The Birth of Territory

27 Pages·2013·0.16 MB·English

The Birth of Territory
stuart elden
the university of chicago press
chicago and london
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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
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isbn-13: 978-0-226-20256-3 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-20257-0 (paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-04128-5 (e-book)
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This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
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contents
Acknowledgments 000
Introduction 000
Part I 000
1. The Polis and the Khora 000
Autochthony and the Myth of Origins 000
Antigone and the Polis 000
The Reforms of Kleisthenes 000
Plato’s Laws 000
Aristotle’s Politics 000
Site and Community 000
2. From Urbis to Imperium 000
Caesar and the Terrain of War 000
Cicero and the Res Publica 000
The Historians: Sallust, Livy, Tacitus 000
Augustus and Imperium 000
The Limes of the Imperium 000
Part II 000
3. The Fracturing of the West 000
Augustine’s Two Cities 000
Boethius and Isidore of Seville 000
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vi contents
The Barbarian Tribes and National Histories 000
Land Politics in Beowulf 000
4. The Reassertion of Empire 000
The Donation of Constantine 000
The Accession of Charlemagne 000
Cartography from Rome to Jerusalem 000
The Limits of Feudalism 000
5. The Pope’s Two Swords 000
John of Salisbury and the Body of the Republic 000
Two Swords: Spiritual and Temporal Power 000
The Rediscovery of Aristotle 000
Thomas Aquinas and the Civitas 000
6. Challenges to the Papacy 000
Unam Sanctum: Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair 000
Dante: Commedia and Monarchia 000
Marsilius of Padua and the Rights of the City 000
William of Ockham and the Politics of Poverty 000
Part III 000
7. The Rediscovery of Roman Law 000
The Labors of Justinian and the Glossators 000
Bartolus of Sassoferrato and the Territorium 000
Baldus de Ubaldis and the Civitas-Populus 000
Rex Imperator in Regno Suo 000
8. Renaissance and Reconnaissance 000
Machiavelli and Lo Stato 000
The Politics of Reformation 000
Bodin, République, Sovereignty 000
Botero and Ragione di Stato 000
King Lear: “Interest of Territory, Cares of State” 000
9. The Extension of the State 000
The Consolidation of the Reformation 000
The Geometry of the Political 000
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contents vii
The Divine Right of Kings: Hobbes, Filmer, and Locke 000
“Master of a Territory” 000
Coda: Territory as a Political Technology 000
Notes 000
Index 000
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Acknowledgments
This book has been in gestation for many years, and would have taken
many more had it not been for the award of a Leverhulme Major Re-
search Fellowship. I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for
this wonderful opportunity. Although I have been employed by Durham
University for almost all of the time I have been working on this project,
research leave and the Leverhulme award have meant that I have spent
time elsewhere in visiting posts. I would like to thank the University of
Virginia; University of Tasmania; University of British Columbia; Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles; New York University; National University
of Singapore; Queen Mary, University of London; University of Washing-
ton, Seattle; and the Australian National University for being excellent
hosts. Libraries at all of the above institutions and in addition the British
Library, Senate House Library, Warburg Institute, Columbia University,
and University of York provided the materials I have used. The Geography
Department at Durham University provided some fi nancial assistance to
help with the costs involved in this book’s publication. Chris Orton, Amy
Kuttner, and the Palace Green Library helped with images.
I have greatly benefi tted from the enthusiasm, support, and advice of
a number of people, of whom I would like to particularly mention John
Agnew, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Neil Brenner, Jer-
emy Crampton, Veronica della Dora, Elgin Diaz, Colin Gordon, Laurence
Hemming, Barbara Hooper, Emma Hutchinson, Engin Isin, Keith Lilley,
David Livingstone, Jeff Malpas, Eduardo Mendieta, Alec Murphy, Nisha
Shah, Charlie Withers and Haim Yacobi. At Durham I have a number of
excellent colleagues, of whom Louise Amoore, Ben Anderson, Angharad
Closs Stephens, Ray Hudson, Joe Painter, and Martin Pratt deserve special
mention. Abby Collier at the University of Chicago Press has been an ex-
ix
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x Acknowledgments
cellent and supportive editor, and Susan Cohan an exceptionally careful
copyeditor. I am grateful for the reports from three anonymous referees for
suggestions and pushing me to justify my approach. Above all, I am grate-
ful to Susan for her love and support.
