[sitta]

I did an "epistemic spot check" of the section on Against the Grain, which caught my eye because I just finished reading the chapter on state formation in The Dawn of Everything. Result: It was indeed legible but was oddly false.

I could not find the "well accepted definition" of the state they sourced from Wikipedia [1]. They give the impression that there is an overwhelming consensus as to what the definition is, whereas the Wikipedia page actually states throughout "there is no undisputed definition of a state", "there is no academic consensus on the definition of the state", and provides multiple different definitions. I have not read Against the Grain, but it seems entirely reasonable for the author to offer their own definition, though it sounds like they could have been more forth coming with it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)