Over a period of several centuries, in a contested, uneven, and layered evolution, the structure of international politics in Europe underwent a fundamental transformation. The complexity of late medieval political organization was regularized and homogenized, yielding our familiar international system, constituted by territorially exclusive sovereign states. This system of states remains the foundation for political organization to this day. In spite of the momentousness of this change, important causal drivers and processes remain unexamined, and key aspects of statehood remain unexplained. This book considers the overlooked but significant role played by cartography in the emergence of modern territorial sovereignty out of the complexity of medieval political rule.

In order to understand just how important mapping was to the constitution of our state system, however, we need first to reconceptualize what we are explaining when we account for the origins of political modernity. What exactly do we mean by the formation of sovereign states? Which aspects of statehood have been explained, and which have been ignored? These questions are made more complicated by our propensity to read backwards into history from the political arrangements of today. In fact, our system of sovereign, territorial states is not a standard from which rare periods of complexity have diverged; instead, states today represent a unique configuration of political authority requiring close scrutiny and explanation.¹

This chapter offers a historically directed approach to understanding our world of territorial states and its origins in early modern Europe. In particular, I highlight the importance of ideas and practices of political authority to the constitution of sovereignty, statehood, and the modern international system. With this focus, the character and timing of the shift from medieval to modern political structures becomes clear.

Conceptualizing political change: authority and the international system

In order to identify and explain transformations of international political structures – historical and contemporary – we need a means for describing any particular set of organizations and institutions in terms that are both historically appropriate and, at the same time, comparable across periods and cultures.² Neorealist International Relations theory contends that the relevant features of any international system are captured by three characteristics – two of which are assumed to be unchanging – and thus represents the extreme in terms of developing abstract categories comparable across periods. Unfortunately, this approach fails to capture the possibility of change or the existence of systems with characteristics different from those of modern states.³ The other end of the spectrum is represented by theories that recognize the particularity of the modern state system and the contingency of its origins. Yet most of these theories tend to describe modern statehood in terms of a set of unique characteristics, removing the possibility of developing categories for effective historical comparison.⁴

Instead, we should describe political institutions in a way that is clearly defined, applies to a wide range of contexts, and avoids assuming that all eras have shared the basic characteristics of the modern state system. This can be accomplished by narrowing our focus to the dominant ideas of political authority and their instantiation in political practices. Authority – defined as the right and ability to demand obedience – is integral to politics in all eras and circumstances.⁵ Ideas and practices of political authority are thus central both to the structure of the international system and to the constraints and incentives presented to actors within that system.⁶ In International Relations, for example, internal sovereignty (effective control over a territory) is distinguished from external sovereignty (recognition of that authority by other states). Both, however, are defined by the character of the authority that a political actor holds, both internally vis-à-vis subject persons, jurisdictions, or territory and externally in terms of the divisions between political entities.⁷

The state sovereignty of today’s international system is, therefore, defined by a particular collection of ideas and practices of political authority: specifically, territorial demarcation and mutual exclusion. These fundamental features of state sovereignty are unique to the modern state system, rather than immutable properties of all human political organization.⁸ The authoritative ideas and practices that undergird modern state sovereignty should therefore be directly interrogated in order to understand both how they emerged from a very different set of arrangements in the late Middle Ages and how they may be changing today.⁹

Ideas and practices of political authority can be investigated by focusing on rule: who rules? Who has rule over what domain? How is that domain defined? How are the rules of different authority-holders separated? Answering these questions allows us to compare foundational political ideas and practices across historical periods.¹⁰ The following paragraphs pursue this approach, presenting a typology of authority types. This is by no means exhaustive of the possible variations in authority, but it nonetheless captures the key differences between medieval political structures, the modern state system, and many other possible arrangements.¹¹ Furthermore, it reveals the specific features of modern statehood that are explained by mapping and its effects, allowing us to distinguish these territorial elements of the sovereign state from other features – such as centralization or bureaucratization – that have been explained by other theories. Two forms of variation in authority are fundamental: the conceptual basis for authority (territorial versus non-territorial, with variation also existing within each category) and the exclusivity of authority (exclusive versus overlapping).

