Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of new actors in the Kuroshio frontier over the decades after the shogunate’s retreat from the Bonin Islands. It observes that pirates, state officials, and scientists formed a triangle of frontier actors. The pirate Benjamin Pease vied for state approval of his local rule in the Bonins, but eventually it was individuals like the official-botanist Tanaka Yoshio or the Bonin settler Thomas Webb who helped showcase the colonial flagship project of the young Meiji empire. The relationship of state and commercial agents, as much as the swift reconfiguration of settler identities on the ground, reflected the physical fluidity and political instability of the contested ocean frontier. Taming this frontier was a project of ideological significance for Japan. Clarifying the state’s relationship with its new subjects by testing new forms of subjecthood was central to this process. The flagship colony in the Bonin Islands became the site of state-funded agrarian experiments centered on exotic fruits and medical plants. Showcased at agricultural exhibitions, these experiments underpinned the “enlightened” character of Japanese colonialism.

Chapter 6 discusses the colonization of the Bonin Islands under the Tokugawa shogunate in 1862–1863. It shows how the steamboat Kanrin-maru’s venture to the Pacific archipelago offered an opportunity to develop and display national symbols of sovereignty, progress, and power vis-à-vis the islanders, just nine years after the arrival of Perry’s black ships. The subsequent occupation of territory under the hinomaru flag and the mapping and labeling of landmarks with Japanese toponyms was an attempt at harmonizing early modern conceptions of climate, subjecthood, and benevolent governance with the exigencies of administrative control over a stateless immigrant community in a colonial competition against Western empires. The chapter argues that the Bonin Islands figured as an experimental colony through which shogunal scholars and officials encountered foreign plants, technologies, and bodies of knowledge at a formative time of Japan’s imperial reinvention. Though upended prematurely in the summer of 1863, this colonial experiment offers a rare window on the possibilities of an imperial modernity under the Tokugawa that never materialized.

Examining the entangled relations between commodities and kin in Indigenous literature, this chapter presents an Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration in the form of dialogue. The first part of the chapter analyses how two Indigenous memoirs, Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) and Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes (2019), critique western commodification by elaborating on concepts of relationality and responsibility. The second part of the chapter analyses the processes of commodification of Indigenous lives for western consumption in the context of climate change, drawing on Cherie Dimaline’s novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay collection titled Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). The chapter’s broader contention is that the genre of Indigenous memoir, which often represents Indigenous bodies as ‘anti-commodity’, adds to conceptualisations that aim to redefine relationships of respect and reciprocity between humans and more-than-human beings.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

This chapter explores an anticolonial critique of emerging postwar international jurisprudence particularly as it pertains to war, using the dissenting opinion of Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal during the Tokyo Trials as a case study. Pal’s critique of Allied uses of sovereignty and international law reflected a larger concern with the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the postwar era, with Pal’s concern being that both continuities and discontinuities in international law continued to maintain unequal relations of power that shape the international order. Pal challenged the conclusions of the other judges at the Tokyo Trials by asserting that the world had not yet become an international society that could truly adopt international criminal law in a just sense. While Pal’s approach to sovereignty and international law contains various challenges and is not a simple prescription that could be easily applied, his dynamic and ambitious vision aimed to equalize the world and therefore represents an aspirational anticolonialism that was lost in subsequent generations of Third World lawyering.

This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. Insurance practices and related metaphors began expanding rapidly from a European base some 500 years ago. The simultaneous emergence of the modern state was hardly coincidental. Increasingly complex societies energized by market economies required protection from risks of various kinds. This required mobilizing and organizing private capital to achieve common goals. The deepening of markets and development of financial technologies now increases demands for protection beyond conventional borders. But where the fiscal power of the modern state underpinned national insurance and reinsurance systems, the absence of a global fiscal authority is exposed by rising cross-border, systemic, and global risks. That the background condition for necessary innovation in governance is uncertainty has also become undeniable.

The overview of the book’s argument provides a framework for understanding the relationship between fiscal policy, sovereignty, and Renaissance English literature. It examines the challenges of sovereign authority in the period, especially the fiscal responsibilities of rulers and the potential for political instability due to taxation. The chapter draws parallels between historical and contemporary debates on taxation, emphasizing fiscal policy’s role in shaping collective security and wellbeing. It delves into the complexities of funding sovereignty in early modern England, highlighting the tension between necessary taxation and perceived fiscal aggression. The chapter introduces the idea of a "fiscal security dilemma," in which efforts to ensure security through taxation can paradoxically create insecurity and concludes with an overview of the book’s chapters and the variety of ways literary writers engaged with the struggle over fiscal policy as central to defining political community and governance in Renaissance England.

In 1788, John Marshall made a prediction that was more prescient than he realized: The federal courts the new Constitution called for would be “the means of preventing disputes with foreign nations.” Marshall could not have known it, but for the next several decades international disputes over persons, ships, and goods caught up in maritime war would wash onto American shores, and into federal courtrooms. The courts’ decisions were essential to the United States’ emergence as a sovereign and independent nation. But preoccupation with Marshall’s famous constitutional rulings has obscured this story of judicial nation-building at sea. And while we have grown accustomed to the idea that “foreign affairs” are the domain of the legislative and executive branches, the political leaders who first tried to solve the puzzle of constitutional governance did not hew to such rigid notions of institutional responsibility. If Marshall’s legacy is the establishment of both judicial and national authority, this book shows that he and his contemporaries did so, first and foremost, at sea.

The history of how the federal judiciary shaped American sovereignty has long been hidden, obscured by two often-told stories about the courts and the nation. One tells us that judges historically have ceded authority to the president in foreign affairs, and therefore have had little influence on the United States’ international relations. The other asserts that the Marshall Court’s constitutional rulings laid the foundation for federal sovereignty under the Constitution. Both of these accounts have elements of truth, but only because of developments a century later. The claim that Marshall’s constitutional decisions shaped the nation projects backward into the past an importance those rulings did not have when they were made. And the notion that the courts have historically had little to do with foreign affairs ignores that early judges were central participants in a cooperative effort among the three branches of government to secure the United States’ place in the world. It is that legacy of judicial nation-building, rather than the stories we have inherited, that can help us think about the courts’ role today.

Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.

A brief overview of the themes of the study shows that the quest for land upon which to erect defensible settlements and from which to raise necessary revenue determined much of the course of Company endeavour. Without land there was nowhere to erect Company factories and accommodation, without land there was no security from the predations of indigenous and rival European forces, without land there was no settlement of indigenous artisans and traders generating revenue, without land there was no revenue from tenant peasants and without land there was no empire. This legitimacy of this quest and the sovereign authority the Company sought depended in part on the administration of justice. Following haphazard attempts to impose English law, the unification of jurisdiction after 1726 provided a degree of coherence across the three presidencies. Accompanied by all the trappings and pageantry of court proceedings, and the assimilation into its ranks of leading figures from the various communities, the mayor’s courts commanded legitimacy and thus a broad acceptance; this despite the persistence of corruption and a failure to render the courts wholly independent from Company influence.