The United Nations headquarters in New York City displays two maps in its lobby. One map is called ‘The World In 1945’. This is the year the UN was founded. The map is a rainbow of colors. Big chunks of blue represent the few nation-states that belonged to the UN at the beginning. Bits of red and tan and yellow and green spread around the map represent places that did not belong to the UN. Many of these non-blue regions were classified as dependent: ‘Territories administered under a League of Nations mandate;’ ‘Territories which by 1949 were under the United Nations Trusteeship System.’ Others were not even countries. ‘The World In 1945’ was a world of empires.