The fourth chapter discusses the officers and personnel of the Court, particularly how they obtained and benefited from their positions. In so doing, the chapter reveals another additional cost wardship imposed – as much as the Crown and its favourites profited from wardship, many of the proceeds were also secreted away by its officers. This originated at the very top – Masters of the Court certainly took bribes from those seeking to obtain wardships, to the bottom, with the Court’s county officer, the feodary. The chapter includes the case study of one such feodary, John Goodhand, whose activities can be traced through the surviving documentary record. Goodhand, as well as making the usual extortions, was accused of kidnapping children he claimed were in wardship – ‘sheep committed to the wolf’ in one court document. Found guilty, he was briefly imprisoned and fined £1,000. But from the Crown’s perspective, he had been an indefatigable servant who had raised Court revenues in his county. After the fine was paid, he re-entered royal service with a letter from Charles I protecting him from future prosecutions.

In that the Crown was only able to appropriate a very small proportion of the potential revenues that might have accrued from wardship, the fourth chapter explains how this was typical of the other fiscal instruments adopted by the Tudors and, more especially, the early Stuarts to raise funds. In particular, the inability of the Crown to prevent massive embezzlement by its officers and agents is emphasised. In the longer term, the atrophying fiscal capacity of the English state and its inability to provide security from even modest external threats helped precipitate the English Civil War.

This chapter locates the emergence of the Greco-Roman city state within a process that saw the expansion of sedentary peasant populations across the Afro-Eurasian world. This was a process accompanied by a wider range of epidemic diseases, the spread of militaristic ‘warring’ states and intensification of slavery. Too often, the rise of the Greeco-Roman city-state has been studies in isolation. This chapter presents the city-state and its ability to mobilize the peasantry for war as one response to the dynamics and constraints of sedentary peasant society and urbanization that increasingly manifested as the dominant form of social organization in a band stretching from East to West across the Afro-Eurasian world from the beginnings of the Iron Age. The chapter starts with demographic growth and the ecological constraints of peasant agriculture, including discussion of Ester Boserup, James C. Scott and the recent work of Graeber & Wengrow. It then moves on to state formation, war-making and military mobilization before analyzing ancient slavery within a continuum of varieties from the early-modern Caribbean to the Islamic world.

Chapter 4 traces the development of states in early modern Europe by revisiting Charles Tilly’s bellicist theory of how war and state formation interacted to reduce the number of states in Europe through persistent warfare. Focusing on state formation before the French Revolution, the chapter sets up a historical baseline that prepares the ground for our analysis of how nationalism affects state borders. Analyzing the external aspects of Tilly’s theory, we reformulate it as observable propositions that are tested systematically with geocoded data on state borders and interstate wars from 1490 through 1790. Proceeding at the systemic, state, and dyadic levels, our analysis confirms that warfare played a crucial role in the territorial expansion of European states, with power differentials increasing the chance of war, which let large states grow ever larger through conquest. Small states disappeared in the process, which in turn increased the average size of states.

Chapter 3 examines the reason why claiming the ‘power of the foreign’ was an effective strategy in the North Caucasus. In order to do so, it reconstructs the politics of tenth-century Alania through an analysis of al-Masʿūdī’s Murūj al-dhahab (332–6/943–7) and analogic evidence. It argues that an aristocrat who could display that they had access to ‘the foreign’ could plausibly claim to be an impartial mediator in disputes between relatively autonomous sub-communities (as), which were the principal building blocks of North Caucasian society.

The Conclusion summarises the previous chapters and their approach. It concludes that Alania should be reintegrated into the historiographical mainstream of Mediterranean and West Eurasian studies. Alania’s example demonstrates that a state-centred approach to political complexity cannot be assumed as the norm; rather, the adoption of state institutions needs to be explicitly explained.

The introduction lays out the work’s overall approach: viewing Alania as an integrated part of the medieval Mediterranean and West Eurasian world. It summarises and critiques existing historiographical approaches. First, it outlines the dominant, ethnicity-focussed approach to Alania, its roots in modern Caucasian politics, and problems with its conflation of ethnicity, statehood, material culture and biological descent. Second, it critiques models that centre state formation, since these are not applicable in Alania due to a lack of any evidence for state structures. Third, it outlines problems with approaches to transregional connection which assume discrete political units interacting with each other. It argues instead in favour of a mutually intertwined model of transregional elite formation, where (for example) Alan elites cannot be separated from Byzantine or Khazar elites.

The Introduction proposes the book’s thesis. During a long fifteenth century stretching from the 1380s into the 1510s, Perpignan’s residents self-consciously abandoned many of the foundational institutions and practices that had been established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They came to believe that the past’s answers could not be the present’s answers. They also came to believe that the present’s answers would not be the future’s answers, because they anticipated a future of unending, unpredictable change and ceaseless adaptation. Driving this development was a series of disorienting experiences, from depopulation to economic decline to social conflict. And even when townspeople sought to preserve their foundational institutions and practices, they could not prevent their destruction at the hands of monarchies that had grown more powerful than ever. The introduction situates Time and Governance in historiographical debates concerning periodisation, as well as the nature and chronology of late medieval state formation. It also relates the study to methodological developments in institutional history and the history of mentalities.