All authority claims have some conceptual basis: ideas defining who or what is subject to the authority in question and how the limits of that authority are understood. The primary distinction is between authorities defined in territorial or spatial terms (in various forms) and authorities defined without reference to space or place.¹²

Territorial authority is familiar to us today, although modern territoriality is merely one of many possible spatial forms of authority.¹³ Territorial claims can be made based on authority radiating outward from a center of control, or they can be made over spaces defined by clear boundaries. Rulers in many pre-modern polities defined their realms as a center of strong control that faded toward the peripheries.¹⁴This was the case even in polities with ostensibly linear boundaries such as the Roman limes (including Hadrian’s Wall) and the Great Wall of China: rather than linear bounds, these fortifications were seen as temporary stopping places on the way to world conquest and were used for internal control as much as for external defense.¹⁵ Political actors did not conceptualize their rule in terms of exhaustive claims defined by discrete and absolute divisions. Territorial authority defined by boundaries, however, is fundamental to the modern state system, as states are defined, in theory if not always in practice, by fixed and discrete boundaries. These boundaries neatly delineate the complete authority of one state from the similarly complete authority of its neighboring states.

Another source of variation in territoriality is the degree of distinction among diverse parts of the spatial claim. Differentiated conceptions of territory posit space as a succession of unique places, each with particular (and perhaps incomparable) characteristics. Homogeneous territoriality sees an undifferentiated space, without qualitative differences between different areas.¹⁶ When considered together, these two forms of variation (center-focus versus boundary-focus, differentiated versus homogeneous) reveal the possibility of fundamentally divergent forms of territorial authority: on the one hand, many historical eras’ notion of rule over collections of places and, on the other, the modern notion of boundary-defined political spaces. The dominant position enjoyed by the latter understanding is unique to the modern world.

Non-territorial authority, in contrast, encompasses claims to political rule that are defined in ways that do not incorporate spatial terms.¹⁷ This category includes a wide range of authority claims, including most prominently those made over individual persons or collections of persons, without regard to their spatial location or distribution. Authorities claimed on a universal level over particular issue areas or types of transactions are also effectively non-territorial: with no boundaries to those claims, they are not operationalized in spatial terms. Although non-territorial claims are the exception in today’s state system, they have constituted a common form of authority in other historical settings.

Independently of its conceptual basis, authority can also vary between the complete exclusivity held by a single authority figure and the overlapping or sharing of authority among multiple holders. If it is exclusive, authority is by definition final; that is, there is only one locus of authority over the particular persons, territories, or issue jurisdictions in question. Overlapping or non-exclusive authority, by contrast, exists when the same subject or target of authority has more than one ruler. Historically, non-exclusive authority has existed in many forms, including multiple homage in feudalism or nomadic claims to territory only as a periodic route of migration rather than as permanent and exclusive claims.¹⁸ The modern state system is defined by exclusive authority, at least in theory; overlaps and shared rule are treated as exceptional.

These ideas about political authority – how it is defined, how it is exercised, and who holds it over what or whom – do more than define abstract notions of sovereignty or political rule. These ideas shape the fundamental structure of political organization and interaction, by determining the identities of actors and their internal and external organization.¹⁹ Internally, how is authority defined? Rule could be defined as territorial control over diverse places or over delimited spaces, or as a claim over collections of persons. Externally, how are the divisions between different rulers’ domains conceptualized and effected? Modern states are understood to have discrete and precise boundaries, but other polities have had very different forms of divisions. The identity of a political actor is defined by these ideas, and thus an actor’s interests are shaped by them as well. What is meant by security or conquest, for example, changes depending on the domain that is being defended or expanded.²⁰

The organization of the actors within an international system is also shaped by those same ideas and practices of political authority. Ideas concerning how actors are related to one another – that is, if any has authority over another – provide the underlying structure to how the system is organized. Contrary to the assumption by neorealist theory that anarchy is permanent and immutable, an examination of authority reveals that every international system has hierarchical elements. International systems historically have varied widely in their degree of hierarchy, and even today’s sovereign-state system – though built on the principle of formal equality – contains hierarchical authority relations.²¹

These ideas, about who are the recognized actors and how they are organized, fundamentally structure behaviors and outcomes in international politics. Actors’ interests are informed by their identities, and the degree of recognition of the legitimacy of other actors’ claims shapes interaction. By exploring the particular character and timing of the shift from medieval to modern political authority structures, the following pages highlight key elements of this transformation that require explanation. The medieval period was characterized by diverse authority types – territorial and non-territorial, overlapping and complex – which, by the early nineteenth century, were reshaped into the modern uniformity of mutually exclusive territorial statehood.

