Stuart Elden: The birth of territory

Abstract

Stuart Elden's The Birth of Territory, like his other works, is an impressive feat of erudition. The narrative takes us from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and up to the time of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, trawling through a wide range of famous and lesser-known writings to reconstruct the prehistory and fitful emergence of something like the modern notion of political “territory.” The different conceptual elements of “territory,” a term we mostly take for granted now as designating the object and geographical setting of secular “sovereignty,” have circulated for millennia in various combinations and approximations. One of Elden's main goals is to show just how nonlinear and context-specific were the various intellectual, political, economic, and social processes that converged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries upon the rough outlines of the concept as we use it today.