Adopting a global approach, Fitzmaurice analyses the laws that shaped modern European empires from medieval times to the twentieth century.

This volume takes a fresh approach to the issue of ‘space’ in intellectual history and puts forward novel ways of rendering conceptions of space useful for historians of political thought. Notions of ‘space’ have become increasingly important to the practice of intellectual historians in recent years. This is evidenced by emerging locutions such as ‘the international turn’, ‘global intellectual history’, and ‘political space’. Thus far, however, it is still unclear what it actually means to take ‘space’ seriously in intellectual history, and what we might gain from doing so. Ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, the contributions to this volume span a variety of diverse topics and showcase the rewards of a spatial focus in intellectual history, both as a kind of place and as an organising principle. The book reconstructs the role of the modern territorial state in grounding reflection on political legitimacy; the interface between oceans and empires as a source of political reflection; and the curious antecedents of today’s spatial turn in German and Indian visions of geopolitics in the interwar years. In doing so, it makes a contribution to an ever-growing field. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Intellectual History.

By examining the relationship between international law and empire from early modernity to the present, this volume improves current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped imperial ideas about and structures of world governance.

Indigeneity is inseparable from empire, and the way empire responds to the Indigenous presence is a key historical factor in shaping the flow of imperial history. This book is about the consequences of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British imperial presence and the First Peoples of what were to become Australia and New Zealand. However, the shape of social relations between Indigenous peoples and the forces of empire does not remain constant over time. The book tracks how the creation of empire in this part of the world possessed long-lasting legacies both for the settler colonies that emerged and for the wider history of British imperial culture.

Using Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources drawn from three genres of legal text, this book is the first full-length study in decades to investigate the evolution of Ottoman land law from its “classical” articulation in the sixteenth century to its reformulation in the 1858 Land Code. The book demonstrates that well before the nineteenth century the tradition of Ottoman land tenure law had developed an indigenous form of property right that would remain intact in the Land Code. In addition, the rising consensus of the jurists that the sultan was the source of the land law paved the way for the wider legislative authority that the Ottoman state would increasingly assert in the Tanzimat period of reform. Demonstrating the profound and ongoing adaptation of a legal tradition that was at once both Ottoman and Islamic, it revises our understanding of the relationship between the modern Islamic world and its early modern past, and what kind of intervention was represented by reform in the 19th century.

This volume explores the intellectual history of the Dutch Empire from a long-term and global perspective, analysing how ideas and visions of empire took shape in imperial practice from the seventeenth century to the present day. Through a series of case studies, the volume critically unearths deep-rooted conceptions of Dutch imperial exceptionalism and shows how visions of imperial rule were developed in metropolitan and colonial contexts and practices. Topics include the founding of the Dutch chartered companies for colonial trade, the development of commercial and global visions of empire in Europe and Asia, the continuities and ruptures in imperial ideas and practices around 1800, and the practical making of empire in colonial court rooms and radio broadcasting. Demonstrating the relevance of a long-term approach to the Dutch Empire, the volume showcases how the intellectual history of empire can provide fresh light on postcolonial repercussions of empire and imperial rule. Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes in villages revealed an array of practices of governance that negotiated with the problem of their applicability to local conditions. And at the same time in Britain, the dominant Ricardian conception of political economy was being challenged by thinkers like Richard Jones and William Whewell, who sought to make political economy an inductive science, capable of analyzing the real world. Through analyses of these three interrelated moments in British imperial history, Upal Chakrabarti's Assembling the Local engages with articulations of the "local" on multiple theoretical and empirical fronts, weaving them into a complex reflection on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India.