The final work of one of the most influential historical sociologists in the United States today. The main thesis of the book is that modern European states were formed in various combinations of military-administrative coercion (primarily tax withdrawal) and capitalist financing (mainly in the form of ever-increasing public debt to private capitalist oligarchies). Charles Tilly (1927-2008), follower of F. Braudel and friend of I. Wallerstein. Based on Braudel’s generalizing worldview, Tilly systematically revealed the full of paradoxes and contradictions dynamics of the growth of state power and, at the same time, society’s resistance to the growth of power over itself, which leads to frequent riots, strikes and revolutions in Western countries of the modern era. From such conflicts, or rather, subsequent or preventive compromises, as shown by the body of work of Tilly and his many followers, gradually, over several centuries, civil rights arise and are formalized by law, the institutionalization of protest movements, legal political opposition and all sorts of forms of what economists called “public goods” - control of violence and crime, access to courts, free education, health care, social benefits, national pension systems. Among experts, the theory of the state proposed by Ch. Tilly is called military-tax - constant wars form states, which in turn acquire morphological features due to what and in what way is available for withdrawal in the form of taxes, duties and taxes.