This book traces the rise of the modern state—a mode of organizing political power within a closed territory—in post-Enlightenment Europe and its spread to the remainder of the world, especially colonial and postcolonial societies. The result of a long process of evolution dating back to the Roman Empire, this new form of state was characterized by the coincidence of public power and public space and the legalization of political and social relations. Intimately linked to the transformation of Western European cultures at a time when their economic might allowed them to conquer many regions of