ABSTRACT
In the present chapter, I continue the study of the spacing of law and politics in the emerging nation state and the struggles between regional and central powers, representing competing machines of capture and striation of space, manifested in attempts to deterritorialise and reterritorialise juridical space. The principal question I explore in this chapter is the connection between the cartographic revolution in the early modern and modern periods and the emergence of a new understanding of both juridical space – as defined by national territory – and the apparition of places for adjudication separate from other political and civic institutions. Earlier studies have established the close connection between the nascent nation state and the development of cartography. 1 It is during this period that a perception emerges of the state as a territorial entity that can be delineated with borders on maps; cities and provinces are represented as belonging to countries – rather than as independent political entities – connected by networks of communication and transportation; and national territory is increasingly a geometrically measured space. These parallel developments are connected in that the state apparatus needed maps to govern efficiently. In other words, maps and map-making were both instrumental for the constitution of the territorial nation state and constituted an imaginary social signification.
