“In fact, if a roving bandit rationally settles down and takes his theft in the form of regular taxation and at the same time maintains a monopoly on theft in his domain, then those from whom he exacts taxes will have an incentive to produce. The rational stationary bandit will take only a part of income in taxes, because he will be able to exact a larger total amount of income from his subjects if he leaves them with an incentive to generate income that he can tax” (Olson 1993, p. 568).
The chiefdom is less dependent on experience and tradition than the community, and it allows people more opportunities to choose their institutions. It thus sets the stage for the third form of political organization—the state. In the state, application and possession are complemented by property, and power relations are built on tradition and violence as well as formal administration and religion. No state arose without a turn to the supernatural. Like chiefdoms, states did not arise as a result of one-off actions. “‘Stateness,’ in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgment of more or less” (Scott 2017, p. 23). James Scott notes that one of the main tasks that the first states had to solve was to prevent the flight of the population. The border, along with the administrative apparatus, is the distinguishing feature of the state as a political organization (cf. Scott 2017, p. 118). “Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery” (Scott 2017, p. 23).
As the state developed into a comprehensive domain of abstract and social technologies, norms, and mechanisms for their implementation, the formal order became more homogeneous, pushing alternative patterns into the geographical and socio-cultural periphery of a culture-society. The periphery, in turn, refused to adopt complex technologies and organizations from the core of the state for fear of enslavement (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 148-9). States themselves, however, were islands in a sea of non-state populations and had to be wary of their peripheries:
“…The very first states to appear in the alluvial and wind-blown silt in southern Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Yellow River were minuscule affairs both demographically and geographically. They were a mere smudge on the map of the ancient world and not much more than a rounding error in a total global population estimated at roughly twenty-five million in the year 2,000 BCE. They were tiny nodes of power surrounded by a vast landscape inhabited by nonstate peoples—aka ‘barbarians’” (Scott 2017, p. 14).