In a recent debate over warlords, Jackson (2003) and Marten (2007) argue that the concept accurately describes cases stretching much further back in history than the period covered by the contemporary African cases around which the warlord literature developed (Reno 1998; 2002). They suggest that the term warlord applies as readily to early twentieth-century China and feudal barons in medieval Europe as it does to the violent figures operating in Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in the 1980s and 1990s. This effort to free warlord theory from the analytical constraints imposed by the modern state system is a useful corrective, but much too timid. Reaching back to medieval Europe does not address the equally limiting notion that warlords emerge from the disintegration of some prior central authority. Looking much further back than the medieval period highlights the crucial role warlords play in founding stratified societies in the first place, and especially in the earliest efforts to claim private property and concentrate individual wealth – which is to say, become oligarchs. And it is for this reason that the debate over warlords provides a useful entry point for an examination of warring oligarchies.

The historical record confirms that warlords have repeatedly arisen out of the detritus of broken empires and disintegrated states, only to recede again when new kingdoms and centralized regimes are formed. The problem is that this emphasis on breakdown ignores the long period of warlordism that predates the appearance of the first kingdoms.