A very tough book to get through, but a very influential and well-researched: Coercion, Capital, and European States 990-1992.

Tilly argues for the centrality of warmaking in the formation of the European nation-state, and for the nation-state's primacy in warmaking as the reason it became the dominant political organization in the world. Economic, geographic, and political factors set the scene in terms of the relative levels of capital and social structure, but warmaking provides the central drive to state formation.