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 federal courts ultimately came to the nation’s rescue. In 1794, the Supreme Court abruptly reversed course and decided that federal judges could adjudicate cases arising from captures made by French privateers operating from the United States. British officials were initially skeptical about vindicating their sovereign’s rights through the courts, but they came to embrace litigation as a useful weapon in their global struggle with revolutionary France. French diplomats resented judicial interference with privateering, and they demanded that executive branch officers intervene in proceedings to defend France’s prerogatives under treaty and international law. But the Washington administration refused. The courts, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, were “liable neither to controul nor opposition from any other branch of the Government.” Judges continued to have doubts about their role in resolving international legal disputes, but they came to accept responsibility for establishing American sovereignty. This tale of judicial ascendancy might seem at odds with our usual understanding of the courts as the “least dangerous branch” of the early federal government, but the truth is that American policymakers deliberately sought to make the courts supreme, at least at sea.

In 1793, war between France and Great Britain plunged the United States – and the federal courts – into crisis. As the French Revolution reverberated around the Atlantic, the impetuous French foreign minister, Edmond-Charles Genet, launched privateering attacks against British commerce from the United States. The Washington administration tried to prevent Americans from dragging the nation into war, but partisan rivalry and a lack of federal law enforcement power stymied its efforts. Desperate to demonstrate the nation’s sovereign bona fides in the face of British complaints, the administration turned to the courts for help. It asked federal judges to resolve difficult and highly consequential legal disputes that the political branches were unable or unwilling to address. But the judges were not the acquiescent handmaidens in foreign affairs that modern commentators imagine. They balked at violating longstanding principles of international law, and they were wary of compromising the judiciary’s own institutional integrity by intervening in the affairs of state. In the midst of an international conflict of unprecedented scope, the founders’ confidence that the federal courts would ensure the nation’s peace and security seemed to have been mistaken.

In this chapter, the contrast between two models of expatriate masculinity developed earlier is brought to a head, with a fresh twist on the history of masculine identity. In retirement William Cooper indulged his passion for global wanderlust at the expense of his family, whereas Edgar Wilson happily abandoned his expatriate frustrations for a conventional model of settled suburban domesticity with his wife in England, spurning the mobile attractions of the cosmopolitanism they had long nurtured, but with Winifred continuing to exercise her public activism and independence. Ironically, the domestic model, rather than William’s continuing mobility, was most closely associated with the lower middle class, recalling Edgar’s origins and early white-collar labours. The disparity is underlined by a tragic account of William’s last years, interned by the Nazis in wartime Paris after an ill-advised excursion across France. Wartime domesticity for Edgar and Winifred was a struggle, only relieved by a comfortable inheritance from William. Winifred’s Will reflected her long commitment to chosen causes like the Mothers’ Union, a statement of her lifetime priorities.

Mostly, Greek historians treat going to war as something that Greek states do, without there needing to be much account of why they do it. Different were epic wars – the Trojan War and then the Persian War – and Thucydides’ long treatment of the causes of the Peloponnesian War is a direct product of his insistence that this was the greatest war. What his account shows us is what he thought needed explanation, and it is as much his identification of factors as the scale of his discussion of causation that makes Thucydides’ account stand out. His is an account peculiar for the failure to point the finger at individual political leaders, something that elsewhere in his History Thucydides is not reluctant to do. Thucydides never asks whether different action by Athens might have avoided war, avoiding discussing either Athenian policies or politics. The reasons for that are best sought not in Thucydides’ politics, but in his determination that this should be seen as an epic war.

‘Bella gerant alii.’ In 1516, by means of traditional dynastic finagling, the house of Habsburg acquired the thrones of Castile and Aragon, or Spain for short: the most bellicose and spectacularly expanding state in Latin Christendom. Henceforth, it seemed, the Habsburgs would no longer be able to leave war to others.

Since concluding Castile’s civil conflicts in the 1470s, the Spanish monarchs had, by force of arms, reconquered parts of French Catalonia, and added other acquisitions to their realms: southern Navarre, the western Canary Islands, Melilla, much of the Caribbean, and the kingdoms of Granada and Naples. For what came to be known as the Spanish monarchy it was the start of the most sustained period of success – measured by the crude, but decisive, standards of victory in the field and expansion on the frontiers – any Western European state had achieved since the Roman Empire.

Around 1900, scholars commonly marked modern history from the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The size of the army that crossed the Alps – about 30,000 men – and its use of field artillery to batter down the curtain walls of ancient towns was, supposedly, unprecedented. As France’s claims in Italy were subsequently challenged by Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, the duchy of Milan and other Italian states collapsed, or changed hands, with astonishing abruptness. Today, it is no longer clear that the campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559) were so sharply differentiated from those of the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1415–53). But the political cataclysms of our own time seem to confirm Niccolò Machiavelli’s insights into the precariousness of power at the turn of the sixteenth century. No boundary was sacred, and no government lacked a portfolio of ideas for expansion, to be tested if circumstances seemed ripe. Since a power dominant in a given region often worked to keep things as they were, one might distinguish between ambitious governments eager for war and cautious governments concerned to preserve what they had. Any move by a hegemonic power was taken by its rivals as an attempt to reduce them to abject servitude.

In the Feyerabend lecture Kant already presents his claim that the principle of right is a principle of coercion, that is, that the state is authorized to use coercion to counteract an unauthorized violation of universal freedom. Such state use of force is a hinderance of a hinderance to freedom. But how is this coercive power specified in particular circumstances? I examine three extreme cases in which a state might be authorized to use its coercive power against its own citizens to cause their deaths: capital punishment, eminent right in emergencies, and war. This paper will show that Kant offered specific explanations of particular limits to legitimate state power, rejecting different limits offered by Beccaria (capital punishment), Achenwall (eminent right and war), and Vattel (war). These assessments reveal that Kant was of several minds regarding whether in any social contract a citizen could rationally consent to these uses of coercion and whether actual or only hypothetical consent was required. I suggest that only later in the published Doctrine of Right did Kant work out his position consistently.

How did Kant incorporate elements of natural right into his philosophical system after radically transforming the basis for philosophical claims in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Groundwork, and other related texts? I show how Kant praises certain ideas by natural law theorists while rejecting their foundations and many of their applications. Two particular areas reflect this process: Kant’s rejection of slavery and his developing work on war and international institutions for peace. Feyerabend must be understood as a stage in the development of Kant’s overarching unitary theory of right that fuses domestic and international right.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

This chapter examines Henry Stimson’s career and his rise to the pinnacle of the US government until his resignation as secretary of state in March 1933. It analyzes his background, the formation of his political views, and the creation of his foreign policy ideas as a committed member of the Republican Party. Specifically, it explores his tortuous relationship with the American empire and how he became an unbridled internationalist.

The friendship between Shaw and O’Casey was so personally significant that O’Casey’s widow published an entire book on the subject. This chapter charts the course of that friendship, and examines the influence that Shaw exerted upon O’Casey and vice versa. The chapter begins by examining the way O’Casey knew of Shaw’s work before their first meeting, and traces the contours of their personal relationship after O’Casey moved to London in 1926. The chapter analyses the way that, once the Abbey had rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928, O’Casey turned to Bernard Shaw for friendship and advice, and gives a close reading of the reciprocal influence that can be found in the two men’s playwriting and political viewpoints.