I have a review essay of four books coming out in Society and Space in issue 1 next year. The books are Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy; Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600 and Darshan Vigneswaran, Territory, Migration, and the Evolution of the International System. The review is entitled “From Hinterland to the Global: New Books on Historical and Political Understandings of Territory”.

Here’s the beginning and end:

These four books all, in different ways, rely upon and contribute to understandings of territory. They move from the very historical to the resolutely contemporary, and in two cases combine the political-historical in important and insightful ways. The most fully historical is Tom Scott’s The City-State in Europe, which takes a broad comparative approach to the formation and transformation of polities in Western Europe from the high Middle Ages to the…