I have given talks on this project over many years, including in Aus-
tralia (University of Tasmania; University of Western Sydney; University
of New South Wales; Australian National University); Canada (Univer-
sity of Toronto; University of British Columbia; University of Victoria);
Cyprus (University of Cyprus); Finland (University of Turku; Lapland
University); Denmark (Danish Institute of International Studies); Ger-
many (Technische Universität Berlin; Friedrich-Alexander Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg); Holland (Radboud University Nijmegen); Israel (Ben
Gurion University); Hong Kong, China SAR (Hong Kong Baptist Univer-
sity); Italy (University of Palermo; Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa); Ja-
pan (Kyoto University); Macau, China SAR (University of Macau); Singa-
pore (National University of Singapore); the United States (Association of
American Geographers, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, DC; New
School for Social Research; University of Pittsburgh; University of Vir-
ginia; University of Washington, Seattle; Ohio State University; University
of Oregon; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California,
Berkeley; University of Arizona; New York University; Yale University);
and the United Kingdom (Heythrop College, University of London; Dur-
ham University; Bath Royal Literary and Scientifi c Institution; Stafford-
shire University; University of Salford; Swansea University; University of
Leicester; University of Lancaster; Royal Holloway, University of London;
Queen Mary, University of London; Open University; University College
London; University of Cambridge; Queen’s University Belfast; Newcastle
University; University of Westminster; Aberystwyth University; Royal
Geographical Society; University of Birmingham; King’s College London;
Leeds University).
An earlier and longer version of the introduction was published as
“Land, Terrain, Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 24 (2010): 799–
817. Parts of chapter 1 appeared in “Another Sense of Demos: Kleisthenes
and the Greek Division of the Polis,” Democratization 10 (2003): 135–56;
and a section of “The Place of the Polis: Political Blindness in Judith But-
ler’s Antigone’s Claim,” Theory and Event 8 (2005). One section of chap-
ter 3 draws on the second half of “Place Symbolism and Land Politics in
Beowulf,” Cultural Geographies 16 (2009): 447–63. The Leibniz discussion
in chapter 9 develops claims fi rst made in “Missing the Point: Globali-
zation, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World,” Transactions of
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Acknowledgments xi
the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 8–19. I am grateful to Sage,
Taylor & Francis, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Wiley-Blackwell for
permission to reuse this material.
All primary texts are referenced back to the original language, with
English translations noted where available. I have frequently modifi ed
existing translations. With primary texts, references are made to book,
chapter, and section, where possible, to facilitate reference to different
editions.
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Introduction
At the beginning of the second book of his discourse on inequality,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau declares:
The fi rst man who, having fenced off a plot of land [enclos un terrain],
thought of saying, this is mine, and found people simple enough to
believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes,
wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race
had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or fi lling
in the ditch, had shouted to his kind: Beware of listening to this impos-
tor; You are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and
that the Earth [Terre] belongs to no one.1
Confl ict over land, at a variety of spatial scales, is a major factor in
human affairs, and, as Rousseau suggests, its effects have been almost en-
tirely negative. Yet his argument here is twofold. First, that this event was
the foundation of civil society—which, at the time he was writing, still
meant civilized society, that is, society with some form of structure and
power relations. Civil society was, effectively, a society with some form of
government, some form of state. It was opposed to the idea of a “state of
nature,” rather than civil society and state being contrasted, as they were
only after Hegel.2 Second, that if the consequences of this event were to
be prevented, the time to challenge was at that precise moment. It was not
something to contest subsequently, lest the challenge be seen as a rival
plan for division rather than to see division itself as the problem. To be-
lieve the imposter was to mean all was lost. Yet, as Rousseau immediately
concedes:
1
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2 introduction
But in all likelihood things had by then reached a point where they
could not continue as they were; for this idea of property, depending as
it does on many prior ideas which could only arise successively, did not
take shape all at once in the human mind: Much progress had to have
been made, industry and enlightenment acquired, transmitted, and in-
creased from one age to the next, before this last stage of the state of
Nature was reached. Let us therefore take up the thread earlier, and try
to fi t this slow succession of events and of knowledge together from a
single point of view, and in their most natural order.3
Several things might be said of this continuation. He recognizes that
the question of property in land did not arise all of a sudden, but as a stage
in a complicated set of relations that would stretch back in time. As he
later notes, “From the cultivation of land [terres], its division [partage] nec-
essarily followed; and from property, once recognized, the fi rst rules of
justice necessarily followed.”4 Similar questions can be asked about a very
particular understanding of property and political power over land, that of
the relation between the state and its territory.
h
Territory continues to matter today in a whole range of registers. Take,
for example, the post-1989 territorial changes within central and eastern
Europe, where successor states to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and
Yugoslavia emerged and in many instances fought over the delineation of
their boundaries. Kosovo, Trans-Dnistra, Chechyna, and the breakaway
areas of Georgia show the continuation of these issues. We could also
look at the confl ict between Ethiopia and Eritrea in east Africa; Somalia’s
fragmentation into de facto but unrecognized states; the independence of
South Sudan and the ongoing border tensions; the Arab-Israeli confl ict; the
territorial dimensions of the “war on terror,” environmental disasters, re-
source ownership, migration, and climate change, especially in terms of
melting sea ice in the Arctic and the need to delimit maritime boundaries.
Self-determination movements, such as the campaign for an independent
Kurdistan, the independence of East Timor, the long-running disputes in
Western Sahara, Tibet, East Turkistan, and many other areas show that
numerous groups seek control of territory occupied by a state.5 Yet what
are these groups claiming? What is being fought over, divided, mapped,
distributed, or transformed? But where did this idea of exclusive owner-
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