1450 to 1750 xxxvii entailed in hiring private armies (rivalry, rebellion, banditry), the relative advantages of mobilizing national populations, and the high costs of paying for war The cumulative effect of the more or less continuous warfare wracking Europe and its colonies from the 1450s to the 1750s was for state expenditures to grow dramatically and for states to expand their bureaucracies, extend their administrative reach, intensify taxation of their populations, and establish long-term structural relationships with merchants and capitalists Just as states made war, wars made states Some scholars argue that the dynamics set in motion by centuries of intensive military conflicts among early modern European nation-states created the preconditions for the emergence of republican forms of government, understood as a contractual relationship between states and citizens Paying ever higher taxes, and serving in national militaries in ever higher numbers, men demanded something in return—namely, their rights, guaranteed by the state Thus, Enlightenment notions of citizenship and citizens’ rights, some scholars argue, found their origins in the crucible of early modern European wars Women, as non-taxpayers and excluded from military service, were also excluded from the attendant rights demanded by men, thus reinforcing patriarchal norms and gender inequalities relative to the state and within the broader society Warfare, Capitalism, Empires, and Local Responses The Military Revolution in Europe was intimately linked to empire formation, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and all of the other defining characteristics of the era Precisely how this occurred remains the topic of much scholarly research and debate So, too, is the process by which cultures and civilizations around the world responded to these novel methods of waging war The Japanese, for instance, rapidly adopted gunpowder weapons in the 1500s only to close their society to Western influences from the 1610s and largely purge guns and cannons from the island’s repertoire of military technologies In Mesoamerica in the early 1520s, the Aztecs suffered defeat in part because of their different cultural conceptions of warfare, in which capturing enemy soldiers, not taking enemy territory and destroying its state, was the principal goal The ways in which people around the world responded to the European military revolution were as diverse as the world’s peoples