Violence and coercion have always been key elements in human affairs, but their specific forms and the meanings attached to them have changed constantly and are changing still. In particular, societies have always contested the distinction between “legitimate,” state-sanctioned violence and coercion and its “illegitimate” counterparts, between war and peace and war-making and policing, between military and civilian, between insurrection or political violence and crime, and between legal and illegal violence, and have drawn the boundaries between these categories differently at different times. In making sense of all these distinctions, it might seem at first that little of general value can be said, except that coercion and violence form part of the interactive networks that hold large-scale societies together, as well as drive them apart (sometimes irrevocably), and that the capacity to assemble and deploy armed forces is an essential attribute of the state, without which it disappears.

However, existing models of state formation offer more than this. The classic works of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, as well as the work of contemporary scholars such as Michael Mann and Charles Tilly, offer a highly suggestive analysis of European state formation, a “stylized fact” that consists of the following assertions. First, “war made the state and the state made war” — states survived, defeated other states and incorporated their territory, grew and prospered by mobilizing the resources, weaponry, and men to fight wars.