The Burdens of Empire

Anthony Pagden is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute, London; Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence; University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of more than a dozen books, many of which have been translated into a number of European and Asian languages. His most recent publications include Worlds and War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (2008) and The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013). He has also written for the New Republic, the National Interest, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, El País (Spain), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

1. Introduction; 2. Defending empire: the 'school of Salamanca' and the 'affair of the Indies'; 3. 'Making barbarians into gentle peoples': Alberico Gentili on the legitimacy of empire; 4. The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the early modern world; 5. Conquest, settlement, purchase and concession: justifying the English occupation of the Americas; 6. Occupying the ocean: Hugo Grotius and Serafim de Freitas on the rights of discovery and occupation; 7. Cambiar su ser: reform to revolution in the political imaginary of the Ibero-American world; 8. From the 'right of nations' to the 'cosmopolitan right': Immanuel Kant's law of continuity and the limits of empire; 9. 'Savage impulse-civilised calculation': conquest, commerce and the Enlightenment critique of empire; 10. Human rights, natural rights and Europe's imperial legacy.