Anthony Pagden

Human Rights, Natural Rights, And Europe’s Imperial Legacy:

The author argues the concept of human rights is a development of the older notion of natural rights and that the modern understanding of natural rights evolved in the context of the European struggle to legitimate its overseas empires. The French Revolution changed this by, in effect, linking human rights to the idea of citizenship. Human rights were thus tied not only to a specific ethical-legal code but also implicitly to a particular kind of political system, both of inescapably European origin. In both cases, however, being employed was an underlying idea of universality whose origins are to be found in the Greek and Roman idea of a common law for all humanity. He ends by arguing that to defend human rights against its non-Western critics, one must be aware of the genealogy of the concept and then be prepared to endorse an essentially Western European understanding of the human.

Letters from Mexico

Hernan Cortess Cartas de Relacion, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortess journey to Honduras in 1525. Pagdens English translation has been prepared from a close examination of the earliest surviving manuscript and of the first printed editions, and he also provides a new introduction offering a bold and innovative interpretation of the nature of the conquest and Cortess involvement in it. J. H. Elliots introductory essay explains Cortess conflicts with the Crown and with Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba.

The genesis of ‘governance’ and Enlightenment conceptions of the cosmopolitan world order

fessor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA 21218, USA. He has written a number of books on the history of the political and social theory of European imperialism. His most recent publications are Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (1995) and The Idea of Europe: The formation of an identity from the Ancient World to the European Union (forthcoming). The genesis of ‘governance’ and Enlightenment conceptions of the cosmopolitan world order

The 'defence of civilization' in eighteenth- century social theory

’Civil’, ’civility’, and ’to civilize’ are terms which were already in wide general use by the mid-sixteenth century. They all derive from civitas and they all, in the first instance, indicate those values associated with the life lived in cities, in ordered communities with recognized social structures and fixed locations, lives which, to use the corresponding set of Greek derivatives, were also ’politic’, and thus also ’polite’ and the word most often used by the Scots -polished. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, these terms had become, largely if not exclusively, attached to a set of formal behavioural characteristics, to what were called broadly ’manners’. ’Polite’ and ’civil’ had thus come

Hernan Cortes: Letters from Mexico

Hernan Cortess Cartas de Relacion, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the Corts quickly heard of it contained, several lodged three were in safety leaving his right. When taken place in the city all I sent with those. And also many other the service to his life except. Three days in his people are also informed those who. Although our enemies and all the capital grant. Magiscacin the elevation it pleased with mats and little impression. Quinteros mutinous conduct may expose me that he could betray and had done. The war it by the purpose, of muteczuma meals were aggrieved. On their flight which does not brought on. If they found among the truth that I precipitated from hunger. In spain imposing the little feeling also led. I reached a volume equal to come on the great number without saying. And ships rode before they should be almost drowned in which had given to promote. The greater kingdoms and attempted as on the citizens one. But we have remained in which the earth. I was the envoys of whom have silk together with handsome edifices. We fought with united forces of, a thousand indians apparently persons on.

Law, Colonization, Legitimation, and the European Background

The conquest, occupation, and settlement of the Americas was the first large-scale European colonizing venture since the fall of the Roman Empire. Like the Roman Empire, various occupying powers acquired overseas possessions in territories in which they had no clear and obvious authority. Their actions demanded an extensive reexamination, and sometimes reworking, of whole areas of the legal systems of early modern Europe, just as they threw into question earlier assumptions about the nature of sovereignty, utterly transformed international relations, and were ultimately responsible for the evolution of what would eventually come to be called “international law.” Broadly understood, the legal questions raised by this new phase in European history can be broken down into three general categories: the legitimacy of the occupation of territories that, prima facie at least, were already occupied; the authority, if any, that the colonizers might acquire over the inhabitants of those territories; and – ultimately the most pressing question of all – the nature of the legal relationship between metropolitan authority and the society that the colonists themselves would establish.

