‘Ordering the World’ – a slogan originally employed by Chinese government reformers in the eighteenth century – addresses ideas and practices within the administrative field in Asia and Europe. The volume focusses on the transcultural transfer of notions of order, bureaucratic efficiency and bureaucratic ethos as well as their implementation by the adoption of foreign institutions from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The sixteen case studies thereby open up the historical dimension of European and Asian bureaucracies and explore the often asymmetrical transfer of administrative notions, ideas and practices as well as their transformation in different cultures. The authors from both Asia and Europe thereby make decisive forays into a global intellectual history of public administration – an issue, which has hardly been touched upon before in academia.