Introduction

Summary

Whether or not we acknowledge them, the territorial borders of our modern world still shape the narratives historians write. These ubiquitous lines of political control have become “global uniformities,” emerging with what C. A. Bayly termed the “birth of the modern world.”¹ Many of today’s borders embody linear legacies of empire, reflecting the territorialization of the globe in the nineteenth century as European empires reached the zeniths of their power. And while many historians have recently attempted to transcend the national borders of the present by turning (or returning) to global scales of analysis, persistent questions of state formation at the core of even the most global histories resist the boundary-dissolving tendencies of transnational history – though the history of modern border making is itself a decidedly transnational one.