the intellectual historiography of early modern empire

The intellectual historiography of early modern empire.

Introduction

Richard Koebner’s Empire (1961), compiled from his notes and published posthumously, was a

groundbreaking survey of the vicissitudes of “empire” and associated concepts from ancient Rome to

early modern Europe and its colonies.1 Koebner traced the use of empire and its cognates to refer to

sovereign authority and the territory subject to that authority, respectively, and how they came over

time to connote expansive territorial rule in the style of the Roman Empire. His work was

unsystematic and for certain time periods undeveloped, but it was pioneering in exploring the

relationship between such concepts as monarchy, universal monarchy and empire. Many of its

observations—notably, of the ascendancy of England's maritime empire in the eighteenth century2—

were later taken up by scholars to fruitful effect.3

Like Frances Yates before him,4 though focusing on political language rather than visual symbolism,

Koebner demonstrated that imperial ideas were not straightforwardly displaced in the early modern

period by the reality of and concepts associated with the sovereign state. Charles V's Holy Roman

Empire and subsequent aspirants to universal monarchy kept empire alive in both thought and

practice. Yet for a long time this work was not followed up by intellectual historians. This changed in

the early 1990s, which saw the publication of a spate of studies into early modern political thinking

about empire.5 This essay locates that scholarship in its intellectual context by reconstructing the

historiographical developments from which it emerged. It then uses the disciplinary schema thereby

established to better understand where scholars working on these topics today are coming from and

what they are trying to do.

Part I

The 1990s resurgence of scholarly interest in political thinking about empire was a product of two

developments in the historiography of early modern Europe that had occurred in the decades since

Yates's and Koebner’s path-breaking studies: an adoption of "composite monarchy" as a framework

for understanding early modern state-building, and the development of a "New British History" which

sought to understand "Britain" in terms of the interactions of its constituent polities.

1 Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, 1961). For other early studies of imperial ideology, cf. David Armitage,

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 4n12. 2 Koebner, Empire, pp. 77-85.

3 See Part II, below.

4 See the essays collected in Frances A. Yates, Astraea – The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London,

1975); Frances A. Yates, "Queen Elizabeth as Astraea," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10

(1947); cf. J.H. Elliott, "Imperial image makers," New York Review of Books (20 Feb, 1975). 5 Cf. David Armitage, "Introduction," in David Armitage (ed.), Theories of Empire, 1450-1800 (Aldershot,

1998), p. xv.

Composite monarchies

In his 1975 inaugural lecture in the Chair of History at University College London, H.G.

Koenigsberger examined why the distribution of power between crowns and parliaments had varied

across early modern European states. Explanatory models which took as their unit of analysis a single

country in isolation were inadequate, he argued, since most early modern polities "were composite

states, including more than one country under the sovereignty of one ruler."6 Whereas to "outsiders"

the definition of a Frenchman, a Spaniard or German "seemed clear enough," such identities "often

meant little" to the subjects themselves, for whom regional or national loyalties were frequently of

greater significance.7 Like Yates and Koebner before him, Koenigsberger resisted the Whig narrative

of linear progress from "medieval universalism" to "modern nationalism."8 The sixteenth century, he

pointed out, saw three empires stage claims to universalism (the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V,

the Ottoman empire of Selim I and the Muscovite empire of Ivan IV) and two more claim Papal

authority for rule outside Europe (Spain and Portugal).9

Koenigsberger's interest in the dynamics of composite states emerged from his studies of the

Hapsburg empire—a "heterogeneous" and "vast confederacy of states," linked through "the person of

the monarch."10

Spain viewed its European dependencies as categorically different to its American

colonies. Charles V and Philip II did not contemplate imposing Spanish law wholesale on Sicily and

Naples, as had been done in Mexico and Peru, and were careful to legitimate Spanish rule in terms of

Sicilian and Neapolitan law, rather than on the basis of rights of conquest.11

Similarly, because Sicily

was not viewed as a mere province it was spared "the trade monopoly which Spain imposed on the

colonists in the New World."12

Sicilians, for their part, insisted that their allegiance to the Spanish

monarchy was "voluntary."13

Tracing the shifting balance of power in Sicily as the Crown, responding

to the increasing cost of warfare against the Turks, sought to introduce centralised bureaucracy and

6 H.G. Koenigsberger, "Dominium regale or Dominium politicum et regale: monarchies and parliaments in early

modern Europe," in H.G. Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern History (London,

1986) [1975], p. 12; see also pp. 14-17, 22-24. Cf. H.G. Koenigsberger, Monarchies, States Generals and

Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 2001), p. 11. The term

“composite state” dates back at least to Jean Barbeyrac’s 1732 translation of Pufendorf’s analysis of “systems of

states”. (István Hont, "The permanent crisis of a divided mankind: 'nation-state' and 'nationalism' in historical

perspective," in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective

(Cambridge MA, 2005) [1993], p. 458n14; cf. John Robertson, "Empire and union: two concepts of the early

modern European political order," in Armitage, Theories of Empire [1995], pp. 34-35.) 7 H.G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1968), pp. 213, 216; cf.

H.G. Koenigsberger, "Composite states, representative institutions and the American Revolution," Historical

Research 62.148 (Jun 1989), p. 135. Cf. István Hont, "Permanent crisis," p. 456. 8 Koenigsberger and Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century, p. 212.

