The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.

Kimberly J. Morgan is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington DC. She received her PhD in political science from Princeton University, New Jersey and has been a fellow at New York University's Institute of French Studies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research program at Yale University, Connecticut, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr Morgan is the author of two books, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policy in Western Europe and the United States (2006) and The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy (with Andrea Louise Campbell, 2011), and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of US Social Policy (2014).

Ann Orloff is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, and Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair at Northwestern University, Illinois. She received her PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey and her BA from Harvard University, Massachusetts. Orloff is the co-editor of Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (with Julia Adams and Elisabeth Clemens, 2005) and the author of States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States (with Julia O'Connor and Sheila Shaver, 1999). Orloff co-founded Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society and is past president of the Social Science History Association. She has held visiting positions at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Sciences Po (Paris), and the Australian National University, Canberra; she has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Russell Sage Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association of University Women.