A quick glance across a set of world maps spanning the period from the 1500s to the present creates the impression that an early modern era dominated by empires gave way, by fits and starts over the course of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, to a modern global system composed of nation-states. Indeed, the prevalent view of nationhood and nationalism as quintessentially modern phenomena is, in part, premised on the typological and chronological contrast between empire (understood as a realm composed of various lands and peoples governed under a diversity of legal and institutional arrangements) and nation-state (understood as a more homogeneously governed polity whose legitimacy is derived from its claim to embody the will and interests of a particular people) and on the notion that the transition from the former to the latter was unidirectional and irreversible.