9 H.G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse and G.Q. Bowler, Europe in the Sixteenth Century 2

nd ed. (London,

1989), pp. 6, 229. 10

Josep Maria Batista i Roca, "Foreword to First Edition," in H.G. Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire

(Ithaca, 1969) [1950], pp. 10-11, 15. 11

Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire, pp. 51-52. 12

Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire, pp. 142-43. 13

Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire, p. 52.

exclude the Sicilian nobility from power without provoking rebellion, Koenigsberger read the

"internal history of the Spanish Empire" as one of "struggle between the centralizing forces of the

monarchy and the centrifugal forces" of its dependencies.14

Viceroys invested with the "external

attributes" of the monarch to compensate for royal absenteeism; reformed tribunals to increase royal

control; royal titles to flatter Sicilian nobles' self-esteem and compensate them for their loss of real

power—through these and other mechanisms the Crown was able to "build up a central administration

in Sicily," but the process was one of adaptation to rather than head-on confrontation with entrenched

feudal relations. Philip II's claims to absolute authority notwithstanding, Spanish rule in Sicily and

elsewhere remained "subject to severe limitations."15

Koenigsberger later turned his attention to the Netherlands, as a case study in parliament-monarch

relations in what was the early modern European norm: a "composite monarchy within a multiple

state." He analysed the seventeenth century transformation of Spanish rule in Europe from a

dominium politicum et regale to a dominium regale—categories borrowed from Sir John Fortescue,

describing an absolute and a constitutional monarchy, respectively. For personal and administrative

reasons monarchs sought to expand their power over representative assemblies, precipitating

constitutional crises that tended, eventually, to be resolved in the crown's favour. Yet this

transformation was never complete, a key obstacle to its realisation being "the fact of multiple

monarchies." Hapsburg viceroys, for instance, lacked the monarch's authority, which made it difficult

for them "to concentrate systematically on increasing monarchical power."16

To examine early

modern monarchies as "composites" was, in short, to direct attention to the role of (i) interactions

between metropolitan and peripheral elites and (ii) international intervention in shaping, sustaining

and destabilising political orders.17

It was also, crucially, to highlight the fact that early modern states

were the results of a long process of colonisation and conquest—the products, as well as perpetrators,

of empire.18

New British History

In 1973 J.G.A. Pocock appealed to historians to tackle a new subject: Britain.19

His plea was directed

against both Anglo-centric methodological nationalism and excessive Europeanisation; opposed to the

14

Koenisgberger, The Practice of Empire, pp. 46-52, 54, 72. 15

Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire, pp. 88-90, 96, 144. 16

Koenigsberger, Monarchies, pp. 14, 328-29. 17

Koenigsberger, "Dominium regale," pp. 14-17. 18

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (London,

1994) [1993], pp. 3, 306-14; Mark Greengrass (ed.), Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in

Early Modern Europe (London, 1991); David Armitage, "The elephant and the whale," in David Armitage,

Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013) [2009], pp. 48-49; James C. Scott, Seeing

Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), p. 82;

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States AD 990-1990 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 98-102. 19

J.G.A. Pocock, "British history: a plea for a new subject," in J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays

in British History (Cambridge, 2005) [1974].

reduction of British to English history on the one hand, and the assimilation of British to European

history on the other.20

This "New British History," as it became known,21

would take seriously the

composite character of the British polity, and explain its history as the product of interactions between

its component parts. England, Scotland and Ireland, and later Britain's colonies abroad, were each to

be understood as products of conquest and consolidation, linked to each other in turn through a variety

of constitutional structures. Early modern Britain, in short, was a composite monarchy of multiple

kingdoms and ought to be studied as such, with an emphasis on "constitutional and political

pluralism."22

Several works in the New British History tradition appeared in the 1980s.23

These "exciting revisions"

recast state, church, nation and empire as "precarious" and exposed to "multiple contingencies,"

involving the interaction of more than one polity, each possessing in turn its own domestic

dynamics.24

Koenigsberger, too, had used the concept of composite monarchy to resist deterministic

historical models, arguing that a frequent consequence of the composite character of early modern

states was the internationalisation of their constitutional conflicts and hence "the almost complete

unpredictability" of their outcomes.25

But it was in the early 1990s, Pocock writes, that the New

British History was widely taken up.26

The "model of multiple monarchy" was, in his view, its "most

important" contribution.27

The 1990s

The historiographical developments surveyed above together created the space, in the early 1990s, for

a resurgence in the study of early modern empire. Koenigbserger’s work was picked up by a fellow

historian of the Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy, John Elliott. Like Koenigsberger, Elliott emphasised

continuities across the traditional historiographical divide between medieval fragmentation and

20

Pocock, "British history: a plea," pp. 26-27, 43; cf. J.G.A. Pocock, "The Atlantic archipelago and the War of

Three Kingdoms," in Pocock, Islands [1996], p. 82; J.G.A. Pocock, "The Third Kingdom in its history," in

Pocock, Islands [2000], p. 94; J.G.A. Pocock, "The field enlarged: an introduction," in Pocock, Islands [2004],

p. 49. 21

On Pocock's project, see Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603-1715

(London, 1999); Pocock, "The field enlarged"; Pocock, "The politics of the New British History," in Pocock,

Islands [2001]; David Armitage (ed.), British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory 1500-1800

(Cambridge, 2006), chaps. 1-5; Colin Kidd, "Europe, what Europe?" London Review of Books 30.21 (6 Nov,

2008); Richard Bourke, "Pocock and the presuppositions of the New British History," The Historical Journal

53.3 (Sep 2010), pp. 747-770. 22

Pocock, "British history: a plea," pp. 31-32. 23

For instance, Richard S. Tompson, The Atlantic Archipelago: A Political History of the British Isles

(Lewiston NY, 1986); Hugh F. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989) 24

Pocock, "The field enlarged," pp. 47-48. 25

Koenigsberger, "Dominium regale," pp. 22-24. 26

Pocock, "The field enlarged," pp. 47-48. Works included: Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest

and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725 (London, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer

(eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and John

Morrill (eds.), The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York,

1996). 27

Pocock, "Atlantic archipelago," p. 80.

modern unification. While the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were indeed characterised by a

powerful centralising tendency, composite state structures showed remarkable resilience: the

"enlightened" monarchies of eighteenth century Britain and France "remained," Elliott argued,

"essentially composite."28

However such states presented themselves ideologically, in practice early

modern rule involved a precarious balance between the centralising demands of administrative

efficiency in the context of inter-state competition and the centrifugal pressures exerted by jealous

peripheral elites and distinctive national groups.29

In an influential 1992 essay, Elliott made of use of the seventeenth century Castilian jurist Juan de

