The essays in this book represent all that I wish to preserve of what I have written on the political and legal theory of empire over the past fourteen years. All have been extensively revised and rewritten to take account of recent scholarship and to give them an overall coherence as a single volume. Some now bear so little resemblance to their originals as to constitute new essays, and I have changed their titles accordingly. Chapter 6 appears here for the first time.

Some of the arguments presented in Chapter 1 were first used in “Conquest and the Just War: The ‘School of Salamanca’ and the ‘Affair of the Indies’” in Sankar Muthu ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

A shorter version of Chapter 2 was first published as “Gentili, Vitoria and the Fabrication of a ‘Natural Law of Nations’” in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 340–61.

An earlier version of Chapter 3 first appeared as “Ethnos, Race and Empire: The Fabrication of Identity in the Early-Modern World” in Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 292– 312.

Chapter 4 draws heavily on “Law, Colonization, Legitimation and the European Background” in The Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and on “The Christian Tradition” in Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore eds., State, Nations and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103–26.

Chapter 5 relies in part on “Commerce and Conquest: Hugo Grotius and Serafim de Freitas on the Freedom of the Seas,” Mare liberum, 20 (2000) 33–55.

Chapter 7 is a modified and revised version of “The Law of Continuity: Conquest and Settlement within the Limits of Kant's International Right” in Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi eds., Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).