Political authority in the late Middle Ages

In late medieval Europe, ideas and practices of political authority were complex, mixing a range of territorial and non-territorial bases for rule and thus constituting international structures very different from those of the modern state system.²²

Some political authorities were understood and operationalized in territorial terms, though in a way that was distinct from modern territorial statehood. Most territories were defined by a center of control rather than being delineated by discrete boundaries. Contiguous political entities were most often separated by loosely controlled frontier zones rather than by clear linear demarcations, and the peripheries of larger polities were more loosely controlled than the centers. For example, authority in independent city-states was understood to radiate outward from an urban center into a rural hinterland. Although there were some linear divisions – such as waterways used to delimit authority – these were the exception rather than the rule.

Another aspect of medieval territorial authority that differs from modern concepts of authority is the high degree of differentiation among diverse places in the territory. For example, French kings held some parts of France as personal possessions and other parts through feudal vassals. Also, in the Italian city-states, the central city was ruled very differently from the outlying subject towns, let alone the rural space in between. In short, territorial authority was center-focused and constructed on a diverse collection of ideas.²³

In addition to these territorial claims, political authority in medieval Europe was also based on non-spatial forms of rule. In fact, contrary to how we might read backwards from today, the non-territorial forms of authority were often more important to the structure of rule than were territorial claims. The primary form that non-territorial authority took was the system of feudal ties between lords and vassals. Medieval polities were built around networks of homage and vassalage running from kings down to low-level knights. Although feudalism involved the granting of fiefs in land, the superior’s authority was based on a personal bond, not on territory.²⁴ In addition to direct feudal bonds, which were, in theory if not always in practice, based on face-to-face interactions, political rule on a larger scale was also understood as rule over persons rather than over territory. Medieval kingship was founded on the notion of a connection between the king and “the people,” and subjects expressed their side of this bond through symbolic oaths of loyalty. Law, similarly, was applied to peoples rather than to states or territories.²⁵

Non-territorial authorities also included claims over particular offices or issue jurisdictions, which were made without clear spatial definitions. For example, the Treaty of Verdun (AD 843) divided Charlemagne’s empire into three parts. Although in retrospect this looks like a simple territorial partition, in fact the division was framed in terms of jurisdictions and revenues, not territory per se. The shares were meant to be “equivalent in regard to revenues and equivalent in regard to the amount of lucrative offices (honores) and benefices that could be distributed among the aristocracy.”²⁶ Both the ends and the means of this division were conceived of in jurisdictional, rather than territorial, terms.

Overall, rule in the late Middle Ages included various territorial and non-territorial authorities. These forms of authority coexisted not just throughout the region, but also often within a single political entity. A king could claim different parts of his realm based on different principles, territorial or non-territorial.²⁷

These authorities, moreover, were not exclusive, as the vague jurisdictional frontiers and complex feudal networks made overlapping claims normal. Feudal relations created situations of overlapping control, as vassals could owe fealty – and military service – to more than one lord.²⁸These complexities made resolutions among actors at the highest level far from simple. For example, during the Hundred Years War, the obscure origins of the rights of lords to rule their fiefs sometimes left the French and English negotiators unable to settle claims – even when the two parties agreed on who should get what – because the local lords refused to recognize the right of either side to assign control.²⁹ These complexities and overlaps blurred the modern distinction between internal and external affairs, both in terms of diplomacy (as actors at many levels within one kingdom would send embassies) and in terms of taxation (where internal and external tariffs and duties were identical).³⁰

Thus, while it has been argued that state sovereignty appeared in the late Middle Ages – at least in a nascent form – this runs against the evidence concerning how political authority was conceived and operationalized.³¹ Although authority claims were made based on territorial designations, these by no means reflected the underlying principles of sovereign statehood. Notably absent was the modern idea of authority being solely defined by discrete territorial boundaries and being theoretically exclusive within those lines. Instead, both in theory and in practice, authority was constituted by diverse territorial and non-territorial claims, often overlapping and with vague divisions between them. In other words, although there had been some movement toward a more territorial form of rule by the end of the Middle Ages (including, in one well-known example, the shift in title from the “King of the Franks” to the “King of France”), this did not represent a transition to modern territorial statehood or sovereignty.³²

