THAT STATES need armies, and that they must in consequence dispose of effective means of recruiting, equipping and maintaining them, hardly needs to be demonstrated. But different states have adopted different means of achieving this, and the papers in the present volume seek to explore some aspects of the mechanisms through which the late Roman/early Byzantine and the early Arab Islamic states organised the distribution of resources and structured their armies. The relationship between states and their armies is important both for the state centre, as well as for the state as a wider political and territorial entity. In pre-modern states this is generally mediated through the relationship between the centre and its bureaucracy and administrative apparatus, on the one hand, and between the centre and the dominant social-economic élite(s) and/or locally-rooted power structures, on the other. Bureaucratic élites and dominant local power élites may or may not overlap or be drawn from the same social sources. Depending upon the variations in the equation represented by the three or four elements: state - administrative apparatus - social élite - locally legitimate non-central powers - a wide range of possible state formations and legal-constitutional systems has evolved. But the key issue is state power, that is to say, the degree to which the centre can achieve or maintain a monopoly of coercive force, and hence exercise direct control over the resources necessary to its own reproduction and of the administrative machinery through which this is achieved. There is also the question whether states necessarily need to maintain this sort of control or authority in order to survive as states. In addition, certain social-economic and ideological interests are built into this relationship, which will be represented through the factional and political identities evident in the sources.

How do we define a “state“?

It seems almost impossible to arrive at a universally accepted general definition which has any real analytic value. But we need to do it, since although our definitions may vary, the idea of the state is central to our attempts to explain how the political formations with which we are concerned evolved. Historians and anthropologists tend to define the state in terms of the questions they wish to ask. As with any definition, therefore, the notion of “the state” must be used as a heuristic tool, rather than as a conceptual strait-jacket which ignores the fundamentally dynamic and dialectical nature of human social praxis. A useful reminder that this is the case is suggested by the fact that forms of rulership reflect the already socially inscribed nature of power relations: whether we describe these relations in terms of Weber’ s notion of patrimonial or professional bureaucratic structures, for example, should make no difference.