Solórzano Pereira's distinction between "accessory" unions, involving full juridical incorporation, and

unions of "aeque principaliter," in which kingdoms shared a ruler yet remained distinct, to distinguish

between Spain's composite empire in Europe and its incorporating empire in the Indies.30

Whereas

Koenigsberger had primarily studied the former, Elliott tended to focus on the latter, and as such the

concept of composite monarchy was less central in his work. Nevertheless, he had long been aware

that early modern Spain was "a plural, not a unitary, state."31

Resisting the "unfortunate

compartmentalization" that had "tended to separate the study of Spanish history from that of Spanish

America"—a "similar" tendency existed, he noted, "in the study of British history"32—he explored the

impact of the American colonies on Spanish rule in Europe. The administrative challenge posed by

the vast distances separating Spain from its New World colonies stimulated the development of

bureaucratic structures in Madrid, and the emergence of an administrative class to run them.

Psychologically, too, the Atlantic empire promoted the hegemony of Castile within the Monarchy,

fuelling a Castilian arrogance towards that stoked resentment and destabilised the structure of aeque

principaliter.33

"Imperialism and composite monarchy," Elliott argued, "made for uncomfortable

bedfellows."34

In the same period, the New British History was put to use in revisionist analyses of the English Civil

War as a "war of the three kingdoms," or, more radically, "the wars of the three kingdoms."35

Resisting "the reduction of those wars to the English Civil War,"36

historians drew attention to the

previously underplayed37

role of Scotland and Ireland in the crises of the seventeenth century.38

Conrad Russell, for instance, argued that conflict within England ought to be understood as a product

28

J.H. Elliott, "A Europe of composite monarchies," in J.H. Elliott, Spain, Europe & the Wider World, 1500-

1800 (New Haven, 2009), pp. 21-22. 29

Elliott, "Composite monarchies," pp. 10-11, 21. 30

Elliott, "Composite monarchies," p. 7; cf. Greengrass, Conquest and Coalescence. 31

J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (London, 1963), pp. 65, 72. 32

J.H. Elliott, Spain and its World, 1500-1700: Selected Essays (New Haven, 1989), p. 3. 33

J.H. Elliot, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1992) [1970], pp. 81-84. 34

Elliott, "Composite monarchies," pp. 13-14. 35

John Morrill, "The War(s) of the Three Kingdoms," in Burgess, The New British History, p. 67. 36

Pocock, "The field enlarged," p. 54. 37

Morrill, "The War(s)," pp. 71-75. 38

See Pocock, "Atlantic archipelago;" Armitage, British Political Thought, chaps. 1-5 and "Afterword."

of the difficulties faced by the English Crown in ruling multiple kingdoms.39

The New British History

also branched off into a new discipline, Atlantic history.40

David Armitage, a leading proponent of

and participant in this shift, had been heavily influenced by both Pocock and the "composite

monarchy" literature.41

But he criticised the New British History for perpetuating a Whiggish

"separation between the history of Britain and the history of the Empire." While Pocock had called for

British history to incorporate that of its colonies and dependencies overseas, it had in practice focused

overwhelmingly on England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Armitage sought, as Elliott had done for

Spain, to "reintegrate the history of the British Empire with the history of early-modern Britain," for

instance by exploring the relationship between the composite structure of the British state and the

federative structure of the "British Atlantic Empire." Importantly, he pursued this integration "on the

ground of intellectual history."42

As noted, the political thought of empire in early modern Europe had for decades been largely passed

over by historians. Historians of political thought, Elliott complained in 1992, have not yet "accepted

fully the implications" of Charles V's revival of the imperial idea.43

As late as 2000, Armitage could

write that the history of political thought has "more often treated the history of the ideas of the state

than it has the concepts of empire."44

In the early 1990s, however, armed with an awareness of the

imperial character of early modern state-formation and rule, intellectual historians began to

systematically investigate the conceptual categories available to participants in seventeenth and

eighteenth century debates about empire and union. Preparatory work had been done by German

historians in the 1980s, who had investigated concepts of confederation and federation and, in the case

of Franz Bosbach, reconstructed the use of "Universal Monarchy" as primarily a negative epithet in

the publicist literature of the seventeenth century.45

Some scholarship also existed on Andrew

Fletcher, a figure who would emerge as central to Scottish debates about union and empire.46

39

Conrad Russell, "The British problem and the English Civil War," History 72.236 (1987); Conrad Russell,

The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990); cf. Morrill, "The War(s)," p. 84. 40

David Armitage, "Three concepts of Atlantic history," in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The

British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002); cf. Linda Colley, "Multiple kingdoms," London Review of

Books 23.14 (Jul 2001), pp. 23-24. 41

Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 14-15; Armitage, Theories of Empire, p. xvii; Nick Harding, Hanover and

the British Empire, 1700-1837 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. viii. 42

Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 2-3, 22-23, 59-60. 43

Elliott, "Composite monarchies," p. 5. 44

Armitage, Ideological Origins, p. 3. Cf. John Robertson, "Union, state and empire – the Britain of 1707 in its

European setting," in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War – Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London,

1994), p. 251n11; Robertson, "Empire and union," pp. 12-13. 45

Franz Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis: Ein politischer Leitbegriff der frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 1988);

Franz Bosbach, "The European debate on universal monarchy," in Armitage, Theories of Empire; Reinhart

Koselleck, "Bund, Bündnis, Föderalismus, Bundesstaat," in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart

Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in

Deutschland I (A-D) (Stuttgart, 1972). 46

J.G.A. Pocock, "Machiavelli, Harrington and English political ideologies in the eighteenth century," in

Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine

Much of the new body of scholarship originated in seminars sponsored by the Folger Institute Centre

for the History of British Political Thought and organised by, amongst others, J.G.A. Pocock.47

