The key point for our purposes is that, once established, the state was disgorging subjects as well as incorporating them. Causes for flight varied enormously—epidemics, crop failures, floods, salinization, taxes, war, and conscription—provoking both a steady leakage and occasionally a mass exodus. Some of the runaways went to neighboring states, but a good many of them—perhaps especially captives and slaves—left for the periphery and other modes of subsistence. They became, in effect, barbarians by design. Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine
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