Research
Book Project
The Territorial Revolution in Political Thought: Building Bordered States in Early International Law
It is easy to take for granted that the Earth is naturally divided into territories belonging to different human communities. To be politically autonomous, it is often assumed, means to have sole possession of a piece of the Earth’s surface. But it was not always seen that way. Political order was not always identified with a ‘state,’ much less a territorial one. My book returns us to moments in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries that saw the emergence of the state as a basic unit of modern international relations, and asks how international law and political philosophy adapted to the territorialization of politics. Out of the pluralistic and non-congruent dynastic fiefdoms, hardly more than collections of family lands, emerged territorial states claiming exclusive lordship over geographic space. What ensued was an explosion of attempts in law, philosophy, and history, to invent a coherent unity out of lands that were anything but. As the first in-depth study of the transformation of theories of territory, the book argues that between 1648 and 1758, a patrimonial view, which reduced rulership to personal property, was replaced by a new orthodoxy which I call ‘territorialism’: that territorial sovereignty was imminent to a political community and the land it occupied. The book examines this development through four authors in the law of nations and natural law tradition: the seventeenth-century Saxon jurist, Samuel von Pufendorf, who reformulated natural law; the English philosopher and colonial administrator, John Locke; the Prussian philosopher Christian Wolff; and the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Synthesizing the philosophies of territory before him, Vattel offered the ideal-typical doctrine of the state that relied on the 'nation' as an independent legal personality. By 1758, the 'territory' of the territorial state had been transformed from an arbitrary landscape into a 'native country.'
Articles
2018. 'The Nation and Property in Vattel's Theory of Territory,' Global Intellectual History (3) 2, 137-155.
Republished as Ch. 1 of Conceptions of Space in Intellectual History, 2019, D. Allemann, A. Jäger, V. Mann, eds., (Routledge).
2022. '"The Possession of Their Ancestors": Locke and Levellers on Conquest and Native Rights,' History of Political Thought (Forthcoming)
Abstract: This paper argues that John Locke engaged more deeply with the philosophical problem of conquest than has previously been appreciated. It has long been thought that Locke was peculiarly silent on arguments favouring conquest and their critique, a subject that vexed many of his contemporaries and had real implications for crises of his day. This paper shows that Locke not only offered answers to several contemporary arguments in favour of conquest, but gave arguments posed specifically against the theory of the Norman Yoke. In doing so, he invoked the doctrine of ‘native rights’, which were inheritable and inalienable rights against foreign conquerors. However, a central premise of Locke’s argument was the existence of sedentary agriculture on the land of the conquered. The native rights doctrine was therefore consistent with and even reliant upon his agricultural theory of settler colonialism. Only members of a Lockean commonwealth qualified as native to their land. For his theory and its articulation in the English context, Locke drew upon a strand of Leveller ideology from John Lilburne, contesting the Norman Yoke as depriving Englishmen of their native rights. However, in doing so, Locke also rejected the radical Digger approach to the Norman Yoke and native rights discourse, which argued for a native right to cultivate common and enclosed lands. Despite the myriad contexts of Locke’s conquest theory, this notion of native rights has received little scholarly attention.
Under Review & Works in Progress
2022. 'Why Westphalia Still Matters: Rethinking Territory Before 1648,' under review with International Theory.
Abstract: Research on the history of international relations has diverged in two directions. Scholarship on European state formation has focused on its medieval roots, while analyses of the emergence of a system of states has looked to the nineteenth century. Both approaches reject the old Westphalian thesis that a system of sovereign states emerged in 1648. However, in criticizing 1648 for inaugurating neither the modern state nor a system of states, scholars have missed what actually mattered about Westphalia. I argue that the institutional development of Westphalia was the consolidation of territorial rights. Territorial rights were not sovereignty and applied to dynastic families, not states, but they were a key step in the territorialization of European politics. I argue that territorialization grew out of constitutional developments within the Holy Roman Empire from the fifteenth until seventeenth century through attempts to stabilize conflict. Pluralistic dynastic fiefdoms transformed into concentrated spatial entities claiming ‘territorial supremacy’ over their titles, which they labeled ‘fatherlands.’ While claiming territorial authority, dynastic fiefdoms were not sovereign and always operated within the larger empire. Drawing on new historiography, I identify institutional and ideational factors in this development. Understanding the consolidation of territories within the Holy Roman Empire as a development of territorial governance helps explain the territorial foundations upon which the Liberal International Order unsteadily rests today.
2022. 'What we talk about when we talk about space (in the history of political thought),' working paper
Abstract: In this paper I attempt to clarify what it means to read for ‘space’ in the history of political thought. In doing so, I argue that the traditional sources of the ‘spatial turn’ in multiple disciplines, namely human geography, are not particularly helpful starting points for the historian of political thought. There are two main reasons: first, the techniques of human geography focus more on the analysis of social behavioral patterns than the history of ideas; second, and more importantly, the line of thought from Henri Lefebvre onwards is not interested in a specifically political idea of space, and on the contrary often erases the distinctness of political life. In offering an alternative approach, I examine theories of political space in Hannah Arendt’s notion of the polis as a ‘space of appearance’ and Sheldon Wolin’s notion of a ‘political metaphysic.’ Finally, I argue that these conceptions might be incorporated into a contextualist history of ideas by thinking about a spatial context.