This range of authority types constituted an international system composed of a diverse collection of polities, organized with a complex mix of hierarchical and anarchical relationships. Medieval political theory reflected this diversity, as discussions of political organization incorporated a wide range of terminologies and doctrines.³³ Political conflict and cooperation involved kingdoms such as France or England, the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, city-states in Italy and elsewhere, independent city-leagues, and non-territorial corporate groups. None of these polities resembled small-scale versions of the exclusively territorial states of the modern world, nor could they be considered the direct precursors to modern states. In kingdoms, for example, rulers held only incomplete authority over their realms, founded as much on feudal ties and rule over the gens (or people) as on territorial claims. The latter, in any case, were asserted over places, not over delimited spatial expanses.³⁴ The Holy Roman Empire was even more divergent from our norm of modern statehood, as the emperor was simultaneously a German king, the arbiter among a loose federation of small principalities, and a largely symbolic authority figure over all of Christendom.³⁵ City-leagues, such as the Hansa, performed many functions we now associate with states but remained non-hierarchical and only loosely confederated, with limited control over hinterlands. City-states were also common in the late Middle Ages but were not the miniature territorial states they are often declared to be: cities did not have complete or exclusive authority over subject towns or the countryside, and boundaries between city-states were rarely discrete territorial demarcations.³⁶

This complex collection of political actors, founded on numerous overlapping authorities, created an international system organized around a mix of anarchical and hierarchical relationships.³⁷ Concerning the latter, medieval political theory often advocated for the unity of all of Christendom under a single authority – of the Church or the emperor. While such arguments by no means determined the actual relationships between political actors, they did create the possibility for authority relations to exist, if not throughout the system then at least in parts of it. Similarly, although feudalism may have been in decline by the fourteenth century relative to the preceding period, feudal bonds still constrained the interactions of key actors. For example, the lord–vassal relationship between the French and English kings was part of what instigated the Hundred Years War in the mid 1300s and continued to frame the interactions between the two rulers throughout the conflict.³⁸ The status of the Holy Roman Empire similarly reflected the continuing influence of hierarchical elements into the late Middle Ages. While polities outside Germany rarely acknowledged any de facto authority of the emperor, the principalities within the boundaries of the empire continued to be subject to limited imperial authority and interacted through imperial institutions.³⁹

This mixture of hierarchical and non-hierarchical organization among medieval actors shaped political interactions, as was particularly evident in late medieval diplomacy. Envoys, ambassadors, and other representatives were sent between various actors, rather than today’s practice where only recognized, sovereign states treat with one another.⁴⁰ For example, the Congress of Arras (1435) is seen now as a three-way summit between England, France, and Burgundy, but it actually involved a much larger number of actors. The French contingent included not only representatives of the crown, but also those of the nobles and the towns, with an unclear relationship to the royal embassy. Towns ostensibly under the authority of England, France, or Burgundy had semi-independent policies. Paris itself had three groups representing it, one each from the clergy, the city burghers, and the university. Finally, the English embassy was actually a “double embassy” – England proper and Lancastrian-controlled France had separate representatives. Even this apparently simple diplomatic meeting demonstrates the variety of political units active within what is now France.⁴¹

These actors, moreover, saw themselves as members of a single society of Christendom with a shared set of goals for diplomatic interaction. In theory, this society was hierarchical, with the pope held as the highest authority. Although historians have rightly noted that popes rarely if ever achieved this position in practice, the papacy often served as a key mediator in diplomatic interactions, and thereby shaped outcomes indirectly.⁴² For example, papal mediators were essential in negotiating many truces – so much so that during the Great Schism (1378–1417), warring parties found it much harder to settle their differences because they often backed different papal claimants and refused to recognize mediators from rival factions.⁴³ After the end of the Schism, papal representatives once again took a central role in negotiations, such as at the Congress of Arras, where the French–English negotiations were held entirely through papal mediators, without any face-to-face meetings.⁴⁴

Treaty-making practices also reflected the complexity of medieval political authority, as treaties were signed between various actors and were seen as personal obligations rather than as legal agreements between institutionalized states.⁴⁵ Medieval laws of war also differ from their modern equivalents, largely due to the concept that all of Christendom was a single hierarchical society. The type of law applied to war, jus gentium (law of peoples), was seen as common to all Christian peoples, and simultaneously governed what we would consider internal and external military conduct. Ostensibly public crimes such as treason were treated as personal offenses against the ruler, based on the nature of the lord–vassal bond.⁴⁶

In short, late medieval political rule, organization, and interaction were built on a complex collection of territorial and non-territorial authorities, with hierarchical ties connecting rulers throughout the region. This was fundamentally transformed during the early modern period as a system of exclusively territorial states emerged.

