NEW YORK — Dr. Charles Tilly, a social scientist who combined historical interpretation and quantitative analysis in a voluminous outpouring of work to forge often novel intellectual interpretations — as when he compared nation states with protection rackets — died Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 78.

The cause was lymphoma, said John Tucker, a spokesman for Columbia University, where Tilly was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.

Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and contemporary accounts — including municipal archives, unpublished letters and diaries — that he used to develop theories applicable to many contexts.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.

“Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” he wrote in a chapter of “Bringing the State Back In” (Cambridge), which was edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol.

Provocative and profound ideas repeatedly appeared in Tilly’s 51 books and monographs and more than 600 scholarly articles. Marshaling insights from sociology and political science, both of which he taught, he took on subjects including urban migration, the French Revolution, the dynamics of political contention and the sociology of trusting others.

In “Credit and Blame” (Princeton), published this year, he drew on sources from Dostoyevsky to Darwin and from the office water cooler to truth commissions to examine how people fault and applaud each other and themselves. In “The Contentious French” (Belknap, 1986) he plowed through four centuries of history to describe the French as ordinary people fighting for their interests against implacable state power and advancing capitalism.

In his 2006 book “Why?” (Princeton), he tried to make systematic sense of people’s reasons for giving reasons. Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker said the book “forces readers to re-examine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.”

On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Tilly answered, “One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.”