Territorial Organization

Scope Note

General statements dealing with several distinct levels of political territorial organization. Statements dealing with territorial hierarchy will be indexed for TERRITORIAL HIERARCHY (631). Material on political institutions of administrative or territorial units intermediate in size or functional scope between the community and the state, the sovereign or maximal political unit will be filed in the three digit categories below. It will be used only for societies of some political complexity, not for those in which communities are politically independent or for those with petty states embracing only a single district or a small city with its environs. The individual categories represent increasing levels of size and complexity, but since these are not universally comparable they must be considered subject to modification in order to adapt them to the actual territorial units of particular societies.