But a further group of non-citizens must be addressed: slaves.
Thanks to the multi-state system, numerous wars followed. One such was the War of the Austrian Succession. This culminated in the Peace of Utrecht.
The agreement between Britain and Spain - the asiento - was that the latter would grant the former permission to export 4,800 slaves per year to the Spanish colonies in the New Word for 30 years.
Slaves clearly had no right to "life, liberty and property", unlike the citizens of Europe. Between 1600 and 1750 an estimated 450,000 Africans were dispatched to Spanish America under the asiento system.
Again, the feted nomocracy seems to be playing truant here.
Slaves comprised 1% of the Chinese populace, according to Jacques Gernet. In Islam, there was slavery, but of a very different calibre. They were primarily consumer goods - for 'conspicuous consumption' - rather than for production. Furthermore, they occurred in every stratum - from mine worker, to domestic servant, to bureaucrat, to soldiery and even to the kingship. As Finer himself notes, "Mamluk" meant a man of slave origin; yet it was the Mamluk soldiery that alone defeated the Mongols where all others had failed. The Slave Sultans of Delhi are all too well-known.
Finer goes into great detail regarding the almost insurmountable forces arrayed against a European monarch in consolidating his rule and realm in the guise of the Church, the magnates, the cities... and so on, all fungi left over from the despoiled Roman garden. Taxation was paramount to wage war. Yet Europe's monarchs were fiscally starved by the above centrifugal forces.
In antipodean opposition were the Asian states where the populace (subjects, not citizens, remember?) were "born taxpayers".
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