These four books all, in different ways, rely upon and contribute to understandings of territory. They move from the very historical to the resolutely contemporary, and in two cases combine the political-historical in important and insightful ways. The most fully historical is Tom Scott's The City-state in Europe, which takes a broad comparative approach to the formation and transformation of polities in Western Europe from the high Middle Ages to the beginning of the early Modern period. One of its key contributions is to offer analysis of city-states outside of the Italian peninsula. While it does discuss this area at some length, it also has insightful analysis of other parts of Europe, including the geographical region of Germany and some especially helpful discussion of Switzerland. The reading of Cologne, for example, notes how the extent of the city's power extended unevenly from its urban centre. The region must not, are told, seen as uniform or integrated, a clearly delineated market area functioning as a contado by other means. Instead, different trade markets extend in uneven ways, creating what Scott calls a variable geometry which distinguishes the economic region of Cologne from a territorial city-state (page 147). This outlining of the multiple political-spatial forms which cities could take in relation to surrounding areas is one of the best aspects of the book. In this respect, the subtitle is revealing (see page 236). The analysis does indeed provide some valuable insights into the shifting interrelation between hinterland, territory, and region. One of the key developments in this period was from cities that had territories, in the classical Latin sense of surrounding lands, to territories within which there were cities--a more modern understanding that has become the dominant meaning. The older idea of a was indeed much closer to that of a hinterland, of areas outside an urban core. If the book lacks an explicit analysis of this transition in theoretical terms, it provides a great deal of historical-geographical detail that is very helpful in tracing those larger processes. The book as a whole tends to shy away from broad generalisations, but provides the kind of specificity that those kinds of analyses are often forced to neglect (see Elden, 2013). The book's strength, then, is in the historical evidence provided, in the documentary resources mobilized and the ability to work with sources in multiple languages. It is less secure conceptually, with occasional frustrating ambiguity. At one point Scott notes that we are only tangentially concerned with political theory (page 51), and this shows in the imprecision with which key terms are used. Unfortunately, one of these is the very idea of territory, which is often used to translate quite disparate terms. For example, with respect to Fribourg, the Anciennes Terres/Alte Landschaft are described as its core territory (page 187). A tracking of the distinctions and overlap between terms, especially in different languages, would have been helpful. The French terre, German Landschaft, and Latin territorium invoke subtly different things, and give rise to quite divergent literatures. It is only later, around the 16th and 17th centuries, in debates around the status of the Holy Roman Empire, that the distinctive terms become more closely related. There are some provocative openings towards these very issues in the conclusion, when Scott suggests that moving beyond the German distinction between Landgebietspolitik and Territorialpolitik would be productive. He suggests that Rolf KieBling's term Umlandpolitik would be more helpful. Rather than the other terms invoking land, region, and territory, this captures a hinterland policy which does not privilege one form of outreach over another and which acknowledges the importance of informal contacts through clientage, patronage, and kinship as well as bilateral economic agreements (page 218). …