A

series held between 1984 and 198748

revealed, Pocock recalls, that historians of British political

thought were operating "almost wholly" within the field of English political thought. Subsequent

seminars held between 1987 and 1992 sought to correct this by investigating political discourse in

early modern Scotland and Ireland and pre-federal America49

and examining political thought in

eighteenth century Britain, hitherto overlooked "as something of a conceptual terra incognita."50

The work that came out of these seminars51

was self-consciously innovative ("our intention," one

convenor writes, "was to alter the ways British political thought in the early modern period... is

conceived, studied, and taught")52

and explicitly influenced by the historiographical shifts discussed

above. "The realisation that early-modern Europe was a 'Europe of composite monarchies'," David

Armitage introduced a major collection of 1990s scholarship on political theories of empire, "has

clarified the nature of the connection between early-modern state-building and contemporary overseas

Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), chap. 8; Nicholas Phillipson,

"Culture and society in the eighteenth-century province: the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,"

in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society Vol. II (Princeton, 1974); John Robertson, "The Scottish

Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition," in Michael Ignatieff and István Hont (eds.), Wealth and

Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); John Robertson,

The Militia Issue and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985); John Robertson, "Andrew Fletcher's Vision

of Union," in Roger A. Mason (ed.). Scotland and England 1286-1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), chap. 10; István

Hont, "Free trade and the economic limits to national politics: neo-Machiavellian political economy

reconsidered," in Hont, Jealousy of Trade [1990], pp. 258-66. Fletcher, Pocock wrote in 1995, has "emerged" as

a major figure in the Scottish canon. (J.G.A. Pocock, "Empire, state and confederation: the War of American

Independence as a crisis in multiple monarchy," in Pocock, Islands [1995], p. 144). 47

Gordon J. Schochet, "Introduction," in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Religion, Resistance, and Civil War: Papers

Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar "Political Thought in Early Modern England, 1600-1660"

(Washington D.C., 1990), p. iii; David Armitage, "Introduction," in Armitage, British Political Thought, pp. 1-2 48

Gordon J. Schochet (dir.), From Bosworth to Yorktown: The Development of British Political Thought from

Henry VII Through the American Revolution (Spring 1994); John Guy (dir.), Political Thought in the Henrician

Age, 1500-1603 (Autumn 1994); Donald R. Kelley (dir.), Political Thought in the Elizabethan Age, 1558-1603

(Spring 1985); William Lamont (dir.), Political Thought in Early Modern England, 1600-1660 (Autumn 1985);

Howard Nenner (dir.), Political Thought in the Later Stuart Age, 1649-1702 (Spring 1986); Nicholas Phillipson

(dir.), Politics and Politeness: British Political Thought in the Age of Walpole (Autumn 1986). 49

Pocock, "The field enlarged," p. 54. Most important for this discussion were J.G.A. Pocock (dir.), Political

Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-1800 (Spring 1987); Lois G. Schwoerer (dir.), The Glorious

Revolution (Spring 1989); Gordon J. Schochet, Lois G. Schwoerer and J.G.A. Pocock (dirs.), Political Thought

in the English-Speaking World, 1485-1793 (Autumn 1989 and Spring 1990); Roger A. Mason (dir.), Scots and

Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Autumn 1990); John Robertson (dir.), Union, State,

and Empire: The Political Identities of Britain, 1688-1750 (Spring 1991); J.G.A. Pocock (dir.), Empire,

Confederation, and Republic: From Atlantic Dominion to American Union (Spring 1992). 50

Gordon J. Schochet, "Introduction," in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Politics, Politeness, and Patriotism: Papers

Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar "Politics and Politeness, British Political Thought in the Age of

Walpole" (Washington D.C., 1993), p. vii. 51

See especially Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603

(Cambridge, 1994) and John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of

1707 (Cambridge, 1995). 52

Gordon J. Schochet, "Preface and Acknowledgements," in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Empire and Revolutions:

Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar "Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-

1800" (Washington D.C., 1993), p. iv.

expansion."53

A "pattern" of writing British history is "taking shape," Pocock observed in 1995, that is

"of particular utility to" historians of political thought. Awareness of the composite character of the

British polity served to highlight the coexistence of distinct but mutually constitutive English,

Scottish, Irish and British political discourses, concerned among other things with the relations

between their respective countries, and thus drew attention to "such terms as 'empire' and

'confederation.'"54

Pocock himself contributed to this new wave of scholarship with an examination of the American War

of Independence as a "crisis in multiple monarchy." Early modern England was, he argued, an

"empire" in two respects—it exercised rule over Scotland and Ireland, and it was itself subject to no

superior authority.55

These two senses pulled against each other: the Crown's empire over itself was

predicated on a unitary sovereignty that would be undermined were imperial control over Scotland

and Ireland to be consolidated in a confederation; further centralisation would thus have to take the

form of an incorporating, rather than confederal, union.56

Pocock showed that the crisis over

American independence was conceptually very similar. Where Scottish elites had argued for

confederal union with England, against the resistance of the English, so American elites argued for a

definition of "colony" that gave them rights as equal partners in the British system, effectively

redefining empire as confederation.57

But as with Scotland, English elites could imagine incorporating

the North American colonies but not confederating with them. The American colonists' struggle for

equal participation in a confederal British empire was thus frustrated and became a war for

independence.58

Pocock's argument drew on contemporaneous work by John Robertson. Just as Elliott had used the

framework of composite monarchy to reject exceptionialist treatments of Spain,59

so Robertson sought

to show that Anglo-Scottish union was but a "British variant of a wider pattern." And just as the New

British History sought to disinter the distinct political discourses of England's neighbours, so

Robertson viewed Anglo-Scottish union from "the provincial viewpoint of Scotland," a perspective

which, he argued, made evident "the European character of the British kingdoms' relationship."60

Welcoming Elliott's and Koenigsberger's reassessment of the structures of early modern states,

Robertson agreed with Elliott that historians had yet to systematically reconstruct how contemporaries

