ABSTRACT
Globalisation is often seen as a recent development which threatens to undermine state sovereignty, and thus the international order of which sovereignty is a fundamental component. Direct or indirect imperial domination was the form in which the European system of states first became global in scope. It divided the world into several kinds of populations: citizens of Western states; non-citizen subjects of Western states; and various residual populations, consisting of the subjects of states that were independent but not fully accepted as part of the states system. The incorporation of non-European populations into the European system of states was the first, and still most important, form of a globalisation. It was followed, sometimes after a considerable gap, by the second stage in the globalisation of the European states system. The widespread achievement or imposition of independence was only partly a process of the imperial withdrawal.
