ABSTRACT
In this section I want to examine a number of systems of states in the ancient world: that
is, the world before the rise of European civilization.
It will not be possible, or necessary for our purpose, to examine every known system
that binds together distinct political entities. We need to look at the more important and
well-documented ones, and to cover a representative range of developed systems across
our spectrum, from the most imperially integrated to the most fragmented clusters of mul-
tiple independences, in the same way that a general comparative study of states needs to
extend from centralized and homogeneous examples to loosely federated and diverse ones.
