Аннотация:This chapter claims war makes states, and discusses that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other. The reflections that follow merely illustrate analogy of war making and state making with organized crime from few hundred years of European experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying experience. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making. Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. Government's provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise.
