New catalogue

Rights of War, Rights of Peace: The Rise and Fall of Empires and Republics, The Origins of Nations and Peoples, 1500-1800.

In the period covered by the books offered in this catalogue Europe experienced – and inflicted upon others – profound violence. It was, as one of our authors put it, an Age of Iron, of 'massacres . . . and infinite other evills'. This violence had its origins in several contingent events: the breakdown of old polities and the universal authority of the Church, the unexpected discovery of a New World. These raised fundamental questions concerning power and law: where did sovereignty reside, what constituted legitimate title to empire, what were free states or nations and where did their peoples originate, when could resistance to a ruler be justified, what was a legitimate war and were there any limits to force? Were, for example, the Dutch in repudiating Spanish Habsburg dominion, simply outlaws in a state of rebellion or were they within the law of nations as citizens defending a sovereign state with its own legitimacy and history? Or, in France, was the violence of the wars of religion so intense that resistance to the sovereign could never be justified in law, that unreserved acceptance of the authority of the prince might be a price worth paying for order? Violence needed to be justified, conquests and sovereignties legitimated, jurisdictions and histories established: the writers, by no means exclusively jurists, represented in this catalogue responded in various ways to these challenges.

The increasingly frequent European encounter with previously unknown peoples, customs and religions, above all in America, posed questions concerning the nature and origins of mankind and, indeed, asked whether these new peoples were men at all. Were they able to enter into contracts or treaties, could their lands be legally acquired by force only if the war waged against them had been just, or were they outside and beyond the protection of the law, so that their liberty and property might simply be appropriated? This provoked heated debate in Spain within a few years of the first conquests in the New World, while other nations soon disputed the right of the Iberian empires to their overseas dominions. Such concerns coalesced in the writings of Grotius, whose jurisprudence dominates much of our period. Beginning with an immediate practical problem – whether or not the Dutch could, in law, trade freely with peoples and regions over seas conferred by the papacy upon the Portuguese monarchy – Grotius went on to elaborate, from fundamental premises concerning human nature, a minimal law that was applicable to all peoples at all times, grounded on the basic, natural rights of self-defence and self-preservation. Thus the beginnings of the European seaborne empires led to a new jurisprudence of power, that attempted to establish the law governing relations between peoples and states not only within Europe but throughout the world.

Throughout these centuries Europe was haunted by the memory of Rome, the spectre of universal monarchy, of empire, at odds with the promise of universal peace between peoples living under a single sovereignty. The history of the Roman republic and empire was an inspiration to greatness, but also a warning, for it told of the contradictions between the preservation of republican liberty and imperial expansion and the seeming impossibility of preventing the collapse of proud states into luxury, the very fruits of their success leading to corruption and tyranny.

Many of these concerns dissolved in the eighteenth century and new anxieties took their place, but, as we look beyond 1800, our last author, Clausewitz, deeply read in Machiavelli and in the history of the campaigns of our period, reminds us of the persistence of the Age of Iron.

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