Chapter 4 looks at the strengthening of Indigenous networks in the sertão in the Lower Amazon, especially around the Tapajós and Trombetas rivers. Here missions acted as gateways to the deep multi-ethnic forest networks in Amerindian territories where more slaves and converts could be found, and where people were recruited to work on canoes to collect cacao and the drugs of the hinterlands. In these regions, long standing networks between Indigenous societies had alternated between alliance and peace and war and enslavement. Colonial agents were added as new players in the complex set of relations that linked Belém and the sertão. Sometimes the shift of relations led to the strengthening of Amerindian networks, such as in the south bank areas. The reconfiguring of networks led to the reconstitution of the riverbanks and the creation of the hinterland; each region was different according to local dynamics that spawned singular cultural and social situations.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

Chapter 8 on Extraterritoriality discusses how the cross-border nature of climate impacts is addressed within climate litigation. The author scrutinises the interpretation of ‘jurisdiction’ and related procedural and substantive issues in the context of these transboundary impacts. His analysis showcases how these legal principles and procedural rules either facilitate or constrain courts and quasi-judicial bodies in grappling meaningfully with these impacts. In his exploration of key decisions, the author unravels their implications for the global governance of climate change and the challenges and opportunities they present for transboundary climate lawsuits. He distils emerging best practices that reveal how courts and quasi-judicial bodies, through judicious interpretation of legal principles, are grappling with the global dimensions of climate change. Despite the complexities inherent in integrating extraterritorial considerations into climate litigation, the chapter posits an optimistic outlook and highlights how visionary legal reasoning can tackle these complexities in a manner that is conducive to ensuring access to justice for those most affected by climate impacts.

The idea of sovereignty over territory is fundamental to international law. No State can exist without land, and thus the ways in which land can be acquired and retained are concerns of great importance for States. Many international disputes involve land, and are intrinsically bound up with land, and relative to the use of land, so as an issue, sovereignty sits at the heart of international relations as well as international law. This chapter begins by assessing occupation and acquiescence, and then turns to review the distinctive issue for Australia of terra nullius and indigenous rights. The significance of each of critical date, discovery and accretion is reviewed. Postcolonial critiques regarding sovereignty over territory are considered, as are distinctive issues associated with sovereignty over Antarctica and the principle of common heritage.

This chapter “deprovincializes” the histories of Lake Kivu’s societies in the “frontier”, (present-day Rwanda and Congo), during the second half of the nineteenth century. It challenges the dominant narrative of the “greater Rwanda” thesis, which argues that colonial border-making “amputated” Rwanda from a significant portion of its territory. The chapter shifts the attention to the societies Rwanda claimed were part of Rwanda since centuries. The chapter shows that while the Nyiginya kingdom – Rwanda’s antecedent – indeed increasingly sought to exert control over and integrate some of these societies, especially under mwami [s. King] Rwabugiri, their control was incomplete, at times impermanent, and often contested. Such complexities are overlooked when considered from a state-centric, often ideological perspective premised on the stability of a centralized authority. The histories and memories of local communities within the region defy these narratives and provide critical alternatives to what has been largely accepted as mere prologue. These questions are not merely a matter of historical debate, they remain crucial for understanding contemporary debates. While the geographical complexity of this chapter makes it a challenging read, it is foundational for understanding the historical continuities and contradictions throughout the book.

Colonies and mandates, along with protectorates, belong to the wider group of ‘dependent’ territories. Colonies were under the total control of a foreign power which decided all aspects of the administrative, executive and legislative organisation. Public international law was mainly relevant for slavery, forced labour and ‘open-door’ policies. The mandates system was certainly inspired by colonialism, especially in the eyes of contemporaries, for whom colonialism was the ‘white man’s burden’ for the benefit of ‘uncivilised peoples’. However, it also had fundamental structural differences: their purpose – the ‘civilising mission’ – and the triangular relationship (League of Nations, territory, mandate), stand in sharp contrast to the colonial institution. In addition, the mandatory power was not the holder of sovereignty over the mandated territory. The triangular relationship refers particularly to the control that is supposed to embody it. The control exercised by the League marks a notable difference from the colonial system, establishing for the first time in the history of international relations a sophisticated form of indirect international administration of territories.

This chapter deals with questions of sovereignty, territory and jurisdiction during the League of Nations era. It discusses how the concept of sovereignty developed until the League era and how it was understood then. Questions of territory and jurisdiction are closely linked with sovereignty, but, given the immense scope of this topic, it will only be considered as far as it affects the central substance of the chapter. This general exposition of the concept of sovereignty will be followed by an explication how the interwar period saw the emergence of, first, its general principle of horizontal protection of the territorial and jurisdictional aspect of states by international law; second, structured exceptions to this principle qua its vertical limitation of sovereignty through the League system; and third, curious cases where the territorial and jurisdictional powers of states had to be reconciled with other innovative legal principles such as human rights and self-determination. These explications will be illustrated and substantiated by a selection of the relevant cases decided by the Permanent Court of International Justice and other judicial bodies.

