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Territory as a Political Technology

T he idea of a territory as a bounded space under the control of a group

of people, usually a state, is therefore historically produced. Other
ways of organizing the relation between place and power have existed,
were combined in diverse ways, labeled with multiple terms, argued for
and against, and understood differently. Some of these ideas were reappro-
priated, rearranged, and revised by later thinkers. Others were abandoned
along the way. Nonetheless, the notion of space that emerges in the scien-
tific revolution is defi ned by extension. Territory can be understood as the
political counterpart to this notion of calculating space, and can therefore
be thought of as the extension of the state’s power. Equally the state in
this modern form extends across Europe and from there across the globe.
Therefore, from around this time we are justified in talking of the exten-
sion of the state—in this plural sense.
If the modern concept of territory is established by this time, this is
not to suggest that future developments are unimportant. Far from it.
Yet we should understand in what ways they are important. There are, of
course, fundamental changes to particular territories, and debates about
its understanding, how other political-theoretical concepts such as justice
and rights apply to it, but the concept seems to be in place by then. This
may partly explain the relatively unproblematic way in which the term is
used and implicitly understood in mainstream political and geographical
discussions.
Nonetheless, the historical-conceptual analysis offered here should
not simply be used to support that mainstream view of territory. Territory
should be understood as a political technology, or perhaps better as a bun-
dle of political technologies. Territory is not simply land, in the political-
economic sense of rights of use, appropriation, and possession attached to

322
 Territory as a Political Technology 323

a place; nor is it a narrowly political-strategic question that is closer to a

notion of terrain. Territory comprises techniques for measuring land and
controlling terrain. Measure and control—the technical and the legal—
need to be thought alongside land and terrain. What is crucial in this des-
ignation is the attempt to keep the question of territory open. Understand-
ing territory as a political technology is not to defi ne territory once and
for all; rather, it is to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it was
understood in different historical and geographical contexts.
How this idea was put into practice, with historical and geographical
specificity, would take several other books. There are, of course, a good
number of studies of the histories of specific territories and geographies
of state formation. Philosophers, theologians, jurists, geometers, histori-
ans, explorers, surveyors, and cartographers all play their part. Yet several
things are worth attention. In what remains of this book, two broad ar-
eas of analysis of territory from this point on will be briefly sketched: the
nation and the technical. Much valuable work has already done on these
questions, and it is to be hoped that The Birth of Territory will provide a
historical and theoretical background to those studies.

Given the historical parameters of this study, the concept of the nation
and the ideology of nationalism are outside its bounds. Yet it is perhaps
worth underscoring that the relation between the nation and the state
takes place within the spatial framework that the concept of territory pro-
duces. As Fulbrook puts it, “Historically, the formation of states with a
centralised government administering and controlling a clearly defi ned
geographical territory preceded the articulation of ideas of the nation.”1
The qualification to Fulbrook’s point is that it was the idea of the state and
territory that preceded the nation; in practice it was much more compli-
cated and geographically variegated.
It is clear that the treaties of Westphalia and the others from the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century did not introduce a uniform, and uni-
versally recognized, system. States, such as France, whose territory was
already well established, embarked on projects of nation building within
those existing borders. Breuilly notes that one of the issues behind the
revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth century was the sovereignty
of various enclaves within France that had some allegiance to the Holy
Roman Empire. “The modern conception of France as a tightly bounded
space within which the French state was sovereign was opposed to an
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older conception of power as varying bundles of privileges related to dif-

ferent groups and territories.”2 Similar things happened within England
somewhat earlier and the Scandinavian countries at a similar time. 3
Other national groups sought to create a state to represent them within
defi ned geographical areas.4 These would include those like the Italian and
German unification projects in the nineteenth century, as well as a host
of independence movements across the world in the twentieth and twenty-
fi rst centuries. While the boundaries of states in Europe continue to be an
issue today—1945 was important in securing Western borders, but 1989
opened up a whole range of issues in Central and Eastern Europe—in this
earlier period many of the borders were still porous and ill defi ned, and
sovereignty was overlapping.5 Germany had many internal boundary dis-
putes to solve (whether part of a state was in the confederation or not):
its external boundaries were more or less secure depending on whom that
boundary was with. For example, its boundary with France—“the most
modern, boundary-conscious European state”—was “fi xed with political-
administrative precision”; whereas its southern border was simply a line
drawn on the map of Austria. In the north, with the disputed province
of Schleswig-Holstein, “the ‘boundary’ dispute arose via the question of
‘national sovereignty.’” The way this dispute worked out only served to
reinforce the notion that nation-state was a territorially sovereign state.
“Boundaries came to matter more in this political conception.”6 Breuilly
notes that only with the Weimar Republic did Germany actually become
a state—under Bismarck it had been a Reich, an empire: “The tragedy was
that this state was also the product of defeat—its boundaries were seen as
artificial and its constitution as imposed.”7

