to master a society, they first had to discover who was in it. The state “had to create citizens with identities,” Scott wrote. “It had to create citizens with names that could be recorded, with matching addresses, put down in cadastral surveys.” State-making in early modern Europe required a “legible” society; the state had to understand itself before it could do anything. “And in the process of making society legible,” Scott says, “it changed it radically.”
