A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering, instead, the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of
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