Much has been written about the importance of cartography in state proj-
ects. Escolar suggests that the techniques of this rejuvenated cartography
were used for “bureaucratic and administrative management and territo-
rial control of state power in the states of Western Europe” in the sixteenth
century.8 They were prepared to invest heavily in this: as Harley notes,
“The state became—and has remained—a principal patron of cartographic
activity in many countries.”9 While Kain and Baignet suggest that “by
defi nition, state mapping can be practised only after the establishment of
the state,”10 this is in danger of missing the way that, in order to establish
what is actually controlled, mapping becomes both a requirement and a
tool of power. Christian Jacob’s important study on the relation between
 Territory as a Political Technology 325

sovereignty, empire, and cartography is indicative: “The power of maps,

however, is also a tool for power: ruling over a province, a nation, a king-
dom, an empire, protecting or conquering a territory; imposing upon it
the rationality of an administrative grid, a political project of reform or of
development.”11 Given the benefit states gained from accurate maps, it is
no surprise that the key sponsors of advances in cartographic techniques
were states. As Harley puts it, “At the very time maps were being trans-
formed by mathematical techniques, they were also being appropriated as
an intellectual weapon of the state system.”12
Other techniques, such as the ability to more accurately measure lon-
gitude, had important political-cartographic implications.13 As James Scott
has argued, this was about making the state legible: “The premodern state
was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about
its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location,
their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain
and its people.”14
These projects have been studied in some detail in, among other
places, Denmark,15 India,16 and Mexico.17 But it is in France that the most
extensive early project took place.18 Following the 1659 Treaty of the Pyr-
enees, which put an end to the confl ict between Spain and France, a joint
commission was established to set the exact boundary between the two
states, an event that is looked at as inaugurating “the fi rst official bound-
ary in the modern sense.”19 There was also the work done on the border
fortifications of the country by Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, and the
cartographic work done by four generations of the Cassini family.20 The re-
sultant map has been described as “the fi rst original map based on a trigo-
nometric topographic land survey.”21 Yet even though various iterations of
this project were completed in the eighteenth century, the revolution took
this further. While the Cassini map had intended to use geometric and
calculative techniques to make sense of the existing landscape, the revolu-
tion attempted to impose the grid over the top, with the rectangular dé-
partments reordering the geopolitical landscape.22 As Breuilly notes, just
as the revolutionary calendar attempted to secure a more rigorous under-
standing of time, so too did the internal restructuring of France attempt to
undermine “traditional, legitimate understandings of space.” But reason
and nature were in alliance, as boundaries were often established “upon
criteria such as the catchment area of a river.”23
The mapping and control of territory is, in large part, dependent on
such techniques. Only with these kinds of abilities could modern bound-
aries be established as more than a simple line staked out on the ground.
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For mountainous regions, for deserts or tundra, or particularly for the ab-
stract division of unknown places in the colonized world, such techniques
were crucial. They are made possible through a calculative grasp of the
material world, what Lefebvre calls abstract notions of space, or indeed ab-
stract space. One of Lefebvre’s comments on abstract space is relevant here:
“As a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by a state, it is
institutional.”24 There is an inherent violence to these techniques. In the
famous title of Yves Lacoste’s 1976 book, “Geography is, above all, mak-
ing war.”25 Baudrillard’s line of the map preceding the territory has been
picked up by James Corner, Geoff King, and John Pickles, among others.
For Corner, this is always the case, because “space only becomes territory
through acts of bounding and making visible.”26 While Corner recognizes
that Baudrillard is going one stage further, the claim is still central.27
The key is, of course, what kind of map is required, or what kind of
cartographic techniques are needed for the production of territory. None-
theless, techniques that related to territory were not confi ned to the car-
tographic.28 While it is sometimes suggested that the Western model of
the state and its territory was exported to the rest of the world,29 there is
perhaps more truth in seeing the way that in the colonial theater many
of the techniques could be perfected in a purer form. 30 Earlier chapters
showed how some of these ideas of surveying, division of virgin lands, and
so forth, colonial practices for the management of populations, led, or were
partnered by, developments in legal and technical practices. One of the
most widely studied large-scale cartographic, and thereby territorial, proj-
ects is the rectangular land survey in the United States, begun under Pres-
ident Thomas Jefferson, but with earlier antecedents. 31 One of the most
interesting of these can be found in the measuring instruments developed
by English mathematician and astronomer Edmund Gunter (1581–1626),
who had been a professor at Gresham College. Among other mathematical
achievements, he introduced the terms cosine and cotangent. His most fa-
mous study was Use of the Sector, Crosse-Staffe, and Other Instruments. 32
Among these instruments were Gunter’s line or scale, which was an early
slide rule; aids for maritime navigation, including a quadrant; and perhaps
most important, the deceptively simple Gunter’s chain. This was sixty-six
feet long (twenty-two yards), with one hundred links, and originally made
from either iron or brass, and therefore liable to heat-induced errors. It
could be used to measure landscapes, because the length of eighty chains
was exactly one mile. 33 The chain gave both the unit of length of a “link”
and that of a “chain,” which is the length of a modern cricket pitch.
 Territory as a Political Technology 327

