The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow

 

Part 3. Globalizing the Territorial State

 

The language of sovereign territorial states reenvisioned the world as a global order that divided the world into separate states. The practices of colonialism and imperialism inscribed this view on the globe. In Part 3 we show how the territorial state came to depend upon extending its sovereignty beyond Europe, and on the creation of an unequal division of the world’s wealth between European states and the world’s non-European peoples. In Chapter 8 we discuss the expansion of European states and the colonial empires they established across the globe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Chapter 9 deals with the rise of nationalism and the way it re-formed the state and created a range of challenges to European supremacy within the emerging global grid of sovereign territorial states. In Chapter 10 we show how non-European states have reflexively sought to maintain their sovereignty in a hierarchically ordered world of territorial states.

 

The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics