One of the central differences between the modern and the pre-modern is the notion that the world is ruled by laws rather than men. Interestingly though, I think it is the Feudal System that first begins to blur this line and becomes the stepping stone from Rule of Man to Rule of Law. This is because the Feudal System encodifies the relationship between the leige and his subject. This leads directly to such things as the Magna Carter and eventually to the modern idea of a Constitution, but certainly back at the time of the feudal system society is governed primarily by private to private relationships.
An interesting discussion of the emergence of legally-constituted administration is Robert Bartlett's [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Making-Europe-Robert-Bartlett/dp/0691037809]The Making of Europe[/ame]. He discusses, in particular, the way in which the availability of "standard form" charters for new towns facilitated the expansion of Christian Europe in the medieval period.
If you're referring to the rule of laws rather than the rule of man, that goes back to Greece, and the polis . . . the origin of civilization.
That's the institution of the Polis, which I do agree contains a lot of the aspects of the modern concept of the state (and the Roman Republic/Empire contain more).
I'm not so sure about the rule of law rather than the rule of man. So much of the legal system wasad hoc, influenced by the prejudices of the jurors and the quality of the oratory. Certainly punishment was highly variable, depending on how popular you were. And of course there was plenty of scope for semi-legal punishments, which might themselves turn out a few years later after a change in government to be grounds for criminal cases.
I'm not really talking about the rule of law rather than men, although as Bluenose says the Greek polis doesn't really instantiate the rule of law. The best discussion I know of the political dynamics of the polis (and I should say it's not my field, so I havn't read that widely) is Finley's Politics in the Ancient World. The significance of ostracism, in particular, as a political tool seems to me somewhat at odds with a rule-of-law based society. And the presence and use in Roman practice of the
senatus consulta ultima is one piece of evidence against the existence of the rule of law in Rome.
But in any event a polis is not a modern state, despite the tendency to render "polis" as "state" in translations of ancient Greek works. Here is one characterisation of "the state", from Geuss's Philosophy and Real Politics (p 44):
an abstract structure of power and authority distinct both from the population and from the prince, aristrocracy or ruling class, which successfully enforces a monopoloy of legitimate violence within a certain territory.
This does not characterise the polis, or even ancient Rome - for example, both within the polis and in Rome various sorts of private militias seem to have been accepted as legitimate. (Again, this is something which is easy to incorporate into a fantasy RPG in order to convey a sense of "premodernity".)
Furthermore, a polis is not abstract in the same way - for example, it is not conceived of as a bearer of rights and duties distinct from the rights and duties of its people. This is not just an abstract point - it is something that plays out in social and political reality. Thus, as Finley puts it in the book I mentioned earlier (at page 8), in antiquity
the citizen's personal contacts were directly with the government - the legislators, the executive, the courts - because there was no mediating bureucracy.
(Geuss elaborates on this point at pages 44 to 50 of History and Illusion in Politics.)
Finley also notes (pp 22, 130) that a Roman soldier swore an oath of loyalty to his general, which he was required to repeat whenever the general changed.
What distinguishes the modern state, then, is its abstractness, which is realised via the bureaucracy, and its claim to totality in authority. You can have this without law in any rule-of-law sense (eg Soviet Russia), but the sort of law that realises the modern state has to make claims to normative preeminence - preeminence over family, religion, custom, etc - that are quite distinctive.
much of the war torn 'developing' world is pre-modern, and in some cases actually feudal.
The gloss I would want to put on this is that much of that same world is also highly imbedded in a global and more-or-less liberal economic system. So while aspects of it resemble feudalism (as per your milling example) it is also very different from past social and economic life because of the impact of that economic system.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but I think you can go a long way toward making your world feel suitably ancient by having things which we would now consider gross injustices be reutine: officials require bribes in order to do their duty, judges require payment before they'll hear a case, lords hear cases in which they are a party, taxation is arbitarily applied, the office of tax collector is up for sale to the highest bidder, people are judged according to their station, punishment is by a modern perspective grossly outsized to the crime, slavery is accepted as a part of life in even 'good' societies, and so forth. You don't have to put all of that into every society, but neither should your civic society parallel the modern.
I agree with all this. It's the absence of this sort of thing from some published Greyhawk material, and even more markedly from nearly all published FR material that I've encountered, that makes me need to rework the first world a bit before I use it, and makes me ignore FR altogether.
Legal and financial complication is, IMO, a function of how long the society has existed, and how the function of government has changed, and what historical conditions have transpired. A younger civilization is not as likely to have the bulk of laws that an older one does, under those conditions.
I'm not sure about the "how long" - over time complexity builds up, but redundant law can also be swept away. The law of land tenure was more complex in pre-modern than modern Britain, for example. But I agree with your points about "function" and "historical conditions".