Focusing on the same period as the two previous chapters, Chapter 4 examines a multiplicity of collective identities shared by most residents. Municipal citizenship was based on the defence of citizens against non-citizens, most especially the regional nobility. That defence consisted primarily of the ma armada (‘armed band’), which granted to Perpignan’s consuls the right to lead punitive expeditions against those who had injured citizens. Perpignan sought to extend the ma armada as part of an aggressive campaign against the regional nobility, and it maintained the ma armada against all comers, including monarchs. At the same time, Perpignan showed a growing willingness to be Catalonian, modelling its institutions after those of other Catalonian municipalities and accepting Barcelona’s leadership. And the royal state set the stage for its later triumph through the construction of urban fortifications. Garrisoned citadels enabled royal states to project their power against municipalities in ways that had not been possible before, and that rendered townspeople royal subjects first, municipal citizens second.

The Conclusion recapitulates and offers an additional framing of the book’s findings. Perpignan’s history in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries had been dominated by efforts to adhere to the past, whether in the form of the town’s customs or the communal charter of 1197. Those efforts had been predicated on the assumptions that old was good, and that old was better than new. During the long fifteenth century, however, Perpignan no longer valued custom as it once had. In matters of municipal government, it no longer tried to adhere to the communal charter; as regards the ma armada, it could not prevent French and Aragonese kings from suppressing it and from taking control of the municipal government. Most importantly, townspeople began to operate according to new principles: the new was better than old, that the future could consist only of unpredictable change, and that what existed in the present would almost certainly have to be altered in the future. They became temporal relativists, and they did so before the sixteenth-century emergence of relativist thinking in European high culture.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.

This chapter “deprovincializes” the histories of Lake Kivu’s societies in the “frontier”, (present-day Rwanda and Congo), during the second half of the nineteenth century. It challenges the dominant narrative of the “greater Rwanda” thesis, which argues that colonial border-making “amputated” Rwanda from a significant portion of its territory. The chapter shifts the attention to the societies Rwanda claimed were part of Rwanda since centuries. The chapter shows that while the Nyiginya kingdom – Rwanda’s antecedent – indeed increasingly sought to exert control over and integrate some of these societies, especially under mwami [s. King] Rwabugiri, their control was incomplete, at times impermanent, and often contested. Such complexities are overlooked when considered from a state-centric, often ideological perspective premised on the stability of a centralized authority. The histories and memories of local communities within the region defy these narratives and provide critical alternatives to what has been largely accepted as mere prologue. These questions are not merely a matter of historical debate, they remain crucial for understanding contemporary debates. While the geographical complexity of this chapter makes it a challenging read, it is foundational for understanding the historical continuities and contradictions throughout the book.

The Ottoman Empire’s territorial and maritime reach throughout its nearly 600-year existence led to a plethora of adversaries at whose expense the empire continued to expand. The resulting boundaries that constantly shifted over time prove to be sites of cultural, socioeconomic, as well as political history. Ottoman borders are critical windows into the dynamics shaping the larger empire, including the great urban centers often located far from these frontiers. The territorial limits (or beginnings) of this multiethnic empire, extending from South Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Libya, to the Danube and the Caucasus, are crucial tools to gain insights into the complexities that constitute the processes by which the Ottomans administered as much as lived in these regions. Be they witness to the stability that accompanied peace between neighboring states or the frequent volatility caused by war, the empire’s edges served as theaters for intraimperial development that shaped subject and state alike.

From its very origins as a semi-nomadic community seeking to establish itself as an early modern state, large flows of migrants, exiles, and refugees found an accommodating Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the conditions under which migrants settled allowed for many to thrive as the empire encouraged migration as a manner to expand its territorial reach beyond the core Anatolian and Balkan regions. The ethnic and religious diversity of these migrants helped regularly energize Ottoman political, economic, and cultural life. At other moments, in different settings, other migrants destabilized the empire as peasants were uprooted by administrative attempts at settling the new arrivals. Arriving as the empire replaced previous ruling structures to adjust to political, cultural, and economic changes in the larger world, refugees from neighboring empires were thus seen as threats by many while they were welcomed by other constituencies within the Ottoman state, a pattern of settlement that shaped the 600-year history of the empire.

The chapter discusses empires from a broader historical and anthropological perspective, defining the topic and revealing several false assumptions that led the entire discussion of the United Monarchy astray. The chapter shows that while scholars were often using the Roman or even the British empire as a model when assessing the United Monarchy, most empires had a different form, rising very quickly – often evolving not from “states” but from simpler forms of sociopolitical organization, in what is sometimes referred to a stateless empires – and then dissolving just as quickly, often a generation or two after their foundation. Both the very rapid growth of such empires and their rapid disintegration means that although such empires were common, they did not exist long enough to have material manifestations resembling Assyria or Rome. As examples, the chapter looks at the empires founded by Shaka and Genghis Khan as models of empires that seem to serve as better antecedents to the United Monarchy. The chapter concludes that the reconstruction of the United Monarchy presented in the book is very much in line with what is known historically and anthropologically about empires.