53

Armitage, Theories of Empire, p. xvii. 54

Pocock, "Empire, state and confederation," pp. 134-36. 55

On Henry VIII's 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, which proclaimed England an empire, as a rejection of

Papal and Holy Roman Empire claims to authority, cf. Koebner, Empire, pp. 53-54; Robertson, "Empire and

union," pp. 16-17. 56

Pocock "Empire, state and confederation," pp. 136-37, 145-46. 57

Pocock "Empire, state and confederation," pp. 150-53; cf. Koebner, Empire, pp. 105-93. 58

Pocock "Empire, state and confederation," pp. 152-57. 59

Elliott, Wider World, pp. xv, xx. 60

Robertson, "Union, state and empire," p. 226; cf. John Robertson, "The Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707: the

scope for a European perspective," in Andrew Mackillop and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds.), Forging the State:

European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 (Dundee, 2009), p. 52.

understood those structures. In their preoccupation with sovereignty, he suggested, historians of

political thought had neglected concepts—like "empire" and "union"—more suited to a Europe

comprised not of independent states but of "a small number of imperial monarchies ruling over far-

flung, sometimes rebellious provinces," alongside "various federal and confederal unions."61

In a wide-ranging survey, Robertson traced the elaboration over the course of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries of two alternative forms of union: confederative and monarchical (or

incorporating). The latter became associated with expansive territorial empire, and the former with

anti-imperial associations and, later, with commercial maritime empire. In the 1698-1707 debate over

Anglo-Scottish union Andrew Fletcher drew on these categories to promote confederal rather than

incorporating union—a United Provinces of Great Britain. Crucially, the Scots could not advocate a

federal union, since this had been pre-empted by Pufendorf over a century before; they were,

Robertson concludes, "hoist by the rigidity of their conceptual inheritance."62

The continental tradition of Koenigsberger and Elliott was continued by Anthony Pagden, who

explored more systematically than they had done the ideology of European empire. Like Elliott,

Pagden was particularly interested in Spain's American colonies, which drew his focus away from

thinking about composite monarchy and towards concerns about delimiting Papal from monarchical

authority.63

Yet he was certainly aware of the intellectual importance of Spain's composite European

empire, as explored in his analyses of Tommaso Campanella, perhaps the most fervent advocate of

Spanish universal monarchy, and Paolo Mattia Doria. For Campanella, "language" rather than the

sword was the principle instrument of empire: those who acquire "the empire over minds [are able]

soon and little by little to found states."64

A prudent emperor would strike a balance between

acculturating his subjects while respecting "the customs, and above all the laws, of the people he

seeks to control." Campanella later ascribed Spain's failure to achieve universal monarchy to its

mistaken attempt to "govern all the nations according to one manner and not according to the customs

61

Robertson, "Union, state and empire," p. 226; Robertson, "Empire and union," pp. 12-13. Robertson exempted

German scholars from this reproach. Martti Koskenniemi has approached these issues from a different angle,

arguing against conventional wisdom that there was no "international law" prior to the nineteenth century, but

rather a juristic literature of statehood that grappled with an international order that was far from clear-cut.

(Martti Koskenniemi, "International law and raison d'état: rethinking the prehistory of international law," in

Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (eds.), The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico

Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford, 2010), especially pp. 320-35, on the Holy Roman Empire.) 62

Robertson, "Empire and union," pp. 13, 18, 21-22, 29, 32-35, 39-44; cf. Robertson, "European perspective,"

pp. 59-60. 63

Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C. 1500-c. 1800

(New Haven, 1995), pp. 47-52. 64

Campanella, cited in Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in

European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513-1830 (New Haven, 1990), p. 56.

of the land and the heavens appropriate to each."65

Doria developed a similar though more

sophisticated account, Pagden showed, of the failures of Spanish rule in southern Italy.66

To summarise, in the early 1990s historians of political thought returned to the inquiry into early

modern thinking about empire begun by Yates and Koebner in the mid-twentieth century.

Historiographical developments in the intervening period had highlighted structural analogies

between state- and empire-building and drawn attention to the interactions between domestic and

international politics. This provoked intellectual historians to reconstruct early modern thinking about

composite structures, through such concepts as empire, union and confederation.

Part II

Among those scholars working, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on early modern theories of empire

and union was István Hont, then at King's College, Cambridge. Hont had participated in at least one

of the Folger seminars directed by Pocock,67

and was very much aware of the historiographical

developments described above. Like the scholars previously discussed, he was interested in early

modern ideas of empire and state-formation as expressed in debates about Anglo-Scottish union and

European order. But to a greater extent than his contemporaries, his work emphasised the economic

dimensions of those debates.

Hont engaged most directly with the "composite monarchy" literature in a 1993 essay on nationalism

and the nation-state. Drawing on Elliott and Koenigsberger, and on the historical-sociology of early

modern state-building,68

Hont argued that the emergence of the "nation-state" had to be understood in

the context of radical changes in international order over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

That period had seen European states undergo a dramatic process of consolidation, centralisation and

homogenisation, driven by the pressures of economic and military competition; composite

monarchies—Britain foremost among them—transitioned, if incompletely and unevenly, into

absolutist states.69

While Hont allowed for the continued existence of sub-national groups—future

devolutions threatened, he noted, to reveal modern nation-states as "having been concealed empires

all along"70—his emphasis, unlike that of much of the "composite monarchy" literature, was very

much on the process of centralisation composite monarchies underwent. His concern was the

65

Campanella, cited in Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, p. 57. 66

Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, chap. 3. 67

Schochet, Empire and Revolutions, pp. xii-xiii. 68

See Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975); Tilly, Coercion,

Capital, and European States; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power – War, Money and the English State, 1688-

1783 (Cambridge MA, 1990). 69

Hont, "Permanent crisis," pp. 456-62. 70

Hont, "Permanent crisis," p. 455.

significance of the changes in early modern international order, rather than its continuities with the

pre-modern or feudal era.71

Even as early modern states became less composite politically, however, they became more porous

economically, as Europe's large monarchies became increasingly dependent for prosperity and power

on success in international markets.72

The tensions arising from "distinct societies inexorably tied

together in the large-scale and supranational movements of the world economy"73—from the

interaction of increasingly "closed" political systems in an ever more "open" economy74—were an

increasing source of concern for contemporary observers. When seventeenth and eighteenth century

thinkers debated empire and weighed up alternative models for structuring the state, they did so

knowing that the key environment in which those structures would have to survive was that of cut-

throat commercial rivalry.

The Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 was, for Hont, the "first instance of modern state formation where

considerations of competitive trade played a major part."75

In a world where national power depended

upon commercial success, a politically independent Scotland pursuing its own trading empire was

intolerable for England. Given England's superior might, Scottish elites thus faced a choice between

political independence and access to international markets. With Union, they opted for the latter.76

The debate over England's relationship with Ireland, though somewhat different, was also concerned

with forging a stable imperial relationship capable of success in international markets. When English

agitation against Irish competition threatened to strangle the Irish woollen and nascent linen

industries, Anglo-Irish Protestants fought back by contesting the structure of England's composite

monarchy. William Molyneux argued, as North American colonists would later do with respect to the

colonies, that Ireland was not a dependent province of England, but rather a fellow sovereign state

bound through confederation to a joint Crown and hence entitled to participate in English commercial

liberty.77

While compatible with a pre-modern territorial empire, this was, the English Machiavellian

Charles Davenant realised, a lethal threat to a modern trading one. In conditions of free trade,

Davenant worried, Ireland would undersell England, and in an environment where trade had become

an "affair of state"78

this posed a fundamental challenge to English power and, ultimately, its liberty.

Davenant thus urged the forcible suppression of Irish industry and Ireland's subjugation as what James

71

Hont, "Permanent crisis," pp. 448, 459, 462. 72

Hont, "Economic limits," pp. 186-87. 73

Hont, "Economic limits," p. 266. 74

Hont, "Economic limits," p. 188; István Hont, "Introduction," in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 55. 75

Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 64. 76

Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 63-44. 77


David Hume, cited in Hont, "Economic limits," p. 186.

VI and I would have called a "naked province."79

In both the Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish debates,

as reconstructed by Hont, empire was associated with the quest for commercial monopoly. To be a

province or a colony, as distinct from an equal member of an aeque principaliter, was to be forced out

of international trade and condemned to permanent economic backwardness.80

Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Scottish relations were, Hont stressed, local variants of a European problem.

As Andrew Fletcher argued, the conjunction of states and international commerce was inherently

unstable. Whereas peaceful commerce required a cosmopolitan spirit, nation-states continued to

prioritise their own particular interests; commercial rivalry thus led inevitably to global war.81

States,

inflamed by what Hume would later call "jealousy of trade," would always use their military power to

enhance their commercial success, and vice versa. The solution for many seventeenth or eighteenth

century thinkers had to involve detaching international trade from national states, by abandoning the

former or else transcending the latter. One way of doing this was that pursued by England and

Scotland: political union to render commercial rivalry unthreatening. On a European scale, Hont

observed, the "same logic" lay behind projects for "universal empire" and "European Union."82

Alternatively, one could retain the existing European state system but insulate its members from

international commerce. The most prominent advocate of this approach, Hont noted, was Johann

Gottlieb Fichte.83

Part III

Intellectual historians of eighteenth century empire continue to work within the space created by the

advances of the early 1990s, informed by an appreciation of both the constitutional variety of early

modern Europe and implications of seventeenth and eighteenth century transformations in

international political economy. Three important recent studies—Sophus A. Reinert's Translating

Empire,84

Isaac Nakhimovsky's The Closed Commercial State85

and Richard Whatmore's Against War

& Empire86—illustrate the point.

All situate their subjects in the context of a Europe riven by economic and military competition.

Whatmore examines commercial and military rivalry between France and Britain from the perspective

79

Hont, "Economic limits," pp. 228-29, 233; James VI and I, cited in John Robertson, "The Conceptual

Framework of Anglo-Scottish Union," Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos 5 (2009), p. 126. 80

Hont, "Economic limits," pp. 232-33; cf. Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the

Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 16. 81


Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 64; cf. Hont, "Economic limits," p. 263. 83

Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 153; Hont, "Permanent crisis," p. 511. 84

Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge MA,

2011). 85

Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau

to Fichte (Princeton, 2011). 86

Richard Whatmore, Against War & Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century (New

Haven, 2012).

of a small republic, Geneva, fated to be a "pawn in an international power game."87

French

consolidation in the face of British power doomed the reform projects of the Genevan représentants.

In exile, they sought a European order that would secure the liberties of small states, and lobbied

British and French officials to make their proposals a reality. They became increasingly divided,

Whatmore shows, between appealing to Britain to defend Genevan independence from French

aggression, and seeing in France—particularly revolutionary France—the prospect of a cosmopolitan

empire that would treat its neighbours with tolerance and respect.88

Nakhimovsky addresses similar

issues from the perspective of Germany. He reads Fichte's The Closed Commercial State as an answer

to the same problem that had confronted the représentants: that of "creating a republic in an unlawful

environment" characterised by "international commercial rivalry and the constraints that it imposed on

states whose survival depended on their economic success."89

Reinert, too, emphasises a context of vicious commercial competition, using it to argue against

historiographical depictions of eighteenth century trade as straightforwardly antithetical to war. While

some eighteenth century thinkers were indeed optimistic about the civilising influence of doux

commerce, Reinert, like Hont, wants to excavate a more ambivalent line of thought. After the Seven

Years' War, Casanova and Goudar wrote of England that its "dominion of the sea" had enabled it to

"[give] laws to several great nations," an imperial power "entirely owing to money."90

