A Search for Sovereignty
Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900

"Empires usually appear expansive, implacable, and all-encompassing, but A Search for Sovereignty portrays them instead as uneven, tentative, and riddled with gaps and contradictions. The novel topics and surprising juxtapositions in this strikingly original book comprise a vision of world history that is as convincing as it is unsettling. Its achievement confirms Lauren Benton’s stature as one of the most creative historians writing today."
David Armitage, Harvard University

"Lauren Benton has shown, with immense erudition and considerable flair, how central the concern with sovereignty was for all the European overseas empires throughout their long and complex histories. She has shown also how closely tied law was to the concept of space, in ways that will have an enduring impact not only on how world history is conceived but also on how we understand the current tangled conflict over international jurisdiction. A Search for Sovereignty is a brilliant, innovative, and timely book."
Anthony Pagden, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History, University of California, Los Angeles

"Canvassing legal archives over large reaches of the early modern world, Benton discerns striking correlations between the practice of geography and the practice of law - and between discrete categories of space and recurring types of threat to state sovereignty. The resulting account calls for a new map of imperial space - one replete with gaping holes and alarming lumps, a viscous and uneven medium that has eluded cartography to date. This is a superb book that will make a splash among historians, geographers, and social theorists alike."
Kären Wigen, Stanford University

"In this examination of the relation between law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900, Benton argues the Europeans constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law."
Law and Social Inquiry

"… a book of the first importance."
Eliga Gould, H-Soz-u-Kult

"Benton's most notable contribution is to show that sovereignty is indeed a geographical discourse but one comprised and constitutive of multiples spaces, sites, and places, rather than simply than simply the supposedly fixed, bounded and homogenous spaces of territorial states."
Nisha Shah, Political Geography

"Lauren Benton's deeply imaginative monograph rethinks the relationship between law, geography, and jurisdictional politics in European overseas empires … Readers who follow Benton upriver, across oceans, and to islands and mountains with eyes trained for legal posturing and jurisdictional politics will see European empires in a new and arresting way."
Law and History Review

"… succeed[s] in presenting a compelling set of reasons for questioning teleological accounts of sovereignty … [Benton] provides many points of entry for further elaboration on the ways in which empire disrupts the narrative of a steady convergence of sovereignty and bounded territory culminating in the present international legal order."
Kate Purcell, British Yearbook of International Law