the distant past. The computer and information revo-
lution and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, for example,
come to mind as critical events from the recent past
that are, in different ways, profoundly impacting the
geographies we produce, but the opportunity for mak-
ing connections in the text to contemporary technical
and political revolutions such as these was passed over.
That such an opportunity existed at all, however, is
itself a testament to the vitality of the postdisciplinary
histories that Livingstone, Withers, and their contrib-
utors have created and collected here. The slate
for rethinking disciplinary histories and geographies of
knowledge is indeed wide open. Long live postdisci-
plinary history!
Key Words: geography of knowledge, history of geography, revolution.
References
Driver, F. 2001. Geography militant: Cultures of exploration and
empire. Oxford: Blackwell.
Livingstone, D. N., and C. W. J. Withers, eds. 1999. Geography
and enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shapin, S. 1996. The scientific revolution. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Saskia Sassen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006. xiv and 493 pp., tables, footnotes, bibliog., index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 0-691-09538-8).
Reviewed by John Agnew, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.
A widely circulating version of the ‘‘globalization
thesis’’ is that since the 1980s the world has become ever
more integrated economically and culturally at the ex-
pense of states that are becoming increasingly redundant
as networks of flows replace a globe of discrete places and
territories. This trend toward a ‘‘smaller’’ world is usually
then put down entirely to either (or sometimes both)
technological time-space compression or the search by
capital for new investment outlets. This book is welcome
because it systematically introduces a serious political
role for states into the calculus about the origins and the
sociospatial logic of globalization. Yet it does so not
by slighting other elements in the calculus (such as the
roles of technology and capital) but by ‘‘recovering
the multifaceted rather than the monocausal and often
multidirectional character of historical transitions’’
(p. 405) such as that entailed by globalization.
More particularly, and crucial to the sophisticated
understanding of political geography that pervades the
book, ‘‘The epochal transformation we call globalization
is taking place inside the national’’ (p. 1) and not simply
‘‘out there’’ in a separate global domain that has never
existed before. So even if truly global institutions and
processes, many not entirely new if now reinvigorated
and given new functions (such as the World Trade Or-
ganization and global financial markets, etc.), represent
one dynamic of globalization, the other is constituted
nationally by institutions and actors embedded locally
but oriented globally (such as networks of locally-based
activists following global agendas, monetary and fiscal
policies crucial for global markets but made and enforced
nationally, and the spread of legal norms across inter-
national borders). Globalization, therefore, is a two-way
street, originating in the policies and actions of at least
some states but continuing to be deeply intertwined with
local and national sources of policies and actions. In
sum, rather than being about replacing states, global-
ization is about their destabilization and reorientation.
In this book, Saskia Sassen, one of the most prolific
and influential scholars of globalization over the past
twenty years, provides an ambitious, theoretically-
informed empirical analysis of the nexus between territory,
authority, and rights (TAR) that she sees as crucial for
understanding the emergence of globalization. She does
this through three substantive sections, one devoted to
how a world of national states emerged in late medieval
Europe (Assembling the National), a second to how this
world became ‘‘denationalized’’ and globalized in the late
twentieth century (Disassembling the National), and a
third to how digital space and borderings within states
are now creating places within global circuits (Assem-
blages of a Global Digital Age) but without totally
displacing existing national legal and regulatory forms.
The historical focus is vital to the approach. Previous
transitions provide guidance about how complex systems
change, not evidence for how history repeats itself.
Sassen is dismissive of claims that globalization entails
a ‘‘new medievalism.’’ She uses three conceptsF
capability, tipping point, and organizing logicFto cap-
ture the nature of transitions. From this perspective,
Book Reviews 651

understanding how a particular combination or ‘‘as-
semblage’’ of territory, authority, and rights (capability)
in the past began to unravel and at a certain point
(tipping point) gave rise, along with new elements, to a
new organizing logic sheds light on what is afoot today.
The book is a detailed attempt to show how three orders
(feudal, national, and global) had distinctive organizing
logics associated with them and how subsequent ones
grow out of existing ones rather than representing clean
breaks from them.
