Charles Tilly dies at 78

Here is one obituary.  Tilly was a historical sociologist but he had an influence on economic history as well, including the New Institutional Economics:

Dr. Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and contemporary accounts — including municipal archives, unpublished letters and diaries — that he used to develop theories applicable to many contexts. A particular interest was the development of the nation state in Europe, which he suggested was partly a military innovation. In his 1990 book “Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990” (Blackwell), he argued that the increasingly large costs of gunpowder and large armies required big, powerful nation states with the power to tax.

In 1985, he gave early indications of his argument that war made states in an article that said nation states, with their monopolies on violence, function like gangsters’ protection rackets. He said that governments emphasize, create and stimulate external threats, then ask their citizens to pay for defense.

I think of his mid-career work as being most important, such as his The Formation of National States in Western Europe.  In any case America has lost one of its leading social scientists.  Wikipedia offers good links.  Here is Tilly on how to do social science work, recommended.