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Abstract
Over the past twenty years historians have observed that early modern chartered companies exhibited many of the characteristics of the state such that the term “company-state” has become a common trope of analysis. One of the features of statehood, however, that was absent from representations of these companies was any claim to sovereignty. One reason for this absence was that the companies were often perceived to be created by sovereign states. This was not, however, always the case – they were also frequently understood by their own members to have an existence independent of any state and deriving, rather, from natural sociability and compacts. They were also understood to be political communities which raises the question of whether sovereignty was necessary for a community to function like a state: that is, with constitutions, armies, laws, currencies, offices, and diplomacy. At the same time, one might ask what work sovereignty does and why the language of sovereignty was absent from discussions of these corporations. The concept of sovereignty was employed in the early modern period by authors such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes in reference to the necessity for the state to exercise supreme power over rival authorities, notably the church. Early modern corporations, on the other hand, were not engaged in a contest with the political authority of the church, or any other authority, other than sometimes with the states that claimed to have created them, so the concept of sovereignty did no work for them or might raise questions they wished to avoid.
Abstract
This chapter argues that Edmond Richer (1560–1631), a theologian of Sorbonne, at one time syndic of the Faculty of Theology of Paris and a staunch proponent of conciliarism, borrowed from Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty in his discussion of the relationship between ecclesiastical and political power. As early as 1600 he quoted Bodin in one of his early treatises and he used the term sovereignty in the French translation of De ecclesiastica et political potestate, his most famous work (1611), as well as in the Traité des appellations comme d’abus (between 1623 and 1626). What makes Richer significant in the history of the reception of Bodin’s work is his attempt to apply the notion of sovereignty not only to the body politic, as the author of Les Six Livres de la Republique and the jurists and political writers who were inspired by him had done, but to the Church. Richer’s familiarity with the Angevin’s work is evidenced by the fact that he used a clearly Bodinian language in the fifth article of De ecclesiastica et politica potestate, that his colleague André Duval noted that his distinction between state and government was unheard of and that Michel Mauclerc, another theologian of Sorbonne, linked this distinction, which he knew had been used by Richer, to Bodin.
Abstract
Chapter 29 of Hobbes’s Leviathan is devoted to ‘Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a Common-Wealth’. It contains a set of instructions to the would-be ‘Architect’ of a state as to how avoid erecting a ‘crasie building’, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity’. This chapter is a crucial moment of transition in the overall argument. It tells us that sovereignty is best understood along a continuum at one end of which there is the healthy sovereign, the artificial person of the Common-wealth or state. On Hobbes’s view, the state is an idea that can be made material only through being represented by a human individual or group of such individuals, who staff the office of sovereignty. It must follow that as the state sickens with the disorders he identifies, so the sovereign weakens, moving further along the continuum until the point where it ceases to be sovereign at all. Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty turns out to be not only much more nuanced than orthodox interpretations allow, but also of surprising contemporary relevance.
Abstract
Beyond presenting and introducing the subsequent chapters, the introduction seeks to reduce the subject of sovereignty into its most abstract form, namely, that a ruler or decision-maker has the power to rule over others concerning all problems or, the very least, a particular set of problems within a given social context. Challenging this position raises the issue of navigating the relationship between two (or more) powers – in dual relationships this results either in the subordination of one to the other or in coordination. Such dual or multiple power relationships can be studied not only in both Western and global politico-theological contexts, but also with regard to gender power relationships or the relationship between functional spheres (economics, science, politics, etc.). Drawing on the current state of research in the classical field of European juridico-political theory and the evolution of the political concept of ‘sovereignty’ beginning in thirteenth-century Europe, the chapter addresses several methodological problems within the field of global history such as how to deal with distinctions in the modern Western language of analysis, different source languages, and varying global forms of political order when attempting to historicize an object so ephemeral as ‘sovereignties’. Examples illustrating the interaction between the British East India Company and the Mughal Court around 1700 serve as a prolepsis to the subsequent chapters in the latter part of the volume, which is devoted mostly to Eurasian case studies.
Abstract
The chapter sheds new light on the 1619 treatise by Giulio Pace, De dominio maris Hadriatici. In modern scholarship, despite of the date of publication, Pace’s work is usually thought to reflect a pre-Grotian Bartolist tradition of reasoning, recognizing Venetian rule over the Adriatic Sea in complete continuity with the tradition developed in the fifteenth-century legal commentary literature on the Digest concerning the division and occupation of property. By contrast Freed suggests that Pace, probably consciously bypassing Grotius’ 1608 Mare liberum, by concentrating, like Grotius, on the status of the sea as res, yet by introducing an innovative three-fold distinction, arguing that the sea was res nullius as a matter of property, res communis as a matter of use, and capable of someone’s dominium. The legal significance of Pace’s decision to classify the Adriatic as res nullius can be seen in the subsequent claims of occupatio that can be made over res nullius: The first occupant over unclaimed res nullius is entitled to a new title of dominium. In theory, Venice could own the Adriatic, either by occupation or by prescription of time, and exercise its jurisdiction. Pace could serve as Venetian answer to Grotius and as functional equivalent to John Selden’s Mare clausum option just by elegantly refining the old mos-italicus tradition.
