Professor Charles Tilly was one of the pre-eminent sociologists of his generation. His work was remarkable for his refusal to stay within narrow disciplinary bounds. As much a historian as a sociologist, he ranged across centuries and continents in a way that combined dense quantitative and archival research with broad theoretical vision.

His work covered sexual inequality in the workplace and the development of democracy, but his enduring theme was the relationship between politics and violence. He cited the growing cost and complexity of warfare as an explanation for the rise of nation states, arguing that it was the modernisation of fighting techniques which gave impetus to the development of powerful governments with the ability to raise taxes. Memorably, he compared the resultant states to protection rackets — creating a threat of war and then charging citizens to protect them from it.

Tilly was fascinated by conflict, from the great revolutions of Europe to the humblest grain riot. In European Revolutions: 1492-1992 (1993) he panned across 500 years of competing claims on state power, and, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, raised the unexpectedly troubling question of when a revolution could be said to be over.

In Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1995), as in The Contentious French (1986), he amassed a wealth of primary records of local disturbances, bringing out the features they shared. The importance of “political entrepreneurs” like John Wilkes in manipulating grievances into confrontation emerges strongly.

This was an analysis which Tilly was equally as happy to apply to modern race riots. The Politics of Collective Violence (2003) argued that, for instance, relations between Muslims and Hindus in India had generally been peaceful until political leaders turned friction into flames. His arguments have been applied everywhere from Rwanda to the riots in the north of England in 2001.

Terrorism, Tilly argued in the aftermath of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, was “not a creed but a political strategy to extract resources and increase power”. His analysis of the patterns of collective violence in the postwar period suggested a significant shift from inter-state warfare to terrorism, guerrilla conflict, death squads and other irregular forms of violence.

Tilly explained this by pointing to the rise of weaker states which nevertheless offered advantages (financial or ideological) to those those who could exercise power within them.

Collective violence, he argued, “interweaves incessantly with non-violent politics, varies systematically with political regimes, and changes as a consequence of essentially the same causes that operate in the non-violent zones of collective political life.”

In Durable Inequality (1998) Tilly argued subtly about reasons for entrenchments in social divisions in a way that avoided both stale Marxist attitudes about class structure and automatic assumptions of deliberate discrimination. He suggested that gender pay gaps and monoethnic environments alike could be explained by the ways organisations renew themselves.

Simplistically put, people who already have a job will tend to appoint people like themselves, even without intending to. “An inequality that occurs all over the western world is through a hiring process in which somebody sees there is going to be a vacancy and talks to a friend. The majority of hiring originates that way. If you think about it, that helps explain why you get ethnic enclaves within large organisations.”

These self-replicating networks, Tilly believed, were at the root of why inequalities persist despite so many attempts to eliminate them and would not be easily overcome.

This argument would probably count as an example of an “explanatory narrative”. This was one of several categories defined in Why? (2006), a study of explanation. Tilly’s other categories included convention (as when children are told “don’t tell tales”), codes (which explain why your mortgage application was turned down), and technical accounts (like a ballistics report on an assassination). Explanations that don’t fall into the expected category just don’t seem acceptable, as when Donald Rumsfeld explained looting in Baghdad with “stuff happens”. This is a conventional explanation where a narrative would be expected. Similarly, the Hutton report into the circumstances of the death of Dr David Kelly in 2003 studied whether proper procedures had been followed when the public were expecting an apportioning of blame.

Tilly claimed that his efforts to harmonise history, sociology and politics “have always failed in one way or another, but the failure, happily, are usually of the kind from which one learns something useful.”

Charles Tilly was born in 1929 in Lombard, Illinois, and graduated from Harvard in 1950. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Catholic University of Angers, and during the Korean war served in the US Navy, before earning his PhD in sociology from Harvard in 1958. This formed the basis of his book The Vendée (1964), which examined the grassroots of the counter-revolutionary uprising in the west of France in 1793.

He taught at Delaware, Toronto and Harvard before moving to the University of Michigan as professor of history and sociology in 1969. He joined the New School, New York, in 1984 and moved to Columbia University as Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science in 1996.

Tilly was a committed teacher whose many students testified to his inspirational effect. He liked to boast that he had never held office in a professional body, never served on a board or directors and never chaired a department. This left him free to further his phenomenal academic output of hundreds of scholarly articles and more than 50 books.

He is survived by his former wife, Louise, three daughters and a son.

Professor Charles Tilly, sociologist and historian, was born on May 27, 1929. He died of cancer on April 29, 2008, aged 78