Department (country subdivision)

Department (French: département, Spanish: departamento) is the name given to the administrative and political subdivisions of many countries. Departments are the first-level subdivisions of eleven countries, nine in the Americas and two in Africa. An additional ten countries use departments as second-level subdivisions, eight in Africa, one in the Americas, and one in Europe.

As a territorial unit, "department" was first used by the French Revolutionary governments, apparently to emphasize that each territory was simply an administrative sub-division of the united sovereign nation. (The term "department", in other contexts, means an administrative sub-division of a larger organization.) This attempt to de-emphasize local political identity contrasts strongly with countries which are divided into "states" (implying local sovereignty).

The division of France into departments was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès, although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers. The earliest known suggestion of it is from 1764 in the writings of d'Argenson.

Today, departments may exist either with or without a representative assembly and executive head depending upon the countries' constitutional and administrative structure.

The United States used this designation for the "Department of Alaska" during the early period of U.S. rule in Alaska. However, Alaska is now a state of the U.S.

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