But the changing context also related to fundamental shifts in the climate of opinion, and beliefs about legitimate rule. Government leaders, metropolitan and imperial state officials, and settlers of the new extra-European possessions increasingly saw war and rule as inherently public prerogatives of the sovereign state, as we do today. The idea of private wars and diplomacy, commonplace in the 1600s, was now conceived as dangerously archaic and illegitimate, especially if they involved other Western states.