer-
chants, and manufacturers more directly with the state, threatening noble hegemony
in politics.
While theories of the modern state often include territoriality as one of the state’s
attributes, there has been very little attention to the political significance of territorial
governance. Without a well-defined concept of logistics, this would necessarily be
hard to do. Still, as a result, state formation has been reduced mainly to a social
process of political change, enhanced by infrastructure, but not formed through
material processes of territorial politics. But looking at the logistics exercised by the
administration under Louis XIV reveals how important territorial activity actually
turned out to be for empowering the French state and making it a modern institution
capable of wielding impersonal powers.
Defining logistics as a distinct form of power and following its interplay with
strategic power is not only useful for explaining state formation, but also for consid-
ering other moments when disjunctures between strategics and logistics have led to
political weakness, violence, or transformation. It is frequently the case that peasant
rebellions, civil wars, weak governments in contentious societies, and other sites of
conflict arise when strategic and logistical powers are not stably aligned. In some
cases, officials of a government cannot control the infrastructure of their country,
such as roads, media, airports, or train stations. Control of the political process and
control of the landscape are not necessarily continuous, and the disjunctures can
create patterns of stabilized disorder or sites of recurrent violence. At other times,
struggles between superordinates and subordinates are played out as contests be-
tween those with strategic power and those with logistical skills. This is often what
happens in peasant societies when agricultural laborers with the logistical knowledge
refuse to use it to serve elites, disrupting an oppressive social order. There are many
different forms of contentious politics that might be analyzed by looking at strategics
and logistics. These are only a few examples.
Studying logistics also provides a way to understand how risk became an element
of modern political life. It draws attention to the fundamental ways modern states
with their obligations of stewardship and their material infrastructures enroll natural
forces into political life, and insert risk into politics. Interstate highways, bridges,
railroads, reservoirs, airports, fiber optic systems, and satellites are all taken-for-
granted material infrastructures that are never completely under human control.
Governments find themselves held responsible for failures that threaten the well-
being of the population and land. The agential qualities of natural things continue
to be only partly controlled by state agents, so modes of impersonal rule necessarily
continue to have unintended effects and raise risk management issues.
As could be seen with Hurricane Katrina, building canals and levies implies moral
responsibility by the state and carries political risk. When the levies ruptured in New
Orleans, so did the credibility of the government (Mukerji 2007a). The army corps of
engineers was criticized for poor design and (worse) poor maintenance. And political
credibility remains low in New Orleans, too, in part because so many houses remain
unrepaired.
Paying attention to built environments as figured worlds of power also provides
opportunities for new forms of cultural analysis. As Braudel (1977) has shown,
material regimes work on a slower cycle of history than politics, remaining surpris-
ingly unaffected by ideological shifts, rises and falls of political factions, or changes
of regime. While the concept of the longue durée is useful for analyzing the varying
periodicities in history, Braudel treats material regimes as apolitical cultural forma-
tions rather than figured worlds carrying logistical power. He recognizes temporal
differences between strategics and logistics, but does not treat them as different forms
of power.
Doing so is useful for thinking about impersonal rule, and, for example, the
American interstate highway system. It has exercised logistical power through half a
century of rapidly changing strategic politics, and has even survived the shift from
an industrial to a service economy. It has spawned motels and diners, campgrounds
and tourist destinations. Some have come, others have gone. The roads are now
full of passing trucks that serve chain stores and shopping malls in Minnesota,
Virginia, or Southern California, making capitalism seem the source of this system—
not the roads themselves, nor the machines, cement, gravel, asphalt, and laborers who
made them. These anonymous highways, continually shedding some of their history
but maintaining their form, present America to travelers as wild stretches of land
or complexes of freeways that seem the bloodlines of great cities. The collective
imagination of the country has been configured with asphalt and concrete paths that
direct human movement past ghettoes and wilderness alike, defining America and
Americans with a figured world of possibility and raw, competitive struggle. The
interstate highway system is a figured world of the longue durée.
There can be profound shifts in the political significance of material regimes over
time, too. This is apparent in the suburbs of the central valley of California that
were erected from the 1990s to 2000s. They were originally shining exemplars of
the “ownership society,” the Jeffersonian ideal of family home ownership extended
to everyone. Such developments were meant to secure the future of the Republican
Party by making lower-middle-class people property owners with stakes in low taxes
and small government. While interest rates were held low to promote home buying,
this ideal seemed feasible. But the recession of 2009 led to foreclosures, leaving
many developments half empty. The new suburbs changed political significance,
standing now for a failure of stewardship by government: the failure to regulate
banks or the lack of fortitude to let them fail. In both historical moments, the built
environment stood as evidence of good or bad stewardship, helping to configure
political sentiment in complex and changing ways. On the other hand, the differences
in periodicities between strategics and logistics allowed a shift in the figured world
of suburban America; the landscape did not change but it developed new strategic
significance and uses.
Together, the constellation of concepts used in this article—logistics, impersonal
rule, and figured worlds—help to define a way to do materialist analysis in sociology
without depending upon Marx’s theory of history or accepting Weber’s rejection of
it. Material orders, as Joyce (2003) has demonstrated, constitute the environments in
which people live their lives, shaping their subjectivity without their realizing it. They
are ruled, but they experience themselves as free, while working to fit into spaces
designed by others.
Perhaps because built environments are so routinely naturalized in social life, the
material order has been and continues to be the unspoken “elephant in the room”
in social theory. Perhaps it is just too hard to recognize an elephant and keep track
of all its wrinkles without a word to name it. So, I have tried in this article to give it
a name, logistics, and to describe its relationship to figured worlds of power. I have
tried above all to show how logistics could act as an independent form of power in
contest with strategies of social domination.
I have illustrated, too, the historical significance of logistical power, using French
state formation as my example. I have argued that the modern state developed as a
system of impersonal rule and product of political territoriality. Public administration
gained power by becoming politically focused on land management, using material
means to adjust internal social relations as well as to pursue power internationally.
Modern states are the most elaborated systems of impersonal rule, each looking
different because their built environments have been developed to address distinct
issues of power. They carry their histories in infrastructures as well as stories of great
political leaders, and they build their collective futures with scientific infrastructure
such as CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and military bases
around the world. States continue to define their futures with infrastructures such
as the Internet and weapons of war. They continue to exercise logistical power and
devise new tools of impersonal rule.
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Mukerji On Power and Logistics

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The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics,

Logistics, and Impersonal Rule∗

∗ Address correspondence to: Chandra Mukerji, Department of Communication 0503, University of

Sociological Theory 28:4 December 2010

STRATEGICS AND LOGISTICS

Table 1. Forms of Power2

Form of control Political domination Material regime

Logistical power, although not named, is more significant in critical geography

It is a physical arrangement of the material environment that intentionally ratifies

STRATEGICS, LOGISTICS, AND FRENCH STATE FORMATION

The king of France is surrounded by a large number of lords of ancient lineage

STEWARDSHIP AND RESTORATION

improvement, citing the need for administrative stewardship of the kingdom

STRATEGICS AND LOGISTICS IN TENSION IN THE STATE

undermine his independent powers. Patrimonialism was made triumphant (Mukerji

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