The standard distinction between settled societies and nomadic or seminomadic peoples captures contrasts in the scale and organisation of warfare. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, who generally relied on pastoral agriculture or slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, were less populous and their governmental structures were less developed. The timing and rate of change are also issues in assessing whether there was a Military Revolution in the early modern period. The standard account posits one period of revolution from 1560 to 1660, indecisiveness and stagnation, then a second period of revolution that began with the outbreak of the War of American Independence in 1775 and continued with the French Revolutionary Wars to 1815. The Ottoman army, and even more the navy, of 1600 were very different from those of 1450, such that there was a sustained transformation in Ottoman war-making. The political culture of the Ottoman court and public finances also failed to support the enhancement of Turkish military capability.

This chapter probes some of the conceptual problems involved in assessments of government growth, with special reference to the case of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It returns to questions which interested welfare-state historians of the 1960s and 1970s, and offers some thoughts on the limited and specific, but nonetheless important ways in which the role of government on the domestic front could be said to have grown both during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The business of government is generated by the choices both of officials and of private persons. Pre-modern states were sometimes able to achieve surprising things with relatively little official involvement and next-to-no public spending. Hilton equates liberalism broadly with the desire to reduce, or enlighten people as to the necessary limits of, government's role, activities and impact.