Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 2013, 512 pages, $90.00 cloth, ISBN 9780226202563, $30.00 paper, ISBN 9780226202570.

See Gerry Kearns's most recent Society & Space contributions: Governing Vitalities and the Security State, The Butler Affair and the Geopolitics of Identity, and Closed Space and Political Practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford Mackinder

See Stuart Elden's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Introducing Kostas Axelos and ‘The World’, From Hinterland to the Global: New Books on Historical and Political Understandings of Territory, Being-with as Making Worlds: The ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk, and Contributions to Geography? The Spaces of Heidegger's Beiträge, Governmentality, Calculation, Territory

The Birth of Territory traces how the relations between land and power have been understood in a very wide range of texts from the period of classical Greece to seventeenth-century western Europe. For each period, Elden asks if it is meaningful to speak of writers as using a concept resembling the modern understanding of territory, that is of a bounded space as the object of rule. This is very different from Sack’s (1986) treatment of territoriality as a seemingly permanent feature of human interaction, the control of space to control people. Elden describes territory as a particular technology of sovereignty and he finds it rather late in the development of western political thought. For Elden, “Leibniz’s suggestion [of 1678] that the sovereign is he ‘who is master of a territory’ is a fundamental moment in the development of Western political thought” (page 321). Most of this book is about the prehistory of that moment. Along the way, Elden tells us very much about the relations between land and power and we might identify a number of conclusions that emerge from this survey.

The conflict between secular and religious authority is a central theme in this survey. It is striking that, as Elden explains, the ancient Greeks justified their title to their lands through myth. Unlike those people who moved into lands either empty or already occupied, the Greeks claimed to have sprung directly from the soil itself. But this spiritual account of their origins gave the gods a place in legitimating authority that could prove uncomfortable for secular rulers. In his analysis of Euripides play, Antigone, Elden contrasts King Creon’s claim upon the obedience of his people with Antigone’s appeal instead to what she understood to be the will of the gods. These conflicting bases of authority are evident, too, in Augustine’s fifth-century writings that contrasted Jerusalem and Babylon, the spirit and the flesh, the city of God and the city of pagans. Augustine, as Elden tells us, was trying to justify the Church having both spiritual and temporal authority in Christian countries. In the eighth century, the papacy produced a document it fraudulently claimed was a fourth century text from Emperor Constantine vesting in the Pope the lands of the western part of the Empire. When, in 800, Pope Leo III surprised Charlemagne by crowning him Emperor, he implied that Charlemagne’s de facto control over much of Europe was in fact a concession from the Pope, and that Charlemagne’s martial power should be understood as military side of the papacy. Yet, argues Elden, these central questions about sovereignty and legitimacy touched but did not focus upon matters of territory. Creon understood himself as ruling the Greek people rather than a distinct territory in which certain people happened to reside. And Augustine’s city connoted a communion of persons rather than a bounded space. And while the fake document made it seem that Constantine understood the empire spatially, in fact, whereas the Romans had shown some understanding of imperial limits, their notion of these limits is best understood as milestones upon trajectories leading away from the city of Rome.

This question of the relations between religious and secular authority went to the heart of issues of contemporary questions about sovereignty. The Reformation saw princes claim first temporal and then even spiritual autonomy. But, this in no way settled the question of what was precisely the object of temporal power. This brings me to the second of the themes I want to highlight from Birth of Territory, and that is the significance of land. In the fifth century, the Roman Empire split and the lands in the West ceased using Roman law texts as a regular part of jurisprudence. A large part of Elden’s story is about the rediscovery of these Roman texts from the eleventh century onwards. First the surviving works of Roman law were consolidated, then they were glossed so that people could find their way to the topics that concerned them, and then they were commented upon. These commentaries, however, were intended to make the texts useful to contemporary practice. With the commentary of the mid-fourteenth century legal theorist Bartolus, we get a treatment of the concept of territorium that is “sufficiently close to the modern sense of territory that we can begin to translate the term in that way” (page 220). Elden shows how this concept of territorium that for Romans related primarily to the lands around a city from which the city was fed, became for Bartolus something that related to the separation between the realms of temporal authority of respectively the Pope and the Emperor; each had his own lands. In this connection, Elden notes that Barolus treated territory as an immovable good drawing upon a distinction that mattered rather little to the Romans but mattered very much in feudal Europe. For around land as a particular type of immovable good, Bartolus’ contemporaries had knit a complicated crochet of laws. Land was now sometimes a commodity and at all times, then, its conveyancing was freighted with great significance. Once territory is considered as akin to land as a commodity, then, it must be demarcated and if political sovereignty takes anything like this form, then, we see the modern notion of territory emerge for the sovereign exercises power within its lands, rather than over its mobile subjects.

