In the eighteenth century modern states in Europe, the Americas and some parts of the “non-Western” world, embarked on a long and sometimes contentious process of demarcating their boundaries, both internal and international. An older spatial regime based on “jurisdictional sovereignty” gradually gave way to one based on the notion of “territorial sovereignty,” and there are many nuances, aporias and variations in how this project unfolded and ultimately transformed the territorial structure of the state. Throughout this process, surveying and mapmaking operations played an important role, initially in an uncoordinated fashion, in excavating the country's older territorial divisions as a prelude to their rearrangement. Within Great Britain, Christopher Saxton's sixteenth-century county maps made possible the assembling of a national map. Even so, Great Britain's administrative geography continued to be characterized by an unwieldy agglomeration of as many as 15 different levels of local authority, involving civil, criminal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.