Nomads and states in comparative perspective

Abstract

Today every inhabited part of the world is controlled by sovereign states of various types and sizes. In contrast before 1600 a majority of the world’s territories were outside their control either because they were unknown to them or because their sovereign claims on paper were effectively resisted by non-state actors. The most numerous and effective of these non-state actors lived as pastoral nomads. Organized as mobile social and political groups, they occupied and defended territories but did not define themselves by them. If they lost one territory, they could re-establish themselves elsewhere and still maintain their solidarity. Those living on the borders of powerful states such as China developed their own political and military strategies that kept them independent until the early modern period, sometimes creating their own empress as did the Mongols in the thirteenth century. On other occasions (particularly in North Africa and the Middle East), they became the ruling dynasties of established states. Changes in military technology and transportation beginning in the nineteenth and accelerating in the twentieth centuries gave territorial states such an advantage that they completely displaced older alternative forms of that had been politically significant for thousands of years.