Territorial state capacity and elite violence from the 6th to the 19th century

We present new evidence for elite violence using regicide, the killing of kings, and investigate the role of the state in European violence between the 6th and 19th centuries. First, regicide is critically assessed as a proxy for interpersonal elite violence. Second, we propose ‘territorial state capacity’ as a measure of states being able to keep or even expand their territories. We find a negative correlation between the changes in territorial state capacity and the changes in elite violence. This could be interpreted in two ways, either that growing territorial state capacity enabled human society to reduce violence, or that a higher regicide rate resulted in lower territorial state capacity. Another possibility would be a bidirectional mechanism that resulted in a co-evolution of the two variables.