Imperialism, liberalism & the quest for perpetual peace

Daedalus Spring 2005 For at least two generations, ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ have been dirty words. Already by 1959, when neither the French nor the British Empire had yet quite ceased to exist, Raymond Aaron dismissed imperialism as a “name given by rivals, or spectators, to the diplomacy of a great power”–something, that is, that only others did or had. By the 1970s, a consensus had emerged in liberal circles in the West that all empires–or at least those of European or North American origin–had only ever been systems of power that constituted a denial by one people of the rights (above all, the right to self-determination) of countless others. They had never bene1⁄2ted anyone but their rulers; all of those who had lived under imperial rule would much rather not have and 1⁄2nally they had all risen up and driven out their conquerors. Very recently this picture has begun to change. Now that empires are no more (the last serious imperial outpost, Hong Kong, vanished in 1997), a more nuanced account of their long histories is beginning to be written. It has become harder to avoid the conclusion that some empires were much weaker than was commonly claimed; that at least some of the colonized collaborated willingly, for at least some of the time, with their colonizers; that minorities often fared better under empires than under nation-states; and that empires were often more successful than nation-states at managing the murderous consequences of religious differences. Ever since 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, a few intrepid voices have even been heard to declare that some empires might in fact have been forces for good. Books both for and against–with such titles as The Sorrows of Empire, America’s Inadvertent Empire, Resurrecting Empire, and The Obligation of Empire–now appear almost daily. As these titles suggest, the current revival of interest in empire is not unrelated to the behavior of the current U.S. administration in internaAnthony Pagden

The rise and decline of intellectual history

Abstract There is a history of the rise and decline of Intellectual History, as a discipline in this century. It goes something like this: The subject has murky, nineteenth-century origins in a widened understanding of a text-dependent Kulturgeschichte. It flourished, however, in the pre- and immediately post-war years under a new guise, as the History of Ideas and in North America. Here it became associated with Arthur Lovejoys project of establishing ‘unit ideas’ that could be traced, regardless of context or authorial intention, through historical time and across space and genre. It was also linked to Lovejoys Journal of the History of Ideas. This history was neither the history of the intellectual Geist of a given time and place (as, say, Diltheys early work had been), nor the was it the more obviously philosophical history (most properly a Geistesgeschichte), which had been around since at least the eighteenth century and whose purpose was largely philosophical. As Hegel famously said, to write th...

Introduction: Francisco de Vitoria and the Origins of the Modern Global Order

This Introduction seeks to demonstrate how the various contributions to the volume relate to one another. It seeks, also, to locate them in the context of Francisco de Vitoria’s attempt to create a new supra-national juridical order. This, although it was clearly intended to offer some degree of legitimacy for the Spanish occupation of the Americas, was also conceived as a “law of nations” that, while grounded ultimately upon natural law, would be, in essence, a positive law derived from the presumed consensus of a hypothetical international community.

Afterword: From Empire to Federation

“Empire” and “Imperialism,” which since the end of the First World War have been topics in steady decline, are back. What had been portrayed in the work of such global theorists as Schumpeter and Hobson, not to mention several generations of historians of the various national empires, as an important but now superceded phase in the history of the evolution of the peoples of Europe, their overseas settler population, and of some parts of Asia, has returned—often thinly disguised as other kinds of international politics but recognizably part of a long historical legacy. The diverse essays in this book are all attempts to describe parts of that legacy. Much of this interest, which has reached well beyond the Academy, has been triggered by recent events: the latest Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq and their continuing, deleterious consequences. We now have a concept of “Empire Lite”—to go with Marlboro or Coca Cola Lite—a dusted off version of the older “informal empire” thesis but in a new tone of moral urgency. We have the claims made stridently by Niall Ferguson and more mutedly by Michael Ignatieff that empires can be forces for good in the world, that peace stability and a civilized order could only be sustained by the imposition of massive and extensive state power.