This article argues that the dominance of precise, linear borders as an ideal in the demarcation of territory is an outcome of a relatively recent and ongoing historical process, and that this process has had important effects on international politics since circa 1900. Existing accounts of the origins of territorial sovereignty are in wide disagreement largely because they fail to specify the relationship between territory and borders, often conflating the two concepts. I outline a history of the linearization of borders which is separate from that of territorial sovereignty, having a very different timeline and featuring different actors, and offer an explanation for the dominance of this universalizing system of managing and demarcating space, based on the concept of rationalization. Finally I describe two broad ways in which linearizing borders has affected international politics, by making space divisible in new ways, and underpinning hierarchies by altering the distribution of geographical knowledge resources.

This article theorizes connected memory, or in other words how people remember each other's memories, through the connected histories of territorial partition in different contexts. It claims that social memories can travel beyond their original context, pushing beyond efforts to understand supranational “mnemonic communities,” or to understand cosmopolitan memory as a thin memory community encompassing all humanity. It builds on the idea of “connected histories,” arguing that existing approaches to social memory in world politics either neglect connections across national and regional boundaries or scale up the national model to the global level. The article uses the history of territorial partitions as an illustration of three types of connected memory: sympathetic, vicarious, and modular. Partition has often been studied in comparative or aggregative ways, ruling out the possibility that partitions affect each other. But from the partitions of Poland to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, to Ireland, Palestine, and India, partitions have often been events remembered beyond the national context and in the plural. Such memories have, in turn, altered the imaginable possibilities of the future, for example, by providing precedents for or warnings about future partitions.

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Most scholars agree the rise of states led to modern territoriality. Yet globally the transition to precise boundaries occurred most often in colonies, and there are virtually no systematic explanations of its occurrence outside Europe. This article explains how precise boundaries emerged in the earliest context where they were regularly and generally implemented: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America. Unlike explanations of modern territoriality in Europe, it argues property boundary surveys became an entrenched practice on the part of settlers and were a readily available response to intercolonial boundary disputes. After independence, settlers who were accustomed to surveys pursued linear boundaries with Britain, Spain, and Russia. Moreover, the article argues that linear borders (delimited linearly and typically physically demarcated), not sovereignty, are constitutive of modern territoriality. By disentangling the literature’s Eurocentric confusion between modern territoriality and sovereign statehood, the article makes possible a global comparative study of the emergence of modern territoriality.