Paul Alliès suggests that administration in a general sense is crucial to

what he calls “the invention of territory.” For Alliès it is sufficiently im-
portant that “we can say that administration produced territory,” that “ad-
ministration is therefore a constitutive moment of territory” or integral to
“the production of territory.”34 Yet this works the other way too, since he
also suggests that “territory was this wonderful invention whereby bour-
geois power would tame social interactions and their spatial movement.”35
Equally the relation between these kinds of techniques and the economic
has been studied in some detail, particularly in three key studies by Pierre
Dockés, Frank Swetz, and Richard W. Hadden. 36 The last of these—which
develops ideas found in the work of Jacob Klein and others—is in a sense
the most interesting. Hadden’s argument is that mathematical examples
can be tied to trade and capitalism. His argument is in part based on a
shift in the emphasis concerning property in land, but this is a develop-
ment that clearly predates the early modern era. Rather, Hadden is most
useful in recognizing how the advances in mathematical techniques of
that period found an immediate “market” in early capitalism. It is of
course crucial to recognize that the establish of national markets helped
to constitute and consolidate the spaces in which they operated, even if,
as Marx suggests, ultimately capital seeks to move beyond “every spatial
barrier . . . to conquer the whole world for its market.”37
In the late seventeenth century the idea of political arithmetic was de-
veloped by writers such as John Graunt and William Petty. Petty had been
a student of Hobbes, 38 and he developed a means of analyzing human be-
havior, especially collectively, through “number, weight or measure,” and
aspired to the same rigor as science.39 Graunt, especially in his Natural
and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1682), had
similarly used numerical techniques.40 Political arithmetic was one of the
forerunners of the notion of statistics, which etymologically means the
study of states. Alongside Ian Hacking’s pioneering work on probability,
there are a range of other important works that trace this particular rela-
tion of calculation and the political.41
In the extensive literature on the state, the territorial dimension has
often been neglected or assumed as unproblematic. This is despite the
stress on its importance in Max Weber’s famous defi nition of the state:

The state is that human community, which within a certain area or

territory [Gebietes]—this “area” belongs to the feature—has a (success-
ful) monopoly of legitimate physical violence.42
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However, the territorial part of this defi nition—in distinction to com-

munity, legitimacy, and violence—has been rather neglected.43 Yet just
as the sovereign state was only one of the potential ways to organize
politically,44 alternative ways of spatial ordering have existed. Territory is
a word, concept, and practice, and the complicated relation between these
three terms can only be grasped with historical, geographical, and con-
ceptual specificity. In his work on the history of political thought, Quen-
tin Skinner rightly separates the concept and the word, but suggests that
when a concept exists, a word or a vocabulary will be developed to discuss
it, and that, as a general rule, “The possession of a concept will at least
standardly be signalled by the employment of a corresponding term.”45
In a sense Skinner is right, although the word territory is derived from a
much older word, territorium, which did not always have the same mean-
ing. On the other hand, concepts that appear much closer to what is now
labeled “territory” were previously known by other terms. And the prac-
tices of making, controlling, and defending exist in complicated relations
to these words and concepts. Territory, then, as word, concept, and prac-
tice, is a historical, geographical, and political question.

