This book traces the rise of the modern state - a mode of organizing political power within a closed territory - in post-Enlightenment Europe and its spread to the remainder of the world, especially colonial and postcolonial societies." "The book analyzes the different conditions in which the modern state was grafted onto different cultural realities: a metropolitan model adopted by settlers or imposed as an instrument of colonial domination, or a representation of modernity selected by non-Western leaders out of fascination for its alleged efficiency and rationality. The author shows that, from the beginning, various logics of importation led non-Western cultures to invent their own practices of the state, thereby transforming the original model.