Debates surrounding modern state formation and the origins of territorial sover-eignty have been overwhelmingly characterised by endogenous (internalist) and exogenous (externalist) logics of explanation primarily – if not exclusively – operating in the European theatre. On one side, Weberian and Hintzian- influenced approaches to the origins of modern states have emphasised the
effects of war-making and geopolitical rivalries in increasing state institutional and material capacities. In this model, geopolitical and military competition among the great powers in Europe is seen as the prime catalyst and driver in the making of modern, territorially bounded states.107 Focusing on intra- European developments, the constitutive role of the colonial encounter and empire building is accorded, if recognised at all, a secondary place in the explan-atory schema. Consequently, the agency of the Amerindians is given little to no attention.
On the other side, (neo-)Marxist approaches have focused on transforma-tions in the social relatransforma-tions of production (or social property relatransforma-tions) within societies as the ‘prime mover’ in the origins and development of the modern territorialised states system in Europe.108 While some of these perspectives take the endogenous development of capitalism in England as their point of depar-ture, they nonetheless recognise the subsequent role of geopolitical competition in spreading the modern nation-state form, as continental European states sought to confront the systemic pressures posed by the modernising challenge emanating from Britain.109 The primary focus is again centred on intra-European dynamics as the primary site of capitalism’s inception and the modern sovereign states system. While broadening this perspective to include the economically functional role of the ‘periphery’ to the rise of capitalism in the imperial ‘core’, World-Systems Theory pays little, if any, attention to the mutually transforma-tive nature of the colonial encounter in producing (and reproducing) the modern state form.110 Hence, even where intersocietal determinations are invoked by (neo-)Marxist approaches in explaining processes of social change, they fall short of offering a genuinely ‘international’ non-Eurocentric perspective.111 The overwhelming attention to solely European or Western agents is similarly reproduced in constructivist accounts of the rise of the modern states system.112 What all these accounts miss is the fundamentally co-constitutive nature of the colonial encounter in the making of the modern territorial state. Indeed, the transformative effects of Europe’s interactions with non-European societies were evident in the earliest forms of European colonisation.
Returning to the writings of the Spanish jurist Vitoria is again instructive.
In his work, we see a pervasive attentiveness to ‘the international’, taking in European geopolitics, but also those of the Americas and Asia. In Vitoria’s writings we see how the colonial encounter was not only generative of Eurocen-trism as an ideology of colonial legitimation, but also instrumental in mobilising the assumptions of Eurocentrism to develop what would become modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty. Emphasising the absence of proper gover-nance structures among the indigenous populations of the Americas, Vitoria writes, for example, that:
they have no proper laws nor magistrates, and are not even capable of controlling
their family affairs … they lack many other conveniences, yea necessaries, of human life …. It might, therefore, be maintained that in their own interests the sovereigns of Spain might undertake the administration of their country, providing them with prefects and governors for their own towns, and might even give them new lords.113
He then goes on to further substantiate the permissibility of Spanish rule, by articulating the absence of Amerindian governance structures in terms of their historical ‘backwardness’:
for if they are all wanting in intelligence, there is no doubt that this would not only be permissible, but also a highly proper, course to take; nay, our sovereigns would be bound to take it, just as if the natives were infants. The same principle seems to apply here to them as to people of defective intelligence; and indeed they are no whit or little better than such so far as self-government is concerned, or even the wild beasts, for their food is not more pleasant and hardly better than that of beasts. Therefore their governance should in the same way be entrusted to people of intelligence.114
For Vitoria, the ‘justness’ of war could not be founded on a subjective belief that those conducting war were inherently just, since this opened the possibility that ‘even Turks and Saracens might wage just wars against Christians, for they think they are thus rendering God service’.115 Vitoria’s paradoxically subjective solution to the problem was to demonstrate that Saracens, due to the absence of any conformity to natural law, were incapable of waging a just war. In this way, Vitoria was able to exclude Saracens – and by extension Amerindians – from admittance to the legal rights of sovereignty. Finally, Vitoria incorporates into his legal framework a way of distinguishing who is and who is not sover-eign, to justify rule over the Amerindians and the exclusivity of this rule to the Spanish:
if there was to be an indiscriminate inrush of Christians from other parts to the part in question, they might easily hinder one another and develop quarrels, to the banishment of tranquillity and the disturbance of the concerns of the faith and of the conversion of the natives.116
