The Foundations of Modern Territory: Building Bordered States in the Early Modern Law of Nations

In this book manuscript workshop, we will discuss Dr Ben Mueser’s forthcoming book on the emergence of the concept of a territorial state in early modern European political and legal thought.

How did we come into possession of the notion that the earth was necessarily divided into discrete coherent territories, each of which was the theater of a people’s self-determination? This book takes account of the intellectual foundations of that fundamental shift in the early modern law of nations literature, drawing attention to importance of territory in the architecture of modern political thought. The territory of the state constitutes the basis for the distinction between the inside and outside of the state, the domestic and the international, the citizen and the foreigner, and the limits of raison d’état. Despite its centrality, debates in political theory on territorial rights have reached an impasse, in which it is unclear how to address the territorial wrongs of settler colonialism without defaulting to nationalist assumptions of territorial rights. This book seeks to move past this impasse by re-examining the debates and stakes of territory in the period in which territorial statehood first emerged.

Commentators will include Professor Thomas Ahnert (Professor of Intellectual History, University of Edinburgh), Dr Francesca Iurlaro (Assistant Professor of International Law, Koc University), Professor Richard Whatmore (Professor of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews), and Professor Nehal Bhuta (Professor of International Law, University of Edinburgh).

 

Dr Benjamin Mueser is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard College. Formerly he has been a Core Lecturer at Columbia University, and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is a political theorist and international relations scholar working on the historical and normative foundations of states and the territorial order, with interests in the history of international political thought, state formation, and territorial rights. His writing has appeared in International Studies Review, Global Intellectual History, History of Political Thought, and The Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. 

 

Image Credit: Max Boehme