That

commercial dominance could be as sure a basis as conquest for law-giving (i.e. empire) was, Reinert

shows, a commonplace, as was the view that commercial rivalry was simply the eternal struggle for

international supremacy in a new guise.91

The "foundational insight" of this discourse, Reinert echoes

Hont, "was that civic survival had come to depend on success in international economic

competition."92

This sets up Reinert's broader argument that political economy emerged as "a tradition

of statecraft," a "bellicose science" for success in violent economic competition.93

This context permits Whatmore, Nakhimovsky and Reinert to resist methodological nationalism, as

the New British History and composite monarchy literatures had done. Whatmore examines Geneva

as a nexus connecting international power politics with domestic constitutional struggle, stressing, as

had Koenigsberger, the importance of international intervention in shaping the outcomes of early

modern civil conflict. But the process, he shows, also worked the other way, as Genevan

représentants worked tirelessly to alter British and French policy by shaping public opinion and

cultivating influence with important figures (for instance, the "Bowood Circle" in Britain and

87

Whatmore, Against War, p. 168. 88

Whatmore, Against War, pp. 131-33, 144-54, 176, 182-86, 211. 89

Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, p. 62; cf. Whatmore, Against War, p. 13. 90

Casanova and Goudar, cited in Reinert, Translating Empire, p. 13. 91

Reinert, Translating Empire, pp. 21-25. 92

Reinert, Translating Empire, p. 17. 93

Reinert, Translating Empire, pp. 4, 22.

Mirabeau in France).94

Reinert uses John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England as a vehicle to

examine the dynamics of competitive emulation in eighteenth century Europe. Cary wrote his book as

a guide for English hegemony, which had to be based, he argued, on state-promoted industrial

exports.95

As English power became the envy of Europe, his advice was closely attended to by

England's rivals, eager to reproduce its success. Noting Pocock's call for "a more thorough history of

translations,"96

Reinert traces Cary's reception and successive translations across the continent,

showing how with each iteration his book was altered to fit a particular context. Thus, through radical

revision, a guide for imperial dominance became in Neapolitan hands a catch-up manual for the

periphery.97

Robertson had also read Neapolitan thought through the prism of core-periphery relations. After the

crisis of the Spanish succession exposed Naples as a "regnoe governato in provincial"98—a kingdom

governed as a province—the Neapolitan enlightenment developed as an attempt to reverse Italian

decline.99

In this respect, Robertson argued, Scotland and Naples faced a common predicament: both

were "juridically independent kingdoms" that had become "lesser partners in larger composite, or

imperial, monarchies."100

Robertson used this parallel to resist the historiographical fragmentation of

"the Enlightenment" into separate national contexts, identifying it instead as a pan-European discourse

of political economy concerned with both "intellectual inquiry" and "practical reform," that was at

once "open to the cosmopolitan and adaptable by the patriot."101

Reinert examines Genovesi's

translation of Cary in just this context. Once formidable, Naples had come to be viewed across Europe

as "a symbol of misrule."102

Having fallen behind under a succession of foreign rulers, Neapolitan

political economy was an attempt to "catch up."103

Like Robertson, Reinert reads Genovesi's

translation of English political economists as an exercise in cosmopolitan patriotism. English

grandezza was, Genovesi argued, the product of the "singular art and diligence" by which the British

state had promoted its manufacturing exports. In translating English political economy, he sought to

94

Whatmore Against War, pp. 110-11, 205-06. 95



Reinert, Translating Empire, pp. 189, 231-32. 98

Paolo Mattia Doria, cited in John Robertson, "The Enlightenment above national context: political economy

in eighteenth century Scotland and Naples," The Historical Journal 40.3 (Sep 1997), pp. 686-87; cf. Pagden,

Spanish Imperialism, chap. 3. 99

John Robertson, "Enlightenment and revolution: Naples 1799," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

10 (Dec 2000) [1999], p. 30. 100

Robertson, "Enlightenment above national context," p. 674. 101

Robertson, "Enlightenment above national context," pp. 672-74, 696-97; cf. John Robertson, The Case for

the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2007), chaps. 7 and "Conclusion." 102

Reinert, Translating Empire, pp. 186, 189. 103

Reinert, Translating Empire, p. 187; cf. p. 195.

reveal the "springs and levers" England "had operated to lift itself, in all parts of its economy, to

greatness," to facilitate its emulation by others.104

Nakhimovsky, too, exploits a European context grounded in a common reality of commercial rivalry

to approach his subject from a new angle. Fichte's ideas, Nakhimovsky shows, were the product of

intensive engagement with Rousseau, Sieyes and Kant, whose proposals for perpetual peace he

adapted to the political economy of modern Europe. Long maligned as an insular nationalist, Fichte is

thus better read as a participant in "long-running pan-European debates about the moral and political

implications of the rise of modern commerce and finance."105

Hont, as discussed, had associated

Fichte with the eighteenth century proposal to neutralise the threat of commercial warfare by

insulating states from international trade. Nakhimovsky fleshes this out, reconstructing the

philosophical and historiographical underpinnings of Fichte's arguments and their immediate political

implications in the context of rival English and French visions for European order.

It was argued above that whereas the "composite monarchy" literature tended to highlight continuities

between pre- and early-modern European orders, Hont emphasised the ruptures between them.