To this end, Part One explores how the assembling of
national states involved the transformation of divine
kingship into secular sovereign authority and the slow
building of constitutional government formed on such
factors as urban-based merchant capitalism, industrial
capitalism, and the coming of the welfare state. Part Two
makes the case for ‘‘how the current global era consists
partly of global systems evolving out of the capabilities
that originally constituted the territorial sovereign state’’
(p. 407), paying particular attention to the so-called
Bretton Woods era (1944–1971) and how, though it
helped lay the groundwork for later globalization, it was
by no means the onset of globalization itself. In its turn,
Part Three is about some of the most revolutionary
changes associated with globalization, particularly the
electronic technologies that have most enabled it, but
even these are seen as ‘‘profoundly rooted in local spe-
cifics and often derive much of their meaning from
nondigital [and still national] domains’’ (p. 414). Inev-
itably, this brief overview scarcely does justice to a
careful and nuanced argument for how today we can ‘‘see
a movement from centripetal nation-state articulation to
a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages,’’
yet also ‘‘see how foundational the centripetal power of
the nation-state has been, and to variable extent, re-
mains’’ (pp. 422–23).
I find numerous features of the book make a positive
contribution to the debate over globalization. One im-
plicit in the book’s own theoretical logic is the idea that
globalization is still only a partial and not a total devel-
opment either worldwide or across all fields. This is a
salutary reminder to those who think that the world is
totally flat, or whatever other metaphor is chosen to
imply worldwide and functional inclusiveness. A second
is the focus on the nexus between territory, authority,
and rights, which avoids bogging down in the frequently
circular debate about sovereignty when it is understood
as singularly territorial and opens up the innovative
theoretical approach focused on finding the roots of
systemic transition in the shuffling of previous capabili-
ties in the face of new elements rather than in the
emergence of totally new causal forces. Perhaps most
important of all from a geographic perspective, the ap-
proach sees various forms and meanings of territory as
central to the organizing logics of different historic
‘‘assemblages.’’ So, for example, as Sassen points out,
‘‘Assemblages promoting exclusive authority over a ter-
ritory cannot be confined to the sovereign state. . . .
I see today’s global cities and high-tech districts as partly
denationalized strategic territorializations with consid-
erable regulatory autonomy through the ascendance of
private governance regimes’’ (pp. 54–55).
Some aspects of the book, however, I find more
problematic. For much of the world, as if we needed
much reminding today, states have been imported from
elsewhere more than grown organically in situ. Simply
seeing such states as ‘‘weak’’ ones relative to the Great
Powers who have done most of the heavy lifting for
globalization misses the degree to which the weak states
remain the creatures of imperialism or hegemony with-
out the capacity to do much of anything except succumb
to the ‘‘global in the national.’’ The ability of such states
to initiate change or even adapt to it is very much in
question. ‘‘Denationalization’’ implies against, for ex-
ample, typical usage of deterritorialization, that citizen-
ship, fiscal regulation, or whatever derives from the
national when external ‘‘shocks’’ may well have always
been of greater importance in many specific cases. At the
same time, for all states, however ‘‘strong’’ or ‘‘weak,’’
the emphasis on inherited capabilities as directing
change risks overemphasizing continuity, however re-
shuffled the parts may be, at the expense of the elements
that are truly novel in periods of transition. One par-
ticular ‘‘strong state,’’ the United States, takes up con-
siderable space in the book, mainly as an illustrative
example of the general argument. Sassen emphasizes, in
particular, the rise of the presidency during the global-
ization era as symptomatic of an entrenchment of ex-
ecutive power in the current transition. I find this
unconvincing not only because President Nixon, mani-
festly not of this era in the book’s framework, was very
much an ‘‘imperial’’ President but also because the leit-
motif of the most recent U.S. presidencies has been in-
competence and responsiveness to well-funded lobbyists
more than the exercise of effective centralized power
implied here. The disastrous invasion and occupation of
Iraq and the pathetic federal response to the devastation
of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina come to mind for
the former and the earmarks and pharmaceutical legis-
lation written by lobbyists and signed into law by Presi-
dent George W. Bush are reminders of the latter. Yet
the book also strangely denies much of any importance
to the geopolitical role of the United States in the
transition to globalization. Satisfied to dismiss this as
Book Reviews652