This chapter explores the views of prominent Western thinkers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries who addressed the relationship between political thought and the historiography of international law. The chapter’s early modern chronological scope puts into sharp relief the precursors and originalities of the so-called nineteenth-century turn in international law’s historiography. A survey of consequential understandings of the link between international legal historiography and political thought finds that early modern thinkers systematically connected politics and international law by examining their shared epistemological, ontological and genealogical foundations, drawing interweaving lines of reasoning on how these fields are understood, and how they arise and evolve. Thus the arc of texts from Francisco de Vitoria to Jean Barbeyrac that specifically focus on this topic suggests that considerable sophistication existed before the nineteenth-century master narrative of international law’s historiography, and has been partly lost.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

European society has long been wedded to narratives of progress, and many people believe that, despite increased economic inequality, the basic conditions of the majority have improved and rights have expanded. T. H. Marshall’s claim that political rights developed first and were later followed by socio-economic rights is ingrained in contemporary historiography. Yet, if we lengthen our historical perspective, we see that socio-economic rights predate not only the twentieth century but the entire modern period. From the Middle Ages, poverty was considered not only an economic but also a theological and legal condition. The rights of the poor were socio-economic in nature, encompassing necessities and legal representation. However, these rights were eroded in the sixteenth century, as new power structures and labour relations emerged and capitalism developed. By taking a long view, we see that the history of socio-economic rights is defined not by the inexorable march of progress but by moments of erosion, when the rights of the poor were suppressed, along with the history of poverty as a legal condition.

This chapter traces the practice of concluding peace treaties in Early Modern Europe, characterised by the increasing standardisation of clauses, as well as the influence of the concept of legal (or formal) war alongside that of just war. While just war retained an important role in the justification of war, treaty-making practice tended to rely on legal war, which produced a dualist logic in both war-waging and peace-making. Over time, the settlement of territorial conflicts moved from pre-existing claims and rights to conquest as a basis; dynastic legitimacy was subordinated to the raison d’etat. Increasingly standardised amnesty and restitution clauses, retractions of letters of reprisal, and provisions on prisoners of war likewise bore the influence of the legal war concept. Finally, to deal with the ever wider disruption caused by war, separate FCN treaties emerged alongside peace treaties. Later on, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles marked a brief return to a discriminatory concept of war, but its longer-lasting impact was on collective security and compensation of war damage for citizens.

During the Reformation and the Age of Exploration, just war thinkers were forced to reexamine the premises on which the Augustinian tradition had stood, including their understanding of natural law, justice, and sovereignty. This chapter examines three thinkers crucial to that transition: Alberico Gentili, Francisco Suarez, and Hugo Grotius. They are part of the Augustinian tradition, but clearly show signs of subtle departure from their predecessors. Grotius, especially, is a hybrid between the Augustinian past and Westphalian future. They understood themselves to be engaged in a project of continuity: they wanted to salvage and reinterpret the intellectual inheritance of Christendom and reapply it to the changing and fracturing landscape of their day. But the new age inaugurated by the treaties of Westphalia transformed it in subtle but important ways, most prominently by secularizing its discourse and changing its understanding of natural law.

This chapter argues that the emergence of what we recognize as the modern international system develops through evolving practices of diplomacy. IR literature has increasingly paid attention to the early modern development of diplomacy to understand the origins of the system. This chapter offers a distinct interpretation of the importance of diplomacy from the perspective of the closure thesis. In contrast to the typical account of diplomacy as mediating the political fractures that resulted from the breakdown of Christendom, it argues that the adoption and diffusion of specific diplomatic practices, such as the permanent resident ambassador, facilitated closure and boundary-drawing by narrowing the types of actors invested with rights of political representation. Diplomatic practices emerged in part as a means of producing common goods and securing privileged access to those goods for some political actors, while facilitating the political exclusion and subordination of others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the argument’s contemporary relevance. In reflecting on an historical age in which the sovereign state was not yet the only legitimate political agent, the contemporary question is whether today’s legal and representational rights at the global level can or should be emancipated from the state.

Profound religious, political, social and economic change marked the early modern period of European history. The religious reformations of the sixteenth century, the expanding power and fiscality of the monarchical state, the pressures of a growing population, and economic change associated with agricultural enclosures and the first stirrings of industrialisation all contributed to frequent eruptions of collective popular violence. That violence assumed three chief forms. Riots were characterised by geographically limited violence, of relatively brief duration, that generally arose over local issues like the high cost of necessities such as bread in local markets. In rebellions, local protests, often beginning as riots, merged with more general issues to affect more than one locale and to extend for more than a few days when protestors secured effective leadership, often by social elites. Revolutions drew the support of a national group, or of a single ethnic group within one of the ethnically composite states emerging in our period, to seek fundamental countrywide change.

The Introduction defines how historians might use the term political culture as applied to early modern Europe. It explores notions of legitimate authority, the exercise of power, as well as the widespread norms of patriarchy and coercion in the period 1635–1795. It explains the importance of print as the most effective medium for the dissemination of both traditional and new ideas about civic society and good governance.