Showing posts with label legal history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legal history. Show all posts

A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 Review

A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900
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A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 ReviewThis book elevates a technical legal topic to the level of the finest modern historical writing. It does not have everything, but it has everything it needs. All the erogenous zones of a well-informed reader with a smattering of Theory will be stimulated by a book that concerns itself with liminal issues, with exceptions to general rules and systems, with quasi-sovereignty, with the establishment on and by means of the oceans of the sovereignty of the land, with the supposed relegation of non-European civilizations to the status of imperfect polities. The book is underscored with paradoxes, which it treats both sensibly and seriously. There is none of the hackneyed playfulness that issues of this kind can inspire in lesser writers.
The application of legal theories to tracts of territory far from the metropoles in Europe is outlined and analyzed with commendable clarity. The recruitment of law to aid the imposition of colonial will on distant territory is demonstrated. The Eurocentrism of the enterprise, so clear to us today, is pointed up in the treatment of the topic in the early modern period and later.
The discussion of particular issues is especially valuable, such as the legal consequences of the formation of enclaves, which remain of considerable moment today in some parts of the world. Outside pure legal textbooks of the most technical kind, there is little available of this quality on this subject.
In short, this is a work of real analysis, establishing a new way of seeing the history of the period when Europe burst out onto the world stage and, with the jackboot and the lawyer's opinion operating in harmony, divided the world legally into the domains of different European states. The raggedness of the enterprise of empire, the contingency of its creation: these are among the other features of the past that this book holds up for our attention. The book makes the reader wonder how the leaders of modern ex-colonial powers so confidently expect ex-colonies to demonstrate reflex respect for an international law system grounded in the theories elaborated to support the European colonial land grab.
And a writer who beings a chapter with the sentence 'It is hard to avoid beginning with Conrad' very definitely begins well. This reviewer can assure readers that the book continues in the same excellent vein.A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 Overview

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