This territorial designation of sovereignty is the legal framework for absolutism. It has three territorial consequences that Elden elaborates. In the first place, the supremacy of the monarch within its lands involved the reduction of diverse legal systems within a territory to one comprehending a singular national space. In the second place, the imagination of this singular space was perhaps aided by the projection of territorial forms of sovereignty into what were apprehended as spaces devoid of pre-existing law, the new colonies. Finally, this absolutism raised serious questions about the purpose and place of the increasingly moribund Holy Roman Empire. In elaborating these themes, The Birth of Territory engages not only with words and concepts, but also with practices. In this way, Elden takes up the event often thought to mark the birth of the modern states system, the treaties of Westphalia (1648). In an exciting analysis Benno Teschke (2003) has argued that the Treaty did not inaugurate a new system of nation-states, something he argues only emerges with the treaties after the First World War. Instead, Teschke suggested that the Treaty confirmed the Holy Roman Empire and its relations with a series of absolutist states, principalities, and city-states, few of them resembling a modern nation-state. For Teschke, then, the Treaty was the end of an era rather than the start of one. Elden’s argument is rather different. He reviews a contemporary work on the Holy Roman Empire that stressed the rights of princes within their own territory and then notes that the French delegation brought this treatise with them to the discussions. Political theory had a practical purpose. What strikes Elden about the Treaty is its confirmation of the territorial form of sovereignty, both in temporal and spiritual matters. It is true that the Holy Roman Empire was confirmed but with virtually no effective powers other than to exist in name and title. Teschke had based his analysis on the reinterpretation of existing secondary studies and Elden is critical of this failure to review the primary texts of the time, “a lack of textual fidelity,” but also of Teschke as “frustratingly vague with his use of territory as a term” (page 310).

No one will finish The Birth of Territory and feel that Elden is at all vague about the use of territory as a term. It is not only Teschke that is judged wanting. Elden suggests that “most of what Foucault says about territory specifically is at best misleading, as the more thorough treatment here demonstrates” (page 8). When Elden marks Michel Foucault’s score-card, he finds Foucault at fault for reading too much about territory into Machiavelli’s writings and too little into Botero’s. I am content to accept this judgment but I am less persuaded by Elden’s argument about the inadequacy of land as a historical focus. Identifying land as a political-economic concept, Elden suggests that “the importance of property in land is clear from as far back as there is recorded human history”; as such land as a concept will “fail the historically specific test” (page 10). Territory, instead, can be understood “as a distinctive mode of social/spatial organization, one that his historically and geographically limited and dependent, rather than a biological drive or social need” (page 10). Yet the difference in kind between a concept like land and one like territory seems less sharp than Elden claims and Elden’s prose perhaps even registers this difficulty. In contrast to land (and terrain):

“Territory in distinction, at least in its modern sense, but the case can be made for the term in itself, seems to be dependent on a number of techniques and on the law, which are more historically and geographically specific” (page 10).

The value of The Birth of Territory does not depend upon these claims about the very special historical specificity of territory. In fact, as I have already remarked, changing conceptions of land-as-property are at the heart of this story. This brings the story back to Marx’s central concerns in his account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and suggests that it would be fruitful to consider explicitly the relations between political economy and territory bridging between this work and a book such as Keith Tribe’s (1978) Land, Labour and Economic Discourse. Changing conceptions of property seem just as historically specific as the notion of territory as the sovereign control over a bounded space. We might even return to terrain and ask about the historical specificity of its political-military forms as Victor Kiernan (1980) does when he writes of the relations between technologies of war and the spatial consolidation of feudal estates in State and Society in Europe, 1550-1650.

The Birth of Territory interrogates texts from various dates to see if they describe rule as the legal control over a determined space. Time after time we learn that a set of political writings that concern land, law, terrain, sovereignty, empire, or related concepts do not articulate a fully-fledged notion of territory. We may end up asking like the proverbial kids in the back of the car: “Are we there yet.” Elden is certainly able to show that earlier formulations are reworked in later periods, as with the discussion of Roman law in the medieval period; there is a lot in the political thought of each period, however, that relates to land and power but does not get reworked in later times. This means that what really holds many of the chapters together is that they are studies of how land and power were discussed at that time, and that is not so very far from taking land and power as quasi-universals. In fact, there is probably a continuum between categories that have greater or lesser historical specificity, rather than there being a clear distinction between the two. Yet, I must admit that this singular focus gives a welcome coherence to the book for all that it seems to discard large parts of the exposition as not required for later chapters.

