The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy

After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. This article shows how the Reformation, which involved the expropriation of the Catholic Church’s assets, set in motion two processes. First, to finance their wars, Protestant rulers used revenue from confiscated assets instead of selling proprietary offices, leading to fewer venal officeholders who resisted administrative reforms. Second, expropriations made churches poorer and reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, incentivizing a reallocation of educational investments from religious knowledge to secular skills more useful for state administration. This distinctive Protestant developmental path hastened the demise of the patrimonial state. By 1789, the only major territorial states that were bureaucratic were Protestant.