Low Information Voter on Nostr: That I can agree with, but I also think this is a core feature of Statism. The ...

That I can agree with, but I also think this is a core feature of Statism.

The violent disappearance of the weaker states at the hands of the stronger has been going on since at least the Bronze Age.

Large states also can collapse - Orlov's Five Stages of Collapse - leaving a patchwork of non-state and micro-state successors.

But the overall trend has been monopoly at larger and larger scales.

If revenues can be extorted and violence deployed at greater scale, then it will be, up to the logistical and administrative limits of the era. See "Against The Grain" for more details.

In the present era, nothing techically prevents one state from going global and introducing a new Dark Age of totalitarian stagnation. If it weren't for nuclear weapons taking the profit out of the biggest cases, I daresay it would have happened already.