Above: one of the U.S. border patrol’s surveillance blimps With the advent of colonialism, the state’s capacity for control was made far more wide-reaching, and far more intensive. This was by necessity, because the level of repression that had been normal under feudalism wasn’t adequate for the task which Europe’s bourgeois new ruling class had taken on. That task was to assimilate as much of the globe as possible into their extractive arrangement, which with the development of capitalism would require unprecedented proportions of exploitation in order to survive. Relative to the nature of the state in this new era, the medieval state had been extremely limited in its capacity to exercise sovereignty.