Whatmore and Nakhimovsky are interested in both. Like Hont, Nakhimovsky emphasises the

conjunction of closed political systems and an open economy as the most important composite

dimension of early modern states. Yet for Fichte, Nakhimovsky shows, this precisely was a

conjunction between feudal and modern Europe. After the fall of Rome, power was so fragmented

that the continent had effectively been in the state of nature. Pre-political Christendom had, however,

been united through shared norms and a common market, to the extent that Fichte was prepared to

speak of a European national community. With the introduction of Roman law came the rise of

political institutions and eventually monarchical states. Fichte was well aware, then, that modern

states were historical constructions, though for him they emerged less from a process of unification

than one of "division and fragmentation."106

Crucially, this division was incomplete. The formation of states had partitioned humanity politically,

but it had not displaced the pre-political common market. Nations had been "united through laws," but

not by "common fortune."107

This tension became destabilising once states began to finance

themselves through national taxation. Governments from this point viewed their taxable subjects as a

collective whose wealth they sought to maximise by, inter alia, engineering a positive balance of

trade. Trade became an affair of state. Yet individuals continued to consider themselves independent

commercial agents, and resented governments for restricting their commercial liberty. Modern states

104

Genovesi, cited in Reinert, Translating Empire, pp. 195, 198, 202-03; cf. Robertson, "Enlightenment above

national context," pp. 696-97. 105

Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, pp. 2, 8. 106

Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, pp. 74-75. 107

Fichte, cited in Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, p. 76.

thus remained, Fichte argued, "half-anarchic," their subjects interdependent and integrated

commercially yet divided constitutionally. To become "genuine national" communities, Europe's

separate polities had to disentangle their economies too. The alternative was "endless war... between

buyers and sellers," beggar-thy-neighbour state intervention and empire in the pursuit of commercial

monopoly.108

Fichte's description of persistent state fragmentation applied with particular force, Nakhimovsky

notes, to the "motley patchwork" of eighteenth century Prussia.109

French efforts to reconstruct Europe

had important implications for what Pufendorf had, centuries earlier, branded a constitutional

"monster".110

For both Sieyes and the Comte d'Hauterive—a senior official in Napoleon's foreign

ministry—the Holy Roman Empire had to be restructured into a federation of republics in order to

facilitate its integration into a French-led commercial order and wage war on England to make the

world safe for republicanism.111

Mapping Fichte's arguments on to competing Anglo-French visions

for European order, Nakhimovsky shows that opponents of English maritime empire appealed to a

variation of the traditional anti-imperial formation, the confederation. Thomas Paine and d'Hauterive

followed Mirabeau in advocating a "federal" navigation act to establish a French-led free trade area.

Members would exempt each other from trading restrictions, while collectively imposing them on

England. England would soon be forced to join, thereby abolishing its own monopolies. Paine saw in

such a "Franco-Russian concert of Europe" the potential "inauguration of a Kantian regime of

international right" and a step towards perpetual peace.112

Whatmore is similarly interested in the interactions between premodern structures and a transformed

European order. The crucial question facing the représentants was how to render a small commercial

republic viable in a world of large commercial monarchies.113

One intellectual tradition to which they

appealed was physiocracy, which, through its advocacy of decolonisation, free trade and internal

agricultural development, promised to steer France away from destructive external interventionism.

Yet as Whatmore shows, physiocratic doctrine was a double-edged sword: some took its preference

for large domestic markets as a prescription for the incorporation of Geneva into a French-led empire

of free trade.114

Before the French Revolution, the former représentant De Lolme had argued from exile in London

that in modern Europe small states were an anachronism. He looked to Anglo-Scottish and

prospective Anglo-Irish union as a model, arguing in favour of the latter on the grounds that

108

Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, pp. 14, 75-82. 109

Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, p. 72. 110

Pufendorf [1667], cited in Robertson, "Empire and union," p. 34. 111


Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, pp. 96-97. 113

Whatmore, Against War, p. 13. 114

Whatmore, Against War, pp. 143-44.

incorporation would end "national jealousy," enabling both polities to engage in commerce without

seeing each other "as... interlopers," but "like bees labouring for the same hive."115

De Lolme was

bitterly condemned by the représentants. But by the time Britain emerged victorious from the

Napoleonic wars, they were echoing his views.

As the représentants' various proposals for European order—British defence of Genevan

independence; a French-led cosmopolitan empire; perpetual peace centred on a British-French

alliance; a European free-trade area established by U.S.-French destruction of British

mercantilism116—collapsed on the altar of Anglo-French rivalry, they came to accept the negatif

critique of democratic republicanism. "The fundamental fact of modern politics," they now believed,

"was that commercial societies needed large markets, and large markets were best secured by large

states respectful of the composite national elements and social groups that formed them." Rejecting

both republican confederations and European federalism as the routes to European peace, the future

for Geneva, and other small states by extension, was to join a commercial empire.117

Fichte's account of state incompleteness118

meant that he was alive to the persistence of constitutional

variety. European states, he wrote at the turn of the century, are "young," and "we are still living

among attempts to forge them."119

Far from completing their separation economically, most states

hadn't even "attained the absolute sovereignty and bureaucratic uniformity to which they aspired"

politically. They remained, instead, "mismatched shards of former dynastic possessions."120

For

Fichte, as we saw, the problem was not that states were multinational but that they were commercially

interdependent. His proposed resolution required that states possess large domestic markets and the

natural resources required for self-sufficiency. A state's "natural borders," then, were those that were

most conducive to economic independence. In the case of Prussia, this necessitated the incorporation

of Poland and Hanover. It also meant, Fichte provocatively declared, that England and France would

find peace only through union.121

Conclusion

"Empire," "confederation" and related concepts were elaborately theorised and contested in early

modern Europe, which was a world of primarily supranational and composite polities. As the largest

of these became dependent on international commerce, a central preoccupation for seventeenth and

eighteenth century observers was what happened to these conceptual categories when forced to

compete into a world dominated by large commercial monarchies. Much of the most interesting

115

De Lolme, cited in Whatmore, Against War, pp. 131-32. 116

Whatmore, Against War, pp. 5-6, 15, 202-04, 212-13, 220. 117

Whatmore, Against War, pp. 275-76. 118


Fichte, cited in Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, p. 72. 120


Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, pp. 98-99, 110.

scholarship in the history of political thought is now concerned with the same question. Commerce

had traditionally been associated with small republics and confederations; and opposed to extensive

territorial empires of conquest and incorporation. Yet strikingly, as Nakhimovsky and Whatmore

show, for many eighteenth century thinkers the paradox of increasing commercial competition could

be resolved only through ever-more extensive union, going well beyond the framework of any nation.

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