In his study of European state formation—Coercion, Capital, and European States—Charles Tilly convincingly argues that “war makes states.” In their efforts to defend or expand territory, European states built up the administrative capacity to manage warmaking and extract manpower and resources from the populace necessary to wage war. State structures and policies varied according to the degree of urbanization and commercialization within their territories. In states of relatively high urbanization and commercialization, central bureaucracies were smaller, governments depended more on indirect taxes (e.g. tariffs) to fund warmaking, and traded political rights and social services for the their right to conscript soldiers. In states with dispersed populations and dependent on agriculture, state machineries were bulkier, and depended more on direct taxes (e.g. land and head taxes) and force to get sufficient resources and men for war. Though European states would lose none of their bellicosity over the centuries, one quirky outcome of warmaking was the civilization of the state. By the 19th century, the ratio of soldiers to civilians would stop increasing, military spending would decline as a portion of the Gross Domestic Product and government budgets, and states would begin to take on more and more non-military roles. Can we apply Tilly’s model to newer states in the developing world, namely, Guatemala? What drives state formation when there is little warmaking? Central America gained independence from Spain without armed struggle, and there was only intermittent warmaking during Guatemala’s failed effort to build and control a Central American Union from the 1830s to the 1880s. Guatemala did not even have a permanent national army until 1871. This paper explores the possibility that if war did not make the Guatemalan state, coffee did. Of course, promoting and protecting coffee production did not provide the Guatemalan state with the same sort of challenges, or developmental imperatives, as would have organized violence. For one thing, it was cheaper to wrest land and labor from basically unarmed Indian villages (and land from the Catholic Church) than it would have been to prepare for and conduct repeated wars. The Guatemalan state was not pushed to build up the administrative capacity to wage war and extract revenue. Although there was some give and take between rulers and Indian communities over land and labor, the Guatemalan state did not confront the same intense wave of claims urban middle and lower classes gave their states in Europe. For these reasons, Guatemala becomes an inversion of Tilly’s model of state formation: an agricultural state with a feeble internal market, an overwhelmingly rural population, and a small, centralized bureaucracy which lightly taps elites for revenue through trade tariffs. Moreover, Guatemala experiences a militarization rather than a civilianization of the state. The Tilly model turns to geopolitics and the intervention of Great Powers to explain this militarization of the developing world. While the US certainly put heavy constraints on Guatemala, this paper will argue that the political economy of coffee contributed to the militarization of the state, independent of US interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]