What is the State?

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2022

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The state - a centralized administration that exerts control over a territory and can coerce the people living there - is one of the driving forces of the last several thousand years of history. But when and where did states appear, and why? And can we really call all of the various forms of political control that emerged around the world “states?” We can’t understand the world today without understanding the state, but that’s no easy task.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The villagers looked down from the hillside.
0:13.0	Darkness covered the lowlands below, and the gibbous moon was bright enough only to make
0:16.8	out the faint sparkling of the river as it flowed through the valley.
0:20.6	The only spot of real light came from what had until that day been their village.
0:25.4	Now thatched roofs, glued orange and red, waterland dobb walls had collapsed, and animal
0:30.8	enclosures were still burning.
0:32.8	All of them set aflame by the king's soldiers.
0:36.6	The villagers had refused to pay their taxes, refused to be conscripted to build the king's
0:41.4	new palace, and refused to send their sons to fight in the king's wars.
0:46.8	Refusal had brought them first in ultimatum, obeyed or else, and now the soldiers had destroyed
0:51.9	their homes and stolen the things they'd left behind.
0:55.3	If they hadn't fled into the hills, taking their livestock in a few meager possessions,
0:59.7	the soldiers surely would have killed them or carried them off as captives.
1:03.6	Instead they preferred to run, to leave their home and try their luck elsewhere, where
1:08.6	soldiers couldn't find them and tax collectors couldn't take their harvests and animals.
1:13.8	Life in the hills wasn't easy.
1:15.9	These people had always been villagers, and they had no illusions about that.
1:19.8	It was colder up there, water wasn't always easy to find.
1:23.1	They would have to move more often to avoid exhausting their local resources, and they
1:27.3	couldn't simply tend fields of grain as exhausting and uncertain as that had been.
1:31.9	They would have to change their whole way of life.
1:35.1	But that was a sacrifice they were willing to make.
	...

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