Historians talk an awful lot about states and the people who live in them. It’s a broad term, since states may be kingdoms or sultanates, republics or confederations, tiny city-states or massive empires. Their people may be citizens with many rights, or subjects with few rights at all. But they all live in states. Of course, this may give us a distorted view of history. Lots of people in the past didn’t lived in states—they just lived wherever they were, escaping the notice of most historians. With the territory of today’s world almost entirely divided into states, and almost every human a citizen of one, our view of the world’s many communities is largely framed by states.
So it’s useful to look at the emergence of the world’s very first states. Individual examples with plenty of detail will come later in the course. For now, let’s explore some descriptions of what a state is, as well as theories about how the first states came into being.