Theories of Empire, 1450–1800

David Armitage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351879767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Theories of Empire, 1450-1800 draws upon published and unpublished work by leading scholars in the history of European expansion and the history of political thought. It covers the whole span of imperial theories from ancient Rome to the American founding, and includes a series of essays which address the theoretical underpinnings of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, British and Dutch empires in both the Americas and in Asia. The volume is unprecedented in its attention to the wider intellectual contexts within which those empires were situated - particularly the discourses of universal monarchy, millenarianism, mercantalism, and federalism - and in its mapping of the shift from Roman conceptions of imperium to the modern idea of imperialism.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• An Expanding World
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• 1 Imperium Romanum
• 2 Empire and Union
• 3 The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of Ghibellinism
• 4 The European Debate on Universal Monarchy
• 5 Imperio Particular e Imperio Universal en las Cartas de Relación de Hernán Cortés
• 6 The Seizure of Overseas Territories by the European Powers
• 7 Dispossessing the Barbarian
• 8 The Ideology of English Colonization
• 9 Sovereignty-Association, 1500-1783
• 10 Freitas Versus Grotius
• 11 Millenarianism and Empire
• 12 Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 13 New Wine in Old Skins? American Definitions of Empire and the Emergence of a New Concept
• 14 Spain and the Breakdown of the Imperial Ethos: The Problem of Equality
• 15 Aboriginal Property and Western Theory
• Index