Chapter 4 looks specifically at the reorganisation of military power in this period, which is closely related to the declining power of aristocracies. The rise of the modern state and its monopoly of legitimate force made militaries and law enforcement bureaucratic functions of the state, rather than localised privileges of divided nobilities. The pacification of the nobilities, the subduing of their traditions of martial competition to the modern state, opens up the scope for the more civil forms of competition. The ‘wild’ can now be replaced by the ‘domesticated’.

A state is most centrally composed of an administrative bureaucracy. An enormous literature extrapolates the European experience as universal and, with various modifications, asserts that the demands of war drive states to create institutions that can extract resources from society. There is remarkably little scholarship on state formation in East Asia that engages the social science literature. Most state formation occurred centuries after the initial emergence of centralized Chinese rule in the 2nd century BC, but scant scholarship explores it. Furthermore, much of the bellicist literature does not address the question of diffusion, implying diffusion through natural selection or market forces: those units that adapted best survived, those that didn’t were “winnowed.” In contrast to Europe, in East Asia there was clearly diffusion from core to periphery. Emulation, learning, and competition are all potentially present at the same time. The bellicist theory is possibly limited in that it selectively focuses its attention on a single mechanism of diffusion and institutional isomorphism at the expense of non-coercive mechanisms such as emulation.