Modern political authority and sovereign statehood

Today’s international system rests on an authoritative foundation of rule entirely different from what has just been outlined. We now have exclusively territorial states, separated by discrete boundaries and claiming absolute authority within those lines. This set of political structures, though appearing fundamental to us, was only fully consolidated in the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of European politics. Traditionally, the beginning of the modern state system has been placed at the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years War in central Europe.⁴⁷ Even those scholars who do not attribute the modern state system directly to the treaty tend to see this period generally as marking the consolidation of sovereign statehood after its initial appearance in the sixteenth century, or earlier.⁴⁸ These approaches, recognizing some common features between the modern and medieval periods, ascribe too much continuity to two eras that are essentially different.

Political organization in the first century and a half after Westphalia, though exhibiting forms of rule transformed from those of the late Middle Ages, was by no means identical to the system of exclusively territorial and anarchically organized states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The “Westphalian myth” has been criticized by many authors, including Andreas Osiander, who convincingly argues that the idea that a system of states was created in 1648 is a fallacy, “a product of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century fixation on the concept of sovereignty” and based on seventeenth-century anti-Hapsburg propaganda.⁴⁹ The shift to modern uniformly territorial states was not complete until more than a century after 1648.

In terms of how political rule was conceptualized and put into practice, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed the persistence of medieval ways of defining, and separating, political realms.⁵⁰ For one, political boundaries between actors were not the modern linear frontiers of our state system. The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), which placed the boundary between Spain and France on the Pyrenees mountains, was merely the first phase in creating this modern idea of a territorial border: it recognized the legitimacy of the geographic idea of a natural boundary. Other clauses of the same treaty delineated jurisdictional divisions that actually contradicted the geographic boundary. Discrete territorial divisions along the entire length of this frontier were made clear on the ground only in the 1860s.⁵¹ Furthermore, the description of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century rule as “absolutist” reflected rulers’ aspirations better than their actual abilities, as these purportedly absolutist states are better understood as “conglomerate” or “composite” polities – agglomerations of complex and decentralized contractual relationships – rather than as unified entities.⁵²

These kingdoms and republics, therefore, differed fundamentally from the territorial states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in terms of both their internal organization and their external relations. Composite states such as France or Spain coexisted with a broad range of other political forms, such as those that persisted within the Holy Roman Empire, including electorates, free cities, and secular and ecclesiastical principalities. Contrary to the conventional modern view, relations among these German polities were not completely transformed by the events of 1648, as imperial judicial institutions continued to function and the principalities were understood to be “autonomous” rather than “sovereign.”⁵³ International politics, in short, remained anything but an anarchical order among formally equal, sovereign states.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did witness a key institutional innovation that has been declared to represent the birth of modern statehood: the system of extraterritorial jurisdiction for embassies. This system – resting on the idea that part of one state’s territory is actually subject to another ruler’s authority – is held to be a key milestone in the emergence of sovereign statehood.⁵⁴ Yet the early modern ideas and practices relating to extraterritoriality demonstrate that, rather than creating modern territorial authority, the form of extraterritoriality in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries instead reflected the contemporary form of territorial authority: that is, it focused on places rather than spaces and was defined by centers rather than boundaries. Unlike today’s explicit delineation of the property of an embassy (which is then considered the sovereign territory of the embassy’s state), the immunity of early modern embassies was not demarcated cleanly. Instead, early modern extraterritoriality offered a gradually diminishing sense of immunity as one moved away from the embassy.⁵⁵ Thus, the form of extraterritoriality that developed was fundamentally derived from the existing form of territoriality, based on the era’s ideas about authority in general. Extraterritoriality is variable, just as territoriality is, and is not a cause of change but a sign of it – a particular implementation of territoriality in the practices of rulers and states.

Instead, the early nineteenth century is the period in which the transition from medieval complexity to modern sovereign statehood was consolidated. Unlike the 150-year period following Westphalia, after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) all actors were defined in terms of exclusive territorial authority, and both system-wide and subsystem hierarchies and heteronomies (such as the Holy Roman Empire) were replaced by a great-power-managed anarchical system. In key ideas and practices of rule, the early nineteenth century was not a reactionary “restoration” of pre-Revolutionary absolutism but instead represented the implementation of a collection of ideas and techniques of rule that had developed slowly during the early modern period and that were consolidated during the French Revolution and its aftermath.⁵⁶

By the middle of the nineteenth century, rule had taken on an exclusively territorial form, rather than the earlier mix of territorial and jurisdictional authority claims. In political theory, for example, after the mid eighteenth century, authors such as Emerich de Vattel or Christian Wolff came to define states as sovereign and formally equal and noted the importance for such states to demarcate their boundaries carefully.⁵⁷ This theoretical backing for exclusively territorial authority found expression in the French Revolutionary regime’s doctrine of the state as “an exclusive sovereign authority exercised by a single government over a clearly defined territory.”⁵⁸ Many of the jurisdictional complexities represented by foreign or independent enclaves within the boundaries of states were eliminated by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic conquests, and they were not restored at Vienna. Territorial rule was reconceptualized as a space defined inward from the boundaries rather than outward from a center (or from multiple centers).

