John -TMF – Ah yes,but the biggest fist is not necessarily a physical fist. It could be an intellectual fist.
Not all societies, or people living as a collective, are ‘nation-states’. All people, however, are geographic; i.e., they live in a particular terrain and assume some control or ‘right-to-live’ in that space.
And all peoples live within ‘normative habits of belief and behavior’. These include their normative habits of marriage, economic tasks, gender and age and task differentiation, rules of heredity, beliefs about morality, etc.
The ‘nation-state’ is a 15th and later development. [I consider the irrigation societies of Egypt, Aztec, Inca, etc to be more in the line of 'city-states', a minor point.] Certainly, they operated within a clear outline of normative beliefs and behaviour, which were gradually articulated in written and legal form.
Tribal rights to hold on to land weren’t always asserted, and gained, by brute force, for tribes cannot always afford to lose warriors. In many small population tribes, the confrontations were ‘show’; they were public, they were ritualistic, but they were not meant to decimate the other peoples.
The nation states, with their rising populations, were indeed focused on obtaining more resources, but, I’d say that intellectual superiority, i.e., technological capacities, became The Fist, rather than brute force.
