maximum rent extraction was not an inevitable characteristic of premodern states ruling over agrarian societies. In the Persian theory of the Middle Eastern state that was adopted by the Arabs, one of the monarch’s functions was in fact to protect the peasantry from the rapacious behavior of landlords and other elites who wanted to maximize their rents, in the interests of justice and political stability. The state was thus less a stationary bandit than a guardian of an incipient public interest.