This period also saw the final termination of the complex overlapping and shared authorities that had existed in many parts of the continent in the late Middle Ages and in the Holy Roman Empire through the eighteenth century. The Revolution’s concept of sovereignty as having a single locus of authority was among the new tools of power that the ostensibly reactionary post-1815 regimes were happy to keep. This reflected the culmination of a long-term effort by all governments, conservative or revolutionary, to end the sharing of authority over particular domains with other actors. The process was accelerated and completed in particular by Napoleon’s conquests and the resultant vacuum in authority in many realms after his defeat.⁵⁹ This process was supported by many of the preceding centuries’ political writings, such as those of Bodin or Hobbes, which offered useful theoretical backing to the practical imposition of the conception of exclusive sovereignty.

The early nineteenth century, therefore, witnessed the consolidation of the territorial state throughout the European system. Although actors differed greatly in terms of size and power, their constitutive characteristics were, for the first time, almost completely homogeneous. This was the result of two trends progressing since the fifteenth century: the elimination of non-state actors such as the Empire or the city-leagues, and the shift toward exclusive territorial sovereignty as the basis for state rule. The Holy Roman Empire, for example, was formally dissolved in 1806, and city-leagues such as the Hansa had ceased to be important organizations by the eighteenth century. The states that emerged in the post-Napoleonic period were transformed from their composite and weakly centralized precursors: rulers now wiped clean the remaining medieval complexities and overlapping claims in favor of exclusive territorial rule over clearly delineated states.

The possibility of a single hierarchical order extending across Europe was also fully eliminated by 1815, as neither the emperor nor the pope had even a remote possibility of being recognized as a legitimate authority over European rulers.⁶⁰ Instead, the system as a whole was subject to a form of “collective hegemony” under the tutelage of the self-described great powers.⁶¹ Though the terminology has changed, the management of the international system by the most powerful actors has remained a constant feature of the state system since 1815.

The homogeneously territorial definition of the modern state has not been without exceptions, but those exceptions remain defined by the framework provided by the territorially exclusive ideal of statehood. (Today’s challenges to the territorial state are discussed in Chapter 8.) Similarly, features of nineteenth-century political organization that are sometimes considered violations of statehood actually reflect the same exclusively territorial ideal. For example, uniform territoriality extended into European overseas expansion: although the hierarchical internal organization of colonial empires diverged from the anarchical relations among European states, many colonial possessions were nonetheless defined externally in similarly territorial terms, as homogeneous spatial entities separated by linear boundaries.⁶² In fact, Europeans made political claims based on cartographic territoriality earlier in the Americas than within Europe (a process that is detailed in Chapter 5). The contrast between hierarchy within empires and anarchy among sovereign states does not contradict the homogeneously territorial character of the nineteenth-century international system; instead, the difference represented a variation within the framework of exclusive territoriality. This framework remains the baseline against which states are compared, and to which many stateless peoples aspire.

Conceptualizing authority, explaining the territorial state

Medieval authority had various conceptual bases, ranging from territorial to jurisdictional and personal. Complementing this diversity was the prevalence of overlapping and shared rule. In the shift to the modern international system, two major changes to authority occurred. First, the jurisdictional and overlapping forms of authority were eliminated. Second, territorial authority became the sole basis for sovereignty in the modern system. It also underwent a significant change: medieval territorial authority, based on a center-out concept of control of places, was transformed into the modern form of territorial authority, in which control is conceived of as flowing in from firm boundaries that delineate a homogeneous territorial space.

Understanding the particular character and timing of this transformation is a necessary foundation for any explanation of the emergence of modern states. The present chapter’s conceptualization – focusing on the definition and operationalization of political authority – allows us next to examine particular elements of modern statehood that have not been explained sufficiently. The exclusively territorial nature of rule – and the exclusive definition of territories as spaces with discrete boundaries – is fundamental to modern statehood, but it is poorly explained by existing approaches to the emergence of the state. Territorial exclusivity is in fact closely linked to the processes examined in this book: the interaction between mapping technologies and political organization. The next chapter thus examines the early modern revolution in cartographic techniques and uses, providing context essential for explaining the origins of the state.