At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, Charles Maier explores the fitful evolution of territories¿politically bounded regions whose borders define the jurisdiction of laws and the movement of peoples¿as a worldwide practice of human societies.

Charles S. Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has written a number of award-winning books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe, The Unmasterable Past, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, and Once Within Borders.