Charles S. Maier, in his Once Within Borders, has distinguished empires from states in how carefully state boundaries are delineated, and how stable their frontier areas are: More “cohesive” than the space of empires, the state space “aspires to frontiers stabilized by treaty – often as well by the so-called natural barriers of rivers and mountains – and to a more direct, uniform, and pervasive administration at home.” Empires, by contrast, “have tolerated enclaves of local autonomy and relatively loose frameworks for adherence of tributary communities.” The Russian tsars and Ottomans, for instance, “developed ideas of a coherent territory only relatively late and thought primarily in terms of tribal overlordship.”1 Though Maier does not immediately elaborate on exactly what lends a state greater “coherence,” in a footnote, he cites Weber’s celebrated definition of the state as that which claims a monopoly of legitimate physical power.