Taken together, Vitoria’s statements demonstrate that the perceived absence of recognisable sovereign authority in the Americas not only legitimised ‘just wars’, but also necessitated original ways of dividing, claiming and asserting power over newly conquered territories against other European competitors.117 ‘Almost any seventeenth- or eighteenth-century map of America’, Samuel Edgerton notes, ‘reveals the absolute faith Europeans of all religious persuasions had in the authority of the cartographic grid’. For as colonial powers ‘laid claim to
lands solely on the basis of abstract latitudes and longitudes … [t]roops were sent to fight and die for boundaries that had no visible landmarks, only abstract mathematical existence’.118
Indeed, Francis I of France voiced a celebrated protest to these types of argument, claiming that ‘[t]he sun shines for me as for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share of the world’. The king of Denmark in turn refused to accept the Pope’s ruling for the East Indies. Sir William Cecil, the famous Elizabethan statesman, also denied the Pope’s right ‘to give and take kingdoms to whomsoever he pleased’. In 1580, the English government thus countered with the principle of effective occupation as the determinant of sovereignty.119
In these ways, newly formulated notions of linear time came to be comple-mented by novel conceptions of linear geographical space and a concomitant modern form of territorialised state sovereignty. ‘The ostensibly empty spaces of the Americas could be comprehended, negotiated over, and competed for only by using an abstract conception of space built on mathematical cartography’, as Jordan Branch writes. ‘The novel requirements of making extra-European political claims demanded new authoritative practices by colonial powers, practices that were made manifest immediately in linear territorial divisions between spatial expanses’.120 Such novel articulations of linearly demarcated forms of territorial sovereignty in the Americas also had major repercussions for their development in Europe. For the principles of cartography, based on abstract space and linear territorial divisions, were first generated in the colonial encounter in the Americas and then subsequently transported back to Europe.121 The originality of colonial conceptions of linear territoriality can be found most clearly in the treaties of the period. In the Old World, treaties concluding wars typically emphasised nonlinear or noncontiguous territoriality, and the spoils of conquests were divided according to places rather than territories.
This was evident as late as the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which despite its purportedly modern credentials, still listed every noncontiguous ‘place, jurisdic-tion, and right to be granted to one party by the other’.122 In contrast, treaties pertaining to the New World used cartographic or geographic language in order to delineate territorial claims based on linear demarcations and supposedly
‘natural’ frontiers. Territories could be claimed in this way precisely because the known political authorities – that is, the Amerindians – were not recognised, were denied their right to sovereignty and were therefore excluded from any such treaties.123
The first examples of linearly defined claims to political authority can be found in the 1493 Papal Bulls and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal. These treaties apportioned to Spain all newly discovered territories west of a line drawn in the Atlantic Ocean, with Portugal receiving those territories to the east (see Figure 5.1). The significance of such treaties was
Figure 5.1 ‘Catino Planisphere’ (1502) by an unknown Portuguese cartographer, showing the Tordesillas line (left-hand side of map) Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cantino_planisphere_(1502).jpg (accessed 21 November 2014).
‘not in the details of the lines’, Branch notes, ‘but instead in the very idea of using a linear division to assign political authority: “For the first time in history an abstract geometric system had been used to define a vast – global – area of control”.’124
These linear territorial divisions apportioning political authority to European powers over specific locales in the Americas were only partly directed at local
‘sovereigns’. Rather, their novel utility lay in dealing with existing and future European rivals. For while such claims to sovereignty initially served to posit non-European spaces as terra nullius, thereby opening them to European acqui-sition, the primary aim was in regulating the relative claims of competing European powers.125 Thus, ‘such treaties were not concluded with the local
“sovereigns” in mind at all, but functioned rather as a means of demonstrating a relationship of authority or control to other European powers’.126
The origins of the modern form of territorialised sovereignty were therefore an outcome of an aleatory encounter with societies that Europeans considered
‘empty’ – stuck in a ‘state of nature’ and not under or capable of any sovereign authority – and the competing claims to occupy such ‘empty’ spaces by various colonial powers. Rather than being derived from some internal impulse, they represented a response to the particular challenges of jurisdiction in these terri-tories produced by historically specific intersocietal interactions. Such state practices and modalities of territoriality then radiated back to the imperial core in Europe, forming a crucial step in the formation of the modern territorially defined state, but only ‘after the usefulness and legitimacy of linearly bounded authority claims were made clear by centuries of colonial practice’.127 Such legal and political innovations must therefore be understood as various forms of combined development – constructions specifically based on ‘attempts to resolve the unique legal problems arising from the discovery of the Indians’.128 The significance of our spatially decentred, non-Eurocentric conception of the origins of sovereign state territoriality for understanding the rise of capi-talism in Europe and its later ascendency to global domination is threefold.
