States and Their Sources of Legitimacy

The comparative question

The exam rarely asks "what happened in Song China". It asks you to compare. The most useful axis: where does a ruler's authority come from, and who staffs the state?

• Song China — the Mandate of Heaven plus Neo-Confucianism. Officials were selected by civil service examination, which created a bureaucracy of trained scholars rather than hereditary nobles. Combined with Champa rice, expanded canals, printing and paper money, this produced a commercialised economy far ahead of contemporaries.
• Dar al-Islam — the Abbasid Caliphate declined politically, but Islam continued to expand through trade and Sufi missionaries. Turkic states (Seljuk, Delhi Sultanate, Mamluks) took power while legitimising it through religious patronage — building mosques, funding scholars, protecting pilgrimage.
• Europe — politically fragmented. Authority rested on hereditary claim and Church sanction. Manorialism organised the rural economy; the Church operated across borders as the one genuinely continental institution.
• Africa and the Americas — Mali grew wealthy on the trans-Saharan gold-salt trade; Mansa Musa's hajj advertised that wealth across Afro-Eurasia. Great Zimbabwe controlled inland routes to Indian Ocean ports. The Aztec ran a tribute empire; the Inca used the mit'a labour system and a road network to govern mountainous terrain without writing.