The early modern period has drawn a greater -- it would not seem accurate to say *disproportionate* -- share of attention from historians than other periods for which they have sought to test Max Weber's thesis, as expressed in Die Politik als Beruf (1919), that the state can be understood as the authority that exercises a monopoly on legitimate physical violence. This is not altogether surprising. A predominant understanding of the early modern period in western Europe holds that it was then that New Monarchies arose and began a process of eliminating any rivals to their military and policing power within their dominions. Once largely a preserve of Western European history, insights influenced by or resembling those of Weber have been applied to the Mughal realms, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and many other parts of the world besides. Weber himself was not chronologically precise, perhaps because he did not claim to be an historian, but rather was interested in the developments he described outside of precise timelines. But major issues such as the validity and chronology of the concept of feudalism, applicable in Japan and Persia as in Europe, depend to some extent upon when we see the breakdown of feudal systems taking place, and the replacement of many localized centers of power with centralized judicial, police, and military functions acting in the name of a single sovereign authority. One wants to avoid progressivist versions of history, while still conceding that the trend has been, albeit sometimes gradual and with brief reversals, in the direction of military and police standardization and centralization virtually everywhere in the world since the French Revolution. None of this, of course, implies that states today, or for the last several centuries, have enjoyed in practice an iron grip on legitimate acts of violence, whatever some rhetoric in international law may proclaim. Newspaper stories on topics from the Wagner Group in Russia to the private armies that, and warlordism in Somalia today, or in Central Asia and China in the 1920s, testify to the fragility of states' ability to control and canalize violence in directions favorable to their perceived interests. Our three papers have in common that all of them will examine aspects of the great limitations that early modern rulers labored under when attempting to control borders, enforce laws, and levy reliable forces to carry out their political aims.