This chapter explores the commodification process through which Peronist brokers started to demand payment for their political services, downplaying party loyalties and ideological preferences. Qualitative evidence and descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate how three factors influence this process in the municipalities of the Conurbano Bonaerense in Argentina: Poverty makes brokers crucial channels for politicians to meet the demands of the territory; the brokers themselves are affected by poverty and informality; and party leaders are increasingly detached from party ideology, weakening the party’s traditional structures. The chapter argues that this commodification has exposed the Peronist Party to competition from other parties willing to recruit its brokers. It also outlines the average fees brokers charge for various political services, illustrating this process.

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

This chapter describes territorial conflicts among lords, parishes, cities and towns, and how they contributed to emerging notions of the territoriality of states. It surveys debates regarding both the expansion to new territories and the conservation of existing territories and considers how these debates operated both in Europe and in European overseas colonies. It analyses the writing of jurists as well as a plethora of practices that contemporaries pursued, which despite their obvious local reiterations, were mostly pan-European. Among other things, it covers the question of just war, taking possession of not yet occupied land, discovery, prescription, conservation of the status quo and the role of both conflicts and agreements, including agreements with indigenous peoples, natural law, the law of nations and of relations between territory and jurisdiction. To explain developments during the Renaissance, it observes a much longer time span that began in the Middle Ages and allowed for both slow and revolutionary transformations. It shows that developments in Europe were important, but as vital in both encouraging and empowering change was colonialism, which affected many peoples and territories across the world but also modified Europe in ways we have not yet completely understood.

This chapter is a survey of the legal languages used to govern territory, sovereignty and the right of a ruler within a polity. Debates were heavily dominated by feudal and private law-concepts. Sovereigns maintained the diversity of privileges in the territories ruled in the setting of a composite monarchy. Claims and titles could or could not entail consequences for sovereignty. Reservations and exceptions to full internal sovereignty were not uncommon. Succession quarrels (often causes of war), could be solved by treaty, often in conflict with domestic constitutional rules and principles. Mixed polities (Poland-Lithuania, Holy Roman Empire) offered a broad range of argumentative topoi to either confirm or combat overlordship. Internal German questions could quickly escalate to the field of the law of nations through the game of alliances and guarantees. Although republican forms of monarchy and republican oligarchies were on the decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their legal agency was not contested. In extra-European dominions of European sovereigns, the chain of reasoning was significantly lighter, as feudal arguments rarely came into play. Conversely, the agency of subaltern actors in establishing boundaries, or the treatment of native Americans as either allies or subjects provide original avenues of research.

The chapter explains why the balance of power was defined in territorial terms, rather than economically or based on military arsenals. Territory was not the source of rulers’ material capabilities. In fact rulers obtained full control over their territory only much later, but during the eighteenth century it appeared to them that they had to balance territory. Available representants made territory easily measurable, and therefore comparable, whereas economic representants, such as GDP, did not yet exist. The chapter elaborates how the representants of territory emerged: A search for a visual expression of infinity to express God’s unlimited power led to the discovery of single-point perspective in painting in the course of the fourteenth century. Over time, linear perspectival paintings decorated palace walls, and served as diplomatic gifts. Through the intermediary of geometry, the discovery of linear perspective had multiple knock-on effects on a series of representants. In particular, there were intertwined effects between single-point perspective in painting, Cartesian mapping, fortification design, practices of warfare, and garden and palace architecture. These interconnected and largely unintentional changes in their accumulation brought about the conception of territory as a measurable power resource.

This chapter lingers on the very notion of territory itself as a spatial imaginary, a literary trope, and a political crucible for competing ideas of sovereignty. In particular, it examines how territory, or perhaps more precisely, territoriality, did not simply work at the behest of US empire but also served as an essential spatial register for working alongside and even against US territorial annexation, occupation, and colonization. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States asserted an understanding of sovereignty that foregrounded dominance over a territory and its inhabitants. At the broadest scale, territory denoted the sovereign’s property (the United States), and sovereignty denoted control over territory. Settler-colonial notions of sovereignty and territory conflicted with Indigenous understandings of sovereignty that often foreground responsibility to human and other-than-human relatives within a shared space or territory rather than possession of property. This chapter’s three sections, “Terra Nullius,” “Indian Territory,” and “Black Territories,” each take up a concept of territoriality that profoundly influenced US colonial expansion at the expense of other narratives of placemaking. Each section details how narratives of territoriality forcefully shaped US politics and culture while also describing competing notions of placemaking that disrupt these dominant narratives.

In most scholarly accounts, borders are portrayed simply as thin, jurisdictional lines; they define where one sovereignty ends and a new one begins. Recently, scholars have shown that borders are increasingly becoming wide and zonal – an important advance in our understanding. In this chapter, however, it is suggested that even these accounts are insufficient to change our paradigm as they still rely on the state/territory/border triad as their baseline and see contemporary changes as deviations from this norm. In other words, while such work can generate shifts in our understanding of borders, they nonetheless perpetuate the border’s naturalness. To redress this problem, this chapter begins by defining the “Westphalian” border as it is conventionally understood – distinguishing two features, borders-as-authority and borders-as-control. Second, it looks at the development of modern bordering to locate when this “Westphalian” border starts to take shape. The chapter concludes with a reconceptualization – referred to as the Accordion Model – which captures the conditional and oscillating relationship between states, territories, and borders. The hope is that by doing so, we might chip away at the hegemonic hold that the linear border – and the state/territory/borders triad – has on our political imaginaries

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.