Historians and critics assume that the topic of ‘Britain’ and Camden’s Britannia only became political in 1603. But Camden’s Britannia (1586) was political in its very conception. Camden deliberately set out to undermine George Buchanan’s innovative 1582 account of Britain’s three ancient, Gaulish-speaking indigenous races (Britons, Picts and Scots). Camden wants only one indigenous race: Britons. So he conflates Picts and Britons as ‘painted people’, excluding Scots. Ben Jonson, Camden’s pupil, transformed this identification of British indigeneity with painted skin in the The Masque of Blackness, where Britannia becomes an island ‘discovered’ by the daughters of Niger as they seek to become ‘fair’. Inverting the poetry of Claudian, for whom sunburnt Africans and painted Britons mark the extremes of a vast Roman empire, Jonson sets Britannia at the centre of a new sea-empire, integrating the races of Britain by producing them as unpainted and therefore ‘white’. As unpainted indigenous whiteness replaces Camden’s painted indigeneity, what is left is ‘blackness’, the unwashable hue of the peoples beyond the British seas.

This chapter sets out the dystopian critique of the liberal democratic state that emerged when neoclassical economic reasoning was applied to the political realm. The resulting ‘public choice theory’ made assertive claims of democratic state failure that became a mainstay of neoliberal argument, but here they are shown to possess clear affinities with the Leninist account of bureaucracy as the ‘real’ centre of power in a bourgeois democracy. It follows from the deterministic, closed-system reasoning in both Leninist and neoclassical 'public choice' theory that these affinities continued into the respective prescriptions for the preferred constitutional order. The ideal constitution of limited government set out in public choice theory, most notably by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Geoffrey Brennan is shown to be a logically inevitable counterpart to the ‘withering away of the state’ under socialism anticipated by Lenin. The adjacent constitutional arguments of Friedrich August von Hayek are also considered, as is the more empirically robust account of bureuacracy as an essential feature of modernity set out by Max Weber.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. Ithas not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes theachievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

The debate about prosody in English, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in metrical matters at this period sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon which has not been described. Vernacular poets engaged deeply with metrical questions because the contemporary use of Latin metre underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century.Although it has passed almost unnoticed by scholarship, metrical creativity is one of the most astonishing features of the Latin poetry of this period. We cannot begin to appreciate the literary excitement caused by this poetry – and by its vernacular imitations, such as the remarkable metrical display of the Sidney psalter and Herbert's "Temple" – without understanding something of the music of Latin metre, and of the pace of Latin metrical innovation. This chapter offers a ‘big picture’ overview of Latin metrical innovation and experiment, as it reached and was received and taught in England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century

Following some preliminary remarks on the concept of secession and its status in international law, this chapter examines competing answers to two questions that any theory of state secession must address.First, what sort of actor enjoys a prima facie moral right to secede, and in virtue of what features or considerations does that actor do so?Second, on what particular territory is an actor with a right to secede permitted to exercise that right?It then evaluates arguments for and against several international legal norms that might be adopted to regulate unilateral secession, drawing on both moral theories of secession and empirically informed conjectures regarding the incentives those norms might create for various international and domestic actors.

This chapter investigates the conceptual question “what is a human right?” and the normative question “in virtue of what considerations does A enjoy a human right to X?” by examining the recent debate between two schools of legal and political philosophers.Orthodox theorists argue that human rights are a moral right possessed by all human being simply in virtue of their humanity.In contrast, political-practice theorists argue that human rights are constitutive elements of an ongoing attempt to reconceive state sovereignty and the international political order to which it is integral.This political undertaking, which includes the creation, application, and enforcement of international human rights law, provides the proper object of a philosophy of human rights.The bulk of this chapter is devoted to a critical examination of attempts by political-practice theorists to demonstrate the limited relevance of orthodox accounts of human rights to morally justifying international human rights practice (again, including international human rights law).It concludes with a brief consideration of the role that appeals to objective moral principles should play within that practice.

This chapter examines the legitimacy of international law.It begins with an analysis of the concept of legitimacy, or perhaps more precisely, of legitimate authority.It then considers four possible grounds for international law’s legitimacy: enhancing its subjects’ ability to act as they have most reason to act, the consent of those it claims as subjects, considerations of fair play, and international law’s democratic credentials.The chapter concludes with an examination of reasons why we should care about international law’s legitimacy; indeed, why from a moral point of view increasing the international legal order’s legitimacy might even take priority over making it more just.

This chapter is in many ways a chapter that reaches interesting abstractions on the nature of power, rights, and of constitutionalism, all in the interests of environmental law. We began with a discussion on Tiebout, who argued that when people with the same preferences cluster together in communities, that competition between local authorities will, under certain restrictive conditions, lead to allocative efficiency. This implies a market in jurisdictions and in states competing in public goods and services. Van den Bergh’s model forecasts a 'bottom up federalisation', wherein the default assumption is that the best level of governance is at the most local level available, unless it is otherwise demonstrable that the particular environmental issue cannot be sufficiently resolved at that level of government. Another point that we addressed is the issue of centralisation, of whether all actors should be required to comply with a singular jurisdiction-wide regulatory requirement to prevent an environmental problem (centralisation), or, should they be allowed to individually discover their own most efficient method of preventing the environmental problem (decentralisation).