At the beginning of this book, Rousseau’s discourse on inequality was

quoted. In the light of the story outlined here, we can read Rousseau’s sug-
gestion in a new context. In terms of the question of the state of territory,
it is clear that there have been many “crimes, wars, murders . . . miseries
and horrors” resulting from the division and ordering of the world. Yet
Rousseau comes too late: the genie is out of the bottle. He does not sim-
ply come too late in terms of the particular ordering of states and their
spaces—these would continue to be fought over for centuries, and con-
tinue today—but conceptually too late. He is writing at a time, in the mid-
eighteenth century, when politics was fundamentally conceived as operat-
ing with discrete, bounded spaces under the control of a group of people,
usually the state. Where those boundaries were was still open to question,
of course, and what political structures should operate within the area was
widely debated, as it was in Rousseau’s own writings. But the effective
structure was now widely assumed: it had become the static background
behind the action of political struggles.
Indeed, this is found in Rousseau’s own writings. Rousseau declares
that
 Territory as a Political Technology 329

a body politic can be measured in two ways, by the extent of its terri-
tory [l’étendue du territoire] and by the number of its people, and an ap-
propriate ratio has to obtain between these two measures for the State
to be given its genuine size: The men make up the State, and the land
[terrain] feeds the men; thus the ratio requires that there be enough
land [terre] to support its inhabitants, and as many inhabitants as the
land [terre] can feed.46

He notes the extreme cases where people are “unevenly distributed

across the territory [territoire] and crowded in one place while others get
depopulated.”47 He similarly talks of “the resources provided by a large
territory [territoire].”48
Rousseau recognizes the dual aspect of land property and state terri-
tory. Individuals can lay claim to particular sites, which can be within the
larger territory of the polity. In this respect we should understand “the soil
as both public territory and the patrimony of private individuals.”49 The
sovereign and the private individual can therefore have different rights to
the same land.50 Rousseau recognizes that there is a link between these
processes, suggesting that “it is intelligible how individuals’ combined
and contiguous pieces of land [terre] become the public territory [terri-
toire], and how the right of sovereignty, extending from subjects to the
land they occupy, becomes at once real and personal.”51
Yet while the emergence of the idea may have shifted from people to
land, it now works the other way round. Rousseau notes that while they
previously called themselves kings of peoples, now “present-day monarchs
more shrewdly call themselves Kings of France, of Spain, of England,
etc. By thus holding the land [terrain], they are quite sure of holding the
inhabitants.”52 Rousseau thus rehearses an argument that was anticipated
in, among others, Locke. This is made explicit when he suggests that “once
the State is instituted, consent consists in residence; to dwell in the terri-
tory is to submit to sovereignty [habiter le territoire c’est se soumettre à la
souveraineté].”53
To be in the territory is to be subject to sovereignty; you are subject
to sovereignty while in the territory, and not beyond; and territory is the
space within which sovereignty is exercised: it is the spatial extent of sov-
ereignty. Sovereignty, then, is exercised over territory: territory is that
over which sovereignty is exercised. In explicitly endorsing Leibniz’s defi-
nition, Rousseau proves himself to be a thinker of his time, of our time,
where politics, state, and space come together in the concept of territory.
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Similar claims could be made about Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois, the
political writings of Rousseau’s contemporary David Hume,54 or the giant
of eighteenth-century thought, Immanuel Kant.55 The birth of territory is
a long and complicated story, as this study has attempted to show. Terri-
tory is a historical question: produced, mutable, and fluid. It is geographi-
cal, not simply because it is one of the ways of ordering the world, but also
because it is profoundly uneven in its development. It is a word, a concept,
and a practice, where the relation between these can only be grasped ge-
nealogically. It is a political question, but in a broad sense: economic, stra-
tegic, legal, and technical. By this time, though, it had reached maturity.
Whether it is now into its old age is a topic for another place, but reports of
its demise are likely to have been exaggerated.