Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992

Résumé : The central theme of the book is state formation. Tilly writes about the complex history of European state formation from the Middle Ages to the 1990s - a thousand-year time span. While examining political, social, and technological change, Tilly attempts to explain the unprecedented success of the European nation-state as the dominant polity in the world, claiming that "the origins of the modern European state lay in war and preparations for war.