I'd like to tag on to this: what constitutes a 'state'? Though not in the academy myself, I occasionally review/edit papers for friends who are, and often encounter frustratingly elastic and confounding usage of this term in historical and archaeological academic literature. It's the peanut butter of political grouping terms: sticks to almost everything, thus spread so thin it ceases to have any distinctive flavor.

I can understand how unqualified use may be unavoidable in shorter-form works such journal and edited volume chapters. Tight word count budgets often mean limiting precise and focused definitions only to more exotic specialist jargon, and 'state' may seem too familiar a term to burn precious column space on a nuanced elaboration.

To be fair, my experiences with archaeo-x literature have been the most frequently exasperating in this regard. Nearly every paper I've read attempts to bookend the methodology and data dump sections with a narrative whereby the preserved material facts from this or that context are presented as (among other things) evidence of a given group's 'state' agency. But what the author means by 'state', in the abstract, is never formally defined. It's just invoked in casual, unqualified references like 'state sanctioned' or 'state ritualization' or 'controlled by the state' where the entity presumed to be the 'state' is not explicitly identified with an organized body but instead implicitly sketched out by actions mapped on to the material record; a circumspection which tends to evoke little more than an ambient set of sociocultural 'powers' emanating from 'elites','nobles','royals', and my favorite, 'state actors' all mingled interchangeably in a hazy ontological miasma.

Am I just not knowing how to use the three seashells here, and simply ignorant of a widely-acknowledged default sense of 'state' imputed by the typical consumer of this literature? Would it be, i dunno, the Weber sense of the term? The Marxist sense? One of the Greeks? Has the term come to mean different things over time, and if so, is there a dominant meaning that tracks with different historical periods or does the most current academic usage always project backward on to whatever period is being discussed?

I admit my sample is rather narrow, but chasing down references into more fundamental literature in the field has done little to clear this up for me. Is there a resource I could turn to that would help clarify this question in a fundamental survey sort of way - with a title that might read along the lines of "the Evolution of State Identity in World History for Dummies" ?

I think of this questions in terms of economic history: was there a "global" economic system which was centered in the empire. There have been a number of global economic systems, in the sense they covered the known world at the time, but only in the current world economic system do we see a truly globalized economy.

In my readings of Braudel, the current global economic system centered in Venice, when Venice was the conduit between the trans Alpine mining and markets and the Levant. This financial domination moved to Genoa then Amsterdam, finally resting in London. The Spanish exploitation of the New World was financed by the Genoese, thus Spain never held the reins of the economy despite the incredible wealth they mined from the Americas. By this definition only the British truly had an empire though the Dutch may have held the title for a while. It appears the USA has been world emperor since about WWII, but that's my guess.

Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th - 18th Century; and The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World.