BOOK: Eds. Lauren A. Benton, Adam Clulow, and Bain Attwood, Protection and Empire : A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). £ 85.00, ISBN 9781108417860

(Source: Cambridge University Press)

Cambridge University Press has recently published a book on the legal history of protection across empires

DESCRIPTION:

For five centuries protection has provided a basic currency for organising relations between polities. Protection underpinned sprawling tributary systems, permeated networks of long-distance trade, reinforced claims of royal authority in distant colonies and structured treaties. Empires made routine use of protection as they extended their influence, projecting authority over old and new subjects, forcing weaker parties to pay them for safe conduct and, sometimes, paying for it themselves. The result was a fluid politics that absorbed both the powerful and the weak while giving rise to institutions and jurisdictional arrangements with broad geographic scope and influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to trace the long history of protection across empires in Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe and the Americas. Employing a global lens, it offers an innovative way of understanding the formation and growth of empires and uncovers new dimensions of the relation of empires to regional and global order.

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee

Lauren Benton is Nelson Tyrone Jr Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. She is a comparative and world historian whose research focuses on law in European empires, the history of international law, and Atlantic world history.

Adam Clulow, Monash University, Victoria

Adam Clulow is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Victoria. He is a global historian whose work focuses especially on European interaction with Tokugawa Japan and the maritime history of early modern Asia.

Bain Attwood, Monash University, Victoria

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University, Victoria. He has published extensively on the history of settler colonialism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction

Part I. Protecting Subjects, Projecting Power:

1. Protection and the chanelling of movement on the margins of the Holy Roman Empire Luca Scholz

2. Containing law within the walls: the protection of customary law in Santiago Del Cercado, Peru Karen B. Graubart

Part II. Conquest Reconsidered:

3 Webs of protection and interpolity zones in the Early Modern World Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow

4. Plunder and profit in the name of protection: royal Iberian armadas in the early Atlantic Gabriel De Avilez Rocha

Part III. Protection and Languages of Political Authority:

5. Protection as a political concept in English political thought, 1603–1651 Annabel Brett

6. Limited liabilities: the corporation and the political economy of protection in the British Empire Philip J. Stern

7. From nurturing to protection in nineteenth-century Japan David L. Howell

Part IV. Protection and Colonial Governance:

8. Protection claims: the British, Maori and the islands of New Zealand, 1800–1840 Bain Attwood

9. Protecting the peace on the edges of empire: commissioners of crown lands in New South Wales Lisa Ford

10. British protection, extraterritoriality and protectorates in West Africa, 1807–1880 Inge Van Hulle

Part V. Protection in an Inter-Imperial World:

11. Between imperial subjects and political partners: Bedouin borders and protection in Ottoman Palestine, 1900–1917 Ahmad Amara

12. Protection by proxy: the Hausa-Fulani as agents of British Colonial rule in Northern Nigeria Moses E. Ochono

13. The problem of protectorates in an age of decolonisation: Britain and West Africa, 1955–60 Barnaby Crowcroft.

For more information, see the website of Cambridge University Press. 

(Source: International Law Reporter)