adam . # .

(comment length bug ... from prev. btw the login thing seems to be fixed since I upgraded to Firefox 3)

During times of war the flow tended to be the other way, with the extra complication that the main resource states fought over in SE Asia was people themselves. So it's not obviously predator-prey because prey eat different foods to predators. For most of SE Asian history there were more stateless people than state-controlled. That cycle allusion was a bit of Turchin / Scott homebrew I threw in as well. Scott is solidly a qualitative scholar by all accounts.

I don't think Zakaria and Scott are necessarily incompatible; you could say before the advent of the $20k per capita liberal democracy, your choices for liberty were hill tribal anarchy (which, remember, was less marginal than it sounds) or jump. I don't necessarily agree with Zakaria given the Indian experience though. There are also fairly good republican, sub-democratic governments in the world and history.