This book is a significant and welcome addition to the literature on state formation. As is true of any ambitious collection of essays, it provides an opportunity to consider how scholarly treatment of a subject has evolved since the last landmark study in the field — in this case, since the publication of Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994), edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent. If that 20-year-old volume was notable for its argument that state formation could be studied from a cultural and popular perspective emphasizing the “negotiation of rule,” the book presently under review illustrates the multiplicity of approaches and perspectives employed by scholars today. The authors in Miguel Centeno and Agustin Ferraro's volume — an array of 19 historians and historically oriented social scientists — share inspiration from a range of theorists, including Michael Mann, James Scott, Charles Tilly, and Lawrence Whitehead, but they do not...

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