The relations between word, concept and practices are somewhat uneven. Elden places greatest emphasis on the second. So, while the word territorium is found in Roman texts he shows that it is not used to refer to sovereignty and thus the concept of territory is absent, and whereas the word territory is barely found in Shakespeare, it is front-and-centre as a concept in the plot of King Lear. But there is also an unevenness in practices and this brings me to one more of the striking contributions of The Birth of Territory, and that is its discussion of the relations between territory and terror (see also Elden, 2009). This also brings us back to the question of terrain. In the fourteenth century, Bartolus articulated a fairly modern notion of sovereignty and one of the ways he writes about this is to claim that: “Territorium is so called from terrifying” (page 222). Elden notes that this, in a commentary upon a passage from a writer of the second century CE, refers to the capacity of a magistrate to impose law on the lands around a city through exercising “the right of terrifying, that is expelling” (ibid.). This certainly looks like a modern notion of territory that “takes spatial extent as the limits of the magistrate’s legal power” but, adds Elden:

“At that time this would have been understood only in terms of constituent parts of the empire, rather than as discrete political units” (pages 222-3).

I am not sure of the force of that qualification. Certainly, in his discussion of the modernity of the notion of territory adumbrated in the Treaty of Westphalia, Elden is dealing with units understood as constituent parts of the Holy Roman Empire, albeit one that is very much weaker de facto than the earlier Roman Empire. Again, this seems like points along a continuum rather than a difference in kind. Furthermore, in discussing another fourteenth-century commentator upon Roman law, Elden recognises a way that the notion of the ban did not only apply to the city:

“In his discussion of banishment and extradition, Baldus claims that ‘jurisdiction inheres in a territorio’” (page 231).

But here the territorio is the empire because Baldus was writing, as Elden explains, about the right of the Roman upper class to choose banishment outside the Empire as an alternative to execution. In ways that recall Agamben’s (1998) discussion of the ban, this implies an empire as a territory within which it would be possible to apprehend and execute banned individuals. All of this makes the notion of a birth somewhat awkward. Perhaps we might note the conditions under which something like a territory effect becomes possible and that would include both city and empire, at least within the judicial sense of the ban.

Finally, let me remark that the book is not only a major work of scholarship in the history of ideas, and that it sits with Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Glacken, 1967), The Geographical Tradition (Livingstone, 1978) and Geographical Imaginations (Gregory, 1991) as central works for studying the history of geographical ideas, but it also provokes new questions. It seems to me, for example, that the colonial story with its abstraction of space is complicated if we include a place such as Ireland where colonialism was forged in what had to be accepted as an old country and not an empty one. The story of mapping, colonialism, and, yes, territory in Ireland is not the same as in the so-called virgin lands of the Americas or Australia and, as works such as Smyth’s Map-Making, Landscape and Memory (2006) illustrate; Ireland required an anticipation and commentary through political science much as did other territorial enterprises. There is also a sense in which a place like Ireland that lay outside the Roman imperium produced a body of law and commentary upon legal opinion quite different in its conception of land, property and sovereignty than was the case in England or France. In Ireland, territory was for Gaelic society a reaction in the face of colonialism rather than only a means for its projection, and we might uncover a rather different genealogy of the extension of the state from such a case. And even when we move well into the period after The Birth of Territory, we still find in the case of Ireland, the British state invoking a notion of sovereignty that is about control of people rather than control over territory. The British insisted that the Irish were subjects of a British prince and thus it was not allowed to them to give up this allegiance in favour of citizenship in a new state, such as the United States. Thus when Irish-born US citizens came to Ireland to fight for independence in the 1860s, the British tried them as traitors insisting, in the words of the Lord Chief Baron, that: “[H]e who is once under the allegiance of the English sovereign remains so forever” (Mulligan forthcoming). Were this divergent history of Irish territoriality to be written, it would be all the sharper for being able to draw upon The Birth of Territory as a comprehensive statement and subtle explication of the evolving conceptions of the relations between land and power in the core of what came to call itself the West. This is a masterful and useful book. 

References

Agamben G 1998(1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Elden S (2009) Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Glacken CJ (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gregory D (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kiernan VG (1980) State and Society in Europe, 1550-1650. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Livingstone D (1992) The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mulligan AN (forthcoming) Erin’s Hope, Irish Blood and Indefeasible Allegiance: Reconfiguring Citizenship and Nationalism in an Era of Increased Mobility. Historical Geography.

Sack RD (1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smyth WJ (2006) Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530-1750. Cork: Cork University Press.

Teschke B (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso.

Tribe K (1978) Land, Labour and Economic Discourse. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.