First, it gives the lie to the dominant myth that the European states system was a product of geopolitical and socio-economic processes internal to Europe, while further problematising those accounts that conceive of the European state- formation process as an exclusively elite-driven affair. Rather, it was the very struggle to dominate and subjugate the indigenous populations of the Americas that laid the ideological and material foundations for novel conceptions of linearly demarcated, territorialised spaces of sovereignty. These conceptions further functioned to defend territory against the claims of other rival colonial powers. The territorialising process of state formation was then fundamentally Janus-faced: it gazed inward or vertically at the domination of newly claimed
‘empty spaces’ and subject populations, while also looking outward or laterally toward fending off other competing imperial states.
Second, the development and consolidation of territorialised state sover-eignty and capitalist social relations in Europe was an intimately intertwined and co-constitutive process, as the following sections and chapters demonstrate.
Hence, in contrast to influential neo-Weberian and Marxist accounts,129 the formation of the European system of territorialised sovereign states did not precede the rise of capitalism. Instead, the early modern epoch witnessed the co-evolution and transformation of capitalism and the states system in Europe that was ‘overdetermined’ by interactions with the extra-European world.
Capitalism did not only emerge as a consequence of developments internal to England or Europe during the Long 16th Century. It did not later suddenly
‘burst on the international [read: European – AA/KN] scene in the nineteenth century’130 and subsequently radiate outwards in a unidirectional process of European-driven change. Similarly, the territorially bounded states system did not first emerge in Europe during the absolutist era, and it was not exclusively the consequence of the military and geopolitical rivalries operating on the European continent. The upshot of all this is that capitalism and the modern territorialised system of sovereign states retain not only a theoretically internal relationship as conceived from the perspective of uneven and combined devel-opment, but a historically organic one as well. And as we have been at pains to emphasise, this was a relationship that was fundamentally rooted in and consti-tuted by historical processes emanating from outside Europe.
Third, the development of territorially bounded state sovereignty was crucial to the subsequent bundle of processes that eventually led to Europe’s ascen-dency to global domination. The modern territorial state, particularly in its later post-absolutist incarnation, proved a militarily and fiscally efficient vehicle of class rule at home and imperial dominance abroad. The two were in fact inex-tricably bound together, as the development and consolidation of capitalism at home was fundamentally secured and buttressed by imperial expansion abroad (see the next section and Chapters 7 and 8). Moreover, the territoriali-sation of state and military power was a powerful (geo)political vehicle for the
‘endless’ accumulation of capital which, over a relatively short period of time, outpaced non-capitalist rivals (see Chapters 6, 7 and 8). In other words, the co-development and co-evolution of the territorialised state and capitalism was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the subsequent ‘rise of the West’.
Their co-constitutive and reinforcing developmental tendencies formed a kind of cumulatively building virtuous circle,131 setting Europe – or more precisely, Northwestern Europe – on the path to global supremacy.
To be clear, this is not to argue that such institutional and socio-economic innovations directly translated into victories on the battlefield or even in war, as the long history of ‘Western’ defeats in colonial ‘small wars’ has demonstrated all too well. War is perhaps the ultimate realm of radical contingency. Like a boxing match, no one can know with certainty who will emerge victorious,
however imbalanced the power relations.132 Nonetheless, the kinds of radical power imbalances that emerged in Europe with the co-formation of territo-rialised states and capitalist social relations did give these states significant advantages in imposing ‘their’ will – either directly by coercive-intensive forms and/or structurally via the abstract mechanisms of the world market – over other states and societies (see Chapters 7 and 8).