The earliest political units deserving to be called states were France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, the countries composing the Holy Roman Em­pire and Scandinavia, and the Netherlands.

During the first century or so of their existence all of these combined occupied only between 2 and 3 percent of the earth's surface: to be precise, 1,450,000 square miles out of a global land mass of 57,000,0000.

This much granted, the spread of the state into other continents and its victory over other polities may be studied in one of three ways. The first would be to proceed chronologically without regard to location: in other words, to follow the march first of imperialism and then of decolonization as it took place. The second would be to proceed geographically: i.e., divide the world into various regions and trace the way each one separate­ly came to be divided into, and ruled by, states. The third would be to look at the methods whereby states developed in regions outside Western Europe - whether by imitation, as in Japan from the middle of the nineteenth century on, or by conquest and subsequent liberation, as in most other places, or by some combination of the two. Insofar as those methods were largely dictated by the degree that civilization - including, not least, political civilization - had developed in each region before it was touched by the state, obviously these paths are interrelated. What follows here represents a compromise between all three.