A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war. As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet. The existence of a large frontier—rather like migration to the New World for poor Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—provided a less dangerous avenue of relief than rebellion.
