Jurisdictional Accumulation

Introduction -- Early modern extraterritoriality -- Historical sociology, Marxism, and law -- Social property relations -- Ambassadors -- Consuls -- Colonial practices of jurisdictional accumulation -- Analytical crossroads : dominium, consuls, and extraterritoriality.

Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.

Accessible, engaging textbook offering an innovative account of people's lives in the early modern period.

Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities

This is the first book in English to study the history of the Estates General of Burgundy during the classic period of absolute monarchy. Although not a representative institution in any modern sense, the Estates were constantly engaged in a process of bargaining with the French crown, and this book examines that relationship under the Ancien Régime. Julian Swann analyses the organization, membership and powers of the Estates and explores their administration, their struggles for power with rival institutions and their relationship with the crown and with the Burgundian people. The Estates proved remarkably resilient when confronted by the challenges posed by the Bourbon monarchy, and by the reign of Louis XVI they were seemingly more powerful than ever. However the desire to protect their privileges and to extend their authority had not been accompanied by an attempt to forge a meaningful relationship with the people they claimed to serve.

This book compares the two golden ages of private international law (PIL): the first is the era of Story and Savigny in the nineteenth century, while the second comprises the last fifty years. The period between 1970 and 2020 has been one of rapid changes and dense legislative responses, exemplified by the adoption of over one hundred national PIL codifications and almost as many international or regional conventions and regulations. These instruments provide a rich source for this book’s incisive and instructive comparisons and a fertile ground for a reliable assessment of the progress of PIL as a discipline. This book skillfully uncovers and meticulously documents the gradual—and largely unnoticed—transition of PIL from the idealism of the nineteenth century to the pragmatic eclecticism and pluralism of the twenty-first century.