The Territorial Revolution in Political Thought: Building Bordered States in Early International Law
It is easy to take for granted that the Earth is naturally divided into territories belonging to different human communities. To be politically autonomous, it is often assumed, means to have sole possession of a piece of the Earth’s surface. But it was not always seen that way. Political order was not always identified with a ‘state,’ much less a territorial one. My book returns us to moments in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries that saw the emergence of the state as a basic unit of modern international relations, and asks how international law and political philosophy adapted to the territorialization of politics. Out of the pluralistic and non-congruent dynastic fiefdoms, hardly more than collections of family lands, emerged territorial states claiming exclusive lordship over geographic space. What ensued was an explosion of attempts in law, philosophy, and history, to invent a coherent unity out of lands that were anything but. As the first in-depth study of the transformation of theories of territory, the book argues that between 1648 and 1758, a patrimonial view, which reduced rulership to personal property, was replaced by a new orthodoxy which I call ‘territorialism’: that territorial sovereignty was imminent to a political community and the land it occupied. The book examines this development through four authors in the law of nations and natural law tradition: the seventeenth-century Saxon jurist, Samuel von Pufendorf, who reformulated natural law; the English philosopher and colonial administrator, John Locke; the Prussian philosopher Christian Wolff; and the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Synthesizing the philosophies of territory before him, Vattel offered the ideal-typical doctrine of the state that relied on the 'nation' as an independent legal personality. By 1758, the 'territory' of the territorial state had been transformed from an arbitrary landscape into a 'native country.'
Articles
2018. 'The Nation and Property in Vattel's Theory of Territory,' Global Intellectual History (3) 2, 137-155.
Republished as Ch. 1 of Conceptions of Space in Intellectual History, 2019, D. Allemann, A. Jäger, V. Mann, eds., (Routledge).
2022. '"The Possession of Their Ancestors": Locke and Levellers on Conquest and Native Rights,' History of Political Thought (Forthcoming)
Abstract: This paper argues that John Locke engaged more deeply with the philosophical problem of conquest than has previously been appreciated. It has long been thought that Locke was peculiarly silent on arguments favouring conquest and their critique, a subject that vexed many of his contemporaries and had real implications for crises of his day. This paper shows that Locke not only offered answers to several contemporary arguments in favour of conquest, but gave arguments posed specifically against the theory of the Norman Yoke. In doing so, he invoked the doctrine of ‘native rights’, which were inheritable and inalienable rights against foreign conquerors. However, a central premise of Locke’s argument was the existence of sedentary agriculture on the land of the conquered. The native rights doctrine was therefore consistent with and even reliant upon his agricultural theory of settler colonialism. Only members of a Lockean commonwealth qualified as native to their land. For his theory and its articulation in the English context, Locke drew upon a strand of Leveller ideology from John Lilburne, contesting the Norman Yoke as depriving Englishmen of their native rights. However, in doing so, Locke also rejected the radical Digger approach to the Norman Yoke and native rights discourse, which argued for a native right to cultivate common and enclosed lands. Despite the myriad contexts of Locke’s conquest theory, this notion of native rights has received little scholarly attention.
Under Review & Works in Progress
2022. 'Why Westphalia Still Matters: Rethinking Territory Before 1648,' under review with International Theory.
Abstract: Research on the history of international relations has diverged in two directions. Scholarship on European state formation has focused on its medieval roots, while analyses of the emergence of a system of states has looked to the nineteenth century. Both approaches reject the old Westphalian thesis that a system of sovereign states emerged in 1648. However, in criticizing 1648 for inaugurating neither the modern state nor a system of states, scholars have missed what actually mattered about Westphalia. I argue that the institutional development of Westphalia was the consolidation of territorial rights. Territorial rights were not sovereignty and applied to dynastic families, not states, but they were a key step in the territorialization of European politics. I argue that territorialization grew out of constitutional developments within the Holy Roman Empire from the fifteenth until seventeenth century through attempts to stabilize conflict. Pluralistic dynastic fiefdoms transformed into concentrated spatial entities claiming ‘territorial supremacy’ over their titles, which they labeled ‘fatherlands.’ While claiming territorial authority, dynastic fiefdoms were not sovereign and always operated within the larger empire. Drawing on new historiography, I identify institutional and ideational factors in this development. Understanding the consolidation of territories within the Holy Roman Empire as a development of territorial governance helps explain the territorial foundations upon which the Liberal International Order unsteadily rests today.
2022. 'What we talk about when we talk about space (in the history of political thought),' working paper
Abstract: In this paper I attempt to clarify what it means to read for ‘space’ in the history of political thought. In doing so, I argue that the traditional sources of the ‘spatial turn’ in multiple disciplines, namely human geography, are not particularly helpful starting points for the historian of political thought. There are two main reasons: first, the techniques of human geography focus more on the analysis of social behavioral patterns than the history of ideas; second, and more importantly, the line of thought from Henri Lefebvre onwards is not interested in a specifically political idea of space, and on the contrary often erases the distinctness of political life. In offering an alternative approach, I examine theories of political space in Hannah Arendt’s notion of the polis as a ‘space of appearance’ and Sheldon Wolin’s notion of a ‘political metaphysic.’ Finally, I argue that these conceptions might be incorporated into a contextualist history of ideas by thinking about a spatial context.