Abstract
This article explores the gendered and performative dimensions of sovereignty in early modern France by examining a controversial procedure used by French Bishops’ courts (officialités) to adjudicate suits for marital annulments on the grounds of impotence. Even as theorists of royal sovereignty such as Jean Bodin drew parallels between patriarchal authority over the family and royal authority over the kingdom, and royal courts asserted their jurisdiction over marriage, the right of women to have their marriages nullified if their husbands proved to be impotent was widely acknowledged. Furthermore, since impotence was a canonical impediment to marriage, it was generally accepted that Church courts had jurisdiction over impotence suits. Despite this consensus, however, the procedure used by officialités to ascertain the veracity of impotence claims, known as the “épreuve du congrès,” provoked extensive legal and medical controversies. Critics claimed that the congrès, which required the couple to attempt intercourse in a controlled setting and under the auspices of medical experts, invariably favored women, encouraging them to challenge their husbands’ power and promoting domestic and societal disorder. Despite these complaints, this article concludes, royal courts preferred to uphold use of the congrès until the late seventeenth-century rather than jeopardize their own authority by adjudicating disputes where, everyone agreed, the stakes were high and the truth nearly impossible to discern.
Abstract
In early modern Europe, it was common for rebels to call on a foreign prince to support them in their struggle. In some cases, they even went so far as to proclaim this prince as their new monarch. Negotiations then opened in which the definition of sovereignty and its possible transfer constituted both legal and rhetorical issues, establishing a constant competition between the different actors. This article studies a configuration of this type. In 1584, the Dutch, breaking with their legitimate monarch, Philip II of Spain, appealed to the French king Henry III and promised him the crown of the Netherlands in exchange for his military assistance. Based on the exchanges between the French monarchy and Dutch institutions (e.g., cities, provincial estates, the Estates General), we can reconstruct a process of complex negotiations in which sovereignty became a malleable notion and the subject of numerous instrumentalizations. Henry III ultimately refused to become the new prince of the Netherlands, but this episode was undoubtedly important in the maturation of Dutch republicanism.
Abstract
The chapter explores the relationship between the sphere of economics and politics as reflected in the early modern theory of the sovereign’s powers between Bodin and Pufendorf: Early modern sovereigns were facing the problem of burdens by duties that may have practically limited the exercise of their sovereignty. One such duty is the ‘duty of humanity’ or officium humanitatis, originating in Cicero’s ethics. The chapter explores how such humane duties might restrict and regulate acts of sovereignty. While it is a fundamental right of sovereignty to coin money for the purposes of commerce, sovereigns are prohibited from altering the value of money in circulation, an argument developed by Bodin. The reasoning for this is further developed in a study of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, both of whom rely on the contract of sale in the Digest, which is defined by agreement on price, to explain why the prohibition of altering the value of money is a strict duty, binding even on sovereigns. Contracts defined in terms of money, such as sale, are ultimately governed by the law of nature. Devaluing currency would represent not only a failure to uphold a sovereign’s basic duty of humanity, it would also represent a collapse of commercial activity that sovereigns are expected and uniquely empowered to promote.
Abstract
The chapter begins with an analysis of the diplomatic education of the French corps diplomatique around 1700, focusing on the French ambassador at the Ottoman Porte d’Andrezel. Wicquefort, Grotius, and Pufendorf were central for the doctrine that (only) sovereigns were represented by their ambassadors and Edouard de La Croix represented the most advanced author printed usable for the Porte’s ceremonial rules. Three levels of performance of sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean are of interest. The French role as mediator in the negotiations between Russia, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Ottomans in the 1730s reveals how the state system became (re-)hierarchized during that period, with a scrupulous distinction between the ‘big four’ and others concerning the East. Secondly, the triangular relationship between France, the Barbary States (Tripoli and Tunis), and the Ottoman Empire concerning French complaints about piracy around 1728/29 highlights how the French tried to formalize an asymmetrical relationship between the regencies and Versailles, not least by incorporating publicized forms of Islamic acts of penitence. Thirdly, the chapter delves into the relationship between inter-state and intra-state forms of performing, attacking, and claiming sovereignty, particularly in the context of confessional conflicts in the region. The question remains to what extent diplomatic forms and concepts such as the state system and of sovereignty were truly ‘translatable’ between the West and the East.