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  1. Home
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  3. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000
  • Cited by 139
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139924306
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139924306
Subjects:
Legal History, History of Ideas, Law, History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Ideas in Context (107)
Information

Book description

This book analyses the laws that shaped modern European empires from medieval times to the twentieth century. Its geographical scope is global, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Poles. Andrew Fitzmaurice focuses upon the use of the law of occupation to justify and critique the appropriation of territory. He examines both discussions of occupation by theologians, philosophers and jurists, as well as its application by colonial publicists and settlers themselves. Beginning with the medieval revival of Roman law, this study reveals the evolution of arguments concerning the right to occupy through the School of Salamanca, the foundation of American colonies, seventeenth-century natural law theories, Enlightenment philosophers, eighteenth-century American colonies and the new American republic, writings of nineteenth-century jurists, debates over the carve up of Africa, twentieth-century discussions of the status of Polar territories, and the period of decolonisation.

Reviews

'Occupancy, property, and the right and the power to possess are, as Andrew Fitzmaurice says at the beginning of his ambitious and compelling new book, the basis of all human societies and the foundations of all (Western) political thinking.'

Anthony Pagden Source: The Journal of Modern History

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