The world we live in today was created by the rebellions against colonialism and Western control in the twentieth century. Before the First World War, the globe consisted mainly of empires, European and other, with Western expansionism having gone through a particularly virulent phase since the 1870s. Non-imperial sovereignty was weak, even among the European and Latin American countries that constituted most of the world’s independent states. Now, a hundred years later, the empires are gone (with a possible exception for China and Russia) and the number of sovereign countries has more than quadrupled. Behind this transformation was a set of revolutions that insisted on the right of colonized peoples to construct states with the same forms of sovereignty and authority as empires had had in the past. In this metamorphosis lies both a nominal democratization of interstate affairs and the origins of many of our present troubles.